by Trevor Hoyle
A long finger of destructive energy jabs down from the night sky followed by a crash of thunder. Kersh is enjoying himself. ‘Wanna mess with me, do ya?’ he goads Cawdor. ‘Come on then, cocksucker. Make my day.’
‘Quit fooling around, Frank. You might get burnt.’
‘Me? Wanna bet?’
‘You shouldn’t gamble, Frank. Three-time losers never win. Haven’t you learnt that much yet?’
Kersh spins round and grabs the rail tight in both hands, a rictus of fury convulsing his features. ‘You’re in the hot seat, not me,’ he snarls. ‘Watch this.’ The cords strain and stand out in his scrawny neck. At once the lightning intensifies, malevolent mind waves raking across the sky. A bolt of lightning forks down, searing the air and scorching the tiles at Cawdor’s feet. He staggers back, shielding his head, and stumbles towards the doors. The doors slide shut.
Kersh throws back his head and cackles. His knuckles show white, gripping the rail. ‘You’re dead meat, boy. A grease spot, hear me? Dead. Nothing. Zero.’
The entire tower is enveloped in crackling blue fire, granite and glass streaked with heat marks. Another lightning bolt strikes at Cawdor, almost playfully, toying with him, singeing his hair and eyebrows. He can smell himself burning.
Kersh is having the time of his life. He’s in control. This is what it is to have absolute power. Nothing can touch him, or harm him, or hurt him, ever again. Sheeeit, if he knew it was going to be so much fun he’d have gotten Cawdor and his slut bitch up here sooner. He can use the excitement. The thrill of it.
‘Hey! Might just keep you two around for a while,’ he screams with glee, hanging on to the rail. ‘Bring you out now and then when things get a little tame around here.’
With a gaping grin he looks up to the crazy mosaic of light filling the sky. Cawdor thinks he’s suffered, does he? The cocksucker don’t have the faintest notion what real suffering is. Kersh knows. All his life, the same bitter taste of failure, defeat, humiliation. The women he wanted who sneered at him – and worse, laughed. The high-and-mighty people in their fancy apartments who looked at him as if he was vermin. Nobody ever gave him a decent chance. He never had the breaks. Even his girl, Sophie Molosz, bleachedblonde hair and chipped nail varnish, had deserted him when he was in the Pen. He couldn’t even hang on to a cheap piece of tail.
But one thing he can do. What he did to that fat cretin at the gas station who tried to make fun of him. Blow Jeff Cawdor to kingdom come. Yessir. Fry, you fucker. Fry.
The seething mind waves converge and combine to form a blinding blue-white streak of colossal power that lights up the entire sky. It strikes from on high – a shaft of pure energy aimed with evil intelligence and deadly precision directly at Cawdor. Nothing can alter its course. It is unstoppable and instantaneous. In that instant, which seems to Cawdor to expand and stretch to occupy aeons of time, he remembers Kumar’s parting gesture. How he had touched the palm of Cawdor’s left hand – once smashed beyond repair, now restored to him intact in this other world – and had murmured, ‘Kersh may yet live – or die – to regret it.’
He may yet live. Or die.
With his left hand Cawdor grabs hold of the rail as the lightning bolt strikes. It scores a direct hit, suffusing his body with millions of volts. The current shoots through him. It passes down his arm and through the hand gripping the rail. It travels along the rail to where Kersh stands, both hands holding the rail. It welds both of Kersh’s hands to the metal. His body stiffens like a ramrod, grows a full six inches. His milky eye explodes out of his head. His good eye melts and runs down his cheek, which is already melting. His lank fair hair shrivels and curls into black ringlets. His mouth widens in a silent scream and keeps on widening as the lips crinkle and peel off, exposing a skeleton grin.
And then the grin is gone, and Kersh with it.
All that remains is the black residue of his hands, fused to the rail, like a sticky spider’s web. The rest of him is vaporised in a cloud of sooty particles, which swirl up, wisps from a funeral pyre, and disperse into the night sky. After that, nothing at all. Not even the smell of burning.
