by John Farris
At the threshold of Harlee’s room, General Bronc Skarbeck, lavishly decorated veteran of wars, skirmishes, and occupations, suffered the first failure of nerve of his life. It was unexpected, and a shock to his ego. And Harlee hadn’t uttered a word or offered a look to bring him down so drastically.
She was, in fact, alone in her bedroom with its scatter of teen magazines and posters of hardbody striplings nonchalant in low-riding denim and baggy camo, as austere in her sleep as a stone saint atop a tomb. She breathed through her lips with a faint sibilance. Her Mac was on, and humming. She had mail. A fragrant candle by her bed had burned down to a nub of flame in a soft caldera. She looked as if she had been asleep for hours, her dreamtime spanning centuries he could scarcely imagine, drawn from wells of personal experience.
So Marcus Woolwine believed, or would have Bronc believe: one revelation among many during a truly fascinating conversation they’d had at the end of Bronc’s long day. No denying that Woolwine was a sharp old bastard who had explored boggling possibilities of the occult during his long career. On the other hand, past a certain age even the most brilliant minds could spring leaks, pissing away accumulated wisdom, scientific objectivity, or just plain common sense. Therefore, Woolwine’s tales of Fetchlings might have been romantically conceived while the old boy was immersed in a subdelirium’s depths like a nearly extinct blowfish.
The ruby crystal skull was missing from the Magician’s house, however. The room in which it was keeping the doppelganger’s hologram company had been violently disturbed. Because Harlee had made a late-night visit with her friend Devon (confirmed by surveillance tapes), Bronc had no choice but to find out what was going on.
The white streak in her hair (some new fad that was de rigueur within her set?) might have given him pause, that sinking feeling. It was somehow ferocious, alien, in the ghost light of the computer screen. So Bronc imagined as he closed the door behind him and approached Harlee’s bed. Or else attributed his reluctance to ask questions of her to fatigue. His eyes felt dry and grainy beneath the lids. Alertness was smudged, and he had a burnt-coffee backtaste in his raspy throat. Just stay rational, evenhanded. Ask only what he had to know. No staying the night. His heart hung in his chest like an anvil and his balls felt even heavier, with soreness and unpleasant heat. Maybe it was testicular cancer he really needed to worry about. No, just too much screwing lately.
Braver now, settling into her lambency on the edge of the bed. He didn’t care to know more about Harlee than the eye beheld, his senses could absorb. All else must be denied. He would savage the world to keep her. On his terms.
The terms he was about to negotiate.
Harlee opened her eyes a few moments after he gripped a bare shoulder, then increased the pressure of his grip.
“Ohhh, Daddy,” she said, in her intimate movie-goddess whisper voice, looking up into his fuming eyes. “You’re home.” She smiled faintly. “But I’m so awfully tired tonight. I haven’t had a bath and I feel all bloaty, it must have been something—” Her eyes squinched a little as he applied more pressure, then she lightly bit her lower lip. “What’s wrong?”
“Tell me,” Skarbeck said.
“T-tell you what?”
“That you love me.”
“I do. Oh, I love you, Daddy! But you’re hurting me.”
Skarbeck eased up a little as, with his left hand, he laid his beat-up old service .45 on the pillow next to Harlee’s, where she could see it out of the corner of her eye. See the hammer cocked back. His hand remained on the worn checkered butt of his automatic, not gripping it, just lying there, a hand deeply freckled with age spots.
Harlee looked at the weapon for several seconds—the blunt estrangement it represented—licked her lower lip bodingly, looked into his eyes, a gaze of profound despair.
“But what have I done?”
“I don’t know yet. Love, or whatever you want to call it, is one thing. Loyalty, trust—those matter more.”
“You know you can trust me.” Harlee shrugged slightly. Her cheeks looked a little feverish. She cleared her throat, then spoke in her normal voice. One pretense abandoned. Not useful, given the situation. “So, did you and Dr. Woolwine have a tête-à-tête?”
“Yes. What were you to Lincoln Grayle?”
Her eyelids closed in dark sorrow. “His servant.”
