Nightjack

by Tom Piccirilli

  Over the course of the day Pace learned that the English words chorus, chorale, choir, and choreography all come from this same Greek word HOROS. Dance, song, and music were such integral parts of the theater that the single word covered all of it. Pacella liked learning new things. Pace stood aside while the others enjoyed themselves. After the first two times the maids asked him to join in on the dances, they kept away.

  At first Faust was a little distracted, but he eventually got over it and he joined in on the Yeranos—the Crane. They learned how to do the happy, exuberant Syrtos, the national dance, written about by Homer in the Iliad. It was done with a smooth, flowing style by the women, while the men bounced and leaped wildly.

  Pia and Hayden did amazingly well right from the beginning. Faust got better and better as the afternoon progressed. The celebration became an expression of the moment. The Greeks went on to mix step variants. Improvisation that became open challenges, the men trying to outdo one another, the women becoming more and more sensual.

  More people showed up, more food and drink were brought in. More seating and tables. The wide marble floors seemed made for this reason, for gala and rejoicing. Pace sensed that deep-rooted emotions were being purged or expressed, that these people were showing love and hatred and pain in a way that was denied to him.

  He watched the men and women openly weeping during the sad, heavy Zeibekikos, and a lot of bared male chests during the heroic, masculine Tsamikos and Beratis.

  It started as a kind of show—with Vindi telling him, Look upon us, the gods are kind to the peasants—and it became a hell of a party. Vindi joined in on some of the songs. He had a lovely singing voice. His laughter boomed around the villa. The festivities becoming richer and more vibrant by the hour. Young men swooned over Pia—young men would always swoon over Pia, forever. Pace spotted two fistfights about to start but Vindi got there before anything could happen. Old men and women sat clapping their hands, enjoying the food, a little puzzled and astonished by it all.

  Pace watched and drank more ouzo. Eventually he wandered the villa and spent time studying the statues and paintings in the gallery. There were no photos of Cassandra, Kaltzas or his deceased wife anywhere on display.

  He stood on the terrace in the driving rain. In seconds he was as wet as if he’d been dropped into the sea. The fountains below were overflowing across the mosaic tiles, the fruit and nut trees bending savagely in the wind. The storm flung itself against him and he held on to the stone balcony with both hands. The waves crawled into the harbor, wanting to get at him. The statuary below watched him with pitiless eyes.

  When Pace finally released his grip and stepped back inside he wiped his hair from his eyes and immediately felt the hot breath of Vindi upon him.

  The Minotaur, snorting, said, “My employer will see you now.”

  twenty-seven

  He was led to an immense library down the corridor from the suite where they’d slept last night. Twenty-foot-high shelving with rolling ladders set in tracks surrounded the room. There were tens of thousands of volumes. The smell of acidifying paper was overpowering. Busts, carvings, sculptures, and parchments under glass sat on lit pedestals. It was the kind of room that Pacella had dreamed about all of his life.

  Vindi ushered him inside, then retreated and closed the door.

  Alexander Kaltzas sat in a broad leather chair facing Pace, his back to a large window that trembled, the darkness beyond flowing and pulsing as bucketfuls of black water were hurled against the glass.

  Pace had been expecting a broad, powerfully built man, someone imposing, as awe-inspiring as Zeus or one of the Titans. But Alexander Kaltzas was diminutive, fragile in appearance, almost petite. He was completely bald, his angular chin covered with a well-trimmed beard. Extremely red lips gave his mouth an obscene quality. His nose was as sharp as a hatchet.

  He wore a black suit with tails, a high-fastening collar with a perfectly double-knotted thin tie, and a brocaded vest. The man appeared ready for a funeral. His hands were clasped, index fingers steepled under his chin gently stroking the tip of his beard. His gaze rested near Pace but not on him.

  Kaltzas was in complete repose. A word that William Pacella liked to use repetitively in his book. Everybody in the novel was always in repose—after they got laid, after an argument, after the final revelations of a situation were finally made clear, those fuckers were in repose.

