by Joanne Pence
“To understand Algernon is to understand NAUTS and Derrick Holton. Even though they are opposite in almost every way. And deadly enemies.” He glanced at Connie. “It seems to me that meeting Algernon would be well worth your while.”
Connie’s eyes met Angie’s. “Perhaps so,” she said.
“Well, excuse me, please,” Elvis said. “I’ve got to help my friend Phil over there with the tickets. We’re getting a good crowd due to all the publicity about Dr. Mosshad.”
Angie watched Elvis walk over to the man he had referred to. The name Phil had a strangely normal sound for this crowd. Phil himself, however, fit in with the others. He was an older man, his black hair streaked with gray. He was almost bald on top, though his hair was thick and bushy at the sides and back. He had a full beard and wore love beads and Birkenstock sandals with no socks. A true child of the sixties, most likely still searching for the Age of Aquarius.
Angie turned back to Connie and the two were quietly commenting to each other on the bizarre people there when Angie noticed another man hovering nearby. He was a pudgy twenty-something fellow with a little Hitler-type mustache and thin black hair combed forward onto his forehead. He was the man who had been sitting outside the hall and giving away Roswell brochures. She frowned and turned her back to him.
Instead of taking the hint, he moved in front of her. “Are you a member of NAUTS?” he asked nervously.
“I’m here to learn,” she said coldly.
The chubby fellow stepped closer, twisting his fingers. “It’s nice that you’re here. Both of you.” His voice was soft. He smiled at Connie, who looked even more alarmed. “You should both think about joining us. You might even win a hundred dollars.” His smile made his cheeks dimple deeply. “My name’s John Oliver Harding. Everyone calls me Oliver—Oliver Hardy.” He gripped his shirt as if it were a vest and waggled his fingers. “I’m into old movies and comedies.”
“Ah, I see,” Angie said. She looked around for Stan Laurel. He had to be nearby.
Just then the doors opened. “Good-bye, Mr. Hardy. We’ve got a lecture to hear.”
“It’ll be about the men in black. You should enjoy it.”
Better than men in Oliver Hardy disguises, Angie thought as Connie tugged her to the front row for a better view of Derrick Holton.
Another male. This one seemed to be in his forties. His lips, nose, ears, genitals, and rectum had been removed as cleanly and bloodlessly as those from the victim found in Stern Grove. The number 5 had been carved into his chest.
Paavo stood on the infield of the city’s new ballpark and looked down at the victim. He had come from the dugout, where he’d talked to the security team and the groundskeepers who had found the body. They’d given him a good idea of what he’d see when he got there. Maybe that was why, as he crossed the field, he’d made a detour to the pitcher’s mound, stood on the rubber a quick second, and stared at home plate. When he was a kid and would go to Candlestick Park to watch the Giants with his stepfather, he had dreamed of standing on the mound one day. He guessed this was as close as he’d ever get. Then he turned and continued toward the crime scene.
As Yosh joined him, he looked once more down at the body. This one hadn’t been dead a couple of days like Lambert. He was so recently dead his skin still smelled burnt where the cuts had been cauterized. Paavo held his breath as he squatted down. There was no lividity. Finger pressure could not turn the skin any whiter than it already was. It looked as if this victim, too, had been drained of blood. Rigor mortis was in the early stages of development. Three or four hours earlier, the man might still have been alive.
Beside the mutilated body Paavo saw a small waferlike metal object. He didn’t touch or move it until the photographers got there, just in case there was some significance to the way it had been placed at the victim’s side. It seemed to be some kind of computer circuitry, but neither Paavo nor Yosh, nor any of the patrol officers around them, had any idea what they were looking at.
“It’s got to be the same doer,” Yosh said. “I don’t want to think there’s more than one psycho going around hacking up people like that.”
