King of Diamonds

by Ted Thackrey

  porridge-hot!”

  The muscles of my back went into a spasm, then knotted, and I managed to raise my head about an inch and look for the talking skull that had been seated beside me, but it was gone. Or seemed to be gone. Nothing there now but emptiness, far and far and far, down to a sunless sea. I tried to get a better look—with the revived right eye—but only succeeded in upsetting what appeared to be a very delicate system of checks and balances. The world rolled on its side abruptly and I was blind on the right side again, but the left told me that a number of things had taken up residence under the table.

  There was a dog with slavering jaws and glowing red eyes, poised to spring at my throat as soon as it might come in range, and something else that I couldn’t identify. Dark and insectile. With claws.

  I reached up a thousand miles or so into the stratosphere and managed to get a few fingers around the slippery edge of the table and gave an order for my muscles to pull me up, but it wasn’t obeyed until I moved my head and looked at the hand and gave the order a second time. Aloud.

  “Gobble!”

  This time I didn’t recognize the voice at all.

  “Fug-a-gobble-shum!”

  Three people were standing beside the table now, slanting impossibly tall and thin toward an apex somewhere above my head. I thought I recognized one of them. He was new in town, only been at the Manatee for a month and didn’t know Shoo-Fly. But on second glance I could see that I was wrong about that; the bartender I remembered had a head and this one didn’t. His neck ended in a little pyramid like the one on the back of the dollar bill. With a single eye to see the world.

  The others were strangers, too, alien beings never seen in the sane world, and I vomited suddenly—a projectile spasm right out of The Exorcist—as their chests opened in unison to discharge a multitude of gray-green worms that grew and rushed at me and began to pull me from my seat. I fought, but with the wrong muscles, and found myself abruptly tripped and held prone on the dirty floor.

  Stinging sensation in the lower back.

  And then the room inverted and I was falling toward the ceiling as the day outside exploded into a myriad of sparks and pinwheels, whirling and screaming into nothingness . . .

  After that, nothing much seemed to happen for a long time. I think it was a long time. But that idea was slippery; measurements of time and weight and distance seemed to have lost some of their sharpness, so it was hard to tell. And I didn’t really give a damn.

  Curious. I rolled that thought around in my mind, wondering a little at my lack of concern. But that didn’t matter, either. Nothing did. The world around me was hazy. And warm. And soft.

  And bright.

  I lay still for a century or so, thinking about the brightness and wondering if it was real or imagined and trying to focus on something solid. But it didn’t work, and I was about to give up when a sudden burst of inspiration descended and I decided that seeing might be easier if I opened the eye. Raised the lid.

  Wonderful! Of course: The light was real. But there wouldn’t be any images, anything to see, unless I raised the eyelid and let the light strike the eyeball full force. I was filled with pride at my perception. But nothing happened—the eyelid stayed where it was for another few years before I finally remembered to act upon the implications of my deduction.

  And then it turned out to be a mistake. I was on my side in a bed, facing a blank white wall, but things kept happening to the blankness. It was full of life.

  Doors opened and closed in it, and things went in and out.

  One of them, a red-cooked but living lobster with terrible claws, scrabbled out into the room and crossed the floor with a dry clicking of scales and reached for my hand. I tried to pull it back out of danger but my leg moved instead and then I noticed that the hand had nothing to fear anyway because it was already dead. Long dead. Rotted and fleshless like the wrist and forearm. I stopped worrying about the lobster and craned my neck to try to see how much of the rest of me was gone, too, but that was an even worse idea than the one about raising my eyelid, because the effort caused me to roll sideways off the bed and onto the floor . . . amid the slimy white worms waiting there.

  I could feel them crawling across my legs, up toward my crotch, and a voice that sounded a little like my own filled the room with howling.

  A door opened behind me and black-shod feet marched in, mashing the worms to bloody ruin with each step. The world whirled and turned and gyrated, and I closed the traitor eye again and kept it that way until the feelings of motion stopped and when it seemed safe to peek out of my hiding place again I was back on the bed and there was something different about my hands. A different feeling. I wanted to look and try to see what had changed. But it took time—and a little pep talk—to force myself to do that. I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know.

  At length, however, the eyelid seemed to rise of its own volition and I was deeply relieved to see that the bones of the arm were covered once again with muscle and skin and even the short hair I remembered. And something else. A leather strap at the wrist. Not a wristwatch. I was in restraint, strapped to the bed.

  Just as well.

  Don’t want to go back to the worms.

  Or the lobster . . .

  I began to get control of the wall a year or two later. I could close up the doors and even make them disappear and not open unless I allowed them to. And even when they did open, I could keep things from coming out of them if I wanted to. Mostly I wanted to.

  But the minor-key music was still there; some kind of choir was rehearsing in the next room.

  Time was still a problem, too. I couldn’t measure it, and sleep seemed to come upon me at odd intervals without warning and without memory of beginnings or endings, but I knew that it occurred because sometimes I woke up lying free on the bed and sometimes I would notice that the leather restraints had been applied again or there would be a bruise on some part of me that must have been real, because it wouldn’t go away when I wanted it to. But none of it was any real help in trying to judge time, and there was no night and no day in the room.

