Yet the rumors among the locals had persisted; sightings of man-eaters believed to have once belonged to Saddam Hussein’s son Uday, who was notorious for feeding his lions with the flesh of his enemies.
Rumors. Just rumors.
But here, north of Mosul, so far away—this couldn’t be happening.
The lion was closer now.
It stopped about ten feet away and looked back over its shoulder down the alleyway. Edmund registered in the back of his mind that the lion looked well fed. And at the same time he realized he was not afraid, he felt a crack inside his head—the lion, the alley shifting crooked across his eyes, along with a high ringing in his ears. He was vaguely aware of the sound of gunfire and shouting behind him, but felt himself being pulled forward, as if a hand had been placed on the barrel of his rifle, gently pushing it down. He let it fall but didn’t hear it hit the ground as the ringing in his ears grew louder.
The lion turned back, lowered its head, and stepped closer—looked meekly up at him with eyes both sad and full of greenish white fire. Edmund felt as if the air around him had turned to lime Jell-O, his movements heavy and not his own. A dream, a swirly dream of shadows, of bright green crumbling brick and a presence—no, two presences—whispering somewhere behind him.
“Be a good boy and carry that rope for me, okay?”
“C’est mieux d’oublier.”
Then Edmund saw the word G-E-N-E-R-A-L—a flash of silvery letters, stitched in cursive across a dark blue background. It was as if the word was sneaking up on him from behind; as if he was catching only a glimpse of it before it faded back into the black.
“C’est mieux d’oublier.”
Then another crack.
Now, there was only the lion again, staring up at him from the green. Edmund stroked its mane, his hand tracing slowly down to caress its face. Another flash of memory, and Edmund’s fingers were inside the lion’s mouth. He registered somewhere the feel of its teeth, but at the same time saw his fingers as his grandfather’s, the lion’s mouth his own.
The lion licked Edmund’s hand—not his hand, but his good luck charm; the ancient Babylonian seal between his thumb and forefinger.
“C’est mieux d’oublier,” Edmund whispered, and suddenly felt a hot wetness in his groin—felt it running down his legs—and realized his face was cold and moist, his breathing labored as if he was sobbing.
Sobbing?
Edmund could not remember crying since his mother died, since that TV show with the happy little boy who looked just like him got canceled.
“Be a good boy and carry that rope for me, okay?”
“It’s not my fault,” Edmund said—and all at once the alley shifted again, this time with a whoosh, and the green of his NVGs grew brighter. The lime Jell-O dissolved, the air grew thinner, and now there was only the sound of someone calling his name.
Edmund looked down at his hands. The Babylonian seal was gone, and the lion was moving away—did not look back as its heavy paws carried it quickly around the curve of the alleyway and out of sight.
“Come back,” Edmund heard himself whisper. “Come back.”
He felt someone touch his shoulder—heard his name, closer now—but the world had already begun to iris into black.
Edmund awoke in the infirmary, groggy, but clean and dry and stripped down to his underwear. The lights, the col-ors—especially the whites—seemed brighter, and Edmund could hear the tapping of fingers on a keyboard.
“He’s awake, Doctor,” said a female voice to his left.
Edmund turned toward it, but a bright light met his eyes—a man’s voice now, soothing, and a gentle hand on his eyelids propping them open. Then the light was gone, and in its place, big orange dots and lots of questions. Lots of answers, too—most of them “I don’t know” in a scratchy voice that sounded nothing like his own. Words from the doctor like dehydration, heat exhaustion, fainting, and semi-comatose—questions about what he ate, “I’m going to give you so many ccs of this and so many ccs of that,” and more words that Edmund didn’t understand.
And then he remembered—asked suddenly, “Where’s the lion?”
“The lion?”
“Yes,” said Edmund. “The lion who killed my mother.”
“You’re hallucinating, soldier,” the doctor said.
Silence. A dull prick on his forearm.
“Carry that rope for me, Doc,” Edmund whispered, fading. “It’s better to forget.”
