“No doubt, Weez. Those are the same seven characters from the pyramids—the big and the little.”
“Makes sense, doesn’t it?” she said, pulling out her camera. “Each of the seven sides of the pyramid had one of these glyphs. Each of the Other Names is composed of the same seven glyphs, so, in a way, each member of the Seven had his name chiseled on the pyramid.”
She fiddled with the lens as she returned, then leaned in next to Jack and flashed a photo. When she checked the display, she frowned.
“What’s wrong?” Jack said as he and Eddie angled in on either side for a look.
“Blurred,” Eddie said, then grunted. “Huh. Master of the Obvious.”
“Maybe you’ve got some schmutz on the lens,” Jack said.
Weezy gave him a cockeyed look. “Schmutz?”
“Abespeak for dirt. Enough of it down here.”
Weezy checked the lens. “No. Clean. I always keep the lens cover on and—oh, crap.”
“What?”
“Just remembered something.”
She snapped another photo with the same result.
“Damn!” she said. “The pyramid wouldn’t photograph either, remember?”
Now that she mentioned it …
“Right-right-right. Neither would the box it came in. And since this is the same material…”
Weezy returned to her backpack and traded her camera for a yellow pad and one of her Sharpies.
“That never stopped me from drawing them before.”
Less than a minute later she displayed her work.
“I now present the One’s Other Name.”
Jack made a quick comparison with the sigil: a damn near exact copy.
“We hope.”
Her smile faltered. “Yeah … we hope.”
“Whether it is or not,” he said, “it’s a beautiful name … so euphonious.”
“Okay!” Eddie said, clapping his hands. “Our work here is done, so let’s get the hell out.”
Jack couldn’t argue with that.
Eddie led the way up. Jack followed with Weezy’s backpack, then helped her up to the basement level. He was about to unplug the spotlight they’d used below—he’d leave that and the shovels as a gift to the Lodge—when he heard footsteps on the basement stairs. He turned to see two men in suits step into the room from the stairwell.
“Who are you and what are you doing here?” said the one in the lead.
Jack had left his Glock in the backpack while he was digging. Neither of these two seemed to pose much of a threat but that didn’t keep him from slipping his hand inside to find its comforting polymer composite.
“We were hired to excavate the subbasement.”
“I know who was hired,” the guy said, “and you aren’t he.”
Ooh … you aren’t he … a grammarian.
Without missing a beat Jack changed the story: “The One told us to check out the work.”
Both men frowned.
“The one what?” said the second.
Either they weren’t high-ups or were pretending not to know. He bet on the former and figured it wouldn’t hurt to keep them off balance by changing the subject.
He jerked his thumb at the opening in the floor. “We found an interesting variation on the Order’s sigil down below.”
Weezy was nodding. “Really interesting. Like nothing you’ve ever seen before.”
The Order guys glanced at each other. Both looked dubious but finally the first said, “I’ll go see.” He pointed at Jack. “No games, all right?”
Jack put on a wounded look. “I assure you, this is not a joking matter.”
He turned to the second. “Watch them.”
He headed for the opening, descended the ladder, and was down maybe half a minute when his excited voice echoed up.
“Hey, Lee! Get down here. You’ve got to see this!”
Lee gave them a look as he approached the opening. “Don’t go anywhere.”
“As if,” Jack said. “That’s our find and don’t you guys even think about stealing credit.”
He waited for Lee to descend then stepped over to the opening. Both of them were out of sight, so he grabbed the ladder and quickly hauled it up.
Ignoring the cries of “Hey!” and “What the fuck?” from below, he signaled Weezy and Eddie to follow him up the stairs.
“Yeah,” Eddie said. “Let’s roll.”
Jack glanced at him. Let’s roll? Really?
Well, at least they had a name—whether the right name or not, no one could say, but the only name available. It would have to do.
But something about the glyphs and the feel of that sigil continued to gnaw at him.
6
Ernst ended the call and closed his phone. Just ahead, the Manhattan skyline loomed above the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel, while his impatient passenger waited behind.
They had heard from the Manhattan brothers who investigated the Connell woman’s apartment. Neither she nor the Compendium had been in evidence.
And now word from New Jersey. Some of the information was puzzling, and even a little disturbing.
“That was from the brothers who checked the Johnson Lodge. They found two men and a woman in the basement. The woman’s description fits Louise Connell. Descriptions of the men are vague, but they easily could have been Jack and the woman’s brother.”
“What were they doing?”
Here was the puzzling part.
“According to the brother I just spoke to, they were digging.”
“Were they.” A statement rather than a question.
“Yes. They appeared to have been digging in an excavation beneath the basement of the Lodge.”
“That would put them in the ruins of the buried town.”
The One had been very interested in the town when he had quizzed Ernst about Jack’s boyhood.
“Yes. The brother told me that the High Council had authorized the dig and sent an emissary named Kristof Szeto to initiate it.”
“Did they find anything?”
“Someone—they don’t know whether it was Jack and his friends or the workers Szeto hired—but someone unearthed the large, damaged sigil that has been down there longer than the Lodge.”