“Why did he give you to me?”
“I think you know.”
“Pillow secrets?”
“More than that, I hope,” she said, with a tremor in her throat. “Haven’t I been good for you? I’m the daughter-whore you needed—Daddy. The sexual excitement you can’t be without. At no risk to you.”
With his right hand Bronc slapped her smartly but not too hard, just enough to turn her head. She spilled a single tear. He put the hand on her breast and squeezed a nipple. Harlee moaned.
“I can smell your gun! I’ve always hated guns. I know you’ve killed men with it. I don’t want to die! Oh please. If you pinch me any harder I’ll piss my bed.”
Bronc withdrew his tingling hand, smiling ironically.
“You don’t sound much like an immortal—a, what’s the term, Fetchling?”
“But we’re all human! Nine months in the womb, same as you and Socrates and Jesus. We love, we hate, we get diseases, some of us go mad . . . what I’m saying is, we have no superpowers.”
“But you live—”
“Long, but not forever! Meanwhile I can choose where and how I want to live, how I want to look, who I want to be. For a price.”
“You’re bad, aren’t you?” Bronc said, with a subdued, worshipful expression.
“Yes. I have been bad. Sometimes. But I like parakeets and kittens.”
“Whatever he asked of you, the Great One—” Bronc grimaced. “You did it?”
“Yesss. Don’t ask me any more.”
“God, you are something! I know I ought to kill you. Quite frankly. But I’m not afraid of you. Let’s get real here. Harlee, the Magician is dead. Understand? Gone, gone, gone.”
More tears flowed from her hazy green eyes. She lay still with her lips parted, crying, not speaking.
Bronc pulled his .45 back from the other pillow. In a sudden spasm of anger or loathing Harlee wadded that supposedly soiled pillow and flung it across the bedroom. Then she lay with her face in profile to Skarbeck, knees drawn up. He thought of kittens and parakeets and Harlee’s petilant laughter, the purity of her voice enlivening an otherwise empty house. He thought of her pleasing touches at his nape or along the seam of his scrotum. How perfect she was, for the age she claimed to be. Her rondure and milk-sweet kidskin, the still-serrated edges of two front teeth that he could see through lips like lush petals. His young pretty, his plaything, his sensuous treasure: his undoing, should he not keep his wits about him.
“Harlee, where’s the ruby crystal skull?”
“Ohhh . . . it’s in a shoe box under my bed.”
“Good Christ!”
“It’s nothing to be afraid of.” She sat up, sullenly hugging her breasts. All teenager again. “The Great One asked me to take care of it for him.” Harlee shrugged. “I don’t know why that dickhead Woolwine had it.”
Skarbeck didn’t enlighten her. “What exactly does the skull do?”
“Do? I don’t know. Sometimes if you stare at it, you see stuff.”
“Like looking into a crystal ball?”
“I guess so.” Harlee suppressed a yawn, gave him a quick look. Of course she was lying. She wanted him to know she was lying. It was a minor exercise in the subtleties of control. Bronc almost felt married.
“Like I said, the Magician’s gone, Harlee. But that leaves you and me—only—just where does it leave us? I have a question. Be truthful. Grayle must have trusted someone else with access to his vault. Is it you?”
“I don’t know anything about—”
He fired a shot past her left ear and into the silk-upholstered headboard. Close enough that she had to have heard
the disturbance in the air, like a whir of insect wings, that the bullet made in passing just before the loud report rang in their heads.
Harlee jumped in fright, one hand going to her ear, the other diving to her demure nest. That little problem she had. But she could bunk in with him for the remainder of the night. And be of service, if only to rub his tired back.
“Bronc, you shit!” Harlee squirmed in humiliation and outrage, soaking her sheets.
He cocked the .45.
“Don’t!” she said, now holding her head in both hands, clenching her teeth.
“Well?”
“I can get into the vault. Full body scan required. A live body, of course.” She looked up defiantly.
He lowered the hammer and put the .45 away.
