The Karma Booth

by Jeff Pearce

  “It’s not enough,” said the girl quietly.

  “No, maybe not. But please… With what you can do, all that you can do now, we need your help for a worse evil than him.”

  “You mean Viktor Limonov.”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t read him, Mr. Cale. He’s not like Nickelbaum. He’s not like anyone else. I don’t think I’ll be any good to you.”

  “Please help us, Mary.”

  He saw her eyes were wet. Her voice cracked with feeling, and she said, “I told you before… It takes every ounce not to float, you know? And it gets harder.”

  He forgot what she was, whatever she might be, and he couldn’t identify where the paternal urge came from, but he pulled her into his arms and hugged her tight. Comfortingly. Tethering her, even if briefly, to his world. She sighed a little and let out a small grateful moan.

  “In the Musée d’Orsay,” he mentioned casually, “you stand in front of the Van Goghs, and the textures pop right out at you. You never get the same impact from photographs. It’s amazing.”

  She let go of him, wiping her eyes. “You’ll show me?”

  “Of course, I will.”

  “That’s good,” she said, her eyes looking away and her voice again drifting. “I’ve done terrible things. It’s good that you still care enough to show me what’s beautiful there.”

  They waited in the wheel. In a special room of the hub-and-spoke design of La Santé prison, with French CRS riot police and British SAS officers fanned out and deployed in the various cellblocks. They kept vigil behind Victorian Age brown brick and stone. The Ministry of Justice, briefed by London, had taken the extra precaution of evacuating the other inmates to Fleury-Mérogis and Fresnes Prisons in the Paris suburbs. Some police officers posed as inmates, and they were so convincing that a few of the regular guards even began to verbally abuse them.

  It was a prison. It was one of the most famous prisons in Paris, in France itself. They shouldn’t expect anyone to be able to get in. But they knew better. For three days and three nights, they held a vigil. Tim, Crystal, Miller and Mary Ash, usually lost within her thoughts, sitting quietly in a corner. Tim trusted Braithewaite’s prediction that Viktor Limonov would “make a run for it”—coming for the Paris Karma Booth because all others had been shut off. And even Limonov had to know he was expected. He wouldn’t care. There was only one gate left open to him, and they were its keepers.

  Miller didn’t disappoint, proving as expected to be the most nervous of them all. “Guess it kind of fits the French put the Booth in here.”

  Crystal didn’t turn, still tapping away on her keyboard, checking reports at a desk, but she bothered to ask politely, “How so?”

  “Did some reading,” answered Miller, fidgeting. “This place was one of the last homes of the guillotine. Hey, bringing you better capital punishment through innovation!”

  In the background, the two transposition booths were perfectly still and silent. There was darkness behind their thick indexes of glass, and no lights blinked on the control panel.

  “A guillotine, man, that’s a creepy thing to use!” Miller babbled on. “There’s this guy, right? This doctor who actually studied whether the heads were still alive after their necks had been chopped. He saw blinking eyes, and one of the heads even answered his name when the doc called! I mean, it sounds impossible, ’cause there’s automatic reflex and you got cerebral blood pressure dropping—”

  “Miller,” Tim cut in gently. His eyes flicked over in warning to Mary Ash, sitting in her corner again.

  “Sorry,” muttered the young scientist.

  He had, of course, been present when Mary Ash had first been resurrected, but he had steered well clear of her when Tim had brought the girl back to Paris and ushered her into their little control center in the hotel room. He was spooked by all that Crystal had reported the girl could do. And had done.

  Nothing showed on the banks of screens for the CCTV cameras scattered throughout the prison.

  One of the top corrections officers walked briskly in, his scuffed dress shoes clicking along the cement. He didn’t bother to look up from his clipboard as he said idly, “Your man does not show again?”

  “Not yet,” replied Tim.

  They had no way of knowing when he would show. They had come here for three nights, and even expecting Limonov to come at night was a presumption. Tim didn’t know at what point they should admit defeat and have the Karma Booth in this room dismantled like the others. Humanity might have to take its choice with merely capturing Limonov or executing him the more pedestrian ways, leaving a debt of his evil for another generation to pay for down the road. He wasn’t even sure that Mary Ash could do anything to Limonov that would keep him from coming back.

