Robert R. McCammon
Baal
10/1/1988
en-us
Horror
ISBN: 0-671-66484-0
Pocket Books
Original Scan, v1.0

“KING, STRAUB, AND NOW ROBERT
McCAMMON…”

–Los Angeles Times

FROM THE SEETHING CAULDRON OF THE MIDDLE
EAST

HIS FOLLOWERS BURST FORTH IN UNHOLY FURY…

He is the foul seed of evil the dark prophet who
sees what is—and creates what will always be. Across the
earth, he spreads his fiendish blasphemy, unleashes his holocaust,
proclaims himself messiah. But he is Baal, the prince of demons.
Fear him. He will never be destroyed.

From Robert R. McCammon, bestselling author of
Stinger and Swan Song, comes a tale of bloodcurdling
horror where the powers of darkness challenge man to the ultimate
battle… and the winner loses all.

LOOK FOR THESE NOVELS

FROM THE BESTSELLING

MASTER OF HORROR,

STINGER

SWAN SONG

THEY THIRST

BAAL

THE NIGHT BOAT

BETHANY’S SIN

ALL AVAILABLE FROM

POCKET BOOKS

Baal. The Ancient Evil,

Known to Every Generation Where

Chaos Reigns Supreme.

Now He Has Come Again…

This time he was born to a woman raped by a beast with hands of
ice. From his crib, he drove her to murder.

Now millions of fanatic disciples cry out his name in obscene
worship, hailing him as the living prophet, heeding his call to
murder and orgy. On every continent, his work is
done—bombings, terror, war. And only those who follow him
survive.

But three men vow to silence him. In a journey to the Arctic
wastelands, they will track him down: Zark, the shaman…
Virga, the aging theology professor… and Michael, the
mysterious, powerful stranger. Three modern warriors battling a
force more ancient, more horrifying, more merciless than death
itself…

BAAL

Books by Robert R. McCammon

Baal

Bethany’s Sin

The Night Boat

Stinger

Swan Song

They Thirst

Published by POCKET BOOKS

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POCKET BOOKS

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For Michael, my brother,

and Bill, my friend

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and
incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination
or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or
locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc. 1230
Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020

Copyright © 1978 by Robert R. McCammon

Cover artwork copyright © 1988 Jim Warren

Published by arrangement with the author

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 78-58890

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book
or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

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ISBN: 0-671-66484-0

First Pocket Books printing October 1988

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Printed in the U.S.A.

Table Of Contents

Prologue

One

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Two

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

Three

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

Afterword

Prologue

FURY STUNG THE SKY.

Kul-Haziz smelled it. It had the odor
of clashing weapons, of men’s sweat, of new blood, of old
sins.

Smelling it, he narrowed his eyes and
looked over the backs of the grazing flock to the north. The sun
hung high in a white sky, burning as it had for a thousand years.
Its eye saw what was happening beyond the crags, beyond the flat
plains, over meadows and hills in the distance. It saw what he
could not. He could only smell.

His eyes fixed on the grim horizon,
Kul-Haziz took his gnarled staff and walked slowly among his flock,
softly nudging the flanks of the sheep. He was a man who, with his
wife and young son, had always followed the rainfall because the
rainfall meant new grass. Life for the flock. Now, in the distant
north toward the city of Hazor, he saw the gathering of dark shapes
that looked like rain clouds. But no. There was no odor of rain in
the air. He would have smelled it days before. No, not rain. Only
the smell of fury.

Behind him, inside a goatskin tent, his
wife looked up from her mending. On the other side of the rolling,
slightly sloped plain his son had been striking his staff on the
ground to urge straying animals back to the flock. Now he looked
toward his father.

Kul-Haziz stood like stone on the
hillside. He put his hand over his eyes to shield them from the
sun. He didn’t know what was happening. He had heard the
stories from other nomadic families: the wrath of Yahweh has fallen
upon us. We are a doomed race, they said with blabbering tongues.
Yahweh will destroy us all for our wickedness. So said the shepherd
prophets, the nomads of the grasslands, the kings of the hills. His
heart beat within him. It sounded like someone crying out for
knowledge.

His son reached him through the flock.
He grasped his father’s hand.

There was a flash like lightning, but
no lightning. Far away in the distance, to the north, toward the
city of Hazor. It was bright blue and blinding, intense, terrible.
Kul-Haziz clapped a hand over his eyes. His son held to him, hiding
his face. Behind him his wife cried out and the sheep scattered all
around. Kul-Haziz felt the heat on his hand. When it had died away
he looked again and saw nothing. His son was staring up at him, his
eyes asking a question the man could not answer.

And then he saw it. Over the far crags,
beyond the flat plains: trees bending in a fierce wind, breaking
off and flying through the air, their branches turning to fire. And
the grasslands beyond blackened as if an army were marching across
them, leaving Hazor behind. The fire army crawled across the plains
below, scorching them. Thornscrubs exploded in flame. Fire ripped
the sands.

As the wind reached Kul-Haziz up on the
grass-covered hill it whirled around him, tore at his rags,
whispered the secrets into his ear. The flock bawled.

Only a short time now before the fire
would come. It had consumed Hazor and was now devouring every
living thing on all sides of that city. Kul-Haziz knew his family
could take only a few more breaths before the warming air turned to
raging white flame.

At his side his son said,
“Father?”

The prophets had been right. Their
skulls and sticks, their writing across the sky had foretold the
coming of the end. It had only been a matter of time.

Kul-Haziz said, “The great god
Baal is no more.”

He stood like stone.

Burning stone.

ONE

“Who is like unto the beast?”

—Revelation 13:4

1

ON THE TELEVISION SCREEN the newscaster was speaking of falling
economies and the latest South American earthquakes.

Mary Kate slid a cup of coffee across
the cigarette-burned countertop to the night’s last customer.
He looked at her through bleary eyes and mumbled a thank-you.

Ernest was leaning against the counter
watching the late-night news program; he always did. She knew the
routine. “Holy Jesus Christ!” he said.
“They’re killin’ the city with all this tax shit!
You can’t make a decent livin’ no more!”

“Man shouldn’t even
try,” said the customer. “Should just be a bum and lay
around in the park like all those kids do. The world has gone to
hell.”

There was a clatter of plates as Mary
Kate gathered them up. “Watch that!” Ernest said. On
the fly-blown black-and-white screen the solemn face said,
“…fear another assassination
attempt…”

She glanced at her wristwatch. Late!
she thought. I’m running late! Joe’s home by now and
he’d be tired as hell. He’ll want something to eat and
I know how it is when he doesn’t get his dinner on time. Damn
it!

“You know what it is?” the
customer was asking Ernest. “It’s time, that’s
what it is. The world has run the circle. You know what I’m
talking about? The circle’s been run and now, by God,
it’s time to pay up.”

“… kidnapped yesterday by
members of Japan’s Black Mask terrorist organization. Ransom
demands have not yet…” said the newscaster.

“The circle’s been
run?” Ernest asked. He had turned his head to look at the
other man and one side of his heavy-jowled face reflected the
television’s blue glow. “What’d you mean by
that?”

“You’re only given so much
time, y’know,” said the customer, his gaze flickering
from Ernest to the newscaster and back again. “When your time
is up, you go. Same’s true of cities, of countries even. You
know what happened to Rome, right? It reached its peak and then
fell right over the edge.”

“So New York and Rome both got
somethin’ in common, huh?”

“Sure. I read about all this
somewhere. Or maybe I saw it on the tube.”

Mary Kate had cradled greasy,
cigarette-butt-littered plates in her arms. The odors repelled her.
People are just like pigs, she mused. Oink oink oink just like
pigs. She went through a pair of swinging doors into the kitchen
and set the dirty dishes in a rack near the sink. The combination
cook and dishwasher, a young black named Woodrow, lifted his chin
and watched her intently, a cigarette dangling from a corner of his
mouth.

“Do Baby Mary need a ride home
tonight?” he asked her; he always did.

“I’ve asked you to stop
calling me that.”

“It’s right on my way. And
I got me some good-lookin’ rims last week.”

“I’ll take the
bus.”

“I can save you some
money.”

She turned toward him and saw the heat
simmering behind his eyes; that look of his always frightened her.
“I can save you some time. I don’t need a ride.
I’ll take the bus like I always take the bus. You understand
that now?”

Woodrow grinned around the cigarette.
An ash fell like a block of marble from the Tower of Babel.
“I dig, sister. You don’t go for the black meat is
all.”

She swung the kitchen doors shut behind
her and the sound made Ernest look up sharply. His gaze fixed on
her for a few seconds and then turned again to the television,
where a long-legged weathergirl was explaining that the heat wave
would continue at least through Thursday.

That bastard! Mary Kate began
methodically wiping the grime from ashtrays scattered along the
counter. I’ve got to get a new job, she told herself; she
always did. I’ve got to get a new job and get my ass out of
here. I don’t care what it is as long as I’m away from
here!

Here I am, she said. Twenty years old
and a waitress in a slop shop, married to an English-major dropout
who drives a cab. Christ! I’ve got to get out of here even if
it means… doing something I don’t want to do. She
wondered what Joe’s reaction would be if one night in their
cramped steaming apartment she touched him gently and whispered,
“Joe my darling dearest one on earth, I think I’d be
happier as a whore.”

There was a click! as Ernest
switched off the television set. The customer had gone. A dime lay
beside the coffee cup.

“Time to go home,” Ernest
said. “Another day, another dollar. Another lousy dollar.
Hey! Woodrow! Hey! You locking up back there?”

Woodrow called back in his best slave
imitation, “I’se lockin’ up, boss!”

Mary Kate folded her apron neatly and
laid it beneath the counter. She said, “I’m leaving
now, okay? I’ve got to get home and cook something for
Joe.”

Ernest was still propped against the
counter, staring at the empty eye of the television. Without
looking around, he said, “So? Leave.”

She pushed through the frosted-glass
door out into the street where a red neon sign flashed
Ernie’s Grill off and on, off and on a thousand times
a day; once she’d actually counted.