“That’s right,” the doctor said. “It’s better to forget.”
Chapter 52
Two soldiers were killed in the ambush, two were wounded, but Edmund’s team got eight insurgents thanks in part to Edmund’s intimate knowledge of the area and his quick rerouting of his troops toward the park. And even though Edmund didn’t participate in the gun battle, even though no one ever knew what happened to him in the alleyway, his men didn’t blame him for the loss of their comrades.
But Edmund couldn’t have cared less if they had. All that, his former life, was over. All that—the Army, Iraq, war, insurgents, death—all nonsense, all meaningless to him now in comparison to his anointing.
Sergeant Edmund Lambert was given a clean bill of health but declined to speak with an Army counselor. He made two more patrols and killed one Iraqi before flying back to Fort Campbell. He never mentioned the lion or the General ever again, and never once mourned the loss of his good luck charm. The lion wanted it. The lion wanted everything. But most of all, the lion wanted him, too.
It was all so clear to him now. Indeed, the answer had been there ever since he was a child, but Edmund had simply been too stupid to see it. The General.
G-E-N-E-R-A-L
Yes, Edmund thought, if he broke apart the word General (or, wrote it on a piece of paper like his grandfather had taught him, dash-dash-dash and whatnot) and rearranged the letters, one would get Nergal with a leftover E, as in:
G-E-N-E-R-A-L = E + N-E-R-G-A-L
Or, if one preferred, on could write the equation this way:
E + N-E-R-G-A-L = G-E-N-E-R-A-L
Either way it was the same. The leftover e, of course, stood for Edmund. There could be no doubting that now. The evidence was clear, irrefutable, beyond coincidental. Edmund knew this with every fiber of his being; knew it in a way that made him feel as if he had never known anything before.
The god Nergal had visited him in his dreams all those years ago—had bestowed upon him the code, the equation, the formula—and had since waited patiently for Edmund to understand. And how many times had he heard those words from Rally and his grandfather? Equation and formula? Ner-gal had been speaking to him all that time through the old men, too!
And now, finally, Edmund understood what the god was saying: Edmund and Nergal on one side of the equal sign, the General on the other. Yes, only with Nergal could Edmund become the General.
The totality of the equation said so: E + N-E-R-G-A-L =
G-E-N-E-R-A-L
But N-E-R-G-A-L needed E(dmund) to become the G-E-N-E-R-A-L, too. But Nergal was already a general—the supreme general; the most fearful of them all, in fact. So what was Nergal getting at? Perhaps the formula meant Ner-gal needed Edmund to become a real, living breathing gen- eral again. Yes, perhaps Nergal needed Edmund to help him return to the land of the living. But how?
The images on the seal! It was all there! How else could one balance the equation? Nergal wished to return, to become flesh again, and he had chosen Edmund as his vehicle—had actually given him instructions on how to do it! That was why he sent the lion to take back the seal. The lion was Nergal’s emissary, and by returning the seal—that very thing that in ancient times was used in secret correspondence—Edmund had accepted the god’s offer. Worship and sacrifice were the keys to bringing him back!
He had not been hallucinating. The lion was real, and everything happened there in the alleyway just as Edmund remembered it. Edmund was sure of that. The proof was there in the formula.
&nbs
p; E + N-E-R-G-A-L = G-E-N-E-R-A-L
And what was it that Rally had said on the telephone? Something again about getting the “formula” right? Well, that had to be another message from Nergal, too; and now that Edmund had finally gotten his formula right, he would never be so stupid as to ignore or misinterpret his messages ever again.
The messages were everywhere and in everything. Edmund understood this now. He just had to look more closely to be able to read them.
And Edmund knew he needed to look more closely at Rally, too. There was a message there, an answer that needed to be extracted from all his doublespeak about formulas and whatnot; an answer that had been there all along, but again Edmund had simply been too stupid to see it.
