The Cold Smell of Sacred Stone

by George C. Chesbro

  “Garth!” I shouted. “Stop your Goddamn preaching and get off that stage! They don’t want to hear it!”

  “You betrayed us!” a woman screamed from somewhere right behind me. “You tricked us! You took our money, wasted our time, and now you’ve killed a lot of us! Satan!”

  “I felt I owed you the truth!”

  A jagged chair leg sailed through the air, bounced off the lectern less than a foot from Garth’s head. It ricocheted into the darkness at the back of the stage, impaled itself in a huge piece of equipment in a bank of electronic gear. Sparks flew, and there was the chilling crackle of unleashed electricity.

  Suddenly it seemed that everyone was shouting in either rage or panic. Fistfights broke out, and more pieces of chairs flew through the air. Garth stayed where he was, pleading for calm, shouting into a microphone that had gone dead. Still holding the child with my left arm, I reached up for Veil’s with my right hand, and he hauled me to my feet.

  “Garth!” I screamed. “Get the hell off that stage! Get out of there!”

  It seemed that chairs were flying everywhere, bouncing off the lectern and stage all around Garth. I cringed, clutched the little girl close to me, and watched in horror as electrical power cables that had been strung along the underside of the balcony were torn away and broken; more sparks flew. A fire had begun to blaze around the electrical equipment at the back of the stage; blue-white electrical fire flickered over the wires, dancing on bare metal. Two loudspeakers suspended from the balcony suddenly exploded.

  “Garth, come on!! This place is going to blow!!”

  He couldn’t have heard me in the din, and I was being rapidly swept away from the stage by an inexorable tide of milling, churning bodies—but Garth’s eyes suddenly met mine. Desperately, I motioned with my free hand toward the sparking wires, then up at the glass dome and the girders. He nodded, again tried to shout into the dead microphone just as a man emerged from the flame-streaked darkness behind him and smashed a chair across his back, driving him to his knees. The microphone flew through the air with its sudden feedback sounding like an electrical scream of protest.

  “Garth!”

  Now people had begun to surge onto the stage from all directions. Garth shook his head to clear it, took a series of deep breaths, then abruptly stood up. Almost absently picking a thick, bloody, wood sliver out of his shoulder, he leaped down off the stage and walked straight toward me. Most people parted as he strode forward, and the others he pushed aside. I was trying to scream warnings to the people around me, but no one would listen. I looked up, saw translucent blue fire dancing along the support girder at the farthest end of the hall.

  And then Garth was beside me. He scooped both the child and me up in his arms, and then both he and Veil began to push toward the closest exit, fifteen years to our left. We were only a few feet away when the electricity reached the slabs of C-5. There was a deafening explosion, and it felt like a steel fist struck me from behind, knocking me from Garth’s arms, throwing us all to the ground. Chunks of steel, slivers of glass and wood whistled through the air over our heads. I struggled to drape my body over the little girl’s, and then something struck me in the head and I passed out.

  I couldn’t have been out for more than a few minutes, because I was suddenly aware of hands clutching at the child and me, pulling us from the rubble, placing us on stretchers. Desperately, I looked around for Garth—and found him lying on a stretcher next to me; he was conscious, staring back at me. We reached out, touched each other’s hand. Then our stretchers were raised and we were carried away through a nether world filled with the scream of sirens and swirling smoke.

  Somebody shoved a television camera in my face, and I swiped at it and turned away in disgust. As I did so, I caught sight of something that filled me with renewed horror and tore a strangled cry from my throat.

  Harry August was lying on a stretcher on the ground, cluthing at his face as attendants struggled to strap him in. Blood oozed through his fingers.

  Mercifully, I passed out again.

  EPILOGUE

  The memories associated with the Christmas Eve carnage, like the memories of Valhalla, remained—as they would always remain. But, with the passage of time, the nightmares ceased, and we were whole again, in mind and spirit as well as in body.

