“Nonsense. I don’t hate you.”
“You hate Jocko. He lied to his best friend.”
“And I know he’s learned his lesson.”
From behind the chair, Jocko said, “He has. He really has.”
“I know Jocko will never lie to me again.”
“Never. He … I never will.”
“Then come here.”
“Jocko is so embarrassed.”
“There’s no need to be. We’re better friends than ever.”
Hesitantly, he moved out from behind the chair. Shyly, he came to Erika, where she remained at the head of the glass case.
“Before I ask for the opinion I need from you,” she said, “I’ve one more thing to show you.”
Jocko said, “Oy.”
“I’ll do exactly what I did yesterday. Let’s see what happens.”
“Oy.”
Once more, she bent down to the glass and said, “Hello, hello, hello in there.”
The shadowy shape stirred again, and this time the sound waves of her voice sent scintillant blue pulses across the case, as a rap of her knuckle had done before.
She spoke again: “I am Queen Esther to his King Ahasuerus.”
The pulses of blue were a more intense color than previously. The shadowy presence appeared to rise closer to the underside of the glass, revealing the barest suggestion of a pale face, but no details.
Turning to Jocko, Erika whispered, “This is exactly what happened yesterday.”
The troll’s yellow eyes were wide with fright. He gaped at the featureless suggestion of a face beneath the glass, and what appeared to be an iridescent soap bubble floated from his open mouth.
Lowering her lips close to the glass once more, Erika repeated, “I am Queen Esther to his King Ahasuerus.”
Out of the throbbing blue pulses raised by her words, a rough low voice, not muffled by the glass, said, “You are Erika Five, and you are mine.”
Jocko fainted.
CHAPTER 51
BY PHONE, Deucalion told them to drive directly to the main gate of Crosswoods Waste Management. “You’ll be met by an escort. They’re a Gamma and an Epsilon, but you can trust them.”
The long rows of loblolly pines broke for the main entrance. The ten-foot-high chain-link gates featured green privacy panels and were topped with coils of barbed wire to match the fence that flanked them.
As Carson coasted to a stop, she said, “They’re of the New Race. How can we possibly trust them? This makes me nervous, very uneasy.”
“That’s just the caffeine.”
“It’s not just the caffeine, Michael. This situation, putting ourselves in the hands of Victor’s people, I’m spooked.”
“Deucalion trusts them,” Michael said. “And that’s good enough for me.”
“I guess I know which side he’s on, all right. But he’s still strange sometimes, sometimes moody, and hard to figure.”
“Let’s see. He’s over two hundred years old. He was made from parts of cadavers taken from a prison graveyard. He’s got a handsome side to his face and a caved-in side tattooed to conceal the extent of the damage. He’s got two hearts and who knows what other weird arrangement of internal organs. He’s been a monk, the star in a carnival freak show, and maybe a hundred other things we’ll never know about. He’s seen two centuries of war and had three average lifetimes to think about them, and he seems to have read every book worth reading, probably a hundred times more books than you’ve read, a thousand times more than me. He’s lived through the decline of Christendom and the rise of a new Gomorrah. He can open doorways in the air and step through them to the other side of the world because the lightning bolt that animated him brought mysterious gifts with it, as well. Gee, Carson, I don’t see any reason why he should seem strange or moody or hard to figure. You’re right—it must just be that he’s setting us up, he’s been lying all along about wanting to nail Victor, they just wanted to lure us to the dump so they could eat us for breakfast.”
Carson said, “If you’re going to go off on rants, you can’t have any more NoDoz.”
“I don’t need any more NoDoz. I feel like my eyelids have been stitched open with surgical sutures.”
In the headlight beams, the gates of Crosswoods began to swing inward. Beyond lay the darkness of the dump, which seemed blacker than the moonless night on this side of the fence.
Carson let the Honda coast forward, between the gates, and two figures with flashlights loomed out of the darkness.