Edmund understood this in his gut, although he could not articulate it in his mind; could not reach out and touch that flash of silver stitching against that dark blue background no matter how hard he tried.
G-E-N-E-R-A-L
To see the word written that way—A memory? A dream? Something real or imagined? Something he was projecting now that he knew the formula?
But along with the silver stitching of G-E-N-E-R-A-L came other flashes—distant shadows and voices that brought with them a thick gooiness that reminded Edmund of the medicine. He could not see to whom the voices belonged, but understood there were only two of them—understood this in the same way he had understood the General’s name all those years ago as a child. But the voices were speaking in French; whispers and mumblings and back-and-forth echoes that Edmund didn’t understand.
Edmund knew his ancestors had moved from New Orleans to North Carolina after the Civil War. Was it his family he was hearing? Was it Nergal speaking through his ancestors of his destiny?
C’est mieux d’oublier….
Rally. He needed to talk to Rally. Perhaps Nergal would speak again through him as he had on the phone with the word “formula.” All in good time, Edmund thought. Nergal would reveal everything eventually, but it would be up to Edmund to make sure he read the messages correctly.
Chapter 53
After his honorable discharge was finalized, Edmund made it back to Wilson in time for his grandfather’s fu-neral—a small ceremony, complete with a rent-a-preacher at the family plot in Clayton. Edmund, Rally, Rally’s nephew, and about a half-a-dozen others were the only ones in attendance—no extended family to offer their condolences, no close friends to tell Edmund what a wonderful man his grandfather had been.
But Edmund was thankful for that. He would be able to cut things clean from his former life now that Claude Lambert was dead; would be able to begin preparing for the Raging Prince’s return in private, in secret, without having to worry about family members and friends sticking their noses where they didn’t belong.
However, there were still two loose ends that needed tying up before Edmund could begin: Rally, and that pesky little problem about what the police had found in the cellar. The latter resolved itself gradually, but neatly, and began with a brief meeting in the sheriff’s office to answer some questions about how much Edmund knew. Edmund played dumb, just shook his head and kept saying, “I had no idea,” and “I haven’t lived there since I was eighteen.”
No crime had been committed, the sheriff explained, other than illegal possession of a couple of controlled substances: opium and something called concentrated thujone.
“We had to bring all that over to the state lab in Raleigh,” the sheriff said. He was a tall, portly man with a moustache that Edmund thought made him look like a fat Adolf Hitler. “Looks like your grandfather was cooking up some kind of homemade absinthe. You ever heard of that stuff?”
“No, I haven’t,” Edmund replied.
“I didn’t either until this whole mess got dumped in my lap. Shit is illegal here in the States, but you can still get it in Europe, they tell me. Something you drink by dissolving sugar cubes in it until it looks all cloudy and shit. Christ, Eddie, I’m no expert on any of this—just going by what the lab is telling me. Shit is highly alcoholic—like over a hundred and twenty proof, they’re saying—and made primarily from this stuff called wormwood. Was popular among the French artsy-fartsies in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and was thought to have some kind of hallucinogenic effects. But a lot of that’s been proven now to be bullshit. Anyway, I guess there’s a movement going on to legalize absinthe here in this country. Tastes like licorice, they say.”
“That would make sense,” Edmund said. “I remember the smell of licorice in the house when I was a kid. But my grandfather just called it moonshine. I guess the recipe had been in his family for years. The Lamberts originally hailed from New Orleans, and I remember him saying that his great-grandfather or somebody used to own some kind of saloon there.”
“The lab tells me your grandfather’s stuff was different, though. Had opium and that concentrated thujone and some other ingredients that could make it really dangerous if consumed too often.”
Never too much, never too often—be a good boy and carry that rope for me—
“You’re sure you don’t know where he got all that shit?” the sheriff asked.
“I’m sure,” Edmund said. “But I remember him saying a couple of times that he wanted to patent his moonshine and market it someday. This movement you’re telling me about here to legalize—what’s it called again?”