The air was as thick and heavy as if
she were standing in the center of a steambath. She walked away
from the grill toward her bus stop three blocks away, keeping her
purse high on her shoulder to guard against hit-and-run
thieves.

At one time she had wanted to go to
secretarial school; she and Joe would be able to support each other
and maybe save a little on the side. But then he had dropped out of
school and his subsequent depression infected her as well. They
were now like two survivors of a shipwreck in a leaking life raft.
Too weak to live, too scared to die, just drifting, drifting.
Things had to change.

And now she found herself doubting that
she still loved him. She didn’t know. No one had ever
explained to her how she should feel; her father was the strict
conservative type, a grease-handed mechanic in a New Jersey garage,
and her mother was a chattering bingo addict who wore sunglasses
after dark, as if she hoped to be discovered for the movies by
talent scouts scrounging amid damaged canned goods in second-rate
supermarkets.

She still felt attracted to Joe, yes.
Of course she did. But love? Love? That thrilling passionate dip
into the soul of someone else? She really couldn’t put it
into words, and if she asked Joe to help her articulate it she was
certain he’d laugh. It wasn’t that she was no longer
healthy or pretty or anything like that, though when she stood
before a mirror she had to admit she was far too thin and her face
had taken on the blank stare of a well-worn woman. No, something
was needed; something drastic.

The grill was far from her thoughts
now. Ahead the streetlights glowed yellow all along the curb. The
empty scarred stone faces of apartment buildings watched her pass
as solemnly as priests with bowed heads. Garbage cans overflowed
into the gutter and newspaper headlines shrieked of murder and
arson and the threat of war.

This heat, she said. This heat. The
sweat had burst out across the bridge of her nose. It had collected
under her arms and now trickled down her sides. How many more days
of this? Already two weeks. How much longer? And only the beginning
of summer, with the hottest months yet to come.

The bus stop. No, no, a block further.
Her footsteps on the empty street echoed back and forth, back and
forth between the stone walls. How much longer, she asked herself,
can I take this?

Ahead she saw that the globe of one of
the streetlights had been broken. Someone had thrown a stone or
bottle and broken the glass, but not hard enough to completely
shatter the bulb. It flickered wildly, buzzing like a great lost
insect, yellow to black, yellow to black, yellow to black. It threw
black shadows across the faces of the fearful watching priests.

“Come here,” someone said.
It was a gentle, distant voice like that of a little child.

She turned and wiped her forearm across
her face. It came away wet.

There was no one. The street was empty
and quiet but for the noise of the bulb above her head. She pulled
her purse higher on her arm, clamped it in her armpit. Hunching her
head down, she walked on toward the bus stop. Her bus would be
there soon.

“Come here,” said the
voice, cool and startling as if a cube of ice had been pressed
suddenly against her forehead. She stopped abruptly and stood
motionless.

Mary Kate glanced over her shoulder.
Someone’s playing a joke, she thought. Some little kid is
playing a joke. “That is not funny,” she said to no
one. “Go on home.”

But before she could move away the
voice said softly, “Here. I’m here.”

Something touched her; it was like
smoke, grasping with whirling changing fingers. She felt it moving
beneath her wet garments; her flesh crawled. The voice had walked
up the skeletal staircase of her spine. And now it descended with
measured steps.

“I’m here,” someone
said, and she turned to peer into a black garbage-strewn alley that
smelled of urine and sweat.

Someone was standing there, someone
tall. Not a child. A man? Wearing a man’s clothes, yes. A
man. Who? A mugger? She felt an electric impulse to run. Above her
head the broken bulb screamed in shades of yellow and black.

“Do I know you? Do I know
you?” she found herself asking; a damned stupid question to
ask a mugger, she angrily told herself. Her grip tightened around
her purse. She was going to run and keep running until she’d
lost him.

“No,” he said quietly.
“Don’t run.”

He remained in shadow. She could see
his shoes, a pair of battered black wingtips below dark trousers.
He made no attempt to come closer to her. He simply stood framed in
the alley entrance, with his arms at his sides, and she felt the
urge to escape drained from her. No need to run, she told herself.
This is someone I know.

“I’m someone you
know,” he said in his childlike whisper. “I’m
someone you haven’t seen for a long while. There is no need
for fear.”

“What do you want with
me?”

“Time. Just a moment out of all
moments you will ever live. Is that too much to ask of a
friend?”

“No. Not too much to ask.”
She felt strange and heavy. Her head swam in a pool of yellow and
black; her tongue was a plate of concrete jammed back into her
mouth.

“If I reach out my hand for
you,” he asked, “will you take it?”

She shuddered. No. Yes. Yes. “My
bus,” she said in a helpless, unfamiliar voice.

His arm pierced the shadows. The
fingers were long and thin; filth caked the nails.

The heat lay heavy about her shoulders
and her hair, wet and stringy, clung to her neck. I can’t
breathe! she screamed inwardly. I’m drowning! I’m
drowning. The mad buzzing streetlight drilled into her brain and
lit it in glaring yellow neon. I don’t want to, she said to
herself.

And he answered, “You
will.”

His hand touched hers. The fingers
locked around her knuckles, moved over her palm, clenched her wrist
with a steadily rising force.

And then from the alley shadows a face
yellow-illuminated burst its soundlessly screaming mouth open to
devour her. She had no time to see him; she was overcome by a
powerful high odor of something burning. His flesh was wet and
soft—spongy—and hot. He bore down on her as she fell
screaming and clawing to the concrete.

He smashed her head into the sidewalk.
Again. Again. Something was bleeding; her ear was bleeding. The hot
blood was streaming down her neck. “YOU BITCH!” he
shrieked in a voice that flailed her like a burning whip.
“YOU DAMNED COCKSUCKING BITCH AND ALL YOUR LOVERS
DOGS!” The man’s breath smelled foul and hot. She
cringed as he beat at her breasts; he ripped her blouse and raked
the smooth skin of her abdomen with his nails.

She screamed in agony and sang harmony
with the streetlight. A window across the street slammed shut. Then
another.

With both hands he tore away her skirt.
Then he spread wide her thighs and drove in with a mad inhuman
strength that ground her buttocks against the concrete. He pressed
his fingers against her eyes and for an instant she thought,
I’m dead oh God I’m dead.

“OOOOHHHH GODDDD!” she
screamed aloud. Her mouth was filled suddenly by a greedy eager
tongue.

“DIE YOU BITCH DIE YOU BITCH YOU
CUNT DIE!” he screamed pounding and grinding and pounding and
pounding until he climaxed with a fierce shudder that drew the
breath from him and made her whine with pain.

“Hey! Hey! You! Get away from
there!” Brakes squealed and rubber burned. She felt his
weight rise from her and smelled him again; the odor made her vomit
on the concrete. She heard someone running; no, two people running.
Someone running away and someone running toward her. Oh God oh God
oh God help me.

Mary Kate opened her eyes and saw a
young man. Woodrow. Woodrow running toward her and behind him a
fire-engine-red Buick with shining chrome wheel rims that caught
the distorted reflections of streetlights. Woodrow reaching her and
bending down and the cigarette dropping from his lips
and…

2

HE CRACKED THE TOP off a can of beer and stood at an open window
staring down at the dark quiet street. She’s been late before
but not like this. The bus never ran this late.

He’d tried the grill but it was
past closing and no one answered the telephone. Maybe the bus had
broken down. No, she would’ve called. Maybe she missed it and
had to walk. No, that was a hell of a long way. Maybe she’d
had an accident; or maybe she’d gotten crazy like she had
before when she didn’t come home for two days and
they’d finally found her sitting in the park, doing nothing
but just sitting.

Shit. Why does she do these things to
me? He drank the beer down and placed the can on the splintery
windowsill. She’s more than two hours late. More than two
hours and where can she be this time of night? He picked up the
telephone and started to dial her parents’ apartment in
Jersey City but then he recalled her mother’s whining voice.
He put the receiver back on its cradle. Not yet.

Out in the distance, above the packed
dirty rows of square-shouldered buildings, a police siren wailed.
Or was it an ambulance? He’d never learned to tell the
difference like some people could. Something had happened. Standing
in the dark small fourth-floor apartment that inhaled the odors
wafting from beneath other doors, he was certain something had
happened.

And he stood waiting and frozen until
someone knocked at the door. But he knew it would not be her; no.
The police officer with an impassive acne-scarred face simply said,
“I have a car outside.”

In the car on the way to the hospital
he asked, “Is she all right? I mean…”

“I’m sorry, Mr.
Raines,” the police officer said. “They asked me to
pick you up.”

He sat in an antiseptic-white waiting
room on the seventh floor and clenched his hands. Hit by a car.
That was it. Oh Jesus God hit by some drunk while she was walking
to her bus stop.

Even at this early-morning hour,
Bellevue moved at a frantic life-and-death pace. He watched the
doctors and their nurses consulting charts in low-keyed, serious
voices. And a sight that chilled him to the bone, a man in a suit
sprinting down the hospital corridor, his shoes clat-clat-clatting
on the linoleum. He sat and watched these private dramas until
finally he was aware of someone standing beside him.

“Mr. Joseph Raines?”
someone asked. A tall gaunt man with tightly curled gray hair. He
said, “I’m Lt. Hepelmann.” He flashed an NYPD
badge and Joe rose from his seat.

“No, no. Sit down.
Please.” Hepelmann put a hand on the younger man’s
shoulder and eased him back down into the chair. He sat beside him
and drew his own chair closer, as if he were a friend about to
advise him on a personal matter.

“I knew she was late and I knew
something had happened,” said Joe, staring into his palms.
“I tried the grill but no one answered the phone.” He
looked up. “A hit-and-run driver?”

Hepelmann’s deep-set blue eyes
were calm and untroubled. He was used to scenes like this.
“No, Mr. Raines. I don’t know who told you that, but
she was not struck by a car. Your wife has been… assaulted.
She’s safe now but still in shock. She might have died but
some nigger saved her. Ran the guy off and chased him a block
before he got away.”