“What worries me,” Paavo said, “is that there was only about a week between this murder and the earlier one—depending on how accurately we estimated the day of Lambert’s murder.” Anyone who killed so brutally usually took a few weeks, even months, between crimes. Past studies of serial and spree killers showed that such killings often accompanied a kind of sexual frenzy on the part of the killer. Those who mutilated their victims, in particular, always went into a profound exhaustion for days thereafter. It was considered nearly impossible for someone to kill again in such a lurid way after only a few days. Nearly impossible, but obviously not completely so.
Or—the thought was chilling—there might be more than one killer. A cult, perhaps? One that had a sick fascination with death.
Equally grim was the possibility that these killings were being done without the frenzy and emotional involvement and release such horrid crimes usually entailed. Was it possible for a man to commit crimes like that without passion? To do it with indifference? Not if the killer had any humanity at all.
Paavo slowly circled the victim. Needle marks speckled his arms. He was so skinny his ribs showed. The corpse’s unkempt and dirty hair, battered and scarred hands with dirty nails, and callused feet with ragged toenails were the markings of a man who had lived hard and lived on the streets, the antithesis of the immaculate Bertram Lambert.
Just as with the last victim, something about the mutilation and the way the victim lay cast a ritualistic tinge over the murder. All the flesh that had been removed had surrounded an orifice of the body. It was significant—but why?
“Number five,” Yosh muttered, as much to himself as to his partner. “What the hell does it mean? The other guy had a seven. Seven, five? Seventy-five? I don’t get it.”
“It might be the start of an even bigger number,” Paavo said.
“Let’s hope it’s not too big a number,” Yosh said, his voice low. “I don’t want to see any more vics end up like these last two.”
Paavo silently scanned the empty ballpark. “Something tells me we’re only looking at strike two.”
12
“I don’t know about this.”
Angie and Connie peered up at the large, dark, and dreary building on the part of Larkin Street that lay between the gentrified gay area of Polk Street and the seedy porn shops and prostitute haunts of the Tenderloin. Angie double-checked the address Triana had given her. This was where she was supposed to meet Algernon.
Connie nervously hooked her arm in Angie’s. “It looks kind of creepy from out here, but I’m sure it’ll be fine inside. Can’t judge a book by its cover. Ha, ha.”
Angie glanced at her friend and grimaced. Still, she was thankful Connie had consented to come with her. “We’ll go up there, see what Algernon is all about, then leave,” Angie said, mustering her courage.
“That’s right. It’ll help you in planning his dinner party, plus I need to do this.” Connie straightened her back, lifting her chin as she pushed open the main door and entered the building. “If Derrick and I are to have a chance together, I need to understand him and everything he’s involved in a whole lot better than I do now.”
Angie had to agree to that. After the bizarre lecture about the men in black—a mysterious lot whose job was to intimidate witnesses to UFO activities—she and Connie had gone with Derrick to the Top of the Mark for cocktails. Angie had to admit that Connie couldn’t have looked better. Derrick, though, had been troubled and distracted.
Dr. Mosshad hadn’t reappeared that night, as expected. Derrick darkly hinted that Algernon was somehow behind the scientist’s disappearance. Angie couldn’t get him to say why, but as the evening wore on, Derrick had grown increasingly agitated.
When Connie asked if Algernon was dangerous and if the police should get involved, Derrick had laughed. Algernon was no more danger
ous than a maggot, he had said. In fact, he added, that was what Algernon was—a maggot to be squished.
Soon after, they had called it a night.
Now, with growing apprehension, Angie walked up the stairs to the Prometheus Group meeting in apartment six. The walls of the stairwell and hallways were painted black and the doors a garish red. No welcoming doorbell was evident. As Connie nodded encouragement, Angie knocked.
The door was opened by a woman wearing a soiled, sleeveless, floor-length Cleopatra-style outfit—except Cleopatra wouldn’t have been caught dead in it. Tied around her head was a gold ribbon and sticking up from the center, over her forehead, was a small yellow plastic snake—the type that cost about fifty-nine cents at a toy store.
It was all Angie could do to stop staring.
“Greetings, fellow voyagers,” the woman bellowed. “I am Isis, daughter of the Great Pyramid. Welcome.”