  There had been no way to prove that the K.G.B. had been responsible for the bathhouse explosion that had killed dozens of people, and injured hundreds of others. Even if there had been proof, it was doubtful that it would have been presented; as Mr. Lippitt had correctly predicted, the government of the United States had not shown any great urgency to get out the truth about what had happened, for fear that the resulting publicity would damage relations between the two countries. The Soviet premier had delivered a personal, oral apology to President Kevin Shannon for the “deplorable, unauthorized acts of an insane Soviet citizen,” and as far as Kevin Shannon was concerned that was the end of the matter. That was fine with Garth and me—and with Veil, who’d had a tad more than passing experience with government debacles and hastily arranged cover-ups. What the leaders of these two great powers of the twentieth century did to, or with, each other was of little interest to the three of us; in the short run, it at least seemed to mean that the Soviets owed us one. Despite the savage lessons of Siegmund Loge and the Valhalla Project, Garth and I had refused to give up hope—and one of our hopes was that humankind had a future; we also hoped that whatever new, dominating nation-states arose in that future would show considerably more wisdom, and considerably less insanity, in their stewardship of our planet and its peoples.

  Garth’s People would end up a little less than a chapter, a little more than a footnote, in the history of bizarre religious cults spawned in the United States of America.

  In the stories that had surfaced in the press and on television, I’d somehow come out a hero, Garth something less than that. I’d feared that Garth would be bitter, but that hadn’t been the case at all. In the preceding months he had been keeping a decidedly low profile, but he had kept busy reading a great deal, thinking a great deal, and performing all sorts of volunteer charitable work in situations where he could be reasonably assured of anonymity. For some ridiculous reason I had always considered myself the “softer” of the two Frederickson brothers, and I’d been wrong. It was Garth, not me, who had inherited the largest part of our mother’s transcendent tenderness and mercy. For the first time in years, since the funeral in Peru County, Nebraska, for our nephew which had sucked us into the maelstrom of the Valhalla Project, my brother seemed completely at peace with himself, totally unperturbed by the opprobrium heaped upon him in some religious and political quarters ever since his Christmas Eve “recantation” and the storm of death and destruction that had followed.

  “I’ve been thinking of asking my brother for a job,” Garth said evenly as he pulled off the Haverstraw exit of the Palisades Parkway. We were back in Rockland County, but this time we were heading for the Helen Hayes Hospital.

  I looked over at my brother to see if he might be joking, but he apparently wasn’t. I thought he looked good in his beard, and with the dark glasses which he now habitually wore. “Which brother is that?” I asked with some surprise.

  “The only one I’ve got—the short guy.”

  “You’d have to give up your disability payments.”

  “I’m not disabled anymore.”

  “I thought you were considering going back to the force.”

  “I’ve been giving that as much consideration as you’ve been giving to going back to teaching. Hell, they wanted to make you chairman of the department.”

  “It’s true that I could teach again if I wanted to; I don’t. I’ve still got a bitter taste in my mouth after the number they did on me during the Archangel business. Maybe one day; not now.”

  “You’ve got more P.I. business now than you can handle, and I thought you could use a partner. Are you turning me down?”

  “Shit, Ga
rth,” I said with mock seriousness, “I was really hoping you’d go back to work as a cop. If you go to work with me as a P.I., who am I going to have in the NYPD to pump for information when I need it?”

  “It’ll be good for your character not to have me to run to every time you need sensitive information from the police. Besides, you don’t seem to be hurting in that department; half the cops in the city would probably prefer to talk to you than to me.” He paused, and his thin smile faded. “I’m not that person anymore, Mongo; I’m not a cop. I’m not sure what—who—I am now, and I’m hoping I may be able to find out with you. How about it? Are you going to let me come to work with you?”

  “It sounds good to me,” I replied with a grin.

  Garth grunted. “My name comes first, since I’m the oldest and biggest brother. We’ll call the agency Frederickson and Frederickson.”