“Assaulted? Assaulted? What does
that mean?”

Hepelmann’s jaw tightened. This
was the moment that broke them to pieces, the mental image of some
guy ramming himself in between thrashing thighs. “There was
sexual penetration, Mr. Raines,” he said softly, as if
sharing a secret.

Raped. Jesus Christ. Jesus Holy Christ.
Raped. He looked directly into Hepelmann’s eyes with a savage
ferocity. “You got the sonofabitch?”

“No. We haven’t been able
to get a description. Probably it’s some nut who has a
history of… violations. When Mrs. Raines recovers
we’ll get her to page through our mug files. We’ll get
the guy.”

“Oh man. Oh man oh man oh
man.”

“Listen, you want a cup of coffee
or something? Here. A cigarette.”

He took the cigarette the lieutenant
offered. “Christ,” he said weakly. “But
she’s okay, right? I mean, no broken bones or
anything?”

“No broken bones.”
Hepelmann leaned forward until he might have been whispering in the
other man’s ear. “I’ve worked a lot of these
cases, Mr. Raines. These things happen a hundred times a day.
It’s rough, yes. But you adjust to it. And usually the woman
adjusts faster than the man. Everything’s okay now.
It’s over.”

The man didn’t react to this
statement as Hepelmann had seen others react. He simply sat and
smoked the cigarette, his eyes boring down the tunnel-like hospital
corridor. Someone was paging a Dr. Holland on the address
system.

“Some people are just like
animals,” Hepelmann said. “They think of one thing and
they go after it. Hell, they don’t care who it is. I’ve
investigated violation cases where the victims were eighty-year-old
grandmothers! Hell, they don’t care. Their minds are gone
already.”

Joe sat quiet and still.

“You know what they ought to do?
And I’m a firm believer in this. They ought to take these
damned guys and cut their balls off. I’m sincere.”

Someone was walking toward them down
the corridor. Joe watched the man approach. He presumed the man was
either another police officer or a doctor because he carried a
clipboard.

Hepelmann stood up and shook the
man’s hand. “Dr. Wynter, this is Mr. Raines. I’ve
told him she’s going to be okay.”

“That’s correct, Mr.
Raines,” the doctor said. There were deep lines of strain
around his eyes. “She’s suffered some minor cuts and
abrasions but otherwise she’s physically sound. She’s
in a mild state of shock now; it’s natural after something
like this so don’t be alarmed. Now you’re going to have
to be very strong for her. When she begins to recover she’s
going to have a little orientation disorder. And she may believe
you think less of her. That’s a problem many rape victims
encounter.”

He was nodding. “Can I see
her?”

The doctor’s eyes flashed over to
Hepelmann and then back to the other man. “I’d rather
you didn’t right now. We’re trying to keep her sleeping
under sedation. Tomorrow we can get you in to see her for a few
minutes.”

“I’d like to see her
now.”

Dr. Wynter blinked.

“The doctor’s right,”
said Hepelmann, grasping the other man’s elbow. “Look.
It’s been a tough night. Go home and get some sleep. Okay?
I’ll even give you a ride.”

“Tomorrow,” Dr. Wynter
said. “Check with me tomorrow.”

Joe ran a hand over his face. The men
were right. She should sleep for a while and, anyway, there was
nothing he could do. He said, “Okay.”

“Here,” said Hepelmann,
stepping toward the elevators on the other side of the corridor.
“I’ll give you a ride home.”

Before the elevator doors closed on
Raines and the policeman, Dr. Wynter said, “She’s going
to be all right”

Wynter stood motionless for a moment
after they had gone. He trembled inwardly from the confrontation
with the man. What was he? A taxi driver, Hepelmann had told him.
The man had looked intelligent; a high forehead, eyes that when not
cold with fear would be warm and generous, moderately long dark
hair that curled over his collar. An intelligent man. Thank God he
had not pressed to see his wife.

Dr. Wynter walked back up the corridor
to the nurse’s station. He asked one of them, “Mrs.
Raines is resting now?”

“Yes, sir. She’ll be calm
for a while.”

“Very good. Now listen to me
well. You make your nurses understand this.” He lowered his
voice. “No word on any other floor about her condition. This
is our problem. Okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

He nodded and continued through the
corridor around to her room. He stopped himself as he reached for
the door. No need to look in on her again; no need to look at her
body and ask himself and the skin specialist Dr. Bertram what the
hell it was. He knew the answer. But what in Christ’s name
would he tell Raines? What was the logical explanation for those
burns on her body? Certainly not friction burns incurred as she was
forced to the harsh concrete.

The burns were in the shape of human
hands.

First-degree burns, yes. Nothing
serious, but…

Handprints where the rapist had grasped
her. Hands burned across stomach and arms and thighs as distinctly
as if they had been dipped into red paint and then slapped against
her smooth white flesh.

And two fingerprints.

One on each eyelid.

3

IN THE PREDAWN HOURS the heat wafted high above the city and
then, dropping down, wrapped itself like ropes around blocks of
granite slugs. It waited for sunrise, to burn the city dry.

He had not slept. Bloated with beer, he
sat in a cracked vinyl chair before the open window and watched the
lights that never dimmed, very far away, toward the city’s
heart.

My God, he said to himself over and
over until he thought there was someone else standing behind him
and speaking. My God. How can a man be allowed to do something like
this? He saw the scene in the reddened eye of his mind: the drunken
gutter bum waiting in the shadows as Mary Kate approached. Then
leaping from his hiding place to bear down on her like a heavy sack
of filth. And pounding pounding pounding until he couldn’t
bear to think about it anymore.

Things hadn’t been the greatest
in the world for a while; he knew that too well. And now this moved
inside him like something trying to escape through the bears of his
teeth, something to make him pick up a gun and roam the streets
like a mad spittle-mouthed dog.

He had telephoned her parents earlier.
Her mother choked back a cry. “And where were you? You
weren’t where you were supposed to be! No, you were sitting
on your ass at home! She could have been murdered!”

“I’m holding you
responsible for this, Joe,” said her father, taking the phone
away from the woman and bellowing into it. “Now act like a
man! What hospital did they take her to?”

“They’re not going to let
you see her,” he said quietly. “They wouldn’t
even let me see her.”

“I don’t give a damn about
that! What hospital?”

He deliberately put the receiver on its
cradle, cutting off the man’s voice. He had expected there
would soon be an angry knocking on the door but they didn’t
come. Maybe they’d checked the hospitals and found her, or
maybe they meant to find him later on in the morning. He
didn’t care; for the moment he was glad he didn’t have
to face them.

He had come from the Midwest two years
ago, hunting an education and a “meaningful
experience.” His family were people “tied to the
land,” as his father put it. They had wanted him to root
himself into the earth and grow like an ear of corn, rich with the
good ways of the dirt. But that was not for him; he had known it
for a long long time. He wanted to become a teacher, perhaps of
Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature, but first he wanted to
live, to break away from the flat land of his birth and perhaps in
the city find himself born again. That was when he was so much
younger and idealistic.

He’d found a part-time job
driving a cab, enough to get by on with monthly allowances from his
family, as he attended classes at night. And for a while he enjoyed
Othello and Central Park concerts and the sweet strength of
pot.

Then he met Mary Kate. He walked into a
diner and there found himself attracted to a thin doe-eyed young
girl who slapped plates down and feverishly wrote his check in a
stilted, unschooled hand. They had nothing in common except an
immature sexual yearning; she liked to read love novels in the
afterglow. His parents had protested violently at the news of their
impending marriage. Son, they’d written, if you do this thing
you can’t count on us sending you money anymore. Remember
your education. He’d written back: Go to hell.

But then the plans had turned to smoke.
Money was needed badly; driving the cab became a full-time
occupation and the English courses went down the drain. Their
dissimilarities became painfully obvious; her illiteracy made him
wince. And here they were, like two roommates who suddenly
discovered they got in each other’s way. They barely made
enough money to live on; a divorce was beyond their means.

Yet there had been good, close times.
On their “honeymoon,” a trip to the movies to see a
horror double bill, they sat together in the balcony and threw
popcorn at the leering bloody faces, then slipped down under the
seats and necked, smacking loudly like highschoolers. They did have
their friends in common; scatterbrained longhairs who supplied them
with some good highs at low costs; a few married couples he had met
in his classes. And sometimes a few buddies from the company would
pop over for beer and poker and she would serve them sandwiches,
writing them checks on paper napkins. That was always good for a
laugh.

Sitting in the chair amid drained cans
of beer, he realized how different the apartment was without her.
At this time of the morning, usually, he would be awakened by her
restless thrashings as she fought hashhouse phantoms in her dreams.
He sometimes sat up on their sofa-sleeper and watched her eyes dart
beneath closed lids. Dreaming of what? Rush hour? The dinner trade?
A hamburger fifty feet across?

He was responsible for her, for better
or worse, as the vows had said. It was only right that he take care
of her through this thing. He gathered up the cans and threw them
into the trash. Outside, dawn was breaking behind a gray veil. It
was odd, he thought, how at this time of morning the sky was so
washed and featureless, neither holding the promise of sun nor
rain. Blank like a staring impassive face.

He waited until visiting hours and then
took a cross-town bus back to Bellevue.

On the seventh floor he stopped a nurse
and inquired about his wife.

“I’m sorry, sir,” she
told him. “I can’t let you see Mrs. Raines without an
official okay from either Dr. Wynter or Dr. Bertram.”

“What? Listen, I’m her
husband. I’ve got a right to see her. What room’s she
in?”

“I’m sorry, sir,” she
repeated, and started to move away toward the nurses’ station
down the corridor.

Something was wrong. He had sensed it
earlier and now he knew. He grasped her wrist. “I am going to
see my wife now,” he said, leveling his gaze at her. “I
am going to see her and you’re going to take me to
her.”

“Do you want me to call a
security officer? I will.”

“All right then, goddamn it, you
go ahead and call a damn security officer. But you’re taking
me to her room.” His voice had become unintentionally harsh.
From the corner of his eye he saw the nurses at the station
gawking. One of them reached for a telephone and pressed a
button.