One of them was a guy, rough-looking but handsome in a brutish kind of way. He wore a filthy white T-shirt, jeans, and thigh-high rubber boots.
In the backsplash of the flashlights, the woman appeared to be movie-star gorgeous. Her blond hair needed to be washed, and her face was spotted with grime, but she had a beauty so intense that it would have shone through just about anything except a mud pack.
With his flashlight, the man showed Carson where to park, while the woman walked backward in front of them, grinning and waving as if Carson and Michael were beloved kin not seen since everybody had to flee the Ozarks one step ahead of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms task force.
Like the man, she wore a filthy white T-shirt, jeans, and thigh-high rubber boots, but the unattractive getup somehow only emphasized that she had the body of a goddess.
“I’m beginning to think our Victor is less a scientist than he is a horndog,” Carson said.
“Well, I guess it doesn’t cost him any more to make them curvy than to make them flat.”
Switching off the headlights and then the engine, Carson said, “We’re taking all our guns.”
“In case we have to protect our virtue.”
Carson said, “Now that we’re planning on you having my babies, I’ll protect your virtue for you.”
They got out of the Honda, each with two handguns holstered and an Urban Sniper held by the pistol grip, muzzle toward the ground.
The man didn’t offer his hand. “I’m Nick Frigg. I run the dump.”
Close up, the woman impressed Carson as being even more gorgeous than she had appeared from the car. She radiated a wildness but also an affability, an animal vitality and enthusiasm that made her hard not to like.
She declared with energy, “Marble, mutton, mustard, mice, mule, mumps, muck, manhole—”
Nick Frigg said, “Give her a chance. Sometimes she just has trouble finding the right word to get started.”
“—mole, moon, moan, mush, mushroom, moth, mother. Mother! We saw the mother of all gone-wrongs tonight!”
“This is Gunny Alecto,” Nick said. “She drives one of what we call our garbage galleons, big machine, plowing the trash flat and compacting it good and solid.”
“What’s a gone-wrong?” Michael asked.
“Experiments that have gone all wrong down at the Hands of Mercy. Specialized meat machines, maybe some warrior thing now and then was supposed to help us in the Last War, even some Alphas or Betas that turned out not like he expected.”
“We bury them here,” Gunny Alecto said. “We treat them right. They look stupid, stupid, stupid, but they kind of come from where we do, so they’re sort of weird family.”
“The one tonight wasn’t stupid,” Nick said.
An expression of awe possessed Gunny’s face. “Oh, tonight, it was all different down the big hole. The mother of all gone-wrongs, it’s the most beautiful thing ever.”
“It changed us,” said Nick Frigg.
“Totally changed us,” Gunny agreed, nodding enthusiastically.
“It made us understand,” Nick said.
“Heaps, harps, holes, hoops, hens, hawks, hooks, hoses, hearts, hands, heads. Heads! The mother of all gone-wrongs talked inside our heads.”
“It made us free,” Nick said. “We don’t have to do anything we used to have to do.”
“We don’t hate your kind anymore,” Gunny said. “It’s like—why did we ever.”
“That’s nice,?
?? said Carson.
“We used to hate you so bad,” Gunny revealed. “When Old Race dead were sent to the dump, we stomped their faces. Stomped them head to foot, over and over, till they were nothing but bone splinters and smashed meat.”
“In fact,” Nick added, “we just did that earlier tonight with some like you.”
“That was before we went down the big hole and met the mother of all gone-wrongs and learned better,” Gunny clarified. “Man, oh, man, life is different now, for sure.”
Carson shifted her grip on the Urban Sniper, holding it with both hands, the muzzle aimed at the sky instead of toward the ground.
Casually, Michael did the same with his Sniper as he said, “So where is Deucalion?”
“We’ll take you to him,” Nick said. “He’s really the first, isn’t he, the first man-made man?”
“Yes, he really is,” Carson said.
“Listen,” Michael said, “we’ve got a dog in the car. Is he going to be safe if we leave him here?”