“Long as you understand that I’m the man now. You need me to stay alive, Harlee. I need for you to show me how I can live longer. And incredibly rich, of course.” He didn’t miss the slight curling of her lip. “I want to cancel my life insurance. I don’t want to read obituaries anymore. I hate funerals. It’s a corrupt old planet, but you can’t beat the perks. Depending on how well we work together, no reason why the two of us can’t have our fill of the cream off the top. Is there?”
Skarbeck smiled encouragingly, having spoon-fed the message. He settled back to watch her lap it up.
2:24 A.M.
Eden Waring came out of Cody’s bedroom like someone roused from sleep by a nearby detonation or a scream in the night: she looked edgy, vaguely dismayed, disoriented.
He looked up from the draftsman’s table where he had been sketching, laying out a future painting.
“Everything okay?”
She made a disagreeable face. “I hate my dreams. Hate them. I need something to write with.”
Cody gave her a legal pad and a pen from his rolltop desk. She sat on a sofa with a Wolf Spider clan blanket for a throw and almost tucked her right leg under her before remembering that his roomy flannel shirt still didn’t cover all that much. There was a large coffee-table book, Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings, bleached skull with horns like a bleak mountain range against a sere blue sky on the dust jacket. She looked at it, shuddered, turned the book over. Using it as a lap desk, she began furiously to write, her face still bunched in an expression of loathing and dread.
Cody wanted sympathetically to give her a hug, but he went to the kitchen instead. Two thirty in the morning. He wasn’t sleepy; still energized from the quiet solid hours of creative work. He puttered around making tea. When it had brewed he returned to relaxing and daydreaming in the L-shaped room that was filled with books, paintings, sculpture, bright throw rugs on the oak floor. He didn’t have much in the way of furniture: the sofa bed for visitors, a comfortable lounge chair for reading. Good full-spectrum lighting was Cody’s priority.
Two steaming cups on a tray and a bottle of Courvoisier in case Eden felt the need of a strengthener. She had put the legal pad on the beveled glass that covered a sand painting and was stretching to work a kink out of one shoulder. Her expression not serene but less troubled. There was a sleep crease on one ruddy cheek. Her strawberry-blond hair needed a few licks. He adored her, a bolt to the heart that had him feeling dizzily as if his next step would be off a cliff. Whoa now, Cody. He glanced at the legal pad. Facedown. Well, if she wanted him to know—
“Thanks,” Eden said, taking the cup of tea from him, considering the brandy, deciding she didn’t want to get started. “I know I must be a terrible houseguest. Keeping you up at all hours. Was I—making a lot of noise in my sleep?”
“Didn’t hear you. But I’m good at shutting out the world when I’m drawing.”
“Oh. Can I see?”
“Sure.”
She admired his charcoal and pencil sketches. Figures and faces, mostly Indian. “There’s something about your Navajo woman with the two small boys. Are they twins? And I think I know her face.”
“Probably seen it a few thousand times in the mirror.”
“Is that what I’d look like if my hair was darker and braided? Am I going to be in a Cody Olds painting?”
“Don’t know how far I’ll go with it. I was meaning to get away from the figurative for a while and do a narrative, but with objects, not people. Then you came along, and a dream I had inspired me to—try this one. How long do your dreams stay with you?”
“Not long, fortunately, after I write them down and put them away. But there are those dreams that keep coming back, pressing me for answers.”
“Do you see the same thing over and over?”
“No. The images change, but the symbology is linked from dream to dream.”
“Prophetic dreams, you called them.”
“The worst ones, yeah.”
“Real booger bears. Rivers of fire in the streets of Las Vegas.” Wanting her to open up; but he instinctively knew he couldn’t keep pulling on that thread without unraveling the relationship.
Eden had looked away from him. Then she went to the shutters over the single large window behind his drafting table and opened them.
“Not in the streets,” she said. “What are those mountains out there?”
“Don’t know what they’re called. I don’t believe they’re volcanic. So there’s not much chance of—”
“And it won’t be rivers of fire. Do you keep a Bible around, Cody?”
He found it in a bookcase, long unopened, a gift from a high school teammate who was now an itinerant evangelist in rural Texas.