His threat had done its work.
“Room 712,” she said, and shook away from him.

He walked on down the corridor to room
712 and entered without hesitation.

Mary Kate was asleep. She had been
placed in a private room with off-white walls and white half-closed
window curtains. Through the blinds the sun cast three stripes
across her bed.

He closed the door behind him and
approached her. The sheets were pulled up around her neck. She
looked pale and wasted, frail and lost. Her eyelids were oddly red
and swollen, probably, he thought, from crying. Here, surrounded by
cloud-like walls, she seemed very far removed from both the harsh
neon-painted grill and their forlorn apartment.

He lifted the sheets to take her
hand.

And when he did he staggered back.

Splotched along her arm were the
reddened marks of hands. Grasping and clawing, they crawled
five-fingered along her flesh, disappearing beneath her hospital
gown. The red hands tore open her thighs; a handprint clutched at
her throat. Fingers, like some strange faddish makeup, painted her
cheek. He let the sheets fall, knowing that beneath her gown more
hands moved, clutched, clawed in an obscene bit of choreography.
Branded, he said. Like a piece of beef. Someone’s tied her
and branded her.

Someone touched him. Someone behind
him. He caught his breath and whirled around. The touch had seared
him.

It was Dr. Wynter, with dark circles
beneath his eyes that clearly indicated he, too, had gone without
sleep. A severe-looking nurse stood behind him in the doorway.

“This is the man who caused the
disturbance, Doctor,” the nurse was saying. “We told
him he couldn’t just…”

“It’s all right,” Dr.
Wynter said softly, searching the other man’s eyes. “Go
back to your station and tell the security officer everything is
under control. Go on, now.”

She looked from Dr. Wynter to the
ashen-faced man who stood limply over the bed and silently closed
the door.

“I didn’t want you to see
her,” the doctor said. “Not yet.”

“Not yet? Not yet?” He
looked up, his lips spraying spittle, his confused eyes demanding a
fierce vengeance. “When? Jesus Christ! What’s happened
to my wife? You told me she’d been attacked… you
didn’t say a damned thing about this!”

Dr. Wynter reached over and arranged
the sheets neatly around the sleeping girl’s throat.
“She’s in no pain,” he said. “The sedative
is still in effect.” He turned to face the younger man.
“Mr. Raines, I want to be candid with you. Lt. Hepelmann
asked me to withhold some things from you so as not to…
overly excite you.”

“Jesus Christ!”

Dr. Wynter held up a hand. “Which
I agreed with. I felt… telling you certain things would not
be in order. These marks are first-degree burns. I’ve had two
skin specialists examine her during the night. I called them out of
bed. They both came to the same conclusion. Burns. Like a moderate
sunburn. Mr. Raines, I’ve been in medicine a very long time.
Even probably before you were born. But never, never have I seen
anything like this. These are the handprints of the man who
attacked your wife.”

Dazed and suddenly very tired, he shook
his head. “Is that supposed to explain anything?”

“I’m sorry,” Dr.
Wynter said.

Joe had moved to the edge of the bed.
He put his hand out and gingerly touched the print on his
wife’s cheek. It was still hot. When he pressed the flesh the
print whitened away, but when the blood flowed back it re-emerged
in a sear of red.

“What could have caused
this… ? My God, the way these marks… ?”

“I’ve never seen anything
like it. Neither have the police. There should be no lasting tissue
damage. It should peel within a few days, exactly as a sunburn
would. But the heat from the man who attacked her left its mark,
amazingly, on her flesh. And there is no way I can stand here and
say that I understand it.”

“And you didn’t want me to
see until you could explain.”

“Or at the very least give an
excuse why we couldn’t. One theory has been offered by a
psychologist friend of mine, though I tend to discount it because
he said I woke him in the middle of a nightmare. He proposes that
it’s a psychological reaction to the attack, a mind-over-body
sort of thing. But I am convinced that those are burns from some
sort of… unnatural source of heat.”

“So you can see for
yourself,” Dr. Wynter continued, “why we must keep this
as quiet as possible. Our observation will continue for another
week or so at the very least. We wouldn’t want any of those
National Enquirer journalists nosing around, would we? All
right?”

“Yes,” he said. “All
right. You say she’s in no pain?”

“No pain.”

“Jesus,” he breathed,
stunned by the patchwork of hands that violated her body, though
their owner was now God knows where. “The man,” he said
after a moment. “The man who attacked her. Did he… you
know… did he… ?”

“In emergency our usual procedure
was followed. She was cleaned and probed. The nurses administered
diethylstilbestrol. We’ll conduct a thorough pelvic-vaginal
exam. But from all indications there was no spermatozoal contact.
Evidently the man was interrupted just prior to climax.”

“Oh man,” said Joe.
“Another week? I’ve got some insurance, but I
don’t know… I’m not a rich man.”

On the bed Mary Kate stirred. She
whimpered and her arms weakly flailed the air above her.

He sat beside her and took both her
hands. They were cold. “Don’t worry. I’m
here,” he said. “I’m here.”

She stirred again and finally looked up
at him. Her face was swollen and her hair was disheveled and dirty.
She said, “Joe? Joe?” and, reaching out, she clung to
him and cried bitterly until the tears had wet the front of his
shirt.

4

THE SUMMER MOVED like something alive. It weakened through
August, losing days like scorching drops of blood.

The handprints peeled away, as the
doctors had theorized, and Mary Kate came home from the hospital.
She adjusted well to everyday life and no mention was made of the
attack; in fact, it seemed to Joe that she was much more content
with both her job and their life together. Once, though, they
watched a television program about a rapist on the loose in
Manhattan and she suddenly began laughing, quietly at first but
with a rising, frightening intensity, until she burst into tears
and he held her as she trembled.

Lt. Hepelmann telephoned to ask if she
would come down to his precinct stationhouse to page through their
mug files. She declined, explaining to Joe that if she ever saw the
man again she felt sure she’d go into hysterics. He told
Hepelmann and put down the phone before the policeman could
protest.

There were other calls and visits: from
Dr. Wynter, who told them he wanted to check with Mary Kate every
few weeks because the “handprint symptom,” as he now
called it, was something he would not soon forget: from her
parents, who brought her flowers and bottles of wine and who spoke
to him with the tongues of serpents.

One night while they sat in the dark
before black-and-white figures on the television screen, she looked
at him and he saw the images reflected, glistening, in her eyes.
“I love you,” she said.

He sat still. The phrase was neither
familiar nor easy for him.

“I do. I really do. It’s
just in the last few weeks that I’ve realized I love you so
much.” She put her arms around his neck and kissed him
lightly on the lips, her hair soft against his face.

He returned her kiss. Her tongue
slipped into his mouth and explored it like a wet Columbus, though
the world was hardly new. He felt his body answering the call.
“All right,” he said with a wry smile. “You want
something. I can always tell.”

She held him tight and kissed him
again. She always smelled, he thought, like newly mown grass in a
wide, wet field. Probably his Midwest “tied to the
land” imagination showing. She leaned over and nibbled softly
at his ear. “I want,” she whispered, “a
child.”

She followed his eyes. They slid away
from her toward the television screen. “Mary Kate,” he
said in a low, restrained voice, “we’ve gone through
all this before. There will be a time when a child will be welcome.
You know that. But right now we have a hard enough time supporting
ourselves, much less another mouth. And I wouldn’t want to
bring up a child in this neighborhood.”

“That ivy-covered suburban
cottage you’ve been dreaming about,” she said,
“is something we’re never going to have. Can’t
you see that? Now we don’t have anything. Don’t look at
me like that. You know I’m right. All we own right now is
what we have in this apartment, things that are either yours or
mine. We don’t have anything we can call
‘ours.’”

“Come on,” he said.
“A child is not a toy. You don’t pick up a child and
play with it like a doll. You’d have to quit your job,
I’d have to work a double shift. Hell, no.”

She disentangled herself from him and
stood staring through the open window, her arms folded across her
chest. Finally she turned to him again. “I need
something,” she said softly. “I really do. I want
something to be different… I don’t know what it
is.”

“You’re coming down off a
traumatic experience.” He winced. Christ! Don’t bring
that up! “You need some time to rest, baby. Don’t get
yourself all upset about this. We’ll talk about it
later.”

Mary Kate watched him, her dark brown
eyes unyielding in a face suddenly pale and hard. She said,
“We could get a loan to cover my time off from
work.”

“Mary Kate. Please.”

She came over beside him and put his
hand to her cheek. He was amazed to feel tears. What the hell is
this? he wondered. She’d never before gotten this emotional
about a child. Usually, after he’d explained to her the
economics of the thing, she would drop the subject without
argument. This time she was hanging on with a tenacity he’d
never seen before. “It would be a beautiful child,” she
said softly.

He eased her over the chair arm into
his lap and whispered, “I’m sure it would be,”
kissing the tears away as they danced down the fine plains of her
face.

“Now,” he said, nudging her
chin to root her out of this mood, “what is ‘it’
going to be? Can’t have them both ways, you know. Got to have
one or another.”

She smiled and sniffled.
“You’re teasing me. I don’t like to be
teased.”

“I’m not teasing.
We’re going to have a child someday. We should at least
decide now what ‘it’ is going to be.”

“A boy. I want a boy.”

“Everybody wants boys. What
happens to girls when they’re born and they find out their
parents wanted boys? That’s the beginnings of the inferiority
feelings women have. A girl would be nice. Pink diapers scattered
all over the floor, dolls lying on the chair so that when I sit
down something squeaks and it scares hell out of
me…”

“You’re teasing
again…”

“You want a boy, huh?
That’s all right. Then there are those little plastic
soldiers that puncture your bare feet when you walk into the
kitchen for a midnight snack. That’s all right.”

Mary Kate snuggled closer to his chest
and held tightly to him, her hands gently swirling at the back of
his neck.

