Hoberman kept tapping her nails. “What about money?”
“What about it?”
“Did he take any with him? Did the wife notice anything missing?”
Grove nodded. “He’s got money, yeah—a lot of it. He had two private accounts that are showing heavy activity the day he disappeared.”
“I wish we had some of it,” Geisel said. “The guys on the third floor are killing me over budgets this year. I’m going to want DNA linkage before I write off on all this.”
“Should have it by the end of the day.”
Hoberman said she wanted to go back to the mummy, back to the reason why this wasn’t a basic copycat situation.
“Okay, look,” Grove said, beginning to pace across the end of the table, pushing down the emotion, the urgency squeezing his guts. “I realize how it sounds—all mystical and woo-woo and everything—but the behavior as related by the wife smacks of a classic psychotic break . . . and more.”
Hoberman asked what he meant by “more.”
“I’m still working on that part,” Grove replied.
“All right, fine, so it’s a work in progress,” she prodded, “so give us a progress report.”
Grove looked at her. “What we do over the next few weeks, our next move is huge.”
“Why is that?”
Grove stopped pacing. “Because I think we’re all part of Ackerman’s delusional universe. Even us, the bureau, the shit we do.”
“And what makes you think that?”
Grove shrugged. “Call it intuition, a gut hunch . . . whatever. But that’s why I think we ought to be at the next scene with a complete tactical unit. If one should occur, God forbid . . . I think he’ll be there. He needs to see the aftermath, experience it, be a part of it.”
Geisel shifted restlessly in his chair. “Ulysses . . . you know if there’s any gut hunches I would put complete stock in, it would be yours.”
“Tom, I—”
“The kind of resources you’re talking about, the paperwork alone would choke a mule.” Geisel shook his head, running fingers through his graying hair. “If you could just give us a little more, tell us about this hunch.”
Grove wondered how far he should take this with them. He took a deep breath, then let it out with a sigh. “The reason I feel this way . . . is mostly because of the way I felt when I first saw the thing.”
Dead silence.
“I know how it sounds,” he went on. “I can’t understand it myself. But there’s something deep beneath the surface behavior here, that’s all I can tell you. I got a taste of it when I first saw that mummy . . . when I realized it was the same signature as Sun City. The look on that face. You’ve got photos in your reports, you can see what I’m talking about.”
“Ulysses—”
“I get paid to make judgment calls,” Grove continued, pacing again. “They’re all judgment calls. Subjective opinion. Maybe it’s an empathetic thing here, I don’t know, I really don’t. But I think we should continue working up in Anchorage, and I think we should get the word out on Ackerman. Because Ackerman’s our guy. That much I’m positive about. He’s our guy. And that’s the only part that really matters. Right?”
Another pause.
“Am I wrong about that?” Grove asked the room, getting very little reaction. “Do we have anything better than this guy? Do we like anybody else here?”
Silence.
Grove felt his pulse quickening. They had to agree with him. They had to give him what he wanted. They basically had no choice.
A thousand miles away, just outside Portland, Oregon, the man who was once Richard Ackerman lay on the floor of a squalid motel room.
Sobs shuddered through his lanky body like jolts of electricity, making his broad shoulders tremble and his grizzled face contort with agony. Faint mewling noises puffed out of him every few moments, but mostly he cried silently, convulsively. There was little pain in his weeping. It was the last remnant of his conscious mind, his last shred of humanity fighting the thing inside him.
“No, I won’t,” he sobbed, arguing with the voice in his head, his breath raising tiny puffs of filth off the shopworn carpet. “I’m done with it, I’m done, I won’t do it again.”
The voice begged to differ with him and calmly explained that he would continue to kill again and again and again and again and again until he found the right one, the right victim, the chosen one—
“No! No! Noooo!” Richard Ackerman howled in agony, pounding his fists against the floor. His fists were large, the size of gourds, but they were also knotty and rawboned. The hands of an aging artisan. These were hands that had once danced over calculators and spreadsheets, serving captains of industry, shaving millions off the corners of corporate income tax returns, now reduced to the bloodstained, psoriatic, leprous claws of a homicidal maniac.