Eden sat on one side of the sofa and turned to the end of the Bible, the last pages of Revelation. After a couple of minutes she found the passage she’d been looking for.
“ ‘And I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet-colored beast,’ ” she read aloud in a dry monotone, “ ‘full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns.’ ” She sighed and laid the book facedown on one knee, looking bleakly off as if she had no further need to see, fingers of one hand on the twisted chunk of metal she wore like a talisman on a gold chain outside Cody’s old shirt. Pressing it lightly against her solar plexus. He had wondered about it, this talisman, although there were many other things about Eden Waring that intrigued him more.
After a while Eden said, “I skipped Sunday school and church most of the time when I was growing up because I already knew . . . mysteries below heaven, the truth of the afterlife, just about everything they weren’t teaching from the New Testament.”
“From your own dreams?”
“Yes.”
Cody stretched out in his leather lounger and reached up to turn off the reading lamp above his head.
“Did you see this scarlet beast in your dream tonight?”
“No. Because the beast is gone, and anyhow St. John’s vision doesn’t jibe with . . . my knowledge of things as they are. It wasn’t scarlet, either. It had the body of a tiger, dark gray with black stripes, and only one head, but that was the head of a jackal or hyena. Ugly enough, in its fashion. The beast was the alter shape of the Magician, and its purpose was to mate with me.”
“Why you?” Cody said, after a few jolting beats of his heart.
“To combine our powers in a third entity, beast of woman born, ruler of the Long Darkness, the tribulation of mankind the Bible also refers to.”
Cody swallowed some cognac, looking a little unhappy.
Eden said, “If you want to call the cops, I promise I’ll go quietly.”
“I already told you, I’m in for the long haul. You just keep coming up with . . . But I don’t read you any way but truthful. I like to think I know people pretty damn well.”
“Listen, Cody. My mom is a clinical psychologist. She could tell you about patients who are intelligent, well spoken, and so plausible in their delusions they could beat a lie detector every time. I could be one of them.”
“Then I must be delusional myself. I’m dreaming all of this, right?”
He got up from his chair, crossed to the sofa, lifted Eden straight up, and kissed her. Eden’s r
esistance lasted a couple of seconds. The kiss went on for a while, until she got her toes on the floor.
Cody said, when he pulled his face back inches from hers, “Finally got to the part of the dream I’m liking best.”
Eden touched his mustache, his lips, eyes losing focus. “Don’t get me going. I’m—”
“Involved. I know. With this Tom fella who’s run off on you.”
“No, he hasn’t! Dammit, Cody, I’m sure he took the were-beast away, with the help of . . . others. A friend in Rome. This wasn’t the first beast the Church has had to dispose of. Tom is making sure the thing is buried, and stays buried forever.”
“So that would make two of you who have seen it.”
“And Bertie. And Tom’s houseman and others at Shungwaya. I wasn’t there the first time it came calling on me. Cody, let go now.”
He let her go. She stayed close.
“First time I kissed a girl,” Cody said, “I counted to myself. One Mississippi, two Mississippi . . . Like I was holding my breath under water.”
Eden snickered. “I was chewing gum, and I didn’t know what to do with it. I must’ve swallowed it, because we were really lip-locked. I’d better have a drink now. Short one?”
“Okay. So if the beast wasn’t in your dreams, what did you see that upset you so much?”
“The feminine half of Mordaunt’s soul. Tom and Bertie also saw her, or it, in Africa just a couple of weeks ago, mounted on the were-beast that had come there looking for me. She was naked, wrists bound by silver shackles. Her body unmistakably a woman’s. But her face, they said, was unformed, a specter. Tonight I had a better look at her in my dream. She was walking on a mountain of human souls and bones, and that mountain was called Acheron. Unshackled at last, pulling down stars with one hand, unearthing lightning from the depths of the mountain with the other, combining celestial and man-made power into a fury of pure energy that crackled from her fingertips. She wove a web of fire above the mountain and the desert and down to the city of the desert; and all of the souls inside the great city looked up and they cried out, ‘Alas, alas, Babylon,’ because none could escape.”