“A big businessman, maybe
that’s what he’ll be,” he envisioned, kissing her
forehead and then the closed lids of her eyes. “Maybe the
President.” He reconsidered for a few seconds. “No, no.
Scratch that. But somebody important.”

As the television continued flickering
its shades of fantasy, he picked her up and carried her to the sofa
that, when kicked in the right place, turned down into a
spring-mattressed bed. He laid her down between the cool blue
sheets and then, undressing, joined her there. She twined her arms
and legs around him in a sweet captivity.

He made love to her in a soft, quiet
way. Her body, always responsive, reacted to the caress of his
fingertips. She cried out and he took her cries deep into his
throat. But always in his mind was the knowledge that someone else
had enjoyed her warmth. Someone else, held between her thighs, had
moved his body powerfully within her. The vision nagged
relentlessly at him and he sought to control it by concentrating
only on her body; the firm ripened breasts, the smooth light down
on her arms and thighs, the barely healed scratches that ran the
length of her belly…

And when he slept, enclosed by her
limbs, he dreamed of those marks he had first seen beneath the
crisp hospital sheets. Now they moved in red circles on her body,
around and around until every inch of her flesh was burnt and
swollen. And then a fiery hand planted itself on his face and
sought to gouge out his eyes and hold them steaming on the tips of
vaporish fingers.

When he awakened from his troubled
sleep sweat was cold at his temples. He rose quietly from wet
sheets and stood in the darkness, staring at her where she lay
coiled on the mattress. Behind him the television’s test
pattern cast a black-shadowed grid on the opposite wall. He
switched it off.

Those nightmares, he thought, are
becoming too real. They had begun when Mary Kate returned from the
hospital. When his mind was unguarded in sleep they crept out from
their hiding places and sowed the seeds of hysteria. They now hid,
rasping, in corners, listening, listening. Waiting for him to lose
strength and return to the bed. And when his eyes had closed they
would ooze from their crevices to touch hot fingers to his
forehead. Against them he was defenseless. What was that theory, he
asked himself, about the subconscious mind being the ruler of the
body? That the subconscious mind, through dreams, spoke in cryptic
scrawls of mental pain? Shit on it, he protested to himself.
I’m just tired as hell.

He went into the bathroom and drank a
glass of cold water, then returned to bed, and slipped against Mary
Kate’s warmth. As an afterthought he threw aside the sheets
again and rechecked the door to make certain it was locked.

In the morning he was stirred by the
sun as it lay in golden stripes across his face. She was cooking
bacon and eggs for him—something she rarely did anymore.
Usually it was only cold cereal and a pot of reheated coffee. He
made a conscious effort to be pleasant to her as she moved about
the tiny nook of a kitchen. There was no mention of babies and he
drank his fresh strong coffee while talking about the new dispatch
man they’d hired at the cab company.

During the weeks that followed she
ceased to talk about wanting children. He was honestly relieved not
to have to answer her questions about why they couldn’t
afford a baby. The frequency of his nightmares diminished until,
finally, he lost his fear of giving himself up to the darkness of
sleep. Mary Kate settled back into a regular work schedule, though
now she always left the diner before dusk, and it seemed to him
that his tips were getting better. He was certain it was his
imagination but he felt inspired and new all the same. He began,
after a while, to entertain thoughts of returning to school.

He soon decided to do so without
consulting Mary Kate, and telephoned a friend he had met in a
literary criticism class three semesters before. “Hello?
Kenneth? This is Joe Raines. Right, from Marsh’s
class.”

“Oh yeah. Hey, I haven’t
seen you for a while. You’ve been hiding or something?
What’d you come out with?”

“B. Just barely. Listen,
I’m thinking about getting back into school next semester and
I’d like to know what’s going on, who’s teaching
what. I’m taking a day off Friday and I… we…
wondered if you and Terri could drop over.”

“You’re still hacking,
huh?”

“Yeah. It’s pretty rough
but it beats working.”

“I know how it is. God, you and I
have got a lot of ground to cover. It’s been almost a year
since I’ve seen you.”

“Well,” said Joe,
“I’ve gotten caught up in things, I guess.”

“Friday? Okay then, that sounds
great. I’ll pick up a semester catalogue for you and bring it
over. What time? Do you want us to bring a bottle of
wine?”

“We’ll take care of that.
Would seven be okay?”

“Fine. You’re still at the
same place? The sweat-box?”

“Right.” He laughed weakly.
“The sweatbox.”

“Okay then, we’ll see you
Friday. Thanks for calling.”

“Sure. Good-bye.”

The idea of returning to school excited
him. For him attending classes was a release from the hot chrome
crush of Manhattan traffic. The cavalier poets would sing in his
ears instead of the metal voice of a taxi meter.

That night after work when he told Mary
Kate of his decision, he was surprised at her genuine enthusiasm.
On Friday afternoon they shopped for sandwich meats at the
delicatessen on the next block, then went to the neighborhood
liquor store to look for two bottles of a good inexpensive wine.
Their arms filled with packages, they kissed on the front steps of
their building, and a small kid laughed at them from behind a fudge
popsicle.

Kenneth Parks and his wife, Terri, were
the kind who attended student-sponsored bonfires and campus Bogart
festivals. He was tall and lean, the perfect build for a basketball
player though he had told Joe he was never athletically inclined.
She was his perfect complement, a girl of medium height with
flashing green eyes and long chestnut-colored hair. Dressed in
clothes that were neither too old nor too new but just, as the rage
demanded, “lived in,” they were a magazine couple, and
Joe immediately felt a little insecure as they entered his
cluttered, poster-walled apartment.

“The man is here,” said
Parks, grasping his friend’s hand. “Haven’t seen
your face for a long time. I almost forgot what you looked
like.”

Joe closed the door behind them and
introduced his wife. She stood smiling and composed.
“Joe’s told me about you,” she said to Parks.
“Aren’t you the guy who explores the caves? A
spe—” she began hesitantly.

“Spelunker. Yeah, off and on I
guess.” He took the glass of wine Joe offered and gave it to
his wife. “Used to do it every weekend when I was a
kid.”

“What do you do for a
living?”

“Well…” He glanced
over at his wife, whose eyes were bright and empty over the rim of
the wineglass. “Terri’s father is kind of…
lending us the money we need until we finish school.” He
playfully punched Joe’s arm. “Old buddy, only one more
semester to go and then I pound my feet flat looking for a
job.”

“And they’re hard as hell
to come by. I was lucky to get the one I have, believe
me.”

Terri sat with the wineglass in her
hand, transfixed by a poster on the opposite wall that showed King
Kong atop the Empire State Building, crushing a bullet-spitting
biplane in a hairy fist. “Do you like our apartment?”
Mary Kate asked.

Parks had opened a semester catalogue
on the scarred coffee table before him and indicated courses he had
marked with a ballpoint pen. “And Dr. Ezell is teaching my
European Lit Forum. That’s supposed to be one of the major
gut-grabbers this semester.”

“Oh yeah? I suppose Ezell
hasn’t eased up any?”

“Hell, no. That guy
should’ve retired years ago. He mixes his lectures up, still.
Like that final we had where he was asking us questions from
another comparative lit course. My God.”

Joe grunted. “Listen, can I get
you a sandwich or something?”

“No, thanks. This is fine.”
He glanced over to where Mary Kate and Terri had begun a
conversation of their own. Terri’s eyes were widening.
“So,” he said flatly, swinging his gaze back to Joe.
“You want to get back into it.”

“Yes, I do. I’ve got to. I
need something more than what I’m doing. I mean, sure,
driving a cab is okay. Really. I hear some fabulously funny stories
and the tips are fair. But I don’t want to stay there, like
I’m locked behind the wheel or something. I’ve got to
move in some kind of direction. I’ve got to take that first
step.”

“And you want to complete your
degree. You’ve only got two more semesters to go,
right?”

“Three more.”

“The worst thing you can
do,” Parks said, “is to start and then quit. What
happened? You didn’t have the money?”

“Yeah. I don’t know. I
thought I could make it with what I had. And I was stupid. I
wasn’t prepared the way I should have been. My grades started
falling off and I just lost interest in studying.” Mary Kate
said something to him which he didn’t hear. He nodded at her
as if to say, Just a minute and I’ll listen to you. Terri
watched them as if she were frozen. “I wasn’t prepared
for the grind of both school and work and it took me
under.”

“I guess I’m lucky in that
respect. Terri’s father is making it very easy
on—”

Terri was nudging her husband in the
ribs. He looked at her and then at Mary Kate.

Mary Kate’s eyes were fixed on
Joe’s face. “What have we decided to name our
baby?” she asked again.

Terri said, “She’s been
telling me all about it. I think that’s great. Really.”
Her voice was quiet and breathless, as if her lungs were grabbing
for air. Joe thought something was wrong with her.

He asked, “What?”

Mary Kate watched him silently. Terri
grinned into his face with long horselike teeth.

“I’m pregnant,” Mary
Kate said. She looked at Terri. “He didn’t know. This
is a surprise.”

“I can tell it’s knocked
him on his ass,” said Parks, slapping his friend on the back.
“Here, here. Let’s drink a toast. Everybody fill their
glasses. Come on, Joe, drink up. You’ll need your strength to
open those diaper pins. Here’s to the expectant mother. Come
on, Joe, snap out of it.”

“How long have you been
pregnant?” Terri asked. “That’s great.
Isn’t that great, Kenny?”

“A little less than a
month,” Mary Kate said. She watched Joe as he stared into the
depths of his wineglass, swirling the liquid round and round as his
lips slowly tightened.

“A baby,” Terri was saying,
as if mesmerized by the word, “a baby. We want to have a baby
sometime too, don’t we, Kenny? Sometime when we finish
school.”

He lifted the glass to his lips.
“Sure, sure,” he said. “Damn. A kid. That’s
really something.”

Terri rambled on about sweet babies in
cradles surrounded by squeaking Donald Ducks and pink rattles. Mary
Kate’s eyes never moved.

“This,” Joe said very
quietly, “finishes it.”

Parks hadn’t heard him. He leaned
over and said, “What’d you say, old buddy?”