“Bring him along,” Nick said. “Dogs—they love a dump. They call me dog-nose Nick ’cause to help me in my job, I have some canine genes that give me a sense of smell half what a dog’s is but ten thousand times what you smell.”
When Michael opened the back door of the Honda, Duke bounded out and raised his nose to the rich night air. He regarded Nick and Gunny warily, cocked his head left, then right.
“He smells New Race,” Nick said. “And that worries him. But he smells something different about us, too.”
“Because we’ve been down the big hole,” Gunny said, “and had our heads talked in by the mother of all gone-wrongs.”
“That’s right,” Nick said. “The dog, he knows.”
The Duke of Orleans tentatively wagged his tail.
“He smells like a good dog,” Nick said. “He smells the way I’d want to smell if I didn’t have just some canine genes but was all the way a dog. He smells perfect for a dog. You’re lucky to have him.”
Carson gave Michael a look that asked, Are we crazy to go with them into this dark and lonely place?
He read her clearly, because he said, “Well, it’s dark and it’s lonely, but we’ve been through crazy for three days, and I think we’re coming out the other side tonight. I say trust Deucalion and the Duke.”
CHAPTER 52
ERIKA CARRIED JOCKO from the windowless Victorian drawing room, along the secret passageway.
When the troll passed out, he passed way out. He fell so deep into unconsciousness that during this short vacation from awareness, he must have had a room with a view of death.
As limp as rags, his body draped over her cradling arms. Head lolling, mouth open, flaps flopping, he held an iridescent bubble between his teeth, and it didn’t pop until she settled him in an armchair in the library.
Jocko remained the antithesis of beauty If any child were to come upon him accidentally, the unfortunate tyke might need years to regain control of his bladder and would be traumatized for life.
Yet Jocko’s vulnerability, his effervescence, and his touching perseverance endeared him to Erika. Somewhat to her surprise, her affection for the troll grew by the hour.
If this mansion were a cottage in the woods, if Jocko frequently broke into song, and if there were six more of him, Erika would have been a real-life Snow White.
She returned to the windowless drawing room. From the threshold, she stared for a moment at the shapeless shadow nesting within the radiant reddish-gold substance.
The care taken with the decor suggested that Victor came here regularly to sit at length with the creature in the glass casket. If he spent little time in this room, he would not have furnished it so cozily.
She closed the steel door and engaged the five deadbolts. At the end of the hall that bristled with rods, she closed the next door and bolted it, as well.
When she returned to the library, where the pivoting section of bookshelves rotated into place, concealing all beyond it, Erika found that Jocko had regained consciousness. Feet dangling well short of the floor, arms on the arms of the chair, he was sitting up straight, clutching the upholstery with both hands, as if he were on a roller coaster, nervously anticipating the next plunge.
“How do you feel, Jocko?”
He said, “Pecked.”
“What does that mean?”
“Like, say, ten birds want to peck your head, you try to protect yourself, their wings flutter against your hands and arms, flutter-flutter-flutter against your face. Jocko feels fluttery all over.”
“Have you ever been attacked by birds?”
“Only when they see me.”
“That sounds horrible.”
“Well, it just happens when Jocko’s in open air. And mostly in daylight, only once at night. Well, twice if bats count as birds.”
“There’s a bar here in the library. Maybe a drink will settle your nerves.”
“Do you have storm-drain water with interesting sediment?”
“I’m afraid we only have bottled water or from the tap.”
“Oh. Then I’ll have Scotch.”
“You want that on the rocks?”
“No. Just some ice, please.”
Moments later, as Erika gave Jocko his drink, her cell phone rang. “Only Victor has this number.”
She thought that Jocko’s voice had a note of bitterness in it when he muttered, “He who made he who I was,” but she may have been imagining it.
She fished the phone from a pocket of her slacks. “Hello?”
“We’re leaving New Orleans for a while,” Victor said. “We’re leaving immediately.”
