“What happened to the mermen?” Harry asked
“They’re too valuable to keep penned up here. Chueh has them out on reconnaissance patrols.”
“That’s too bad,” Harry said. “I kind of wanted to thank S-s-s-arge for trusting me and getting me back alive.”
“Who was S-s-s-arge?” Doc asked too quietly.
Harry looked at him sharply. “He was the leader of that patrol that saved me. Why?”
“He didn’t make it.” Doc shook his head sadly. “The patrol was ambushed…twice.”
“Oh shit!” Harry moaned. He thought of that pointy-toothed, jack-o-lantern grin and the laughing voice in his head, gone, all gone, just like Doc said.
“They were tracking you,” Jericho said.
“Probably used the monitor on my ka,” Harry said. “That means they’ve got someone working for them at Eternal Life, someone with a lot of authority to get the monitor access codes. Roger…”
Jericho shook his head. “The monitor on your ka went dead that night down in the Sinks. They couldn’t track you with it.” He leaned forward and regarded Harry gravely. “Son, it’s about time you admit you got Roger all wrong,” he said.
For once, Harry didn’t argue. He thought of what Susan had become and all the lies she’d told him.
“You’ve got to understand,” Jericho said gently. “Roger loves Susan very much. Maybe even as much as you…” Jericho hesitated, watching Harry closely, “…once did,” he finished.
Harry felt as if he had been walking around with a bomb strapped to his heart and Doc had just cut the wires and disarmed it. “How did you know?” he asked.
“Know what?”
“Maybe even as much as you…once did,” Harry repeated the words with a sense of wonder, as if they were some kind of magic formula.
“What? Oh that!” Doc growled impatiently. “You’d have to be blind, deaf, and brain-dead not to notice what was going on between you two back there at Chueh’s.”
“Diana…” Harry started.
“Later!” Doc cut in curtly. “First, it’s important that you understand about Roger. He’s a lot like you, a man capable of great love. Right now, he’s wracked with pain and guilt because he blames himself for what happened to Susan. Does that sound familiar?”
“What did happen to her?” Harry asked.
“The world’s a strange place sometimes,” Jericho said. “When I was young, they used to say, “What goes around comes around”. Roger took Susan to the wrong party, just like you once did.”
“Son of a bitch!” Harry muttered.
Jericho nodded. “Roger always did like to run with a fast crowd, movers and shakers, the beautiful people, powerful, jaded, dangerous people. Even after he became king of the castle and had nothing more to prove and no one to else impress…” Jericho unhooked his wire-rimmed spectacles and knuckled his eyes like a tired child. “Anyway, to make a long story short,” he said, replacing the spectacles, “they were at this party, and someone spiked Susan’s drink with black ice.”
“Oh no,” Harry groaned. He closed his eyes and had an instant vision of Isis, with her painted face and little girl costume, fighting for possession of her soul.
“When she came out of it, she wasn’t Susan anymore,” Jericho said. “Something came back with her, possessed her, riding her like a horse, making her do and say things she would never do or say, terrible, perverse, evil things.”
Harry thought of the recent rumors of wild orgies and unspeakable depravities coming out of Roger’s island estate. “How long ago?” he asked numbly.
“Almost six months,” Doc said.
“When did you find out?” Harry asked.
“Not until Roger came to me the night your resurrection went wrong. He was at the end of his rope. He’d tried everything to get Susan back. He even put her through medieval shock treatment and a secret resurrection to try to force the demon to release its hold.” Doc shook his head. “They were acts of foolish desperation. He must have known that they’d already been tried and failed countless times. The trauma units in the sub-basements beneath Eternal life were filled to overflowing, many worse off than Susan, with their kas crippled and nothing left of their original personalities. They were the wolves’ early failures, but with each failure they got better at possessing and controlling. With black ice their success rate went up exponentially.
“Maybe it would have been better for Roger if she’d been one of the failures, just a mindless, homicidal maniac,” Jericho stopped and looked around the ruins of the once mighty Dodger Stadium. “Maybes and might-have-beens,” he said quietly. “This place is full of maybes and might-have-beens.”
For a while he sat staring out over the lagoon at nothing in particular. Finally, he turned to Harry. “Don’t mind me,” he said. “I’m just getting too old, carrying around too many memories, too many maybes and might-have-beens.” He ran his fingers through his always unruly shock of silver grey hair and said. “Now where was I?”
“Roger trying to get Susan back,” Harry said, his voice as neutral as an actuary table.
“Yes, poor Roger,” Jericho said. “He knows all about maybes and might-have-beens. After he tried everything he could to bring Susan back, one of the wolf-possessed came to him and promised that they would give her back if he just did them a few favors.”
“A promise they never intended to keep, of course,” Harry said scornfully.
“I think even Roger knew that,” Jericho said, “but every once in a while, they brought his wife back just to show him that the real Susan, his Susan, was still there inside, alive and conscious and begging for help.”
Harry remembered the brief, cruel glimpse the dying wolf showed him of Susan trapped, tortured, and begging to be set free. A low groan of despair escaped his lips.
Doc looked at him sharply. “What is it, Harry?”
