Infernal rj-9

by F. Paul Wilson

  Jack rounded a curve then and slowed his Crown Vic.

  "What's wrong?"

  "This looks familiar."

  He eased ahead until he saw the uphill gravel driveway. On impulse he pulled in and climbed the grade.

  "This the place?"

  "No, but if it's the place I think it is, then we're almost there."

  Halfway up the driveway he looked for traces of the explosion that had ripped a man apart last month, but found none. A cleanup squad—whether human or the carnivores among the local fauna, he couldn't say—had come through and left no trace.

  As the house hove into view he slammed on the brakes. The tires skidded on the gravel.

  "Oh, shit."

  "Wow," Tom said, craning his neck for a better look through the windshield. "Somebody sure had their fun with this place."

  Not exactly the traditional idea of fun: The front door stood open, its off-kilter storm door swayed back and forth, and someone had smashed every window in sight.

  Tom snorted. "Vandals. The jerk who built the place probably thought he'd leave their kind behind when he came up here. But they're everywhere."

  Jack hoped the destruction was due to garden-variety vandalism. Not a hell of a lot to do in these parts: Add drugs or booze to boredom and just about anything could happen. If that had been the case, fine. But he feared the destruction might have been motivated by something else.

  Seized with a sudden urgency to find Brady's cabin, Jack put the Vic in reverse and started turning it around. Took him four moves before he could nose back into the driveway again.

  "Jesus, what are you doing driving a tank like this? It's a cop car. Or a retirement-village car. And you're neither."

  Jack could have told the shmegege that this black Crown Victoria was the exact match—right down to the license plates—of a car belonging to a big shot in the outfit's Brooklyn wing. But then he'd have to go into a long explanation of why he'd want something like this.

  He turned back onto the blacktop and continued west. Now he had an idea of where he was going. He just hoped that Brady's cabin hadn't suffered the same fate.

  A few miles farther on he found a similar driveway and turned into it. The rear wheels kicked up gravel as he spurred the car uphill. Hurrying wouldn't change things—if damage had been done, it was done.

  When he saw the place he slowed to a stop.

  "Shit!" He pounded on the steering wheel. "Shit! Shit! Shit!"

  Only charred timbers remained of the north wall of Brady's woodsy A-frame. The rest of the house looked almost as bad—not an intact pane in sight.

  Jack jumped out and hurried across the dead grass to the smashed front door. Tom tailed him.

  The inside was consistent with the outside, maybe worse. Looked like someone had taken an ax to everything before starting the fire. Splintered furniture—some of it used as kindling, maybe—smashed framed photos, slashed paintings, books reduced to confetti. Rain washing in through the ruined roof had added to the damage.

  But Jack didn't care about this—his interest lay below. He knew a trapdoor lay somewhere near the center of the main room, but he couldn't see where.

  He dropped to his hands and knees and began searching the knotty pine planks.

  He heard Tom say, "What are you doing?"

  "Looking for the edge of a trapdoor."

  "What makes you think there's a trapdoor?"

  "I just do. Help me look."

  He couldn't tell Tom that he'd been peeking through one of these windows when Luther Brady had swung up a section of the floor and disappeared below… carrying a book… a large, old-looking book.

  Jack was counting on that being the Compendium. Herta had told him Brady had it. And Charlie had said Jack had seen it. If they were right, this had to be the place.

  Tom walked around in a wavering circle.

  "I don't see anything."

  Neither did Jack. But he knew it was here. He tried to remember if the trapdoor's opening edge had been irregular. If so, he wouldn't find an obvious seam cutting across the boards. He stretched himself flat for an ant's-eye view.

  There—a tiny depression running along one of the planks. He rose to his knees and ran his finger along the edge. Yeah, definitely a space here.