Because her husband sometimes found questions impertinent, Erika didn’t ask why they were leaving, but said simply, “All right.”
“I’m already on my way to the tank farm. You’ll go there in the bigger Mercedes SUV, the GL550.”
“Yes, Victor. Tomorrow?”
“Don’t be stupid. I said ‘immediately.’ Tonight. Within the hour. Pack two weeks’ clothes for yourself. Get the staff to help. You’ve got to move fast.”
“And should I bring clothes for you?”
“I have a wardrobe at the farm. Just shut up and listen.”
Victor told her where to find the mansion’s walk-in safe and explained what she should bring from it.
Then he said, “When you go outside, look to the northwest, the sky is burning,” and he terminated the call.
Erika closed her phone and stood in thought for a moment.
In the armchair, Jocko said, “Is he mean to you?”
“He … is who he is,” she replied. “Wait here. I’ll be back in a minute.”
French doors opened from the library to a covered terrace. As Erika stepped outside, she heard sirens in the distance.
To the northwest, a strange luminosity played through the low storm clouds: throbbing, wildly flailing forms of light, as radiant and fiercely white as spirits might be, if you were one who believed in such things as spirits.
The burning sky was a reflection of an unimaginably hot and hungry blaze below. The place where she was conceived and born, the Hands of Mercy, must be on fire.
The rain driving through the trees and spending itself on the soaked lawn made a sizzle something like fire, but here the night had no scent of smoke. The washed air smelled clean and fresh, and the fragrance of jasmine came to her, and in this moment, for the first time in her brief but event-packed existence, she felt fully alive.
She returned to the library and sat on the footstool in front of Jocko’s armchair. “Little friend, you have followed the secret passageway to the hidden room and seen all those lock bolts on the two steel doors.”
“Jocko isn’t going there again. Jocko’s been in enough scary places. He wants just nice places from now on.”
“You have seen the hidden room and the glass casket, and the shapeless shadow alive within.”
Jocko shuddered and drank some Scotch.
“You have heard
it speak from the casket.”
Unsuccessfully trying to make his voice deeper and rougher and menacing, the troll quoted, “‘You are Erika Five, and you are mine.’”
In his natural voice, he said, “There’s something in the glass box that’s at least fourteen hundred times too scary for Jocko. If Jocko had genitals, they would’ve shriveled up and fallen off. But Jocko could only faint.”
“Remember, I took you there so I could ask your opinion about something. Before I ask, I must emphasize that I want to know what you truly feel. Truly, truly.”
Clearly somewhat embarrassed but nevertheless meeting Erika’s stare forthrightly, the troll said, “Truly, truly. No more Jocko-needs-to-pee-Jocko-is-gonna-vomit. That’s the old me. Good-bye to that Jocko.”
“All right, then. I want your honest opinion about two things. We don’t know what that shapeless shadow is. But based on what you’ve heard and seen, is the thing in that glass casket just another thing—or is it malevolent?”
“Malevolent!” the troll said at once. “Malevolent, malignant, venomous, and potentially very troublesome.”
“Thank you for your honesty.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Now my second question.” She leaned toward Jocko, riveting his gaze with hers. “If the thing in the glass case was made by some man, conceived and designed and brought to life by some man, do you think that man is good … or evil?”
“Evil,” Jocko said. “Evil, depraved, wicked, corrupt, vile, vicious, rotten, hateful, totally unpleasant.”
Erika held his gaze for half a minute. Then she rose from the footstool. “We’ve got to leave New Orleans and go to the tank farm farther upstate. You’ll need clothes.”
Plucking at the picnic tablecloth that he had fashioned into a sarong, Jocko said, “This is the only clothes Jocko ever had. It works okay.”
“You’ll be out in public, at least in the Mercedes.”
“Put Jocko in the trunk.”
“It’s an SUV. It doesn’t have a trunk. I’ve got to find you clothes that make you look more like a normal little boy.”
Amazement made yet another fright mask of the troll’s face. “What genius would make such clothes?”