The lightning ceases. The myriad twinkling lights below flicker and are extinguished, like the last, fading impulses of a dying brain. In the far distance, the bright beacon of the glass pyramid flares briefly and is snuffed out. Then one by one the stars grow dim and expire. From the balcony Cawdor watches as the sky gradually darkens and the city fades to black. Soon there will be silence and emptiness and eternal darkness. There will be void.
Kersh has entered the longest night of all.
6
Thud.
Kersh slumped forward against the straps. Both hands hung limp, fingertips quivering as the final twitches of his autonomic nervous system died away. The skin at his shaven temples was scorched and blistered. Dried salty tears, like slugs’ trails, gleamed on either side of his nose. There was brown stuff on his shirt-front, ejected from his mouth and nostrils.
Above his head the fly buzzed. A sixth sense had warned it to take off from his hand the instant the switch was thrown. It droned around aimlessly and then zoomed off to look for a way of escape from the cork-lined room.
Meacham opened the door with the glass porthole and came in, followed by the doctor. The doctor had performed this service a number of times, though he was still nervous. Ninety dollars never seemed, to him, enough. He waited for Meacham to decouple the power cable, as an extra safeguard, before checking for pulse and heartbeat. Even then you couldn’t always be sure. The lingering aftershock did strange things to the nervous system.
The doctor held the flaccid hand for a minute and then went on to perform an auscultation, listening through his stethoscope. The blood was gurgling and settling in the left ventricle, but there was no rhythmic sound. No regular thump of a heartbeat.
‘I think we got a bull’s-eye.’ Meacham stood, hands on the folds of his hips, observing the procedure. He could spot a dead ‘un when he saw one.
‘Maybe,’ the doctor said cautiously. ‘We’ll check the brain.’ He attached a sensor pad to the centre of Kersh’s forehead and knelt down on the rubber mat to study the meter reading.
Meacham half-turned, glancing over his shoulder at the tall figure in the doorway. ‘Not a thing you can do any more. He’s pleadin’ his own case now.’
‘Then his soul is finally at rest,’ Preacher said.
Was that a question or a statement? Meacham speculated. ‘I guess so, Father.’ He never knew how to address these holy rollers, but ‘Father’ would have to do.
‘No signs of any activity,’ the doctor said, rising. He showed Meacham the reading. ‘Braindead.’
‘OK, doc, I’ll put my name to that. Pack your stuff.’ He looked round, pursing his fleshy lips and shaking his head slowly.
The priest seemed reluctant to leave, though finally he turned and went out. He nodded to the warden, left the brightly lit anteroom and climbed the concrete steps, his bony hand sliding along the rail where the paint had worn through to the metal.
Kersh had failed them. It was a tragic and devastating body blow to all their plans. The more so, Preacher knew, because Kersh had been the perfect type. Had he succeeded, he might have created a world – an entire universe – in which the Messengers would have had total control. That there was such a world somewhere, waiting to be discovered, but for the time being merely held in abeyance, Preacher was in no doubt.
There were countless alternatives, he was sure, and this very nearly had been one of them.
Why then had it failed? What had gone wrong? Kersh’s final second, stretched to infinity, was time enough, aeons of time, in which to create the kind of world that the Messengers desired. But that hadn’t happened. No such world had ever existed. It had been stillborn in Kersh’s brain.
Something – or someone – had prevented it from happening.
Another power equal to theirs.
Preacher walked along the main corridor of F Cellhouse, pa
st the sign pointing the way to Unit F-2, known as the Block, and was checked through the double security gates by the guards.
This time that other power – whatever or whoever it was – had defeated them. But that was this time.
Next time it would be different, Preacher vowed.
Next time.
The outer compound of baked red earth was bright as day under the gantry arclights. In the far corner, away from the other parked vehicles, sat the silver trailer like a dulled and battered torpedo, torn posters peeling from its ribbed sides. Preacher was halfway there when he felt a pair of eyes upon him. He didn’t turn or glance that way, knowing at once who they belonged to, and carried on with measured step.