He could no longer contain the rage. It
was blood-boiling, bursting behind his eyes; it was bile that
gathered in his stomach and rocketed, geyserlike, toward his mouth.
It overcame him and suddenly he was standing, his eyes hot and
wild, the glass of wine leaving his hand. The glass shattered with
a loud, pistol-like crack! and wine smeared along the wall
like a thick track of blood. It ran down in rivulets to an oval
pool on the floor.

Terri squealed as if someone had struck
her. She sat, her upper torso swaying slightly, giddy on her one
glass of wine.

Joe stood staring at the eye of blood.
His arms hung limply at his sides; he no longer seemed to have any
muscle. The act of throwing the glass had drained him of all
energy. Now even his speech was faint and weak: “I…
I’ve made a mess. I’ve have to clean it up.”

A moment before, a candle had burned
within him, something to warm him and give strength to go forward.
Now someone had suddenly put it out; he seemed to smell the sharp
odor of a smoking wick. He stared dumbly at the broken glass and
the pool of wine until Mary Kate went to the kitchen and returned
with paper towels and trash can and began to clean the floor.

Parks was struggling to maintain a
smile. It was awkward and lopsided. His bewildered eyes made him
look wild and embarrassed, as if he had just stepped onstage
without knowing what the play was about. He took his wife’s
arm and stood up. “We’d better go,” he said
apologetically. “Joe, call me, okay? About your
classes?”

Joe nodded.

Terri said to Mary Kate, “I think
it’s wonderful. I hope he’s not too upset. Men are like
that.”

“Good night,” said Parks,
pushing his wife ahead of him, and Mary Kate closed the door after
them.

She stood with her back to the wall,
watching him as he continued nodding at his absent friend’s
last question.

“A month?” he asked her
finally, avoiding her face. Instead he studied the red drops that
slowly ran the length of the wall. “A whole month and you
didn’t tell me before this?”

“I didn’t know how
to—”

He looked at her, his eyes burning.
Over his shoulder King Kong glowered at her as well.
“That’s impossible. Unless you’ve been lying to
me about taking the Pill. You were lying to me, weren’t you?
Goddammit!”

“No,” she said softly.
“I haven’t been lying.”

“I don’t care about that
now!” His anger sparked again. He took a step forward and she
realized, with the harsh coldness of fear, that she was trapped
against the wall. She had seen him lose his temper before. Once,
after a heated telephone argument with her father over money, he
had torn the telephone from the wall and smashed it to the floor;
he had jerked lamps up off tables and hurled them crashing across
the room until finally she left the apartment, wandering for two
days until found by a police officer in the park. She had always
been afraid of his unrestrained anger, though he had never before
raised a hand to her. Now his red-rimmed eyes glared
vengefully.

“I want to know,” he said
in a loud, ragged voice, “when you decided we’d have a
child! I want to know when you decided to forget every goddamned
thing I have ever told you about our having a child!”

“I always took my pills,”
she said. “Always. I promise.”

“Shit!” he yelled at her,
and the word was like a hand across her cheek. She winced from the
blow and stood breathless. He reached out for an ashtray, a ceramic
bowl that had been given to them as a wedding gift by one of her
uncles, and tensed to smash it across through the kitchen and into
the far wall. The weight of it in his hand made him suddenly stop,
realizing the utter futility of shattering bits of clay to avenge
his bitter disappointment and, worse, to dispel his conviction that
she had finally, utterly, overstepped her bounds. He let the
ashtray drop to the floor and stood, his chest heaving, too
confused and angry to do anything.

She sensed a gap in the tension.
“I swear to you,” she said quickly before his anger
could peak again, “I’ve never missed my pills. I
don’t know. I felt that I should have an examination about
two weeks ago and the doctor told me. I got the bill out of the box
before you could find it and paid it myself.”

“He’s wrong!” said
Joe. “The doctor is wrong!”

“No,” she said.
“No.”

He sat down slowly on the sofa and put
his face in his hands. “You don’t get pregnant unless
you… Shit. Oh man. Mary Kate, I cannot afford this.
I’ll go under… I swear before God I’ll go
under!”

She waited until she felt certain that
his anger had subsided. She came over and quietly knelt on the
floor beside him, taking his hands and pressing them against her
cheek. “We can get a loan. Maybe from my father.”

“Sure,” he said. “He
won’t let me have a dime!”

“I’ll talk to him. I mean
it.”

He shrugged. After a moment he said,
“You’ll talk to him?”

“We can get a loan from him and
we’ll be okay,” Mary Kate said. “It’ll be
rough; we know it will be. But other people have kids and they make
it. They scrimp and save like hell but they do make it,
Joe.”

He withdrew his hands and looked down
into her innocent, wide-eyed face. Through tightly drawn lips he
said, “I don’t mean a loan to keep the child, Mary
Kate. I mean a loan for an abortion.”

“Goddamn you!” she cried
out, drawing away from him. The tears burst from her eyes and
streamed down over her cheeks. “No abortion! Nobody in the
world could make me go through that!”

“You’re not going to break
me,” he snarled bitterly at her. “That’s what you
want to do! You want to finish my ass off!”

“No,” she said, her teeth
clenched. “No abortion. I mean it. I don’t care what I
have to do. I’ll work a double shift, night and day.
I’ll sell my blood, I’ll sell my body. I don’t
care. No abortion.”

Joe faced her, his lips working but no
words coming out. He wondered if this was what made so many men
just walk out the door and never come back, this sudden and
terrible power she had obtained, this awesome force that came with
the knowledge that she harbored a child in her body. The King is
dead. Long live the Queen. But when the hell did I die? he asked
himself. Two years ago? A minute ago? When?

Something was working its way out from
a deep place of tissues and bone. It swam up through her blood and
surfaced across her face. It distorted her features and left her
glowering at him like an animal. She said, “The baby is
mine.”

He slumped back on the sofa, wanting
instinctively to lengthen the distance between himself and the
woman whose white teeth glittered in the darkness. She had placed
defeat like a crown of black thorns on his head. Her face, as
lifeless and determined as some ancient concrete death mask, ate
its way past his eyes and hung marionettelike in his brain, dancing
there like a grim shade of what she had been only a few moments
before. He shuddered suddenly and wondered why. In an empty,
toneless voice he said, “You’re killing me, Mary Kate.
I don’t know why or how but you’re killing me all the
same. And this business about a child. This is the last nail in my
coffin.”

“Then lie in it,” she
said.

She rose and stood with her back to
him. Her eyes, reflected in the window glass, were fierce and
uncompromising. I will have my baby, she said to the wind that blew
newspapers in the narrow street below. No one on earth will take my
baby away from me now. And standing there she suddenly sensed
someone standing beside her, a man whose pale thin hand touched her
shoulder like a burning brand. I will have my baby.

5

THE CHILD WAS BORN at the end of a turbulent March, while the
wind outside Mary Kate’s hospital room blew snow past the
window in wild high flurries. She heard the scream of the storm
both before and after labor, even as she was wheeled down linoleum
corridors into Recovery.

The child was not beautiful. It was a
boy with tight flat features and piercing, inquisitive blue eyes
that she knew would dim to a much darker hue. But still she
gratefully took the child from the nurse’s arms and held him
close to her breast to feed. The child was very quiet, barely
moving except to grab the flesh of her swollen teat with his tiny
fists.

She didn’t care for Joe’s
choice of a name for the baby, Edward, after one of his more
obscure English poets. Instead, she wanted a name that had been in
her family for years. So on the records of birth was written
Jeffrey Harper Raines, over Joe’s mild protests that the name
Jeffrey currently belonged to one of his least favorite of her
cousins.

When they brought him home from the
hospital they lowered him into a crib he would share with
red-lipped rubber animals. Above the crib, attached to the ceiling,
was a hanging mobile of grinning plastic fish. She would move the
fish in a tight circle and Jeffrey always sat in silence, watching.
They arranged the crib so the child could see the television. It
disturbed Mary Kate in the first few weeks that Jeffrey was home,
that the child so seldom cried. She complained about it to Joe,
citing tears as a healthy response in children, and he replied,
“So? Maybe he’s satisfied.”

But Jeffrey never laughed either. Even
on Saturday mornings during cat-and-mouse cartoons and Howdy Doody
reruns, Jeffrey’s eyes roamed the tight confines of the
apartment while his new teeth gripped at a pacifier. The lack of
emotion in the child’s eyes worried her, they were like the
eyes of a fish or a snake, desiring either the cold sea or the
depths of a den.

Sometimes when she held the child she
thought it didn’t seem to want to be near her. He would fight
against her grasp and, when she pulled him closer, he would reach
out to pinch her flesh between his fingers. Looking at Jeffrey,
actually examining his features, unsettled her more and more as
time went on. He didn’t seem to resemble her at all, nor did
he resemble Joe, as much as she imagined this to be the case. He
would comment dryly on how the baby would eventually look just like
him but she knew it was far from the truth. And what was the truth?
Was it perhaps locked away in her subconscious, lurking there where
she remembered dimly a screaming ambulance and nurses white against
emergency walls, groping, groping, groping?

Despite her disappointment, she never
allowed herself to cry. She always stopped thinking about the child
before the rush of tears, of mad whirling self-doubt, of figures
framed in darkness, could begin.

Joe had begun working a double shift
three days a week at the cab company. He came home on those days in
the early morning hours, ready to drink a can or two of beer and
fall into bed, sometimes without even undressing. Some days he went
to work in the same clothes he had worn the day before and slept
in; sometimes he went without shaving for days at a time; he had
neither the time nor the energy to even consider a return to
college, and always his sharp accusing eyes cut her to the quick.
He barely spoke to her anymore unless he found it necessary, and
she learned to turn her back on him in bed.

In three months’ time, as the
apartment began to become cluttered with rubber toys and diapers
and smelled of sourness and milk, Joe took to leaving on rambling
walks, often not returning until Mary Kate had been asleep for some
time. Wakened by the opening door, she would hear him enter, often
drunkenly, and mutter to himself things she couldn’t quite
hear. The bastard, she would say to herself. The stupid drunken
bastard. And then she would say sharply, without looking at him,
“Take your clothes off before you come to bed.”