The voice inside him ebbed suddenly, giving him temporary respite from the constant pressure on his brain. “Okay, okay, okay, I can deal with this,” he uttered into the carpet. “I can beat this, I can.”
He swallowed the horror and the poisonous metallic taste in his mouth, then struggled to his feet. He lumbered over to the mirror. He wore a torn flannel shirt, half the buttons missing, the front flayed open to reveal sagging, stained pectorals. Streaks of finger-painted blood and feces crisscrossed nipples haloed in gray hair. He looked at his face. Two hollow, sunken eyes buried in wrinkles stared back at him. His iron-gray hair, once meticulously coiffured by the finest Michigan Avenue stylists, now resembled a fright wig.
For a brief instant he considered bursting out of his motel room, running through the streets covered with the Nevada lady’s blood, screaming at the top of his lungs for somebody to stop him, stop the thing inside him from killing again. But as quickly as the notion crossed his embattled mind, it dissolved into a caul of agony. Richard Ackerman wrenched himself away from the mirror and began prowling the edges of the room, wringing his hands, a lab rat pacing the confines of its maze.
In this state, it all seemed so clear, so obvious, so excruciatingly pathological. He realized he was sick. He was very sick. In some ways, he had been sick since he was a child in Cincinnati, and had secretly tortured the neighborhood pets and the errant raccoons that had wandered onto his stepfather’s vast property. And all the boarding schools and private universities and political string-pulling in the world could not change the morbid images of blood and flesh that had haunted Richard Ackerman’s fantasies and dreams since he was a kid. But now, all this secret deviance had come to a head. His head. Somehow he had managed to acquire this diabolical personality as if it were a virus or some exotic bacteria he had ingested from eating tainted food. And when it waned—as it was currently doing—he could almost think clearly.
He realized he should turn himself in. He should be in an institution where he couldn’t hurt anybody. But he also knew that these thoughts would soon melt away in the acid bath of the entity’s will. The entity would awaken again, erasing all knowledge and memory of his past, and get him cleaned up and fit and ready again for the Work.
The thing inside him had a shape, a color, and a texture—it was black and papery and malignant, like a face made of charred parchment. It was ravaged by a cancerous sickness, and it burned in him like a feverish furnace. It was an engine that powered his body, made him move with savage stealth toward some cosmic purpose that he could not begin to understand. He sensed it was old, very old, ancient, and it commandeered his body with the meticulous precision of a master puppeteer, but he was not certain about the mechanics of it. All he was sure of was that the entity was growing progressively dominant.
Soon there would be nothing left of the Old Richard Ackerman. He would have fewer and fewer of these intermittent spells of normalcy and would ultimately shrink inside himself like a tiny hard seed . . . until there was nothing left but the New Richard leading him toward some horrible objective. But even in this fleeting moment of insight—this fading state of awful self-awa
reness—the Old Richard Ackerman knew precisely when and where that black, silent, noxious energy had first overcome him with the abruptness of a lightning bolt.
Crawling.
Crawling . . . on his hands and knees, his face raw from the wind. Eyes stinging. Hard to see. His back wrenched from the fall, the pain screaming. He keeps crawling. Keeps crawling. He has his sights fixed on that dark object ten yards away. That dark thing is not what it seems. That dark, leathery, brown object is important. It has shown itself to him for a reason.
He keeps moving steadily toward it. A few inches at a time, back up the ice-crusted slope. His gloves are wet from the fall, his fingers stiff with cold. Closer. In the swirling cloud of powder he can just barely make out the object. At first it looks like a pile of clothes or a tattered brown garbage bag half buried in the ice. Closer still. His flesh crawls. His ears ring, terror clenching his guts.
The thing has a face. It has a face, and spindly arms, one raised high and frozen in an awkward position. And a pair of withered brown legs crossed at the feet. Like Christ. Like Christ on the cross. But this figure is the opposite of divine. This figure is a sad, forlorn, bundle of desiccated skin, frozen into the rind of a glacier.