  Alexander Kaltzas, father of Cassandra—unmoving, and at peace.

  “Hello, Mr. Pacella,” he said without any accent.

  The voice had a little grit to it, deeper than you’d expect from such a small man, as if thickened by constant use, shouting orders.

  Pace decided not to correct him. Dripping, he stepped forward and his wet shoes squeaked on the tile floor. He stood and waited to see what kind of opening gambit would be made. “Mr. Kaltzas.”

  “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “Many things, but let us begin with your accepting my invitation. I appreciate you making such a lengthy sojourn.”

  Pacella liked that word too. Sojourn. Pilgrimage. He still couldn’t believe that publishers would reject somebody who knew such fancy words and used them all the goddamn time.

  Pace said, “I didn’t mind coming to Greece.”

  “Please sit.” Kaltzas gestured to the chair directly across from him. He wanted to be close, face to face like gentlemen about to play a game of baccarat.

  Pace sat, thinking, You come all this way ready for blood and butchery, prepared to die but aspiring to live, almost hopeful that the mysteries which bind you can be undone with the triumph over a labor. You come all this way expecting murder and instead you drink and dance.

  He waited in his seat almost wishing someone would try to kill him. That he would, at long last, be able to accomplish something.

  “Why did you invite us here?” he asked.

  “I need you, Mr. Pacella. All of you. The many facets of you.”

  “Nobody needs all of me. Not even me.”

  The small man placed his arms against the armrests of the chair and smiled. “I needed to awaken what had been put to sleep in that institution with abundant amounts of medication. I own several pharmaceutical companies and asked a chief pharmacologist to give me an extensive report on your treatments. Perhaps your doctor was not aware of it, but if you continue with that mixture of medication for another year or so, you’ll have complete renal and liver shutdown.”

  Laying it out like that, practically saying that Dr. Brandt was trying to murder Pace. Maybe it was true. You just couldn’t tell with that lady.

  “Why do you think you need me?” Pace asked. “The many facets of me?”

  “To save my daughter,” Kaltzas said. “To lift the curse upon her. To counteract what was originally done to her. What you, in fact, did to her.”

  “What did I do?”

  “Infected her with your affliction.”

  Pace thought about that for a minute.

  He said, “How do you know she didn’t infect me?”

  Kaltzas angled his chin. “Why do you say that?”

  “My affliction, as you call it, began the day I saved your daughter’s life from the fire that killed my wife.”

  Pace had a hard time saying my wife, talking about a woman he could hardly remember, but at the words Pacella chewed his tongue until his mouth filled with blood. He swallowed it and the taste made Jack throb.

  Kaltzas’s repose wavered for a second. His lips grew even more red until he looked like he’d bitten someone’s throat. “My daughter...this illness...it may have originated with her?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not blaming anyone. It happened to me that day, I believe. In the fire. When I watched my wife burn to death.”

  “My daughter was always troubled, but it wasn’t until after—”

  “Why don’t you say her name?” Pace asked.

  “Cassandra,” Kaltzas said, with so much emotion that it was li
ke a hot wind in Pace’s face. What did it mean, for a father to say his child’s name like that?

  Without turning in his seat, Kaltzas indicated the window behind him. It seemed like it might shatter at any minute and shred him to ribbons.

  Kaltzas said, “This storm. It’s yours, isn’t it?”

  “That sounds crazy.”

  “True. Nonetheless, it is yours.”

  “Yes,” Pace admitted.

  “As above so on earth. Heaven rages because your soul is not at peace.” A strange, small sound fluttered from the man. It had almost nothing in common with laughter but Pace figured that’s what it was supposed to be.

  Pace said, “What the hell do you want with us?”

  “My sole interest is in you.” The steepled fingers returned to his beard.

  “I see. Why?”