  “No way,” I said with a firm shake of my head. “I’m not only the founder, but I’m the smartest and best-looking brother. We’ll call the agency Frederickson and Frederickson.”

  “You drive a hard bargain, Mongo,” Garth said with a sigh. “Incidentally, you don’t have any idea what this woman we’re going to see wants?”

  “Nope. Dora’s an occupational therapist at Helen Hayes, and a friend. I met her a thousand years ago, when I was with the circus and we used to do benefits for the children’s division.”

  “But she doesn’t know me. Why would she ask you to bring me along?”

  “You can ask her when we get there. Turn left at the intersection.”

  Ten minutes later we pulled into the parking lot of the Helen Hayes Hospital. We went up to the second floor, where Dr. Dora Freed had her offices. The sprightly, gray-haired occupational therapist greeted us both warmly, then asked us to wait in a large, empty recreation room down the corridor.

  The man who came through the door five minutes later was clean-shaven, well dressed in blue slacks, highly polished black loafers, a blue wool sleeveless pullover worn over a white shirt. The man’s face was still scarred, but plastic surgeons had obviously been working on him, for he didn’t look nearly as disfigured as he once had. There was a broad, almost dreamlike smile on his face.

  “Harry!”

  “Hello, Mongo,” Harry August said, turning in the direction of my voice and tapping his way toward us across the hardwood floor with his white cane. I shook his extended hand. “Thank you so much for coming—I was so excited when I found out that Dora and you know each other. Is Garth with you?”

  “I’m here, Harry,” Garth said, putting a broad hand on the other man’s shoulder. “I’m sorry about what happened to you. Mongo and I didn’t know.”

  “Please, please, don’t be sorry!” Harry August said quickly.

  “If we’d known you were a patient here—”

  “But I’m not a patient—not any longer. Now I work here.”

  My brother and I exchanged glances. Garth started to say something, but Harry August cut him off.

  “Garth, there are two reasons why I asked Dora to call Mongo and have him bring you here. First, I want you to know how grateful I am to you.”

  Garth frowned slightly. “Harry,” he said quietly, “if you hadn’t become involved with me, you wouldn’t be blind now. What are you thanking me for?”

  Harry August shook his head vehemently. “If I hadn’t become involved with you, I wouldn’t have been blessed with the only sight that matters.” He paused, tilted his head toward the ceiling, and once again his face was wreathed with a dreamlike smile. He looked years younger. “I was blind before I met you; my whole life was filled with bitterness and hatred, clouding my vision. Then I was crippled. After I lost my eyes in the explosion … I’ve had a lot of time to think in this new darkness, which for me isn’t nearly as dark as the darkness I used to live in. It was only after I lost my eyesight that I could remember and fully appreciate the peace and happiness you brought to so many people. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was happy when I was with you—probably the happiest I’d ever been in all the years since my face had been splashed with acid. But there was so much bitterness and hatred for people in me, I was so crippled in my heart that I didn’t even know I was happy. And so I was constantly trying to think of ways to cheat you and Garth’s People.”

  “Harry,” Garth said in a low voice, “that isn’t important now, and there’s no need for you to talk about it.”

  “But I want to talk about it. It’s why I wanted you to come here, so that I could tell you how you changed my life and made me whole again. I believe with all my heart that God sent you to me on the sidewalk that day; God sent you to save me, to help erase the bitterness in my heart. Now I’ve been reborn, and I’m a baby in the living heart of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. I feel as if I have—I do have—a whole new life to begin living, and it’s one that’s filled with unspeakable joy. I thank God for sending you to me, and I thank you for helping to show me the way. There are many people who hate you now; they blame you for all those deaths, for what happened. But they’re wrong. I love you, Garth, and I want you to know that I’ll never, ever, forget what God and Jesus Christ, through you, have done for me.”

  I looked at Garth, who was staring intently at Harry August. There was a strange expression on my brother’s face which I couldn’t read at all, and I wondered what he was feeling and thinking.