He approaches it and looks down into its ancient, cadaverous face.
A sudden urge wells up in the man—the urge to touch. Equal parts revulsion and fascination, it is accompanied by a convulsion of chills. The man’s hands shake, his chin trembling. He has harbored this secret compulsion ever since he was a child. Touching things that he’s not supposed to touch: an oil painting in a museum, the innards of an electric toaster, the smooth mons of a neighbor girl’s vagina. Now it is irresistible. He finds himself reaching down to that scorched black face.
He touches the papery skin of its jaw.
Something like icy electric current suddenly sparks off the mummy’s flesh—ancient eyes snapping open. A surge of cold, black, electric voltage floods into the man, a soundless gasp puffing out of him.
The man jerks backward instinctively, as though recoiling from a live electrical socket. The radiant yellow pupils of the corpse peer up at him now, a smile tugging at the corners of the mummy’s face. Except it isn’t a smile. It is a grimace—an ageless, eternal, omniscient death rictus—and it widens, and widens, until the mummy’s mouth becomes a doorway, a portal into a black void.
The modern man tries to scream, but no sound will issue from his lungs, as a tidal wave of dark energy courses through him . . .
. . . baptizing him, inundating him, changing him.
10
Behold the Hunter
Grove hurried down the steps of the Restin Annex Building, fiddling with his umbrella, Zorn at his side mumbling wisecracks about how well the meeting had gone, the rain coming down in sheets, the wind buffeting them. Lightning popped overhead. Grove smelled ozone and angry seas as they reached the street and hustled toward their car, which was parked in the staff lot just west of the building. Thunder cracked a hole in the sky to the east, rattling the air.
As they reached the car and climbed in, the noise of the rain practically drowned the sudden trill of Grove’s cell phone. “It’s Maura,” he announced with thinly concealed delight as he pulled the phone from his inner pocket, glancing at the display.
“Who?” Zorn was wiping moisture from his bald head as he settled in behind the steering wheel.
“The journalist, the one from the magazine.” Grove thumbed the Answer button and said into the phone: “Is this the famous Maura County?”
“Mighty cozy with this lady,” Zorn murmured to himself, starting the car, then pulling out of the lot.
Grove heard Maura’s trademark husky voice greeting him on the other end of the line: “Hey, stranger. How goes it with the Ackermans?”
“Long story, very interesting,” Grove told her, deciding to keep the details to himself for the time being. “You back in Frisco?”
“Yep, and I got news.”
“You got news.”
“Yep. Something’s happened. And you’re not going to believe it.”
Grove glanced out at the rain. “To be honest with you, at this point I’ll believe just about anything.”
After a pause: “Not to be melodramatic, but it’s just something you gotta see to believe.”
“You’ve got my attention,” Grove said. “Tell me what happened.”
“Let me ask you something first.” Maura lowered her voice as though worried someone might be eavesdropping. “Is there any possible way you could come here? I mean right now. Hop on a flight and come here today?”
Grove glanced over at Zorn, who was dying behind the wheel, wanting so badly to hear the other end of the conversation. “You mean San Francisco?” Grove said into the phone.
“The magazine’ll pay. It’s four hours tops from O’Hare. Right?”
“That’s true, Maura, it’s four hours from Chicago. The problem is, I’m not in Chicago anymore, I’m at Quantico, in Virginia. What is going on? What is this about?”
Another pause: “You remember that invitation I sent to the archaeologists, the one I attached to your last e-mail?”
“Sure I do. Your prehistoric VICAP idea.”
“Exactly . . . well, I got some replies.”
Grove listened to the mysterious silence. “And . . . ?”
“Ulysses, I don’t mean to be such a geek about this, but it really is impossible for me to explain it over the phone. You’ve just got to see it.”
Grove sighed. “Hold on a second, Maura.” He turned to Zorn, who at that point was pulling the unmarked government sedan down an entrance ramp into bustling highway traffic. “Terry, old pal,” Grove said, “how would you feel about taking a side trip to San Francisco with me?”