  Jack pictured Brady lifting the door. It had opened toward the rear of the house. He searched for a ring embedded in a plank. Had to be one. Brady couldn't have lifted it without—

  One of the knots two planks away looked different. He touched it and noticed it didn't feel like wood. He worked his thumbnail along its edge and up popped a metal ring, painted to look like wood. Jack hauled back on it and a section of the floor angled upward.

  "Jesus!" he heard Tom say. "How did you know?"

  He ignored the question as he threw the trapdoor back. A wooden stairway led below.

  Jack started down. "Wait here."

  "No problem."

  5

  -65:26

  At the bottom Jack found himself in a dark, tiny cube of a room, maybe eight by eight. Daylight through the door above provided faint illumination. Probably should have gone back to the car for the flashlight, but hadn't wanted to waste the time. The enlarging of Vicky's mark had filled him with a desperate urgency.

  He looked around. Shelves lined the space, stacked with envelopes and magazines and books of all sizes. The one he'd seen had been large, somewhere between sixteen and twenty inches on a side.

  He stepped to the nearest shelf and began pulling things off it. They felt soggy—water must have seeped through and worked its way down here. He caught sight of photos in the magazines as he tossed them on the floor—naked boys. No surprise there.

  He worked his way along the shelves until he came to a steel cabinet, like a fuse box. He tugged on the handle. Locked.

  Well, he'd fix that.

  Jack pulled his Spyderco folder from his back pocket and snapped out the blade. He worked it along the edge, wiggling and pushing until he had a third of the blade inside, just above the lock. Then he leaned against the knife, prying… prying…

  The door popped open.

  Blessed be the man who invented tempered steel.

  Jack pulled open the door and squinted into its dim interior. Only one thing inside: a book—big like the one he'd seen Brady bring down here. Had to be the same.

  But was it the book?

  Jack pulled it out and hefted it. Heavy. The covers and spine seemed to be made of stamped metal. He stepped to the center of the space and held it in the shaft of light under the trapdoor.

  Markings embossed on the cover… he squinted at them… looked like random squiggles at first, then they swam into focus… words… in English…

  Was this what the prof had talked about… the text changing to the reader's native language?

  Compendium ran across the upper half in large serif letters; and below it, half size: Srem.

  Jack felt his throat constrict. He'd found it. Goddamn it, he'd found it. But was it what he needed?

  He pounded up the steps to the main floor where he'd found Tom standing by the rear wall with a shocked look on his face.

  "Got it!"

  Tom didn't seem to hear. He clutched a couple of torn, water-stained eight-by-ten photos. He held one up and looked at Jack.

  "Here's a picture of some guy with Oprah." He held up the other. "And here's the same guy with President Clinton. I know I've seen him before but I just can't place him."

  Might as well tell him, Jack thought. Sooner or later it'll come to him.

  "That's Luther Brady."

  Tom's eyes widened. "The Luther Brady? The Dormentalist? The pedophile?"

  "The same. Look—"

  "The indicted-for-murder Luther Brady?"

  "Yes."

  And you're talking to the guy who put him there.

  "This must be his place!" Tom pointed to the open trapdoor. "How did you know about that?"

  "I know about a lot of things." Jack jerked his thum
b toward the front door. "We're getting out of here. And you're driving."

  6

  -65:14

  With Tom ensconced behind the wheel and winding the car back toward Route 84, Jack hunched forward in the passenger seat with The Compendium of Srem balanced on his knees. This being the shortest day of the year, the sun had already set, so he switched on the courtesy light.

  Took him only a few pages to realize this was the oddest book he'd ever seen. Not simply the metal covers with their unusual hinges, and not the curlicue handwriting, but the pages themselves. The page paper—if it was paper at all—felt thinner than onionskin, but was completely opaque. He'd figured that if the book was half as old as it was supposed to be he'd find some damage. But no. Not a tear, not a wrinkle, not a single dog ear.

  And who or what was Srem? If he was the guy who'd put this thing together, he at least could have had the decency to include an index or table of contents.