“Nothing!” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Just tell me what happened.”
Jericho nodded reluctantly and said, “Each time they brought Susan back, Roger was reminded that his wife was still alive, trapped inside her demon-possessed body, and that only he could save her. What else could he do? What would you do? He gave them what they wanted.”
“And what did they want?” Harry asked, his voice deceptively calm.
“Oh, they had quite a shopping list,” Jericho said. “First, they wanted complete access to Eternal Life with wolf-possessed in key positions. Then they wanted Roger to use the full weight of his position as CEO to keep stone-walling, denying, lying, whatever it took, to keep the lid on the fact that the trauma wards beneath Eternal Life were filling up with wolf-possessed who had gone flat-out crazy, homicidal, and catatonic. Finally, when they were ready, they wanted him to empty the trauma wards, spilling these people out on the streets like an insane fifth column, creating fear and chaos and pulling in more souls either through murder or black ice.
“And if anyone made trouble before they were ready…you know, family members, friends, the media, talking too much, asking too many questions…then the black wolves took over. When that happened, these people either ended up dead or got slipped black ice. Either way, the result was the same. The black wolves moved into their bodies…but not always.” Jericho hesitated.
“Not always?” Harry asked and felt something stir in his memory.
“Roger said there were times when a victim’s ka never came back, and the body didn’t resurrect. He assumed they just went into the white light of real death. Later, the wolf that possessed Susan told him the terrible truth, that, sometimes they didn’t take possession of a ka but captured and ate it instead. Can you imagine a greater obscenity,” Jericho’s voice was raw with emotion. “To eat a ka and condemn that person to unbeing, to nothingness forever?”
Harry suddenly remembered the Susan-thing’s tongue thrusting towards the soft palate at the back of his mouth and the insane hunger that drove it.
“Harry, are you alright?” Jericho as
ked. “You’re looking kind of pale.”
“It’s nothing, Doc,” Harry waved it away. “I assume Roger is no longer working for them,” he said instead.
Jericho shook his head. “On the night you resurrected, when we all thought the wolves had taken possession of you too…Well, that was the last straw for Roger. He felt as if he’d betrayed everything and everyone who ever meant anything to him, and he came and told me everything.”
“Just a minute, Doc,” Harry said. “As far as I can see, I don’t mean squat to Roger. Why would my getting possessed bring about such a sudden transformation?”
“Not so sudden,” Jericho said and leaned back and stretched out his legs as the ancient lawn chair creaked dangerously. “Did you know he stayed by your bedside that first night and most of the next day after your resurrection went wrong?”
Harry stared at him with dumb incomprehension, and Jericho shook his head irritably. “You know, Harry,” he said. “For a very smart guy, you can be incredibly stupid sometimes, especially about Roger. There’s a common bond of guilt, love, and respect between you two that Roger always recognized even if you didn’t.”
“Susan,” Harry said.
Jericho nodded. “Susan’s a big part of it, of course, but it goes deeper than that. You two are very much alike not only in the choice of whom you love but how deeply you love and how far you’ll go to protect what you love. And when you fail at that…” Jericho threw up his hands in a gesture of complete defeat. “Well, you know all about that.”
Harry knew what Jericho was saying was true. In a sense he’d known it all along but pigheadedly refused to recognize it. Instead, he self-servingly blamed Roger for everything; for the resurrection torture that destroyed his marriage, for the unforgivable betrayal of falling in love with Susan, and for stealing her from him. Now, he could finally admit that there was nothing to betray and nothing to steal because he had destroyed Susan’s love long before Roger claimed it. As for the torture of those serial resurrections that destroyed his marriage and that he blamed Roger for…even here he had to admit, as he had admitted to Diana, that it was his own fault, a self-inflicted torture, a fruitless attempt to appease a guilty conscience.
A group of laughing mermaids suddenly broke the surface of the lagoon. They were towing nets filled with squirming fish. The children, playing nearby, yelled with delight and swam over to help pull the nets. As they swam for shore, the flick of their tailfins left a rainbow haze of droplets in their wake and the sound of their laughter and singing echoed through the vast ruins of the stadium. Harry watched them swim to a concrete ramp that led up into the bleachers.
Two men dressed much like Harry were waiting to take hold of the net and drag it up on land. There was a great deal of shouting and laughter and one of the young mermaids rose out of the water balanced on her tail fin and shook her ample breasts at the men to whoops of delight and playful teasing.
Harry smiled at this bright ray of normality in the midst of the darkness he felt gathering around him. He looked up at the bleachers and noticed other men working in the terraced fields while others manned gun emplacements high up on the ragged rim of the stadium. Holding back the darkness, he thought.
At last he asked, “What happened to Susan? Who beat her up?” He had a sick, sinking feeling because he already knew.
“The wolves, of course; they wanted you pretty badly and when you came back crazy like you did…” Jericho shook his head. “…Well, we all thought they had you. Even the wolves weren’t sure what happened. We were all waiting for you to wake up and when you didn’t after the first day, things got pretty tense.”
