One last long shot, possibly having to do with the fact that my thoughts were once again turning toward food, but quite justified nevertheless: “hungry watcher.”
Again, the results were mostly New Age blather. But one blog caught my eye, and I clicked on it. I read the opening paragraph and, although I did not actually say “Bingo,” that was certainly the gist of what I thought.
“Once again into the night with the Hungry Watcher,” it began.
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“Stalking the dark streets that teem with prey, riding slowly through the waiting feast and feeling the pull of the tide of blood that will soon rise to cover us with joy . . .”
Well. The prose was somewhat purple, perhaps. And the part about the blood was a little bit icky. But that aside, it was a pretty good description of how I felt when I went off on one of my adventures. It seemed likely that I had found a kindred spirit.
I read on. It was all consistent with the experience as I knew of it, cruising through the night with hungry anticipation as a sibilant inner voice whispered guidance. But then, when the narrative came to the point where I would have pounced and slashed, this narrator instead made a reference to “the others,” followed by three figures from some alphabet I didn’t recognize.
Or did I?
Feverishly, I scrabbled across my desk for the folder holding the file for the two headless girls. I yanked out the stack of photographs, flipped through them—and there it was.
Chalked on the driveway at Dr. Goldman’s house, the same three letters, looking like a misshapen mlk.
I glanced up at my computer screen: it was a match, no question about it.
This was way too much to be a coincidence. It clearly meant something very important; perhaps it was even the key to understanding the entire mess. Yes, highly significant, with just one small footnote: Significant of what? What did it mean?
On top of everything else, why was this particular clue afflicting me? I had come here to work on my own personal problem of a missing Passenger—had come late at night so I would not be harried by my sister or other demands of work. And now, apparently, if I wanted to solve my problem I would have to do it by working on Deborah’s case. How come nothing was fair anymore?
Well, if there was any real reward for complaining I hadn’t seen it so far, in a life filled with suffering and verbal skill. So I might as well take what was offered and see where it led.
First, what language was the script? I was reasonably certain it wasn’t Chinese or Japanese—but what about some other Asian al-
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phabet I knew nothing about? I pulled up an online atlas and began checking off countries: Korea, Cambodia, Thailand. None of them had an alphabet that was even close. What did that leave? Cyrillic?
Easy enough to check. I pulled up a page containing the whole alphabet. I had to stare at it for a long time; some of the letters seemed close, but in the end I concluded that it was not a match.
What then? What did that leave? What would somebody really smart do next, somebody like who I had once been, or even somebody like that all-time champion of bright guys, King Solomon?
A small beeping sound began to chirp in the back of my brain, and I listened to it for a moment before I answered it. Yes, that’s right, I said King Solomon. The guy from the Bible with an inner king. What? Oh, really? A connection, you say? You think so?
A long shot, but easy enough to check, and I did. Solomon would have spoken ancient Hebrew, of course, which was simple to find on the Web. And it looked very little like the characters I had found. So that was that, and there was no connection: ipso facto, or some other equally compelling Latin saying.
But hold on: Didn’t I remember that the original language of the Bible was not Hebrew but something else? I beat my gray cells brutally, and they finally came out with it. Yes, it had been something I remembered from that unimpeachable scholarly source, Raiders of the Lost Ark. And the language I was looking for was Aramaic.
Once again, it was easy to find a Web site eager to teach us all to write Aramaic. And as I looked at it, I became eager to learn, because there was no doubt about it—the three letters were an exact match. And they were, in fact, the Aramaic counterparts of mlk, just the way they looked.
I read on. Aramaic, like Hebrew, did not use vowels. Instead, you had to supply them yourself. Very tricky, really, because you had to know what the word was before you could read it. Therefore, mlk could be milk or milik or malik or any other combination, and none of them made sense. At least not to me, which seemed like the important thing. But I doodled anyway, trying to make sense of the letters. Milok. Molak. Molek—
Once again something flickered in the back of my brain and I 148
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grabbed at it, pulled it forward into the light, and looked it over. It was King Solomon again. Just before the part where he killed his brother for having wickedness inside, he had built a temple to Moloch. And of course, the preferred alternative spelling for Moloch was Molek, known as the detestable god of the Ammonites.
This time I searched “Moloch worship,” scanning through a dozen irrelevant Web sites before hitting a few that told me the same things: the worship was characterized by an ecstatic loss of control and ended with a human sacrifice. Apparently the people were whipped into a frenzy until they didn’t realize that little Jimmy had somehow been killed and cooked, not necessarily in that order.
Well, I don’t really understand ecstatic loss of control, even though I have been to football games at the Orange Bowl. So I admit I was curious: How did they work that trick? I read a little closer, and found that apparently there was music involved, music so compelling that the frenzy was almost automatic. How this happened was a little ambiguous—the clearest reading I found, from an Aramaic text translated with lots of footnotes, was that “Moloch sent music unto them.” I supposed that meant a band of his priests would march through the streets with drums and trumpets . . .