  Jack flipped through the unnumbered, single-ply-tissue pages—lots of illustrations, many in color—hoping to catch a glimpse of the Lilitongue. He went through twice, stopping on the second run and backtracking toward the rear when he thought he saw movement in one of the illustrations.

  Couldn't be. Just a trompe l'oeil of the flipping pages, like the little animations he'd drawn in the corners of his loose-leaf sheets back in grammar school when he was bored and—

  Christ!

  He froze and gaped at a page with an illustration that moved.

  More than simply moving: an animated globe spinning in a void. He recognized it as Earth by the layout of the continents. He also recognized the crisscrossing lines connecting the dots on its surface.

  He'd seen that pattern on an oversized globe hidden away in Luther Brady's office.

  And he'd seen the same pattern cut into the back flesh of two of the women with dogs.

  He ran his fingers over the animation. It felt no different from the rest of the page—not a ripple, not the slightest vibration, not even a tingle.

  "E pur si muove," he whispered.

  Tom said, "What?"

  "Nothing."

  "Find anything yet?"

  "Oh, yeah. But not what we're looking for."

  Jack tore himself away from the animation and began to plow through the Compendium one page at a time. He'd never learned to speed read, but he could scan text at a decent pace. He set three key words as targets: Lilitougue, Gefreda, and infernal.

  About a quarter of the way through he came upon an otherwise blank page that announced:

  THE

  SEVEN

  INFERNALS

  Jack fanned through drawings of oddly shaped contraptions, each with a disturbingly organic look to its design. None of the first six even vaguely resembled the object floating in his apartment.

  He hesitated to turn the last page. If it didn't show the Lilitongue… if Charlie had been wrong…

  Jack took a breath, flipped the page, and exhaled in a rush when he saw the sketch of an irregular sphere with a dimple near its lower pole.

  "Got it!"

  Tom leaned away from the wheel and craned his neck to see. "You found it? What's it say?"

  Jack pushed him back. "Watch the road. I'll read it to you."

  "'The seventh and final Infernal is the Escapement Infernal. Known as the Lilitongue, fashioned by the wizard Gefreda during the final century of the First Age.'"

  "Wizard?" Tom said. "We're talking about wizards? What is this, Dungeons and Dragons? And what the hell's the First Age?"

  "Haven't a clue. But maybe we'll find out if you can shut up for two minutes and let me finish."

  "Okay, okay. Go ahead."

  "'In that time Gefreda became encircled in his castle by his enemies with no hope of escape. And so he created the Lilitongue and was never again seen, by neither friend nor enemy.'

  " 'For that man vexed upon all sides, who would wish to elude his enemies and leave them helpless, yet has not the courage or mayhap the means to exercise the ultimate option, that man has but to depress the Lilitongue's dimple and he will acquire the Stain'."

  "'After the appearance of the Stain, he who is marked shall have eighty-three hours to organize his affairs. Throughout that time the Stain shall spread, gradually encircling his body. When the two ends are united, completing a circuit of his flesh, he shall be removed from his troubles and transported to a faraway place, forever beyond his enemies' reach. He must bid farewell to those people and all things he holds dear, for such shall forever remain beyond the reach of the Stained.'"

  "'Mark you well before depressing the dimple of the Lilitongue: Once acquired, the Stain may not be shed—not by cleansing, not even by flaying the Stained skin. Nor may it be given to another.'"

  " 'When its task is complete, the Lilitongue shall return to its place of fashioning.'"

  The text stopped above an infinity symbol two inches from the bottom of the page.

  Jack flipped and found blank white space. The opposing sheet sported a picture of a double-bladed sword.

  Where's the rest of it?

  He pushed the book flat, looking for signs that a page had been torn out, but found no trace.

  "That's it?" Tom said.

  Jack nodded, then lowered the book and stared through the window.

  Tom groaned. "Damn!"

  Jack couldn't tell if Tom was bemoaning Vicky's fate or cursing the fact that she'd usurped his means of escape.