  “As I said, because of my daughter, of course. Because we are blood now, you and I. Fate has seen to this.”

  “How so?”

  “My daughter is pregnant with your child.”

  Pace stood. Maybe the knife was in his hand, maybe it wasn’t. It felt like he’d just clutched it to his chest and stabbed himself. He had to look down to make sure the stacked micarta handle wasn’t sticking out of him.

  His mouth opened but he said nothing. His lips moved but framed no words.

  “Yes, it’s true, Mr. Pacella. As I said, we are now blood.”

  And then, for an instant, the man...fluctuated. His calm gone, his eyes suddenly filled with a swirling anxiety. Those eyes turned black and cold as quartz.

  And Pace realized what was happening.

  Faust had been right.

  We’re actually channeling these other individuals, entities, and beings. Drawing them from other dimensions, through time and space and across the cosmos. Gathering them to us. Them, and the souls of the departed. These others do not arrive organically, from within.

  He wasn’t talking to Alexander Kaltzas at all, not in the flesh.

  They consume and subsume and, the worst of them, devour. We are simply the beacons. We are the vessels. We are the conduits. We are the possessed.

  He stared at Kaltzas, into the man—trying to focus past the ghost to see the face of a dark-haired girl with sharp aquiline features beneath. A young woman of strength and independence, forged by heartache. With an expression that was, even now, undoubtedly reserved and remote. A girl who had buckled and broken, no worse than Pacella had, like Psyche driven down to the underworld by love.

  Kaltzas remained before him, but Pace knew now, This was a girl with an affliction.

  This was actually Cassandra.

  A moment later, Alexander Kaltzas returned to his peaceful repose. He stood, extended his hand, shook with Pace, and said, “It has been a pleasure, my son. We shall talk again further.” Kaltzas drew him forward, patted his back twice, added, “Welcome to my family,” and walked out of the room.

  twenty-eight

  Pace stood there thinking, Christ, if she really is pregnant, the poor baby. With Pace as the father and Cassandra the mother, this kid was going to be born speaking ninety-seven languages, squealing, hissing, burrowing like a grub, gliding like a tree squirrel. Burning brighter than Apollo, red as Satan’s sores. Reaching for mama’s heavy breast, full of the murdered, the inhuman, and the insane.

  That’s my boy!

  By the time he got out into the corridor Kaltzas was gone. Pace walked the hallway listening to the celebration still going on downstairs, Pia’s laughter loud enough to rise above the music and other noise. The bouzouki band was really kicking into high gear, the crowd stomping in time with Pace’s pulse.

  His head swirled and he wasn’t so sure that he liked being alive anymore, being the man in charge of the body. He was picking up a history in busted bits and pieces, gluing the shards together to form the mosaic of himself.

  A shadow crossed his face and he spun, wondering who was coming after him now.

  It was only another statue of an incomplete man standing on a pedestal, the spotlight rising from between his cracked legs, illuminating his missing hands, his marred face.

  Sometimes you found your symbols, and sometimes your symbols found you.

  He walked down the hall and, as he passed an open door of a dimly-lit room, someone called to him. “Will?”

  You couldn’t help thinking, Jesus Christ, now what?

  He stepped inside the room, feeling the blade passing back and forth from one hand to other at incredible speed.

  Dr. Maureen Brandt was seated before the window, a wretched expression writhing across her lovely face. You could take a lot, but this lady, your own doctor, she was just totally fucking disheartening.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “I failed you,” she said.

  “Not me. William Pacella maybe, but you and I are square.”

  “All of you. Pia, Hayden, Faust, even many of my other patients on the ward. I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  The question seemed to stun her. “You’re not cured.”

  She still didn’t get it. If she cured him, she’d kill him. Reintegrating Will Pacella would squeeze out the In-between man. “We were in a mental hospital. There’s not exactly a high rate of success in such places. It’s a world where recidivism is on the rise.”