“Absinthe.”
“Absinthe,” Edmund repeated. “Well, maybe the old man had the same thing in mind. Maybe he was ahead of his time.”
“It all looks pretty innocent to me,” the sheriff said, chuckling. “He was making it in such small quantities. Clearly no intent to distribute. Christ, if I went around chasing every redneck cooking up moonshine for private consumption, I ’d be one hell of a lot skinnier, that’s for sure.” Edmund pretended to laugh. “And shit, last thing I need right now are the fucking Staties and the DEA breathing down my neck. Can’t prosecute a dead man last I checked. I only knew your grandfather superficially through Rally’s nephew. Other than this bullshit, he seemed to be an upstanding citizen as far as I can tell. Don’t know about you, but I ’d be happy if all this just went away.”
“Me, too,” Edmund said, smiling.
Edmund signed some papers that allowed the sheriff to retain Claude Lambert’s books indefinitely. He couldn’t tie them directly to the illicit absinthe production, he explained, as the books were mainly about botany and general chemistry. But still, he thought it best that Edmund sign a release in case everything came back to bite him in the ass. He made no mention of Claude Lambert’s notebooks.
Rally must have taken them, Edmund thought. He assured the sheriff that he would do everything in his power to cooperate with the investigation—even allowed the fat Adolf Hitler lookalike and a couple of his Gestapo to take one more look in the cellar that evening. And then, much to Edmund’s surprise, in the weeks that followed the whole thing just “went away.”
But then there was the problem of Rally—a problem that resolved itself much more quickly and, for Edmund Lambert, much more satisfactorily.
“I want to talk to you in person,” Edmund said on the telephone the day after the funeral.
“About your meeting with the sheriff?” Rally replied. “You didn’t tell him I was involved, did you Eddie?”
Even though Rally was over eighty, upon his return from Iraq Edmund was surprised to see how frail and skinny he’d become since last he saw him—three years earlier, on a random visit to his boyhood home. And he looked skittish, too; his once bright, smiling eyes all wide and pink and seemingly incapable of holding Edmund’s gaze for long.
“I didn’t tell him anything,” Edmund said. “Don’t worry about that. But I want to talk to you about the General.”
“The who?”
Edmund was silent for a moment, then whispered, “C’est mieux d’oublier.”
More silence, this time from Rally.
“When you coming by?” the old man asked finally.
“Now.”
/> “Makes sense,” Rally said, distantly. “I reckon it was only a matter of time.”
Edmund noticed the tension in his voice was gone—he sounded more like the Rally he used to know—but before Edmund could respond, Rally hung up.
Edmund arrived at Rally’s twenty minutes later.
The old man lived alone in a double-wide on what he often bragged added up to ten acres of “primo farmland.” Most of the land, however, was uncultivated, and the trailer itself was set back about a hundred yards off the road against a thick swath of trees. For as long as Edmund could remember, Rally had said that someday he was going to build his dream house there. And it wasn’t like he couldn’t afford it, Claude Lambert used to say. But for some reason, the old man never seemed in much of a hurry to get out of his trailer. Edmund suspected this was because Rally thought he didn’t need a house when he already had the Lamberts’ to hang around in.
Edmund parked his pickup beside Rally’s, his headlights scattering the more than two dozen cats that the old man allowed to roam free amid the junk that littered his property—old auto parts mostly, including the shell of a beat-up Chevy Nova propped up on cinder blocks. Some of the cats, Edmund knew, were former residents of his grandfather’s tobacco farm; others, most likely their offspring. Rally had often adopted them over the years, more so after Edmund joined the Army and Claude Lambert’s health began to decline.
There were no more cats now on the tobacco farm.
Edmund smiled at the memories of what he used to do to the cats way-back-when before his anointing. How stupid he’d been back then; how blind to the messages that were right there in front of him. And now, the fact that Rally’s cats were gathered out front to greet him when he arrived, well, surely this must be a message from Nergal, too.
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