Zorn’s face twisted into a lascivious grin. “Grove, Grove, Grove, Grove, Grove . . .”
Somewhere north of the Columbia River, after the sun had dissolved like a melting yellow lozenge on the jagged spires of the coastal range to the west, and the shadows had reached across the dirt roads and switchbacks of north Portland like long emaciated arms, the puppeteer again took control of Richard Ackerman.
It happened just north of the mercurial gray waters of Vancouver Lake, amid the rolling patchwork of deforested suburbs and strip malls that made up rustic metro-Portland. Ackerman was hunched over the wheel of a ’97 Buick Regal which he had just stolen out of a salvage yard parking lot, acting on pure compulsion after seeing the door open and the key in the ignition, not knowing exactly where he was going or how he was going to get there.
Stealing a car was another first for Richard Ackerman. Over the past twelve months he had either driven his own automobile—which he had abandoned in an Iowa forest preserve last fall—or had taken buses and trains. Now the white lines ticked under the grimy carriage of the Buick, the vapor light flickering in Ackerman’s eyes as he grimaced at the car’s odor, that greasy, stale smoke smell, the radio tuned to static, his head tuned to static, his central nervous system humming like feedback from a broken tube amp . . . when it happened. The cold metal hand gripped his spine, straightening him in his seat. His teeth cracked. And those great, blackened, papery eyelids opened once again in his brain, looking out at the world through the eyeholes in Ackerman’s skull.
Ackerman shrank inside himself and watched his hands and limbs flex and jerk and curl and straighten. It was like watching a factory manufacturing movement, the puppeteer stoking the furnace of Ackerman’s synapses, sending inertia down through his vessels and into his tendons, through his cartilage and into his marrow and muscle—twitch-twitch-whirrrrrrr—and the thing kept getting better and better at moving Ackerman around, telling him what to do, commandeering his body and soul. Hands welded white-knuckle tight on the steering wheel, eyes shifting like insects, the New Richard yanked the Buick down an entrance ramp and entered a sleepy outlying village.
Barton, Washington, is a little rusted barnacle of a town—not much more than a few hundred doubl
e-wides, ramshackle cabins, and pocked Airstream trailers—clinging to the banks of the Lower River. The Buick roared down the asphalt two-lane that ran along the water’s edge, the blink of red reflectors like a vermin’s eyes in the headlamp glare, endless columns of birch woods sliding by in the darkness, the night sky screaming overhead, scarred and insane with constellations. The thing inside Ackerman convulsed with hunger, a silent howl drilling through his ears. The thing had to feed. It had to hunt and feed and complete its mission.
A neon sign loomed up ahead in the fog bank of dust: REGAL MOTOR INN—VACANCY—COLOR TV—HBO—GO, BLUE DEVILS—GOOD LUCK AT THE STATE CHAMP’SHIP!
A yank of the steering wheel, and the car zigged across the shoulder. Ackerman’s hiking boot snapped down on the brake pedal, and the Buick zagged into a narrow parking place in front of the motel. The car jiggered to a noisy stop, nearly taking out one of the wrinkled metal guardrails in front of the building, raising a cloud of debris in the night air.
The engine died.
Silence returned to the lot, and the New Richard sat there for a moment. Hands still vise-gripped around the steering wheel, heart still pumping, eyes still working back and forth like arc lights. The front window of the motel’s office was ten feet away, a pair of figures sitting in there, the blue glow of a television set apparent in one corner, painting the dim lobby in shifting ghosts. Somewhere in the distant hills the screech of an owl scraped the night sky.
Right then, the New Richard decided that the man and woman in that lobby had to die.
The duffel bag sat on the Buick’s rear seat—hastily tossed through an open window during the commission of the theft. It contained the quiver and the tool belt. The New Richard got out of the Buick, opened the rear door, dug out the duffel bag, put it on the ground, and tore open the zipper. Hands busied themselves with straps and buckles and graphite shafts and razors and oxidized tools.
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