It had been largely forgotten over the years. Ernst hadn’t thought about it in a long, long time—not since the 1980s when he’d researched the Johnson Lodge before visiting it. The sigil had been found in ancient times. The brothers back then had no use for a damaged symbol of the Order but did not feel right discarding such a relic. So they stored it away.
“Then we must assume the Heir saw it.”
“No assumption necessary: He directed the brothers to it.”
The One made no reply. He remained silent as they entered the Midtown Tunnel. Ernst glanced in the rearview mirror and saw him staring out the window, his expression unreadable.
“Does that particular sigil have a special significance?”
His voice seemed to come from far away. “It belonged to me back in the First Age.”
Ernst stiffened in his seat. What a remarkable revelation. That explained the One’s interest in it when Ernst had mentioned it during his quizzing about Jack.
“If only we’d known, it would have been displayed all these centuries in a place of honor.”
“I am glad it wasn’t. I had thought it lost forever.” He seemed full of sudden determination as he leaned forward. “When we reach the city, turn downtown.”
“Yes, sir.”
Ernst knew better than to ask why. But then the One answered his question.
“I must feed.”
7
“‘It may never happen, Weez,’” she said, quoting. “‘This may all be wasted time and chatter.’”
Jack, behind the wheel, stared straight ahead and said nothing as they cruised north on the New Jersey Turnpike. She’d called shotgun for the trip home. She was too rattled about what lay ahead to concentrate on the Compendium.
; She studied Jack. He’d been strangely silent since leaving the Lodge. Something was bothering him. Endangering the baby? She doubted it. That was her worry.
“But, since it is going to happen,” she added, “I guess it wasn’t just wasted chatter. Not that I have veto power.”
He glanced at her. “We all respect your feelings, Weez. There’s just…”
“… too much hanging in the balance,” she said. “I know that. I just…”
“… never believed the end justifies the means.”
Behind them, Eddie laughed. “Are you two going to spend the entire trip finishing each other’s sentences?”
They were, weren’t they. Once again she was filled with such a longing for Jack. What was it? He wasn’t handsome—not ugly, but a long way from a hot guy. He didn’t radiate alpha masculinity; it might be there, but he hid anything that might draw attention.
But he was Jack, and he couldn’t hide what he was from her. And she’d fallen for who he was.
They made a pretty good team too. Didn’t he see that? Well, maybe he did, but he didn’t feel about her the way she felt about him. Not even close. How could he? To him, they were simply … buds—close as could be, with a history that went way, way back, but she didn’t go beyond friend for him. He would never see her any other way, and that tore a hole in her heart.
After a couple of beats of awkward silence, Jack said, “In this case, I don’t think the means are so terrible. The baby won’t know he’s got an Other name.”
“I know. I’ve come to terms with it. The Lady won’t perform the ceremony on anyone else, so that’s the way it has to be.”
Eddie said, “Why not give him a plain old American name right after the ceremony. That way he’ll grow up answering to Tom or Dick or Harry or whatever.”
“Assuming he grows up,” Jack said.
Weezy frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Assuming we have the right name, assuming the Compendium has the right ceremony, and assuming the ceremony will do what we hope it will, we all just might see the summer.”
The summer …
Jack was convinced—said he’d heard from multiple sources—that darkness waited in the spring. If Rasalom had his way, if they didn’t find a way to stop him, there’d be no summer.
“If just one of those assumptions is wrong,” he added, “then all this is for nothing.”
She couldn’t argue with his logic, but he seemed so negative lately.
“The Compendium hasn’t let us down yet.”
“But the name…”
Yes … the name. Everything hinged on the name belonging to Rasalom.
“We have to trust it’s his Other Name.”
“Trust? Trust whom? R?”
“Trust what we know about him from Glaeken—that he suffers from a monstrous case of hubris. The Seven served the Otherness, and one by one he eliminated them until only he remained. It fits perfectly with his personality that as he eliminated them he removed their Other names from his sigil—like crossing them off a list—until only his remained. And it makes sense that he kept that sigil as a souvenir of his triumph.”
Jack shook his head. “But does it make sense that he left it in Johnson, New Jersey, where we could find it? Seems just a little too convenient.”
“Now that you mention it,” Eddie said. “It seems a lot too convenient.”
“On the surface, yes, but ‘too convenient’ implies that someone put it there for us to find. Think about that. We first discovered that sigil when we were in our midteens. Rasalom was reborn just a few months before you. That means when you were fourteen, he was fourteen. Do you see him, at some time during his first fourteen years, hunting down his sigil, transporting it to Johnson, New Jersey, and somehow hiding it under the Lodge? And that’s a big ‘somehow’ because the sigil would never fit through that trapdoor we found back then. ‘Too convenient’ requires an awful lot of assumptions, don’t you think?”
Jack mulled that a moment, then gave a reluctant shrug. “Point taken. But I’m still uncomfortable with how convenient it turned out for us.”