Joe’s sleep was becoming more and
more restless; often he cried out in the dark of night. Then she
would hear him get out of bed, drink a glass of water in the
bathroom and, oddly, rattle the door chain to make certain it held
securely. But she never moved to show him she had awakened, and
when he returned to bed she felt sure he lay for a very long while
with his eyes open in the dark, just staring at her back.

More than once she awakened to see him
framed in the square of light from the window, looking down into
the crib at the sleeping child. He would stand rigid with his fists
white-knuckled, staring down at the little quiet form in white baby
pajamas. In the mornings she would find Jeffrey already awake, his
hands curled around the safety bars as if he wanted to escape the
prison of infancy prematurely. His dark eyes pierced her; he seemed
to be glaring through her at her sleeping husband. Once when Joe
held the child in his arms in a rare show of fatherly affection,
his eye was almost jabbed as Jeffrey pointed with a finger at the
fish mobile. Joe said, “Shit!” and eased the child back
down into the crib, rubbing his injured eye.

She became fearful of Joe. He became
increasingly short-tempered toward the child, as the hot summer
fell upon them like a slavering animal. Jeffrey’s eyes grew
darker. They became black slits that gleamed with some sort of
childish intelligence; his hair became straight and black. His nose
lengthened and Mary Kate saw, with a rush of alarm, that there was
going to be a cleft in the chin. There were no cleft chins in her
family, as far as she knew, nor in Joe’s. She traced the
beginnings of the cleft with her finger, hearing somewhere the
faint wail of a siren across the roof of the city. And Joe had
noticed it as well. He would pop open a beer and watch the child as
Jeffrey played on the floor. Mary Kate was certain that, if he
could, Joe would lean forward and kick the child in the face.

As Jeffrey played with blocks strewn
across the carpet one evening in late summer, she sat before him on
the floor and examined his face. The black eye slits watched her
incuriously, daring her to maintain a steady gaze, as he built
towers of multicolored blocks. The thin fingers moved not with the
clumsiness of an infant, but instead with a practiced adult
grace.

“Jeffrey,” Mary Kate
whispered.

The child slowly looked up from his
blocks.

Mary Kate was forced to avert her gaze
from his intense black stare. Looking into those eyes made her feel
breathless and dizzy, as if she had been drinking. His eyes were as
immobile as those in a painting.

Mary Kate reached out to smooth his
swirling mass of black hair. “My Jeffrey,” she
said.

With one arm Jeffrey swung out and
through the tower of building blocks. They scattered across the
room, and one of them struck Mary Kate in the mouth. She cried out,
startled.

Jeffrey leaned forward, his eyes wide
and entranced, and Mary Kate shivered. She took his hand and
slapped it, saying, “Bad baby! Bad baby!” but Jeffrey
paid no attention. Instead, with his free hand, he touched his
mother’s lip. The fingers came away with a single drop of
blood.

Horrified and hypnotized by his black,
unwavering stare, she watched him put his fingers to his mouth, saw
the tongue dart from between lips to lick the red liquid, saw the
eyes gleam briefly like a light shining far away in the night. She
recovered herself and said, “Bad for baby!” trying to
slap his hand again, but he turned his back on her and began
gathering up the building blocks.

Autumn came, then winter. Outside the
wind was unnervingly shrill, day after day. Leaves clattered along
the gutters. Ice and snow caked the lids of garbage cans.
Throughout the winter bleakness Mary Kate grew more distant from
Joe. It was as if he had given up; now he ceased even to try to
communicate with her at all. He had long since forgotten that she
shared a bed with him and now she knew it was only a matter of time
before he would leave the apartment one night for “a
walk” and never come back. Already he was sometimes gone for
a day at a time and, afterward, when she would scream at him about
having to make up excuses for the cab dispatcher, he would simply
spin around on his heel and disappear again through the doorway.
And then, finally, he would come home unshaven and dirty, his body
reeking of beer and sweat, stumbling through the doorway muttering
something about the child. “You fool,” she would tell
him. “You pitiful fool.”

And one night less than a week before
the child’s first birthday, after leaving Jeffrey with Joe
for a few moments while she went down to the delicatessen for
groceries, she returned home to find him calmly undressing the
child over a tub of steaming water. The child’s hands were
gripped around his shoulders; the eyes were narrowed and cunning.
Across Joe’s unshaven face were red marks that looked like
scratches. An empty wine bottle lay broken on the yellow bathroom
tiles.

She dropped the sack. A glass broke.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she screamed as
Joe held the struggling child over the hot water. He looked around,
his eyes bleary and frightened, and she twisted Jeffrey away from
him to hug the child to her breast.

“My God!” she said, her
shrill voice echoing from the tiles. “You’re crazy! My
God!”

He sat, his shoulders sagging, on the
edge of the tub. His face seemed drained of blood, the only color
the gray circles beneath his eyes. “One more minute,”
he said in a distant, dead, emotionless voice. “If
you’d only stayed away one minute more. Just one.”

“My God!”

“Just one,” he said,
“and it would’ve been over.”

She screamed at him,
“You’re crazy! My God! Oh my God Jesus!”

“Yes,” he said. “You
call out for Jesus. You do that. But it’s too late. Oh God
it’s too late for that. You look at me. Look at me, I
said! I’m dying… inch by inch… I’m
dying, and you know it.” He looked around and saw the
fragments of glass on the floor. “Oh no,” he whimpered.
“My last bottle.”

As he stood up and began walking toward
her, she backed away with the child in her arms. He caught himself
in the bathroom doorway and stood there with his head down and
mouth open, as if he were about to be sick. “I have good
dreams at night, Mary Kate. Oh those dreams I have. You know what I
dream about? You really want to know? I dream of faces that come
flying around me screaming my name. A thousand… ten thousand
times a night they wake me. And I dream of a child’s gouging
out my eyes until I’m blind. Oh Jesus Christ I need a
drink!”

“You’re crazy,” said
Mary Kate, her tongue slowly going numb so she had to concentrate
to get the two words out.

“I thought maybe if I got away
from here, if I slept somewhere else, it would help. If I slept in
the subway, or in a movie, or even in a church, I thought it would
help. But no. You know what else I dream, Mary Kate? My sweet Mary
Kate… you want to know? I dream of finding you on your
knees, my sweet wife, sucking the penis of a man with the face of a
child. That child in your arms now.”

She caught back a cry and saw his mad
eyes darting at the long shadows in the room. “That child is
not mine, Mary Kate,” he said. “I’m certain of
that now. And you’ve known all along. I don’t care how
it’s done, Mary Kate, I don’t care who does it. That
child must die. We can put the body in a trash can somewhere across
town; we can throw the body in the river.”

He stood staring at her, pleading, and
she saw him through eyes that suddenly filled with tears. “Oh
God you need help, Joe. You need help.”

“No one can give me help.”
He staggered weakly to the window and stood with his forehead
steaming the cold glass as his hands scratched across the cracked
walls. He closed his eyes. “Oh Jesus Christ.”

Jeffrey stirred in her arms and moved
against her. “I love you I love you I love you,” she
murmured inaudibly to the child. “He’s crazy. This man
is crazy and he’s going to try to kill you. Oh
God.”

The child’s hands moved at her
face. It burrowed against her for warmth and when she looked down
she saw his strange hot stare.

Joe leaned against the window,
breathing harshly. She saw his breath fan out in a mist across the
dirty glass. Tears streaming hotly down her face, she put Jeffrey
back into his crib and listened to Joe’s wild muttering.
Jeffrey sat up, squeezing his face against the safety bars.
He’ll try to kill both of us, she said to herself. Both of
us. Goddamn his soul! He’s going to kill my baby… and
then me so I’ll never tell anyone what happened!

Going back into the bathroom, she
watched her tears splash the long jagged shards of the broken wine
bottle on the floor. He’ll kill us both. Both both both.
He’s gone crazy. She picked up the neck of the bottle and
stepped toward him.

Joe started to turn away from the
window and opened his mouth to say something.

She took two quick steps and was upon
him, driving the jagged glass into his chest, beneath the
collarbone. He grunted with the shock of the blow and stood, his
mouth still open, looking down at the front of his shirt. When the
racing pain had arrived at his brain, he cried out wildly and
pushed her away. She dislodged the broken bottle and struck again;
his drink-slowed hand was not enough to stop her. The glass pierced
through the rib cage into lung tissue. He coughed a shower of red
droplets that sprayed across her face and blouse. She struck at his
face. He frantically backed away, bleeding from his chest and
cheeks, and still she attacked, like something wild and relentless,
her arm upraised for a second thrust at his face.

His panic carried him backward and, his
arms flailing, smashed him through the window. His face, white and
with terror-stricken eyes, went over the ledge and the last thing
she saw before he fell were his fingertips, reaching desperately
for the windowsill.

Below the window his body lay sprawled
wildly on the concrete, the neck twisted at an angle to the
torso.

Someone, a man in a brown overcoat,
stood over the corpse and stared up at her with frightened
eyes.

Behind her, in his crib, Jeffrey
pointed up at the dancing mobile. “Mommy,” he said in a
saliva-thick voice, “see pretty fish?”

6

THE BOYS, CHATTERING and rough-housing like young jungle-fresh
monkeys, filed into the lunchroom with a burst of noise, taking
their usual seats around a long table scarred with the initials of
those who had come before them.

Sister Miriam watched them from behind
her severe black-rimmed eye glasses, waiting patiently until all
thirty were seated. Even sitting around the table, waiting for
grace to be said before lunch, the children still poked each other
with the rough curious hands of ten-year-olds. She said above their
noise, “All right. Can I have quiet, please?”