  “Look who’s joined the party,” said Crystal, her pen tapping a screen.

  Emily Derosier. Dressed in a simple blouse and peasant skirt, looking very much like the woman she once was in the 1920s.

  “You called it,” she added.

  Yes. Somehow, Tim had figured that she would show up, that she would lend her own abilities to this final confrontation.

  “She hasn’t come the other nights,” said Tim. “Which means…”

  “He’s coming,” she finished for him.

  She got out of her chair and pulled out her gun. Miller stood up nervously. The corrections officer looked from Crystal to Tim and then walked briskly back out, no doubt to tell his men to look sharp. The only one who displayed no reaction was Mary Ash.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Limonov appeared on the surveillance screens minutes later, walking in his confident stride through another part of the prison. Then—

  Comet trails. Frames cut out of context from the running loop of film. Akinetopsia. What Emily had done the first time they had seen her. Damn it, thought Tim.

  SAS officers dressed as inmates rushed out of the grimy, dank cells to surprise and tackle the Russian. He simply wasn’t there. Gone through the funhouse mirror of consciousness. CRS men—fully decked out in their riot squad helmets and clear faceplates—rushed Limonov, their truncheons ready. He laughed at them. They met with more comet trails. Up ahead, more police fired tranquilizer darts, enough to put down a rhino. They shot Tasers at him. Nothing.

  In the room with the Karma Booth, Miller was running through his personal fuse towards panic. “They’re not stopping him. That’s—that’s not good. They’re not stopping him.”

  Mary Ash rocked in place, whispering, “Doesn’t make a difference—he’s already asleep. Gudrun knew. Conscious control over your REM atonia.”

  “What?” asked Miller.

  “Andrew, later!” snapped Crystal, chambering a round in her weapon.

  The police and guards in the tiny screens of diffused light and color suddenly screamed. They dropped to their knees and rolled on the floors. Many vomited. Limonov had done something to them. He paused a moment, standing over several of the fallen cops, enjoying his work, nodding in satisfaction as if a framed picture on the wall had now been adjusted correctly.

  And on one of the surveillance screens, Limonov suddenly appeared down a hallway, where Emily Derosier waited.

  This time, there was more than simply seeing the effect on the screens. The shockwave hit them all, even in this room. It was the forced intimacies outside the Beaubourg. It was the agony of a burn victim, every nerve ending and torched skin cell still igniting in pain pain pain and the sickly-sweet smell of cooked flesh in your own nostrils in an ICU bed, and Tim yelled in horror, thinking for a moment it was Crystal who was burning in front of him, but he shut his eyes, blinked—no. No, it was in their heads, but they couldn’t stop it. Not her flesh, not your flesh, no, but it hurt so much. Crystal was physically fine, but on her knees, shutting her own eyes tight against the horror. Miller was in a fetal posture in a corner. And on it went: a shearing of the most private thoughts, taken away and replaced by the darkest impulses and memories of assault. The urge to hi
t and strike back, an urge fulfilled in a revolting scene playing out of brain matter splattering under a baseball bat and then the vomit-inducing crack of wood against skull. Sick urges of razors on skin. Razors peeling back—no, no, NO, NO!

  She hit him full force. Emily. Like a psychic battering ram, she struck Limonov with the despairs of crushed ambitions from those lying unconscious around them, the drowning, choking sensations of lonely, broken self-esteem. Shame over pitifully squalid, momentary lapses in decent moral judgment and scatological embarrassments, shame that expressed itself in more than one rutting worm squirming along Limonov’s head but not enough and why don’t you

  Simply

  Fucking

  DROP.

  Tim felt more than saw. He felt Emily Derosier throw everything she had at him. The nausea was overwhelming, his head bursting with cluster migraines and all the residual loathing and self-loathing and pain of their battle, and he crawled up from the floor and staggered to the bank of screens, seeing Limonov still standing. Emily lay on the floor. Oh, no.