Why drums and trumpets, Dexter?
Because that was what I was hearing in my sleep. Drums and trumpets rising into a glad chorus of singing and the feeling that pure eternal joy was right outside the door.
Which seemed like a pretty good working definition of ecstatic loss of control, didn’t it?
All right, I reasoned: just for the sake of argument, let’s say Moloch has returned. Or maybe he never went away. So a three-thousand-year-old detestable god from the Bible was sending music in order to, um—what, exactly? Steal my Dark Passenger? Kill young women in Miami, the modern Gomorrah? I even dragged in my earlier insight from the museum and tried to fit it into the puzzle: so Solomon had the original Dark Passenger, which had now come to Miami, and, like a male lion taking over a pride, was therefore trying to kill the Passengers already here, because, um . . . Why exactly?
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Or was I really supposed to believe that an Old Testament bad guy was coming out of time to get me? Wouldn’t it make more sense simply to reserve myself a rubber room right now?
I pushed at it from every side and still came up with nothing.
Possibly my brain was starting to fall apart, too, along with the rest of my life. Maybe I was just tired. Whatever the case, none of it made sense. I needed to know more about Moloch. And because I was sitting in front of the computer, I wondered if Moloch had his own Web site.
It took only a moment to find out, so I typed it in, went down the list of self-important self-pitying blogs, online fantasy games, and arcane paranoid fantasies until I found one that looked likely.
When I clicked on the link, a picture began to form very slowly, and as it did—
The deep, powerful beat of the drum, insistent horns rising behind the pulsing rhythm to a point that swells until it can no longer hold back the voices which break out in anticipation of a gladness beyond knowing—it was the music I had heard in my sleep.
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Then the slow blossom of a smoldering bull’s head, there in the middle of the page, with two upraised hands beside it and the same three Aramaic letters above.
And I sat and stared and blinked with the cursor, still feeling the music crash through me and lift me toward the hot glorious heights of an unknown ecstasy that promised me all the blinding delight ever possible in a world of hidden joy. For the first time in my memory, as these passionate strange sensations washed over and through me and finally out and away—for the first time ever I felt something new, different, and unwelcome.
I was afraid.
I could not say why, or of what, which made it much worse, a lonely unknown fear that roiled through me and echoed off the empty places and drove away everything but the picture of that bull’s head and the fear.
This is nothing, Dexter, I told myself. An animal picture and some random notes of not terribly good music. And I agreed with myself completely—but I could not make my hands listen to reason and move off my lap. Something about this crossover between the 150
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supposedly unconnected worlds of sleep and waking made telling them apart impossible, as if anything that could show up in my sleep and then appear on my screen at work was too powerful to resist and I had no chance of fighting it, had simply to watch as it dragged me down and under into the flames.
There was no black, mighty voice inside me to turn me into steel and fling me like a spear at whatever this was. I was alone, afraid, helpless, and clueless; Dexter in the dark, with the bogeyman and all his unknown minions hiding under the bed and getting ready to pull me out of this world and into the burning land of shrieking, terror-filled pain.
With a motion that was far from graceful I lunged across my desk and yanked the computer’s power cord from the wall and, breathing rapidly and looking like someone had attached elec-trodes to my muscles, I jerked backward into my chair again, so quick and clumsy that the plug on the end of the cord whipped back and snapped me on the forehead just above the left eyebrow.
For several minutes I did nothing but breathe and watch as the sweat rolled off my face and plopped onto my desk. I had no idea why I had leaped off my chair like a gaffed barracuda and yanked the cord out of the wall, beyond the fact that for some reason it had felt like I had to do it or die, and I couldn’t understand where that notion came from, either, but come it had, barreling out of the new darkness between my ears and crushing me with its urgency.
And so I sat in my quiet office and gaped at a dead screen, wondering who I was and what had just happened.
I was never afraid. Fear was an emotion and Dexter did not have them. To be afraid of a Web site was so far beyond stupid and pointless that there were no adjectives for it. And I did not act irrationally, except when imitating human beings.
So why had I pulled the plug, and why were my hands trembling, all from a cheerful little tune and a cartoon cow?
There were no answers, and I was no longer sure I wanted to find them.
I drove home, convinced that I was being followed, even though the rearview mirror stayed empty the whole way.
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The other really was quite special, resilient in a way that the Watcher had not seen in quite some time. This was proving to be far more interesting than some of the ones in the past. He began to feel something that might even be called kinship with the other. Sad, really. If only things had worked out differently. But there was a kind of beauty to the inevitable fate of the other, and that was good, too.
Even this far behind the other’s car, he could see the signs of nerves starting to fray: speeding up and slowing down, fiddling with the mirrors. Good. Uneasy was just the beginning. He needed to move the other far beyond uneasy, and he would. But first it was essential to make sure the other knew what was coming. And so far, in spite of the clues, he did not seem to have figured it out.
Very well, then. The Watcher would simply repeat the pattern until the other recognized just what sort of power was after him. After that, the other would have no choice. He would come like a happy lamb to the slaughter.