  I knew time was passing, however, because after a while the doors in the wall began to fade and I found that I could open them only with effort and even then, a big part of my mind told me they were not real.

  Progress!

  I was coming right along.

  And then came the moment when I knew I had been asleep, because I woke to find a man sitting in a chair beside the bed. Between me and the wall.

  He looked competent: wide shelf of jaw and hard little eyes peering from scar-tissue slits located too close to a nose that had survived a series of mishaps and reparations. There was a break in the line of the upper and lower lip, souvenir of a long-ago knife slash, improperly repaired. The lobe of the left ear seemed to be missing. He was wearing a business suit, complete with vest and understated necktie.

  “Can you hear what I say?”

  The damaged lips opened and closed around the words, but the eyes didn’t change and I wasn’t sure of the answer. Or if I should be talking to him. After all, he might not really exist.

  I decided to try a question of my own.

  “Who are you?” I said.

  The response seemed to irritate him.

  “My name is Soames,” he said. “Just like it was the last fifty times you asked.” The head turned to address someone outside my scope of vision. “You told me the son of a bitch would have it together again by now.”

  “He’s all right,” a male voice said from somewhere behind me. “Just give him a chance. Blessed be.”

  “Blessed be . . . ”

  The man named Soames—Jackhandle Jack, some bright little part of me offered, dredging the connection up from disorder and running back to look for more goodies—turned his gaze back to me.

  “My name is Soames,” he repeated, making the words separate and distinct. “I need to know if you are still hallucinating. Seeing things.”

  The bri
ght little thing that had been so quick about his nickname seemed to have trouble with that one. It hesitated, running back and forth for what seemed like a long time, before darting into the debris and coming back with the answer.

  “No,” I said. “Well—not as often, anyway. The wall won’t come open unless I tell it to anymore. And sometimes not even then.”

  “Good. And do you hear any strange sounds—things you don’t understand or can’t identify?”

  “No. Where are we?”

  That got the flickering wraith of a smile from the lips. But the rest of the face wasn’t involved.

  “With the Master,” he said, watching closely to see how I would take the news and apparently enjoying what he saw. “In the Temple of the Eternal Flame.”

  I let it sink in, and realized I wasn’t surprised. Somewhere in the rubbish pile I’d been mining for answers to his questions, some core of rational order seemed to have survived—and worked out a sketch of the situation. But I hadn’t been able to use the information. I wondered suddenly why I was able to do so now.

  “Why am I here?” I heard myself ask, before the editing process had a chance to operate.

  “You are our brother,” Soames said with an air of gentle solicitude so practiced as to seem almost genuine. “Our responsibility. Blessed be!”

  He had answered the wrong question. I had simply been wondering why I was still alive. But I found his response intriguing.

  “When did I get to be your brother?” I inquired.

  This time the little smile lasted longer and was made all of sweet accord. But it still didn’t get as far as the eyes.

  “You have been one of us for several months now,” he said. “The records of your conversion are kept here—in the temple—all in good order, should anyone care to inspect them. But of course, the transition from your former life has not been easy for you. This happens sometimes.”

  I was beginning to understand.

  “The road to salvation,” I said, “is filled with pitfalls. Sometimes the pilgrims stumble . . . ”

  Soames’s nod said he was pleased to have such an apt pupil.

  “And fall,” he agreed. “Go a little weird in public—like you did, over at the Manatee. But the heat around here are used to that by now. They call us the minute they know the nut case is one of ours.”

  “Especially the South Bay City police.”

  That got me the first real smile of the day.

  “Fine body of men,” Soames said, the side of his face twisted in a rictus that might have been irony. Or contempt. “Solid and reliable. Our working relationship is, as the Master says, beyond reproach. But we try to keep on good terms with the rest of the cops in the vicinity, too. So, there was no trouble at all with the Manhattan Beach force when you blew your top.”

  I could follow all of that, but my brain still seemed to be filled with molasses. Or something else. Ideas seemed to arrive in slow motion. And tumble out of the mouth.

  “That’s why I wasn’t taken to a hospital,” I said. “To a real psycho ward?”

  He nodded.

  “The temple cares for its own. And you’ll be happy to know that our rate of cure—of conversion, that is—remains extremely high. In fact, one hundred percent. Blessed be!”

  The head did not move, but the eyes left my face long enough to talk to the other person in the room. “You were right,” he said. “He’s rational enough now. Tell Flax we’ll be ready in a minute or two.”

  There was a stir in the airspace behind me, and whoever had been standing there left the room. I didn’t bother to look over my shoulder; no curiosity about who it might have been. I thought that ought to have worried me. But it didn’t.

  Soames was talking again and I had a feeling I ought to listen.

  “The old hippies had a real thing for acid,” he said. “Using it started as an experiment, so they tell me. Some of the more irresponsible university rat-men—headshrinkers with big research grants and nothing much on their minds—noticed that lysergic acid could produce symptoms that were a ringer for schizophrenia. Mental, physical, and sensory disorganization, with manifestations of violence. A fun thing for them; they decided to share it with the world: Tune in, turn on, drop out.”