Next to the chain-link fence, May-Beth Gaskins watched the tall black-clad figure cross the compound and enter the trailer. So much for high-flown prophecy, she thought contemptuously. So much for bullshit promises. She really had fallen for Preacher’s fake bill of goods, and now she felt disgusted with herself for being so naive. Another life – a new life – that’s what Preacher had offered her. Filled her head with romantic dreams that she might become beautiful and famous, powerful and rich. She snorted derisively. Imagine her swallowing that guff when it all depended on a petty hoodlum and three-time loser like Frank Kersh. She must have been crazy. The only legacy Kersh had to offer eternity was a piece of stringy buzzard meat.
One thing she knew for damn sure. No more visits to that ramshackle chapel out on Frog Wash Road to listen to the Messengers spouting their phoney claptrap.
Shaking her head, May-Beth passed through the side gate, leaving the bright arclights for the darkness beyond the compound. A warm night wind brushed her cheek. Overhead, a few wispy clouds floated by, lit by a pale slice of moon like a piece of silver paper stuck to the sky.
TIMESPACE
1
The building shook: it was one of the most spectacular storms he could remember ever having hit New York. From his office window on the 23rd floor of the Chrysler Building, Jeff Cawdor watched the flashes of blue lightning flickering through the dark roiling clouds, felt the shock wave of the thunder in the soles of his feet.
A shiver of awe and wonder rippled down his spine. Made you understand how the ancients could believe that it was the gods up there, hurling lightning bolts across the heavens in an ultimate tussle for supremacy.
Mankind hadn’t really progessed that much further, he thought. For all its science and technological advance, there was still a stubborn, deep-rooted belief that the elemental forces of nature were outside its control, and, more significantly, beyond its understanding. Sure, they could be ‘explained’ in mechanical terms. But there was an intuitive sense – hence the awe and wonder he felt – that they were part of a grand enterprise of which mankind had only an inkling of understanding, had barely scratched the surface. The more we learn, he reflected, the less we realise we know.
A thought straight from a fortune cookie, Cawdor thought to himself, grinning.
The epicentre of the storm was moving on, crossing the Hudson River into New Jersey. The boom of thunder was trailing a few seconds after the flashes, not so deafening as a few minutes ago. Craning to look down, Cawdor could see that the murk was starting to clear. At the height of the storm, Lexington Avenue had been shrouded in grey, from up here the stream of cars and the dots of people as invisible as creatures at the bottom of the ocean.
For just an instant back then, as the shiver went down his spine, he had been tempted to glance over his shoulder. It was the feeling one gets of there being another presence in the room. He had resisted the urge. The rational part of his brain told him it wasn’t possible for anyone to be sitting there, because he would have heard that person enter the office. And no one had. No one with a dark narrow face and liquid brown eyes, wearing silver-framed spectacles that winked in the penumbra outside the bright cone of the desk lamp. No one with slender brown hands clasped to his chest, leaning forward with an expression of concerned inquiry. No, definitely not. People simply didn’t appear out of nowhere. It defied logic.
And yet, as he turned away from the window, he was conscious of holding his breath. He held it long enough to make sure the chair was empty. Then, seeing that he was alone, Cawdor let it go. Logic had prevailed.
The storm had distracted him from his work, and there was a pile of it to be got through before he went on vacation in three days’ time. Don was frantic that he complete the Florida development proposal before he went. Don was due to make the pitch for the $22 million contract, which would be their slice of the hotel and casino complex at Holmes Beach near Sarasota. The design work was finished, but the technical specs were causing problems. For the past week Cawdor and his engineering team had been wrestling – at times almost literally, it seemed – with trying to incorporate the air-conditioning system into a building that at the touch of a button switched from open-air arena to closed auditorium. The management wanted their air-conditioned cake, and they wanted to eat it too.
He swung his leg over the swivel chair and settled himself at the drawing board. The CAD screen displayed the structural stress projections: a three-dimensional skeleton of the building, with a blizzard of numeric notations highlighted in red covering all the stress points. The figures hadn’t added up when the storm had pulled him magnetically to the window, and they didn’t now, twenty minutes later.