“I’m Angie, daughter of Sal and Serefina. This is Connie. We’re here as guests of Triana Crisswell.” The two moved cautiously into the apartment. The furniture was as run-down as the rest of the building—a green Naugahyde sofa and chairs that must have been nearly forty years old. Didn’t that stuff ever wear out? It was the most resilient legacy of the fifties. Wooden chairs filled the rest of the room. Three men and four women chatted and paid no attention to the new arrivals. Triana was not among them.
“Here it comes!” someone shouted. Everyone leaped from their chairs and circled a computer monitor.
“We’re going to look at some pictures taken by members of our Santa Fe chapter while visiting Egypt,” Isis explained. “Santa Fe is filled with good feng shui, so sensitive people such as us can live there. Only a few places are suitable for us, you know.”
“Is that so?” Connie asked, bobbing her head to see the computer screen.
“Yes. Santa Fe, Sedona, and of course, San Francisco and Berkeley.”
There was nothing in the least bit spiritual or ethereal about Berkeley to Angie’s eye. She wondered if that was feng shui humor.
“It’s beautiful!” one of the men shouted when the photo came clearly into view. Connie moved in close to get a better view. To Angie, though, it looked like all other photos she’d seen of the Great Pyramid.
Angie watched the changing images for less than a minute, then stepped back to Isis, who remained near the door. Connie seemed to be as engrossed as the others watching the photos and listening to a running commentary about the chambers inside the pyramid.
“Why does it mean anything special to you?” Angie asked Isis. “Does this have to do with pyramid power—putting things inside little pyramids to make plants grow better, or whatever?”
“Not at all,” a voice behind them said.
Angie turned toward the man who entered the room. He was tall and darkly handsome, with flowing black hair and a black suit that bore a close resemblance to the old Nehru jackets of fleeting popularity. “That was New Age nonsense,” he said. “This is real. The Great Pyramid is so large it can be seen from the moon.” His gaze fixed on Angie. “Were you aware of that?”
“No, not really.” She took a step back, as if pushed by the power of the man’s eyes. “I don’t see that that matters.”
“The Great Pyramid’s base is equal to thirteen acres. Its weight is so great, only a solid stone mountain would be able to hold it—and the ancients built it right on top of solid granite. You must be a new member of our group,” he said, taking her hand in both of his. His middle finger bore a heavy gold ring in the design of a cobra. “Tell me, little skeptic, how did such primitive people know that deep within the earth, far below the sand they chose, stood a mountain of solid granite?”
Mesmerized, Angie’s gaze flitted between his black eyes and the gold snake that coiled round and round his finger. “How did they?” she asked. This man had to be Algernon. There couldn’t be two such powerful personalities in one group. She glanced toward the entrance. Where was Triana?
The man was already speaking. “It took a special knowledge impossible for them to possess”—his voice dropped dramatically—“on their own. It also took a special knowledge for the ancients to place the Great Pyramid in the exact center of the Earth’s land mass.”
Angie’s eyes widened. “The exact center?”
“Come.” Holding her hand, he led her away from the others, across the room to a desk with a globe of the world. She turned toward Connie, wanting to gesture for Connie to come with her, but Connie’s attention was glued to the computer monitor.
With his right hand he slowly spun the globe. “East to west, the pyramid’s axis corresponds to the longest land parallel across the Earth.” He stopped the globe with Egypt facing them. “North to south, it passes through the longest land meridian on Earth. In other words, out of three billion places on this planet where the Great Pyramid could have been built, the spot chosen was the one place where the greatest north-to-south and east-to-west land masses cross.” He whispered in her ear, “How could the ancients have known that?”
She swallowed hard, both intrigued and somewhat alarmed by this man and the sexual energy he exuded. “I don’t know.”
He wore a closed-mouthed, indulgent smile as he turned her to face him. Gazing down at her, he kept his hands on her arms as he spoke. “The total length of the Great Pyramid’s base is a precise fraction of the Earth’s circumference, and the ratio of the height to its base perimeter is the same as the Earth’s radius to its circumference. How could the ancient Egyptians have known that?”