  “Tim…”

  He ran over to Crystal, helped her sit up, and they hugged each other tight, rocking for a moment in each other’s arms. Tim remembered Miller, now slumped against a wall, tears streaking down his cheeks.

  “Oh, Jesus…”

  “Andrew! Andrew, it’s okay. You’re all right, you’re not hurt—”

  “No, but… Oh, fuck, I’m not. Then why…? Oh, Jesus, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry—”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about,” said Tim, helping him to stand. “It’s not you. They did it, they…”

  He didn’t finish, looking around for Mary Ash. Had she gone out to face Limonov? No.

  Still sitting in a chair, staring at nothing, back to the pensive, haunted girl he had first met. No sign of the young graphic artist who had temporarily returned on Tim’s guided trip to the Paris art museums. She had smiled at the Impressionist paintings. Her spirit had lifted, and he had hope for her then. But now—

  She hasn’t moved, he thought. She said she wasn’t sure if she could fight him, and she’s just sitting there.

  And she isn’t helping us either. Lost within herself.

  There was a low hum.

  The control panel for the Karma Booth had switched on.

  None of them had touched the controls.

  It was operational. There was a sizzle and crackle and lights began to flicker within one of the transposition chambers.

  But they hadn’t turned it on.

  Tim ran out of the room to intercept Limonov. He had nothing on his side. Emily had told him he had come back through the Booth seemingly unchanged, with no gifts like the others. Limonov had strangely not bothered to kill him last time but had tortured an innocent instead, directing her to run him down and impale him. All he could hope for was that the bastard still needed others to do his dirty work when it came to Tim, but that all the policemen were either unconscious or too ill and traumatized to respond to his mental whims.

  “Limonov!”

  Unless he just plain killed Tim with his mind.

  The Russian was walking leisurely down the hall, heading right his way and towards the room with the Karma Booth. As he saw Tim, he let out a convulsing laugh that grew to a wheeze like a cartoon dog. Then to an insane child’s giggle and finally to a Saturday night drunk’s wet bellow.

  “Well, look who is back! Are we rested?”

  “Limonov, there are still ways to stop you. There’s a good sledgehammer back there. I’ll take it to the machine.”

  “Fine, Cale, I shall give you a five-second head start. Right before I give you a few things to think about.”

  And he filled Tim’s mouth with the angry dissonance of noise, sound that tasted like rust and corrosion, and new sounds that made him want to vomit; all the hedonist melodies at his command, stolen from a mute blond child. Limonov blistered his mind with Edward Brewah’s Sierra Leone corpses stinking to high heaven and buzzing with flies and maggots, and when he ran out of those, he scorched the inside of Tim’s brain with bloody amputated limbs of Rwanda and the sodomies of Myanmar’s Insein Prison, the grisly, slow deaths in Syria’s civil war rubble. The mental parade of bloodlust and cruelty went on, but Tim clutched at the thought of: Ignore.

  He didn’t know where the strength came from, but he managed to stay on his feet. Still in the monster’s way.

  Limonov kept walking towards him, and in his human life, the Russian had been a trained mercenary, skilled in hand-to-hand combat, just like Zorich had been. The bastard could kill him with his fists and a well-placed roundhouse kick if he wanted to. Shaking and hating himself for it, Tim knelt down and picked up a fallen truncheon next to an unconscious CRS officer.

  “I must say, Cale, you really are proving hopeless. What are you protecting? This place? This world? I will be gone from this place in a few minutes! And even if I stayed, you’d be on the losing side. You do not see the bigger picture.”

  “Enlighten me,” said Tim, gripping the truncheon tight. Time. He needed time. Someone to come help. Emily to recover if she were still alive. Mary Ash, if she could come out of her reverie.

  “It’s simple enough,” said Limonov, pausing a moment, standing in place. “You know all those Discovery Channel items about so many species of animals and insects disappearing every week, every month? They’re gone. Wiped out forever. What a tragedy! Now think about endangered species. And reincarnation. And us. You know… all the ones that your kind with narrow vision label evil. Well, it means we will not have to work our way back up the food chain to humanity—those irritating ladder rungs of karma. No more slug, dung beetle, fish, badger, chimp, whatever. Human incarnation, no waiting! Thank you, uncaring humanity, for wiping out the other species! And so here is a new toddler setting fire to cats, a wicked gleam in a little girl’s eye. And there is another one. And another. And another. They wait, and they grow.”