  “I don’t think you should be so forgiving.”

  “It’s my nature,” he told her. It was the truth. “What are you doing here?”

  “I had to come. To make certain you were safe.”

  “Vindi paid you and brought you here.”

  He stepped closer, willing her into his arms, but she remained seated. She still intoxicated him with her allure, perhaps more now than ever. Maybe he just needed someone from his past—his own past—to be here with him. He started to turn away but couldn’t quite complete the motion.

  He flashed again on the first time he’d seen her: waking up in the hyper-white cell room, strapped in the funky straitjacket tied to the stainless steel railings surrounding the bed. Dr. Brandt introducing herself by name while she flicked a fingernail against a syringe, sticking the needle into his neck. How could it not make an impression?

  “I really wish you’d stop looking at me like that,” she said.

  “How?”

  “You know how.”

  “Yeah, but I want to hear you say it.”

  “Like you want to fuck me.”

  There it was. He’d always know that, on some level, Dr. Brandt really hated her patients. They were, to an extent, infecting her with their troubles, putting different kinds of thoughts into her head.

  “Maybe I love you,” he said. “Maybe you’re in love with me.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Some people might call it crazy, but I’m glad you don’t throw that word around so easily.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  He remembered the final smile she’d given to him before he’d left the States, that condescension somehow mixed with bereavement. As if she’d almost managed to rescue the part of him worth redeeming, before he’d proven himself past all atonement

  “I need your help,” she said, and moved in such a way that her breasts jutted, consciously or unconsciously luring Pace in to do her will.

  “You need my help? To do what?”

  “To save Cassandra Kaltzas.”

  It was acceptable to go mad with lust, but he didn’t need the extra burden right now. “Kaltzas said the same thing. But what can I do?”

  “I’m not certain, but you’re a main part of her illness, and so you might be an aid in her treatment. Cassandra didn’t have a breakdown in the accepted understanding of the word. She was...obsessive. Whereas you, Pia, Hayden, and Faust make each other more ill, I believe that you might actually be an aid to Cassandra, and help me draw out her primary personality again.”

  “Her father says she’s afflicted. And that I’m the cause. She’s pregnant with my child, he says.”

/>   Dr. Brandt’s entire body tightened in the chair. Her brow furrowed and she shut her eyes, and he saw the muscles in her beautiful face working to no benefit. When she looked at him again she was nearly pouting. “At first I thought you were the impetus, the catalyst for shared mass hallucination. But you weren’t merely seeing and interacting with the other patients’ alternates. You were ingraining the ill with their fractured psyches. You were giving life to their additional personalities.”

  “That’s not possible,” he said. “You can’t spread split personality disorder.”

  “Apparently you can. Perhaps with implanted suggestions. And with additional suggestions you can help seal the fractures and reverse the process.”

  “You know, lady, you’re as nutty as any of us. And everybody knows it.”

  She gave him a sad smile there that made the center of his chest hurt. “We’re breaking new ground here, Will. We’re far and away from the usual psychoneurotic disorders.”

  How often did you hear that? We’re far and away from the usual psychoneurotic disorders. She didn’t even realize how ludicrous it sounded.

  Dr. Brandt said, “That’s why I know I’m responsible, in part, for your continuing illness. I should have turned your case over to psychiatrists whose skills exceeded my own. Or at least invited others to study your case and weigh-in with their professional opinions. But I was selfish. I was greedy. I wanted to keep you to myself. I guarded you jealously.”

  He didn’t know how to take that. “But if you wanted to study me so badly, then why did you keep trying to shake me free from it? With such intense therapy? The medications? That fucking straitjacket?”

  “I was...conflicted.”

  He let out a bark of laughter. “Yeah, I guess so, lady!”

  “I’ve got to talk to him,” she said.

  Knowing exactly who she meant, but unable to say the name. “Who?”

  “Jack.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s a part of this.”

  It made no sense. “He doesn’t talk.”