by John Farris
He left a message for Pope John XXIV. Then he went down the mountain in search of Eden, still feeling dazzled and shaken by what he had seen, the chaos her passions and wild talent had wrought.
OCTOBER 27 • 1:09 A.M.
Bronc Skarbeck’s cell phone, which played the first eight bars of “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” woke him up in the bedroom he shared with his teenage mistress. Bronc, in spite of the injuries that had been done to him at the abrupt conclusion of his military career, remained intensely loyal to his country, but not to the fools, connivers, and outright traitors (in his estimation) who were currently in charge.
“General, it’s Perk. Sorry about the lateness of the hour, but there’s been—we don’t know everything yet, but it looks serious.”
Perk, for Elizabeth Ann Perkins, was Lincoln Grayle’s executive assistant. Too smart and efficient to bother him with anything short of devastating news, probably involving the Magician. Grayle had been in town for a few days, so it wasn’t a plane wreck.
“Out with it, Perk.”
“They’re calling it a landslide. Took out the facade of the theatre and all of the terrace. The slide is blocking the Grayle Parkway and covering two of the parking lots.”
“When did it happen?”
“A little after midnight, according to the sheriff’s office. A helicopter’s up there now, assessing the damage.”
“Casualties?”
“We don’t know yet; reports are still sketchy.”
Skarbeck knuckled the crown of his head. Nearly flat front to back, crisp military haircut, dyed pimento red in defiance of his years.
“Why call me? Where’s Linc?”
“That’s just it, General. I don’t know. He might still have been at the theatre when it happened. But he hasn’t answered his cell phone. Now that I think about it—” A tremor in her voice, then she resumed, low and fretful, “Oh, I hope he wasn’t just driving away when it all came down.”
Skarbeck flinched slightly. “Take it easy, Perk. Did you try Linc at home?”
“Yes, sir. They haven’t seen him since late yesterday afternoon.”
“When did you see him last?”
Beside Skarbeck on the round bed, the size of a circus trampoline, Harlee Nations stirred in pearl-gray sheets, rolled over on her stomach, and smiled with her eyes closed, her youthful, creamy face enlivened by the romance of a dream.
Skarbeck, pleasantly distracted, passed a hand over the firm contours of her truly wondrous ass. Her skin tone like balm to his calloused hand. The phosphor of his commando’s chronometer shed green light on his inamorata like the aura of a séance. Harlee read rock music and hairstyle magazines exclusively although she had graduated high school, valedictorian of her class, at fourteen. She liked to drive very fast in her candy-apple red Viper V-10 and was taking lessons on handling the new Ducati bike he’d given her. For exercise she was serious about fencing, belonged to a local club, and practiced three times a week. She smoked a little dope with Skarbeck when the mood was right, and her pet name for him was Wondercock.
Give Harlee a couple of years—he knew this from experience with others her age—and she would become a major-league ball buster. While he grew older, once again burning himself at the stake of his obsession.
“Perk, you there?”
“Oh—yes, sir. I was thinking. There was a three-hour dress rehearsal for Linc’s new show; that was over about eleven o’clock. So he was in his suite when the girl showed up.”
“Girl?”
“She told me that she had an engagement with Linc, which I thought was pure horse puckey. I mean I’ve heard that one before. But—”
“Describe her.”
“Well—midtwenties, if that. Attractive, but no raving beauty. Strawberry blond, deep tan. Her left eye turned in a little, but that didn’t detract from—”
Skarbeck felt a sudden chill.
“So who was she, Perk?”
“Wouldn’t give her name. But Linc knew her. From the way she talked, the message she wanted me to give to Linc, there obviously was a relationship. She was nervous, but very determined to see him.”
“What was it she wanted you to tell him?”
“She said, quote, ‘I want Linc to know that what began at Shungwaya must be finished tonight.’ ”
“Shung—? What or where is that?”
“I don’t know, sounds African, doesn’t it? And he just came back from Africa not too long ago, so I thought, hmm. You know. Anyway, I repeated what she wanted me to say to Linc, and tired as he must’ve been, he sounded really pleased. Wanted me to bring her right on back to his suite. And that was the last time I saw him. It must have been about a quarter past eleven. Most of the cast and crew were already out of there, and I left a few minutes later.”