  He reread the piece, searching for a loophole, a way out for Vicky, but…

  Once acquired, the Stain may not be shed—not by cleansing, not even by flaying the Stained skin. Nor may it be given to another.

  He could see only one way to interpret that: Vicky was in deep, irreversible danger.

  Tom said, "I heard something about a 'faraway place.' Where do you think that means?"

  "Someplace you don't come back from."

  The Otherness maybe. He and Dad had had a brush with some of its inhabitants in Florida. The thought of Vicky in a place like that… unbearable.

  Eighty-three hours… why that number? Sounded like a prime, but so what?

  He did a quick calculation: Vicky had activated the Lilitongue around nine P.M. last night. It was now going on three. That left roughly sixty-five hours before she was "transported to a faraway place."

  He wanted to be sick.

  Tom said, "Maybe the book's wrong."

  Jack shook his head. "Cool it with the wishful thinking. You saw the mark on Vicky's back. This morning it was bigger. It's stretching out to encircle her, just like the Compendium said."

  "Shit. I feel so awful about this."

  "You should." Jack wanted more than ever to strangle him. "You damn well should."

  "Hey—"

  "Shut up, Tom. Just shut the fuck up. I need to think."

  Did he ever. How was he going to break this to Gia?

  7

  -62:04

  "What's wrong, Mom?"

  Gia tried to hold back the tears as she looked at Vicky. She'd let a single sob escape. She had to stifle the second. She sensed that if she let it push through, it would burst the dam and she wouldn't be able to stop.

  Jack sat to her right on the couch, his arm around her back. Vicky stood to her left. Tom had secluded himself in the kitchen. A single reading lamp on the side table lit the old dark book-lined shelves of the Sutton Square house.

  "It's okay, honey." She prayed her voice wouldn't shatter. "I'm just very sad."

  "Why? Is it the book?"

  "Yes, honey."

  She slipped her arms around her child and squeezed her.

  "Is it a sad book?"

  "Very sad."

  The Compendium lay on her lap. Gia stared at the illustration of the Lilitongue, hating it. Then, through tear-blurred eyes, she read the text for the fourth time, searching for a shred of hope.

  Part of her balked at the possibility that anything so outrageously fanciful could be true. It was the stuff of Harry Pott
er novels.

  But another part of her called up a vision of that black mark—the Stain—stretching across her daughter's back and she knew it was true.

  Gia felt her world crumbling around her. She couldn't lose her little girl! It wasn't going to happen—it couldn't happen! Not Vicky! Please not Vicky! Take me instead!

  "There's got to be a way out, Jack."

  His arm tightened around her. "I agree. Has to be. We've just got to find it in time." He reached for the book. "Tomorrow I'm going to take this—"

  She clutched his arm. "Take it where?"

  "To Abe's professor friend. I already called him but he's gone for the day. But I'll show this to him. Maybe he'll be able to tease something out of the text that we don't see."

  "And what if he can't?"

  "Then we go public with the Compendium and the Lilitongue. Haul the world's best minds here and see what they come up with."

  "But you won't be able to find this professor till tomorrow, right?"

  Jack frowned. "I'm still working on tracking him down tonight. Abe had only his office number. The museum won't give me his home number."

  "Okay, you go looking, but leave the book with me."

  "Why?"

  "To save time." Dear God, so little left. "Have you been through the whole book?"

  "No. Look at the size of it. Must be a thousand pages."

  "That's my point. While you're out looking for this professor, I'll comb through every single page. There may be more about the Lilitongue hidden inside. And that way, when we bring this professor in, we'll know where to direct his attention."

  Jack chewed his upper lip for a second or two, then shook his head.

  "We'll both do it—tag-team style. You do an hour, then I'll do one. That way we won't go blind."

  "But what about Abe's professor?"

  "Who better to track down his home address than Abe? I'll put him on it."

  Relief flooded through Gia. She didn't want to be alone here with Vicky, this ancient book, and the Stain.