She couldn’t even follow what he said, let alone be able to answer. Where were Triana and Connie?
“When you look at the stars, little skeptic,” he said, placing his hand on her chin to tilt her head upward as if toward the heavens, but in fact toward him, “the positioning of the pyramids is mathematically proportionate to how the constellation of Orion would have appeared in the sky in 10500 B.C.”
“That’s very long ago,” she murmured. She felt as if her body had turned to Jell-O.
A harsh female voice broke the spell being cast on her, and the stranger dropped his hands. “Old doesn’t begin to do it justice,” Isis said, stepping up to them both. Her eyes burned. “The pyramids were built at that time, you know.”
Angie faced her. This was something she did know. “The pyramids were built twenty-five hundred years before Christ, not ten thousand.”
“That’s old thinking,” Isis said with a sneer. “The new places them much earlier. Archaeologists discovered that a vent in the King’s Chamber points to Orion. A vent in the Queen’s Chamber points to Sirius—the star sacred to Osiris’s consort, Isis. Orion, as you probably know, was the sacred home of Osiris, the Egyptian god.”
“Isn’t Osiris the god of the dead?” Angie asked, her gaze drawn again toward the dark stranger.
“Life and death spring from each other,” he said. “One could say the pyramids, too, are as connected with death as with immortality. In that sense it is, in all, a death cult.”
Isis held her chin high. “We are its priest and priestess. Osiris and Isis, the lovers.” She gazed fondly at the man, then back to Angie. “Let me introduce Osiris.”
Angie glanced up at him. He gave her a small bow and that same haunting smile. “In a past life I was Osiris, little skeptic,” he said. “In this life, I am also called Algernon.”
13
“Algernon! You’re the person I’m here to meet,” Angie said. “I was hired by Triana Crisswell to put on a dinner party for your new book.”
He chuckled and took her hands. “Well, no wonder you are so skeptical, then. I was wondering how someone such as you had found her way here.”
“Triana Crisswell invited me here to meet you. I wonder where she is. With me is my fr—my assistant. Let me get her.”
Connie chose that moment to look up, and she saw Angie waving her over. Her eyes widened when she noticed Algernon.
As the two met, Angie took the opportunity to better stu
dy the man now that she knew for sure who he was. He was a lot older than she had first assumed. His skin had the too-tight look usually associated with women who’d had face-lifts, and his hair was too black to be natural. His neck and hands most gave his age away. Still, natural or not, he was a handsome man and—she had to admit—he had a lot of sex appeal. Just as Triana Crisswell had told her.
“It’s so nice to meet you,” Connie said. “Angie and I went to a NAUTS lecture yesterday. I heard so much about you.”
A hard look passed over his eyes and then was gone. Angie hoped she had imagined it. It was chilling. “You went to a NAUTS event and learned about me?” Black eyes darted from one to the other. Then he burst out laughing. “That was like going to Rush Limbaugh to learn about Bill Clinton. Did they have anything good to say?”
“Are you rivals, or what?” Angie asked, careful not to answer his question.
“Rivals denotes equals,” he replied. “I’m afraid jealousy has more to do with our differences than anything. When the first leader of the Prometheans died, I took over. That was how he would have wanted it. Others—Derrick Holton in particular—couldn’t bear to be second to anyone and left the group. NAUTS is small and weak and wrong. That’s why they have no followers, why they must resort to stunts like that ridiculous alien abduction of Mosshad to get attention. It makes us all look silly.”
Angie remembered that Derrick was convinced Algernon had something to do with Mosshad’s being gone so many days. Listening to him now, though, she doubted Derrick’s assumption was correct.
“What if Mosshad’s disappearance wasn’t a sham?” Connie asked. “Mosshad didn’t return for the big NAUTS meeting when he was supposed to.”
Algernon shrugged. “More drama? Who cares? The Prometheans and I know the truth about the universe and the future. There is more to the universe than most men can imagine. The ancients, the Egyptians, understood it, and so do I. I am followed by many. I am the truth.”