  I remembered. A few of my classmates at Sewanee had fallen into the trap. Most had escaped. But not all, and I was not likely to forget the last time I saw a youngster named Brian Hoskins, who had been an honor student in his pre-acid days. Someone had slipped him a real bone-rattler, an eight-way hit—lysergic acid mixed with tranquilizer and two or three other things that never were clearly identified—that sent him on a trip from which there was no return. On my last visit, his hands had been covered with boxing gloves held in place with tape, to keep him from cutting himself to pieces with his fingernails, trying to get out of his skin.

  “Mostly, the form of acid used was LSD-twenty-five,” Soames continued. “But there were others—other variations on the theme—and until the experiments were officially forbidden by law, a few experimenters were achieving remarkable results with them. Whole new worlds of mental engineering. And as you may imagine, not all were willing to abandon their work when it became illegal.”

  “Naturally,” I said. “And of course, you know someone like that.”

  “He was the Master’s discovery. Dr. Immanuel Flax, M.D., Ph.D., was a fellow inmate of the federal reformatory at Okagomee. They had a lot in common, both being punished not for real crimes but for their ideas.”

  “Gideon was there for mail fraud.”

  Soames’s right hand moved out with the quickness of a snake, and he snapped a hard forefinger accurately against the end of my nose. It smarted, but there was something odd about the pain. It seemed to be happening to someone else. I didn’t really mind.

  “Dr. Flax,” he went on as though the blow had never been struck, “escaped from Okagomee a few months after the Master’s release. He was never recaptured—and I hear there is even a move afoot in Washington now to offer him amnesty. Sponsored by the congressman from this district, who thinks he would like to be a senator. Anyway, the point is that Flax has been experimenting again, and he’s been getting some really amazing results with a combination of LSD-eighteen, psilocybin, and scopolamine. You’re going to love it!”

  Soames smiled again and I think he might have liked to tell me more, but the door behind me opened again and I felt a sudden stinging sensation in my left buttock and found that I didn’t care about that any more than I had about having Soames hit me in the face. There was something else, though.

  Something important.

  A word. Somewhere back in the boonies, the little creature that ferreted out bits and pieces was running back and forth looking for a word and it was very important and I hoped he would find it and bring it to me so I could see, but he was still poking around unsuccessfully when two pairs of hands reached under me and lifted, and the world adjusted itself to a different level and began to turn and I knew I was being taken out of the room to some place I hadn’t been before for a purpose that I probably wasn’t going to like. But that was all right, too. What the hell. These were nice people. They would take good care of me. I was among friends.

  “Blessed be!” Jackhandle Jack Soames said. “Have a nice trip . . . ”

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  Fair enough.

  But hardly a perfect answer, for the time of harvest is too late to recognize the bad seed that has been sown.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The word was ogawa, and I laughed a little, hugging it to me, as the gurney team wheeled me down the hallway.

  But the word was slippery. Kept getting away.

  I tried to concentrate.

  Ogawa-no-jutsu: an esoteric subdivision of ninjutsu. The art of breaking down toxic substances inside the body. You can use it to counteract the most violent poisons. Or to cure indigestion.

  I laughed again, riding along, at the idea of using it for indigestion. That
had just occurred to me. Master Masuda hadn’t said anything about it, but he would see the connection at once and be amused, as I was, when I told him. Except, of course, that I would probably never see Yoichi Masuda again. New friends now. A new life. Such a lovely day!

  The hallway was half paneled with good walnut that had survived terrible abuse over the years and now was being restored by loving hands. Above, a work crew had paused halfway through the job of removing the grimy drabness of institutional green paint in favor of something that would surely have to be better, no matter what it was, and I found myself feeling pleased about that. The old hotel had been a classy lady in her prime; no reason she couldn’t be queen of the beaches again—with the right kind of treatment. Wonderful . . .

  Ogawa-no-jutsu.

  Hallway lights moved past with swift regularity. We paused under one for a long time, but I didn’t bother my head about why we had stopped. My friends would take care of it. And I had something else to do.

  Didn’t I?

  Yes. I did. But now it had slipped away from me, and the sense of loss I felt was all out of proportion to the happy world around me. The world of the hotel and my friends and the lights.

  Ogawa-no-jutsu.

  The busy little entity that was in charge of important things snatched the idea back from the very edge of oblivion and screamed its name at me, jumping up and down to get my attention and tell me it mattered. Terribly. Ogawa-no-jutsu. Master Masuda had only begun my training—but hadn’t I used the technique once without his help? Yes. Sometime or other. I had used it. For what?

  No matter. Another time, another place; another day, another dollar. I chuckled to myself as a clanking, wheezing sound announced the arrival of the reason for our pause there in the hallway. A door opened and we moved through it and I found an important new word and concept pushing up through the quicksand of my mind: elevator. We were in an elevator—that was much easier to think about than . . . what was it? The other idea had slipped my mind again and the effort of mounting a new search seemed like more work than I wanted to do just then.