“So chances are Linc could still be there, spent the night with his visitor. Okay, but we don’t know if the theatre was damaged inside by whatever caused the rock fall.” Skarbeck paused. “The road’s blocked, you said, but there are a couple of other ways out, aren’t there?”
“Yes. Two tunnels through the mountain. That’s how the night crew made it out, or so I was told. Most of them are in the parking lot now, waiting to be helicoptered down the mountain.”
Skarbeck, not exactly fearing the worst, still felt a stirring of tentacles in the lightless deeps of his paranoia. What if Grayle had been buried under tons of rubble in his sports car? The General had cast his lot with Grayle after an unfortunate alliance with the Multiphasic Operations and Research Group, known as MORG. But without the Magician’s power and money his ambitions would be little more than rubble too. And he was sixty-five years old. The hand that was straying over Harlee’s lovely body trembled, and this slight seismic disturbance was enough to make her flinch and sigh through parted lips. But she didn’t wake up. He envied her blissful sleep. He had a prostate the size of a baked potato and could count on being up three times a night to piss, depending on how much he’d had to drink before bed.
He suspected cancer but by God there wasn’t going to be any cutting. No resultant impotence and adult didies for Bronc Skarbeck. If it was there like a bad seed in the prostatic tissue but failed to metastasize, then he might squeeze out another eight or ten years. Statistics favored a final round of longevity. Time enough for his comeback, a takeover of the government that had, as he devoutly believed, betrayed him and snatched his honor away. His first attempt had been aborted by the girl with the wayward eye described by Perk. But at the time he hadn’t had the Magician as chief plotter and cohort.
“Perk, I think all we can do for now is just hang and wait for Linc to contact one of us. Meantime you should get in touch with the insurers. I’ll want an estimate of damages soon as the sun comes up in the morning.”
“All right.”
“Rocks are always falling off mountains. That’s what Lloyd’s is for. And listen: don’t worry. Could be that Linc decided to wring some suspense out of this unfortunate occurrence. Crank up the old publicity mill. His kind of brainstorm, wouldn’t you say? ‘Lincoln Grayle’s Real-Life Miracle Escape from Death.’ ”
Elizabeth Ann Perkins laughed uncertainly.
“Sure. He might think of something like that. Disappear for a few days, scare the hell out of all of us. All for the good of the show.”
“With his TV special coming up during November sweeps. Spectacular timing. Ratings could be through the roof this time.”
“Yes, that would be—General Skarbeck, I have another call! Then I’d better be going over to Grayle’s Mountain, see for myself how bad things are.”
“Good. You do that. Stay in touch.”
Skarbeck folded his cell phone and continued to sit on the low bed, scratching his still manly, convex chest through a blizzard of graying pelt. He was thinking of something Lincoln Grayle had said to him a couple of evenings ago while they were assessing Plan A on a terrace of the Magician’s house in the deep blue and orange of high-desert sunset out there
on Charleston Mountain.
We are plotting tonight what will become the myths of tomorrow.
Spoken with that prankish grin of his that on occasion could produce goose bumps on the forearms of a battle-tested hard-ass old Marine commandant.
Skarbeck drew the back of his hand across his nose and smelled blood.
It was leaking from one nostril. He had decided that the nosebleeds were a result of ingesting the testosterone booster known commercially as Uptight, which was an imperative for keeping his dick at DEFCON ONE during the delights of the bedchamber Harlee provoked in her soft, insinuating fashion and with her splendid nakedness. Uptight was a potent vascular dilator hacked off shaggy stumps in a Japanese rain forest. Emperors and warlords for millennia had been fortifying themselves with it. But just a smidge too much of the powdered lichen could raise his systolic pressure to three-alarm status while charcoaling the dyed roots of his hair.
Skarbeck padded into the master bathroom, a palace within a palace, marbled and skylighted for drinking in the stars while soaking or steaming. He stuffed a ball of cotton up his nose. The dribble of blood had him wishing for the physical immortality that only Lincoln Grayle possessed (Skarbeck never thought of him as Deus Inversus, in order to keep a firm focus on the reality of the here and now that he inhabited).