Until then, even the watching had purpose. Let him know he was watched. It would do him no good, even if he saw the face watching him.
Faces can change. But the watching would not.
T W E N T Y
Of course there was no sleep for me that night. The next day, Sunday, passed in a haze of fatigue and anxiety. I took Cody and Astor to a nearby park and sat on a bench while I tried to make sense of the pile of uncooperative information and conjecture I had come up with so far. The pieces refused to come together into any kind of picture that made sense. Even if I hammered them into a semi-coherent theory, it told me nothing that would help me understand how to find my Passenger.
The best I could come up with was a sort of half-formed notion that the Dark Passenger and others like it had been hanging around for at least three thousand years. But why mine should flee from any other was impossible to say—especially since I had encountered others before with no more reaction than raised hackles. My notion of the new daddy lion seemed particularly far-fetched in the pleasant sunlight of the park, against the background of the children twittering threats at one another. Statistically speaking, about half of them had new daddies, based on the divorce rate, and they seemed to be thriving.
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in the lovely Miami afternoon. The Passenger was gone, I was alone, and the only solution I could come up with was to take lessons in Aramaic. I could only hope that a chunk of frozen waste-water from a passing airplane would fall on my head and put me out of my misery. I looked up hopefully, but there, too, I was out of luck.
Another semi-sleepless night, broken only by a recurrence of the strange music that came into my sleep and woke me as I sat up in bed to go to it. I had no idea why it seemed like such a good idea to follow the music, and even less idea where it wanted to take me, but apparently I was going anyway. Clearly I was falling apart, sliding rapidly downhill into gray, empty madness.
Monday morning a dazed and battered Dexter staggered into the kitchen, where I was immediately and violently assaulted by Hurricane Rita, who charged at me waving a huge stack of papers and CDs. “I need to know what you think,” she said, and it struck me that this was something she definitely did not need to know, considering the deep bleakness of my thoughts. But before I could summon even a mild objection she had hurled me into a kitchen chair and began flinging the documents around.
“These are the flower arrangements that Hans wants to use,”
she started, showing me a series of pictures that were, in fact, floral in nature. “This is for the altar. And it’s maybe a little too, oh, I don’t know,” she said desperately. “Is anybody going to make jokes about too much white?”
Although I am known for a finely tuned sense of humor, very few jokes based on the color white sprang to mind, but before I could reassure her on the subject, Rita was already flipping the pages.
“Anyway,” she said, “this is the individual table setting. Which hopefully goes with what Manny Borque is doing. Maybe we should get Vince to check it with him?”
“Well,” I said.
“Oh good lord, look at the time,” she said, and before I could speak even one more syllable she had dropped a pile of CDs in my lap. “I’ve narrowed it down to six bands,” she said. “Can you listen 154
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to these today and let me know what you think? Thanks, Dex,” she went on relentlessly, leaning to plant a kiss on my cheek and then heading for the door, already moving on to the next item on her checklist. “Cody?” she called. “It’s time to go, sweetie. Come on.”
There was another three minutes of commotion, the highlights of which were Cody and Astor sticking their heads in the kitchen door to say good-bye, and then the front door slammed and all was si
lent.
And in the silence I thought I could almost hear, as I had heard in the night, the faint echo of the music. I knew I should leap from my chair and charge out the door with my saber clamped firmly between my teeth—charge into the bright light of day and find this thing, whatever it was, beard it in its den and slay it—but I could not.
The Moloch Web site had stuck its fear into me, and even though I knew it was foolish, wrong, counterproductive, totally non-Dexter in every way, I could not fight it. Moloch. Just a silly ancient name. An old myth that had disappeared thousands of years ago, torn down with Solomon’s temple. It was nothing, a figment from prehistoric imaginations, less than nothing—except that I was afraid of it.
There seemed nothing else to do except to stumble through the day with my head down and hope that it didn’t get me, whatever it was. I was bone tired, and maybe that was adding to my sense of helplessness. But I didn’t think so. I had the feeling that a very bad thing was circling closer with its nose full of my scent, and I could already feel its sharp teeth in my neck. All I could hope for was to make its sport last a little longer, but sooner or later I would feel its claws on me and then I, too, would bleat, beat my heels in the dust, and die. There was no fight left in me; there was, in fact, almost nothing at all left in me, except a kind of reflex humanity that said it was time to go to work.
I picked up Rita’s stack of CDs and slogged out the door. And as I stood in the doorway of the house, turning the key to lock the front door, a white Avalon very slowly pulled away from the curb and drove off with a lazy insolence that cut through all my fatigue DEXTER IN THE DARK
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and despair and sliced right into me with a jolt of sheer terror that rocked me back against the door as the CDs slipped from my fingers and crashed onto the walk.
The car motored slowly up the street to the stop sign. I watched, nerveless and numb. And as its brake lights flicked off and it started up and through the intersection, a small piece of Dexter woke up, and it was very angry.