  Finally, Garth asked softly: “What was the second thing you wanted to say to me, Harry?”

  “All of these months, after God and Jesus had entered my heart, I thought about the stories you’d told of the Valhalla Project, and of how Siegmund Loge had come up with this mathematical formula called the Triage Parabola that predicted humans would soon be extinct. The stories were true, weren’t they?”

  “Yes, Harry,” Garth answered, his tone flat. “The stories were true.”

  “But Loge’s conclusion wasn’t; that’s the second thing I wanted to tell you. He may have been a genius, but there’s no way any mathematical formula can predict the impact one man, such as yourself, can have on the lives of others—like me. The Triage Parabola is flawed because God, and His miracles, cannot be computed. We will not become extinct, because that is not God’s plan. We will survive until that day when Jesus Christ returns to rule us and bring paradise to earth. I thought you should know.”

  Now there was a prolonged silence. I had nothing to say, and I was almost afraid of what Garth might say. But then Garth simply wrapped his arms around the other man, gently hugged him. My brother’s expression was still unreadable.

  “I’m glad you’re happy, Harry,” Garth said evenly.

  “Listen!” Harry August said brightly. “There’s a bar just around the corner. Will the two of you let me take you there and buy you a drink?”

  “I’ll drink to that!” I said quickly—and too loudly; my voice echoed in the large, empty room.

  Garth looked at me and laughed, and then we followed the blind man out of the room and down a corridor toward the elevators.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Mongo Series

  1.

  Santa Claus was long overdue, and if I didn’t hear sleigh bells in another hour I was going to start calling the hospitals.

  Santa couldn’t be drunk, because my brother no longer drank—not since he’d emerged from the drug-induced madness that had transmogrified him into a de facto, reluctant religious guru to millions, and the subsequent events that had caused the deaths of thousands of people and almost killed the two of us. Garth kept a well-stocked bar in his apartment for drinking friends and his imbibing sibling, but at the moment he was out of Scotch—the imbibing sibling’s drink of choice. Consequently, I went up a flight to my own spacious apartment on the fourth floor of the renovated brownstone on West Fifty-sixth Street that we’d recently purchased, and which now served as our respective homes as well as the richly appointed offices of the recently founded investigative firm of Frederickson and Frederickson, Incorporated. As fo
under and senior partner I had, of course, insisted that my name be listed first.

  I didn’t really want a drink and could think of no reason why Garth would call my apartment when he was supposed to meet me in his own. But I poured myself a drink anyway and checked my answering machine; there were messages from three former colleagues at the university who had called to wish me a Merry Christmas and tell me how much I was missed in the halls of academe. Nice. I put on a heavy cardigan, slid open the glass door at one end of my living room, and went out onto my frozen rooftop patio and garden to look down into the street for some sign of jolly old Garth, whom I desperately wanted to see stay jolly. The possibility that something could happen to conjure up my brother’s sleeping demons was a constant haunt.

  It was four days before Christmas, not quite two years since my brother had emerged from his long illness and subsequently burned all his professional, and most of his personal, bridges behind him. Not that there had been that many bridges left standing for either of us to raze, but I’d at least had my somewhat problematic career as a private investigator to which I could return.

  Almost ten years before we had become involved with one of your mad scientist types, definitely not of any garden variety. Dr. Siegmund Loge had had two abiding obsessions: the music of Richard Wagner, specifically the Ring, and saving humankind from what he was convinced was its impending self-imposed extinction. All he’d needed to indulge his passion for Wagner was a good sound system, but it had turned out that his second obsession required the cooperation, however obtained, of Garth and me, of all people. Lucky us. Siegmund Loge had come within a Frederickson brother or two of loosing upon the world a plague that could have conceivably altered the makeup of every living thing on the planet, and forever changed, perhaps canceled, human history. Finding a way to stop him had nearly cost us first our sanity, and then our lives. And, as far as I was concerned, Garth’s sanity was still a tenuous thing, to be jealously guarded and tenderly nurtured.