Or was Grayle the only immortal in his large coterie?
Skarbeck had never pried, but he did have an occasional tremor of suspicion about the luscious girl in his bed. A time or two during the weeks since she had moved in, Skarbeck had seen something pierce her facade of pubescent artlessness—calculation in sage-green eyes that suggested she was not exactly what he had assumed her to be. Not a fragile reed inside a great body, clueless about the big bad world, but imperial in manner and heritage, timelessly wise. That made him wonder if she had another master to whom she was devoted. After all, the Magician had introduced Harlee to him. A gift of the Magician. The analog of which was the Trickster. Possibly she was a part of the intrigue surrounding Grayle at many levels of his purpose; a spy, in fact.
Skarbeck was no dummy, in spite of being willing prey to his libidinous weakness. The Magician knew his history: Skarbeck’s obsessive need for young, unplundered (except by Skarbeck) pussy. That weakness, along with an untimely binge after he was passed over for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs a little more than a decade ago, had resulted in the kind of salted-wounds humiliation only the media can provide.
He was dead certain that he’d been set up by his enemies at the Pentagon and on the Hill. After rehab he was no longer a drinking man, the only positive outcome of his ordeal, but his thirst for revenge remained far stronger than a repressed appetite for Tennessee sipping whiskey.
So immortality was beyond his grasp. But vitamins, herbal tonics recommended by his associate Dr. Marcus Woolwine, and spectrochrome therapy, or SCT, prescribed by Lincoln Grayle, tilted the odds (should the self-diagnosis of cancer be wrong) in favor of his reaching an eighth decade still reasonably hale, faculties intact. His face and body viewable from all angles in mirrors mirrors mirrors enhanced confidence and morale. The vaunt of an eagle, the gangsterish hauteur that lifetime military hard-cases often possess, and well-hooded scheming blue eyes.
At the moment, however, his eyes revealed a certain uneasiness.
He knew the identity of the girl Perk had mentioned, the one paying a late call on the Magician. Whom Grayle might have been entertaining still before the cliff face fell. She was Eden Waring—the Avatar, by virtue of her psychic prowess. And recently she had become the obsession of Lincoln Grayle, the human aspect of Mordaunt, Deus Inversus. Who believed that he could control the Waring girl’s powers. For what purpose? Grayle hadn’t been forthcoming; need-to-know basis, whatever. Skarbeck was cautious about trying to fathom the dark side of his employer.
But he knew more about Eden Waring: paranormal, dangerous, godlike. Not inhuman, however, and assuredly not immortal.
Then there was the matter of Eden’s doppelganger, whom Skarbeck had heard about but not seen. Eden’s mirror image, from a parallel universe (according to Lincoln Grayle, but he’d said it with that teasing smile of his, so who knew), a recent arrival in Las Vegas, where the weird and otherworldly seemed to be commonplace, at least around showtime. The dpg apparently was another project of Dr. Marcus Woolwine—psychiatrist, mesmerist, and bioengineer—who had dealt with her once before and not to his advantage. Grayle had hinted to the General that doppelgangers could travel through time. Skarbeck had reserved comment (no business of his, actually) except for a nod to indicate he was open to possibilities while privately thinking that physical near-immortality was one thing (he had read enough of the ancient histories, half a million years’ worth of the continuum of life on earth, to acknowledge that it was a near-truth). But flitting around centuries past and future, cutting across parallel universes? Bullshit.
Not that he really cared. He was committed only to what Lincoln Grayle wanted from him, and covetous of the astounding resources the Magician could bring to Skarbeck’s objectives: literally the wealth of an entire planet.
“Is it your nose again?” Harlee said.
She was leaning against a marble pillar in the wide entranceway to the bath and spa, partly and beguilingly obscured by a pedestaled urn of red roses. Dreams were dissolving in her eyes. There was about her an air of arrested motion, like someone who has missed a cue to begin her life.
“Not serious,” Skarbeck assured her. “What woke you up, babykins?”