Weezy understood. That skepticism made Jack Jack, one of the reasons he had survived so long doing what he did. She doubted she could make him comfortable, but maybe she could make him less uncomfortable.
“I don’t think he had anything to do with its presence in Johnson. But I’ll bet the Order did. What do we know about the sigil? It’s a relic of the First Age, which makes it about fifteen thousand years old. Because it’s made of the virtually indestructible tenathic, it survived the Great Cataclysm that ended the First Age. Because it’s a relic of that time, it was only natural that the Septimus Order—which adopted it as its seal—would have preserved it through the ages. Somehow it wound up in the Pine Barrens.”
“It’s that ‘somehow’ that bothers me. Even if it’s not ‘too convenient,’ it’s one helluva coincidence. And ‘no more coincidences,’ remember?”
“Well, we know from Glaeken that the Order settled in the Barrens and caged the last q’qr there—another leftover of the First Age. Is it such a stretch to believe that they’d bring along this ancient, damaged sigil too? Unless they’ve got some sort of Rosetta Stone, I’m sure they had no idea of the significance of the seven glyphs, or that it had once belonged to the One. But they kept it because it was an antique, a reminder of their salad days. It wound up in the town that was eventually buried, and they built the Lodge over it.”
Jack’s expression remained sour. “Just blocks from the home of the Heir.”
“No, you’ve got it backward, Jack. Rasalom’s sigil was brought to the Barrens long, long before you were born. Probably before the Pilgrims arrived. The sigil wasn’t moved near you—you came to it. Do you know why your folks settled in Johnson?”
He shook his head. “Never occurred to me to ask. My folks got married in the fifties, and moved to Johnson after Kate was born. I have no idea why they chose Johnson. I’m pretty sure it was my dad’s idea—he liked the idea of raising a family in a small town, away from all the crowding and problems of big-city life, and my mother tended to leave those decisions up to him. Wish he was alive so I could ask him.”
“Well, I can see only three possibilities: He was either drawn there, pushed there, or just happened to stop there.”
Jack grimaced. “I’ve been moved around the chessboard all my life. Maybe he was too.”
“So maybe it’s not a coincidence.”
“Maybe it’s not,” he muttered.
He still didn’t seem satisfied.
“What’s wrong, Jack?”
Instead of answering, he pulled off the road into a service area and parked near the food court.
“We have to go back.”
“What?” Eddie said. “No way. We’re halfway home.”
Weezy was baffled. “Go back for what?”
“I need to see that sigil again.”
Eddie popped his seat belt loose and leaned forward. “But you won’t get to see it again. As it was, we were lucky we weren’t arrested for trespassing or breaking and entering. They’ll be watching for us. We got what we came for. If we go back to that Lodge again we’re sure to get arrested and that’s the last thing we need.”
For once she had to agree with her brother. As much as she hated to side against Jack …
“He’s right, Jack. Risking arrest only plays into Rasalom’s hands. We need to get this name to the Lady and put the Naming Ceremony behind us.”
“Okay, maybe three of us can’t go back, but one can.”
“How?” Eddie said.
“Where the hell are we?”
“Exit Seven-A is ahead,” Weezy said. “Route 195. Trenton, et cetera.”
“Good. Gotta be a car rental place there. I’ll rent something and drive back to Johnson while you continue on to the city.”
He put the car back in gear and started moving again.
She said, “I don’t get it, Jack. I just don’t get i
t. What do you hope to find?”
“Nothing. I hope everything is just what we think it is. But I…” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Give me something. Please.”
“I just don’t like the way everything is falling together so neatly. It feels orchestrated.”
“Maybe it is orchestrated—but by the Ally.”
“Yeah, well, you know how much I trust the Ally.”
Weezy sighed. She had no comeback for that. She knew what the Ally had done to him. She didn’t trust it either.
But she trusted Jack.
8
Ernst checked his watch again. Hours now since he’d dropped off the One.
The One had offered no explanation, simply directed him to an address in the East Twenties and walked into a brick-front office building. A brass plaque was affixed to the wall to the left of the door, but in the fading light Ernst could not read it from the street.
I must feed …
What was he feeding on in there?
Ernst had driven around the block a number of times until a parking space opened with a view of the entrance. He’d left the car and walked over to view the plaque close up.
MRP RENEWALS.
He could find nothing else to give any hint as to what was being renewed, so he returned to the car and called the Order’s office in midtown. He asked the receptionist who answered to look up the organization.
After a short wait she said, “It appears to be a drug rehabilitation facility.”
Ernst stared at the entrance. What possible need could the One have for a place like that?
He watched a few people straggle in and out—none of them looked like the clientele one would expect at a rehab center. Finally the One appeared. He walked to the curb and stood. Ernst started the car and pulled in before him.
Ernst got a brief look at him while the courtesy light was on and was nearly as shocked at his appearance now as he had been this morning. The wounded, haggard, exhausted, depleted man who had exited the car was gone, replaced by someone who looked healthy and rested.
The Dark at the End (Repairman Jack) Page 31