  Tim didn’t answer this. The truth was, he couldn’t think of any useful comeback.

  “All your life you’ve heard it, yes?” Limonov went on. “How the world is getting worse: more serial killers, more pedophiles, more genocide… You never put those two facts together. Yes, we recycle. Well, I suppose not ‘we’ to be fully accurate, but those sympathetic to my interests.”

  “It has to be more than a numbers game,” said Tim, but the words sounded weak even in his ears.

  He would have to hit him. He would have to try. He had found the strength to fight Zorich, but he had been armed with a gun, and even then he had failed. Try anyway.

  “Oh, let me guess!” mocked Limonov. “Good inevitably wins? You already know we are beyond such pitiful constructs. You’ve met the colonial masters. Now we are taking back the country.”

  Tim tensed, sinking a little on his knees, knowing he would have to push forward and swing the club. And then Crystal was standing next to him, breathing hard but steady on her feet and holding up her gun, aiming at Limonov. But before she could fire, she cried out, her eyes shutting tight in pain once more, and her shot going wild. It was impossibly loud in Tim’s ears, and he was astonished to see Limonov knocked back, sinking to one knee as his shoulder bloomed crimson.

  “You cunt!” he roared.

  She collapsed to the floor under a new invisible onslaught, and Tim knew Limonov would kill her if he didn’t swing now. The Russian was already muttering words to himself that the injury didn’t matter, none of it would matter at all in a few seconds, everything would be different. The truncheon in Tim’s hand whipped through the air with a vooom sound and hit nothing. Limonov’s boot lifted and neatly shot to the side of Tim’s knee, kicking him down, and then the Russian’s fist hammered down on his collarbone. Had Limonov not been hurt, he surely would have broken it.

  Get up, you fool, thought Tim. His head hurt. His knee was on fire, but he could limp, nothing broken.

  Crystal. Crystal was glancing back to him as she ran after Limonov.

  “I
’m fine!” he shouted. “Stop him!”

  As she disappeared into the room with the Booth, he heard gunfire, Crystal’s Glock. But he also heard the familiar noises of the equipment…

  He rushed in.

  Miller lay on the ground, weeping again, clawing at an unseen thing on the back of his neck. Nothing there, but still he felt the threat. Crystal still held her gun outstretched, but she was no longer firing. She merely stared impotently at her target, and Tim could see why.

  Limonov was facing off against a new opponent. No—an old one. Emily Derosier was haloed in the blinding whorls and nebulae of the Karma Booth only she was outside a chamber. Tim understood. When the equipment had switched on, it had come from her. And she must have given him the strength, too, to ignore the monster’s mental assault in the hallway until she could join them here and hold the line.

  Limonov couldn’t have done anything with the machine and neither could they until she had come on the scene. Faked out the Russian completely, making him think he had won. Braithewaite, thought Tim. The machine’s creator had said he held the power source, and he must have bequeathed it to her in the same way Geoff Shackleton had given up his abilities to Mary Ash. Mary… Where was…?

  The girl had collapsed to the floor. She looked drained and was panting, tears down her cheeks. She had tried after all. She had clearly tried against Limonov. Her smoky eyes looked sadder than Tim had ever seen them, and in those eyes was now an expression of grief that was eternal, universal. A doctor’s leukemia verdict. Crinkling, yellowed telegrams of every mother’s son blasted to bits on the distant Somme. The mumbled announcement of the well that had gone dry, dooming an entire refugee village.

  They were rendered almost silhouettes in the dazzling phantasmagoria of the first Booth chamber and around Emily herself. Limonov, too, changed, his hideous will expressing itself in a dozen alternating faces depicting hate and ugliness, his taut mercenary body at an angle as it struggled against her hurricane. She wouldn’t let him past her. The Booth blazed with its light, promising him escape, and she wouldn’t allow it.