While he worked he let his mind dwell on the promise of Tuscany. Cawdor was half-afraid he’d banged on about it a bit too much and that Daniella wouldn’t be all that impressed by the reality, beautiful as it was. Or worse, that she might even be bored. At sixteen she was no longer a child, and yet not an adult, and it was impossible to predict what her reactions might be. They had taken the villa, with its own pool, situated in the hills above Cecina, for three weeks. There would be trips to Florence and Pisa, and the coast was within easy reach. For him and Sarah, visiting museums and art galleries, and discovering the treasures of village churches would be a delight, but they would need to ensure there were plenty of less serious diversions as well. Cawdor was determined that the holiday was going to be fun for all three of them.
The storm still rumbled faintly, way off in the distance. Minute by minute the sky was visibly brightening. Patches of blue had appeared, and the sun was playing hide and seek behind the tumbling banks of cloud being swept inland on a westerly breeze.
Just after four there was a light tap at the door and Phyllis entered. She apologised for disturbing him and held up a sheaf of letters. ‘If I’m gonna catch the mails, these need your signature.’ She stood near the desk, eyebrows raised, her cheeks dimpling in a smile of entreaty.
Cawdor looked up from the board. ‘Sure, I’ll sign ’em right away.’
He swung round as Phyllis placed the letters on the blotter and stood waiting, her chubby hands pressed together at her bosom.
‘Coffee on the hob?’ Cawdor asked, approaching the desk.
‘Just made a fresh potful. Like some?’
‘Great timing.’ Cawdor grinned. ‘As usual. Fetch me a mug while I sign these. Thanks, Phyllis.’
He watched her leave the office and then sat down at the desk to sign the letters. He was through signing them by the time she returned with his mug of coffee, black, one sugar, just the way he liked it.
Bright sunshine flooded in, illuminating the clutter on Gribble’s workbench like a searchlight. Sitting in his usual hunched posture in front of the VDU screen, he gazed dreamily across West 116th Street at the pale stone edifice of Columbia University Library.
Maybe she was in there right this minute, working away at some impenetrable ancient text, glasses perched on the end of her nose, short red hair like a flaming beacon under the cowled reading lamp. A Lorentz was her name – he’d seen it on the Natural Sciences department board – though he hadn’t yet discovered what the ‘A’ stood for. Angela? Alice? Abigail? None of those seemed to suit her. She wasn’t due to become an official member of the faculty u
ntil September, but Gribble had seen her around the campus for the past three weeks. He assumed that Ms A Lorentz was engaged in private research, or possibly preparing her doctoral thesis. She’d smiled at him, just the once, in the staff refectory, when he’d been dithering about what to have for lunch: picking up dishes and putting them back again, because he always got flustered when faced with more than three things to choose from.
Gribble knew (everyone had 20/20 hindsight!) that he ought to have grabbed the chance right then, got talking to her, made some witty remark, or, failing that, a dull pleasantry would have done. Anything would have been better than clearing his throat and colouring up like a lovesick, tongue-tied adolescent and shuffling off with his tray. How pathetic could you get?
He sighed and blinked and drew his mind back to work. There was always that – and he was damn lucky, he supposed, that he loved it so. Not many could say the same. Be thankful for small blessings, Gribble admonished himself. And anyway, there was always a next time, and next time he would find a smile for Ms A Lorentz, and a shaft of wit to go with it, if only he could think of one.
He tapped at the keyboard, quickly becoming engrossed once again with the program he was trying to write. It was purely for his own amusement, and he had been tinkering with it for weeks now. The basic concept was very simple; the execution fiendishly difficult. The idea was for the user – in this instance, G Gribble, Esq. – to enter his own vital data (age, education, circumstances, personality profile, future prospects and aspirations) and the program, which he’d named Delphi, would then chart his ‘world-line’ for the next five, say, or even ten years. The ‘world-line’ represented the general direction of a person’s life, touching on all important aspects such as career, relationships, illnesses, accidents, and any other major events likely to have a bearing on how the future unfolded.
Gribble intended Delphi to be a fun thing rather than a program with any serious application. But it also might be instructive. Find out where his career was headed, if he was going to win the Irish Sweepstake, whether there was a steady relationship on the horizon – even, fingers crossed, with a tall, slender redhead by the name of Angela-Alice-Abigail Lorentz.