“Tell me exactly what happened,” Harry said in voice so matter-of-fact and without emotion that Jericho looked at him and hesitated. For a second, he felt as if he was standing on an open beach, the air crystalline, perfectly still, the world holding its breath, waiting for the hurricane that was surely coming. He wondered if Harry was aware of the scars that covered his body, like fine hairline cracks in old porcelain. Jericho didn’t think so, not yet. And when he did, would he know what they meant? He felt a cold shiver of premonition, like the first, faint breeze of that approaching storm.
He shook it off with a resigned shrug. Isn’t this what he’d been working towards all along? There would be no turning back now even if he wanted to. Instead, he said, “When you didn’t wake up after twenty-four hours, Roger made sure that you were as secure as possible and then left you with me. He’d been under a lot of pressure the last few days and knew it was only going to get worse, no matter which way you woke up. He needed to get away from it all for a few hours and made the mistake of going home.
“The wolves were waiting for him with Susan. They were there to teach him a lesson. The wolf that possessed Susan released its grip and they brought her back to full consciousness. Then they tortured her in front of Roger. Afterwards, they told him what they wanted and that this was just a little sample of what would happen if he didn’t do it.”
“What did they want?” Harry asked.
Jericho eyed him, trying to gauge his mood and gave up. “They wanted you of course,” he said. “For some reason, they weren’t convinced they’d taken possession. If you woke up and weren’t possessed, they wanted another crack at you. This time they’d make sure and use black ice if they had to.
“For the first time, Roger felt a glimmer of hope that you might have survived intact, and he began making plans. First, he had to convince the wolves that if you came back intact and they tried to give you black ice, it would be impossible to keep the lid on what was happening at Eternal Life.
“The reporters were already asking questions, he told them. You were usually out of rebirthing within twelve hours, and it was already way over that. If you didn’t show up soon, they would begin taking a closer look at all those stories of demonic possession. It wouldn’t take much to blow the lid right off. Then, no amount of damage control would help.
“You were all they had, all they ever had, to keep control of the situation. People trusted you. As long as you kept coming back whole and sane and assuring everyone that everything was okay, people were willing to accept it. But if you didn’t come back soon or if you came back wolf-possessed crazy, Eternal Life and any plans the wolves had would be blown to hell.
“The wolves made a big show of accepting this, even setting conditions for what they wanted in exchange for not making a run at you if you came back whole.”
“All that about signing a new contract or going on promotion tours,” Harry said remembering Roger’s halfhearted attempts to keep him tied to Eternal life.”
“Nothing but misdirection,” Jericho said. “They even made Roger suspect they’d slipped black ice into the drinking water on your bedside table.”
“Son of a bitch!” Harry said, remembering Roger dropping his cigarette butt in the water so he wouldn’t drink it.
Jericho nodded. “Nothing but misdirection. They already had other plans for you.”
“Susan,” Harry said.
Jericho nodded.
“So they decided to wait and get me someplace alone, where no one could see or interfere, and they used Susan to get me there,” Harry said.
“They always have one of your clones ready at Eternal Life,” Jericho said. “All they had to do was hook it up to the spin-generator.”
Harry shook his head. “I think they had other plans for me,” he said and told Jericho about the wolf dressed in Susan’s body who tried to seduce him and then drive its obscene tongue up into his brain and suck out his mind and eat his ka.
“It was the ultimate solution to their King of the Dead problem,” Harry said. “There would be no more messy uncertainties of resurrection because there would be nothing left to resurrect. It was neat, clean, and permanent, with no questions asked because everyone knew I was retired and would assume I took a long vacation somewhere and didn’t want to be disturbed.
“They let me walk out of Eternal Life and
didn’t try to stop me because they were keeping an eye on me and knew I was heading for that side door and told Susan just where to wait.” Harry closed his eyes and once again saw her battered face as she looked up at him with tears in her eyes. “I saw what they did to her, what they wanted me to see,” he said without opening his eyes. “She told me Roger did it. I believed her. I had the feeling something was wrong, but I still believed her enough to go down into the Sinks.”
He opened his eyes and looked up at Jericho. “Jesus, Doc, they were good. They knew all the right buttons to push, the guilt, the anger, the distrust of Roger, even the self-serving need to protect her against him; they got it all just right. Even that thing down in the Sinks dressed in Susan’s body must have had complete access to her personality matrix and all her memories.”
“Now you know the kind of pressure they were putting on Roger,” Jericho said.
Harry looked away, out over the lagoon. “What happened to the real Susan?” he asked in that quiet, uninflected voice that was like the stillness before a storm.
Jericho eyed him warily. “Roger said they took her with them back to the Nevada Quarantine.”
Harry sank back on the recliner and stared up at the sunlight flickering through the palm leaves overhead. He remembered Roger standing in the recovery room, cajoling, apologizing, threatening; doing everything he could to get him to sign another contract. Then finally, when he knew it was all in vain, turning to the two-way mirror and flicking his cigarette at it with the bravado of a man facing a firing squad and giving it the finger. Now that he knew who or what was probably sitting behind that mirror and what was at stake, he could better understand the hopeless courage and desperate defiance behind that gesture.
Eternal Life Inc. Page 33