Harlee shrugged. “You weren’t there.”
She straightened and came toward him, treading lightly and with a diffident hunching of her shoulders as if, until he beckoned, she was unsure of her welcome.
“And you missed me.”
“Yesss.” Rising on tiptoe to give him a kiss. Those exquisite painted toenails. She had a breathy little voice that reminded him of Marilyn Monroe. But when they had watched Some Like It Hot and Skarbeck had pointed out to her the vocal similarity, Harlee had wrinkled her nose and said with great though unwitting comic timing, “But she was a blonde.”
Now Harlee said, with an urging lift of her chin, “Are you coming back to bed, Daddy?”
“Soon as I pump ship,” he promised.
“I’ll hold it for you,” the sloe-eyed girl said. “You like for me to hold it while you’re whizzing, don’t you?”
So that’s how it went, with Harlee cuddling behind him, arms around his waist, fingers delicately agrip, his heart glowing, their love a thing of many mirrors. Nudity, he thought, while waiting patiently to pee, was charming in children, innocently erotic in the pubescent young, grotesque in bodybuilders and those high-fashion models who skip too many meals. There was pathos in the nudity of the very old. As for the in-between years, bodies were what you made of them. Skarbeck still took pride in how he looked, and his reflections of self-approval added kick to Harlee’s intimate fondling.
And so to bed for a half hour of gentle romping, sensual kinsmen of the night. Afterward, Harlee asleep again in his arms. His heartbeat was troublesome, a long while coming off its high; but a lovely wind swept his senses, cooling embers of rut.
He stayed awake for some time, alert to a brooding intuition that the rock fall on Grayle’s Mountain might have more ominous implications than he’d originally thought. Probably it would be a good idea to drive out at first light, have a look-see.
1:55 A.M.
. . . Tom Sherard drove the back roads of the valley and desert until at last he saw her, a lone slow-moving figure at the side of a long straight road to nowhere.
He slowed the rented SUV to a crawl and kept pace with her and she never looked his way. She walked with her head up, eyes fixed on the dim mountainous distance.
He pulled ahead of her, turned the SUV in her direction, all lights blazing. She must have been nearly blinded, but she kept walking until he got out and stepped into her path. Then she just stood there, swaying a little, looking intently at his face. Her o
wn face was grimy, her clothing filled with dust. Breakouts on her lower lip from hives. She began to tremble, as if she were just feeling the cold.
“Where are we, Tom?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then let’s stay lost. For a little while longer. Can’t we, Tom?”
She fell forward then, eyes closing, as if she were falling out of the sky.
6:58 A.M.
. . . The ringing of Sherard’s cell phone shocked Eden from her doze.
She left his side, where she had been warm and content, crept out from beneath the thin blankets on the bed they shared in a nondescript motel, the first they had come to, in a desert town that might have been in California, or Utah. The room had a single inadequate radiant heater and the floor felt like an ice rink to her bare feet. Eden rummaged in the pockets of his hunting jacket and came up with the phone. Answered.
She listened for twenty seconds, let out a soft cry as she sank down trembling on the side of the creaky bed, turned her face to Tom.
He raised his head, blinking to get the sleep out of his eyes, and stared at Eden.
“Is it about Bertie?” he asked.
“She’s awake and alert. Still on the ventilator but doing, they s-said, miraculously well.”
His face relaxed into an expression of gratitude and then irony at the echo of the word miraculous somewhere in his mind.
“All right, then. That’s my girl. She’s begun to heal herself.”
“C-can she do that?” Eden blubbered.
“In many instances. Will you please get under the covers? You’re shaking to pieces.”
She had never felt more naked than in this decrepit room, four stained walls, a loose window that let in a whistling wind, a bed, the man she had made love to in the shower, soapy and voracious, then again minutes later in the bed. He was now looking at her with unexpected composure when she’d dreaded that he would push her away from him like a cheap pickup he already was tired of, regretted. She was embarrassed by her body and bones, the sores on her lower lip, the still-unbanked fire in loins and breast. Not because he’d done badly by her but because each orgasm she’d experienced had seemed only a promise of greater bliss to come.