They settled like food bubbling in a
pot and watched her as she stood before them, a dark grandmother in
her black habit. She held up her clipboard. It was her
responsibility to make certain they’d all returned from their
recreation period. She knew their names and faces well, but still
there was the possibility that one of them, perhaps one of the less
bright ones, had managed to straggle into the forest around the
orphanage. It had happened once before, many years ago when she had
first begun her work here, before the fence was put up, and there
had almost been serious consequences for the child. Now she took no
chances.

“We’ll have roll call
before our lunch,” she told them, as she always told them.
“James Patterson Antonelli?”

“Here.”

“Thomas Keene
Billings?”

“Here.”

“Edward Andrew
Bayless?”

“Present.”

“Jerome Darkowski?”

“President.” Giggles and
howls from the children. Sister Miriam looked up sharply.

“You have half an hour for lunch
before the next group comes in, children. If you choose to be silly
you simply waste your time. Now I asked for silence, didn’t
I?” She turned back to her clipboard. “Gregory Holt
Frazier?”

“Here.”

“She went through the alphabet,
nearing his name. Sometimes she wished that he would leave, that he
would turn his back on the home and disappear like a wraith into
the thicket, leaving perhaps only a shred of torn clothing on the
fence to indicate that he had ever been there at all. No, no, she
said inwardly. Forgive me. I don’t mean to think such things.
She glanced up, her eyes nervous behind the glasses, and saw him
sitting there, at the head of the table where he always sat,
waiting for her to get on to his name. He was smiling faintly, as
if he knew what unprofessional disorder lay behind her mask-like
features.

“Jeffrey Harper
Raines.”

He didn’t answer.

The children had stopped moving.

They waited.

He waited.

She cleared her throat and kept her
head down, away from them. She caught the odor of hamburgers
cooking back in the kitchen. “Jeffrey Harper Raines,”
she repeated.

He sat in silence, his hands folded
before him on the table. His black eyes, narrow slits in a pale
face, challenged her to challenge him.

Sister Miriam dropped the clipboard
down by her side. Really! This nonsense had gone on quite long
enough! “Jeffrey, I called your name out twice. You failed to
answer. You will write your name two hundred times during your
study hour and present that paper to me.” She looked to the
next name on the list. “Edgar Oliver Tortorelli.”

But it was not that child who answered.
This was the voice of another child. Him.

“I didn’t hear my name
called, Sister,” he said, hissing the word Sister so she
thought at first he was going to utter a profanity.

She blinked. She felt suddenly hot.
Trays and plates clattered in the kitchen. She said, “I
called your name. Children, didn’t I call Jeffrey’s
name?” She winced. No, no. Don’t bring the other
children into this. This is something between him and me, not
them.

They squirmed in their chairs, their
eyes moving like little dark marbles between the boy and the
woman.

“My name is Baal,” the boy
said. “I do not answer to any other name.”

“Now don’t start that
nonsense again, young—”

The crack of his voice stopped her
short. “I will not write a paper. I will not answer to any
name but my own.”

She stood helpless under his steady
gaze. And she saw the grin slowly spread over his mouth, lifting
the lips into a cruel smile, yet those eyes… those eyes
remained as cold and deadly as upraised rifle barrels. Sister
Miriam slammed the clipboard down on the table. The other children
jumped and giggled nervously, but not him. He sat motionless with
his hands folded before him.

Sister Miriam looked through a doorway
and called to the sisters in the kitchen, “They’re
ready for their lunches now.” Without another glance at the
children, she pushed through the heavy doors that led out of the
dining hall. Down dim corridors lined with classrooms, through the
main corridor, past the reception area, out stained-glass doors
onto the great wide porch and past a gray-metal sign near the steps
that read THE VALIANT SAINTS HOME FOR BOYS. Out in the far
playground, rimmed by the forest that was beginning to lose its
late-autumn colors of red and yellow, another group of boys ran
round and in circles like bees about a hive.

She traversed the courtyard and started
across the concrete drive for a small brick building, so dissimilar
in its construction to the rambling gable-eyed hulk of the
orphanage, that housed the administrative offices. Beside that
building, ringed by trees that glowed bright yellow in the
sunlight, was the orphanage chapel.

Sister Miriam entered the brick
building and continued through quiet wine-carpeted hallways to a
small office with the name Emory T. Dunn in gold script on
the door. His receptionist, a frail woman with a bitter face,
looked up at her. “Sister Miriam? Can I help you?”

“Yes. I’d like to see
Father Dunn, please.”

“I’m sorry. He has an
appointment in ten minutes. I believe we have a nice family for the
Latta child.”

“I have to see him,” Sister
Miriam said, and the receptionist watched, astonished, as the other
woman knocked on the door without listening to what she, an
orphanage legend as Father Dunn’s receptionist for twenty-one
years, had said.

“Come in,” said a voice
from behind the door.

“Really, Sister Miriam,”
the receptionist said indignantly. “I don’t see
why…”

Sister Miriam closed the door behind
her.

Father Dunn, seated behind a wide
blotter-topped desk, looked at her with his quizzical gray eyes. He
was a middle-aged man with gray hair that still held, here and
there, traces of a glossy black. Behind him, on an oak-paneled
wall, were a score of citations for his theological and
humanitarian work; he was an intelligent man who had brought his
degree in sociology from Harvard into the priesthood with him.
Sister Miriam had wondered about him at times. He was certainly a
well-kept and dignified man, though there was often a brief flash
of ill temper in his eyes.

He said, “Isn’t this rather
irregular? I have an appointment shortly. Could you come back later
this afternoon?”

“Please, Father. I do need to
talk with you for a moment.”

“Perhaps Father Cary can help
you? Or Sister Rosamond?”

“No, sir,” she replied,
unwilling to give any ground. She had talked to all the others
before. They had listened politely and made their suggestions, some
liberal and some harsh. But none of them had worked. Now it was
time for Father Dunn’s opinion and she was not going to be
cut short before she’d spoken her piece. “I need to
speak with you about the Raines child.”

Dunn’s eyes narrowed
fractionally; she thought they even became icy as he stared up at
her. He said, “Very well, then. Please sit down.” He
motioned toward a black leather chair and with the other hand
switched on his intercom. “Mrs. Beamon, ask Mr. and Mrs.
Scheer to wait a few moments, please.”

“Yes, sir.”

He sat back in his chair, fingers
tapping steadily on the blotter. “I believe I’m
familiar with this problem, Sister Miriam,” he said.
“Any new developments?”

“Sir… this child. This
child is so… different. I cannot control him. He hates me
with such an intensity that—well, I can almost physically
feel the hate.”

Father Dunn reached again for the
intercom. “Mrs. Beamon, will you find the records for me on
Jeffrey Harper Raines? Ten years old.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I believe you’ve seen his
records?” Father Dunn asked.

“Yes, I have,” Sister
Miriam said.

“Then you’re familiar with
his history?”

“His history, yes; not his
motivations.”

“Well,” Father Dunn said,
“you might be familiar also with my theories on infant
stress. Are you?”

“Not directly. I believe I
overheard you and Father Robson discussing the subject.”

“Well then,” he said,
“consider the fact that the infant is the most superbly
sensitive of all God’s creations. From the moment of birth
the infant is reaching out, touching, exploring a new environment.
And he reacts to that environment; the environment molds him to a
certain degree. Infants, or children of any age for that matter,
are remarkably perceptive of emotions, passions.” He held up
a finger. “And hatred in particular. An infant can carry
those disruptive passions, those emotions that seethe on the edge
of violence, with him for the rest of his life. The child
we’re speaking of, as you’re aware, has had a history
of… unpleasantness. The rape of his mother ignited in her a
small spark of hatred that, growing unchecked, finally culminated
in the murder of her husband with the child present. I believe this
is the seed of hatred, of agony perhaps, that Jeffrey carries
within him. He’s been affected by a scene of brutal violence
that repeats itself just on the fringe of his
memory…”

Mrs. Beamon came through the door and
put a yellow folder marked RAINES, JEFFREY HARPER, on Father
Dunn’s desk. He thanked her and then silently turned pages
for a moment. “Jeffrey probably doesn’t even remember
that night, at least not in his conscious memory. But in his
subconscious mind he can recall every angry word, every brutal
blow.” He glanced up for a second to see if she were paying
attention. “And then, Sister Miriam, there’s the
psychology of the orphan to consider, and what we have here are
those who are continual orphans, children no one wants, children
who cause problems, children who are problems. They didn’t
ask to be brought into the world. They think it was some kind of a
mistake, someone forgot to take their birth control pills, and so
here they are. We’re managing—very slowly and with
minimum return on maximum effort—to break through to some of
them. But this Raines child… has not yet let us
in.”

“He unnerves me,” she
said.

Father Dunn grunted and looked back to
the yellow folder. “He’s been here four months,
transferred to us from the St. Francis School for Boys in Trenton.
Before that he was transferred from the Home of the Holy Mother in
New York City, before that the St. Vincent Boys’ Center, also
in New York City. He’s been in several foster homes, all of
which in one way or another have not seemed to work out. The
parents have repeatedly cited his unwillingness to cooperate,
his—” he glanced up at Sister Miriam “—foul
language and habits, his defiance of parental authority. And then
this thing… this recurring insistence on denying his
Christian name.” He raised his brow and looked at the woman.
“What do you make of that?”

“He refuses now to even answer to
his real name. He calls himself Baal and I’ve heard several
of the others address him also by that name.”

“Yes,” said Father Dunn,
swinging his chair around to stare out an open-curtained window at
the children playing in the recreation yard. “Yes. And I
understand he refuses to attend chapel. Is that correct?”

“Yes, sir. That’s correct.
He refuses to even set foot in the chapel. We’ve taken away
his playground privileges, his movie privileges, everything, but
nothing works. Father Robson told us to reinstate his privileges
and go about our business as usual.”

“I think that’s
best,” Father Dunn said. “Very strange, very strange. I
wonder if his father was a religious man?”

Sister Miriam shook her head and Father
Dunn said, “Well, I don’t know either. I only know
what’s written here in his file. He doesn’t socialize
very much with the others, does he?”

“There are a few I believe
he’s taken into his confidence, but they’re all like
him, silent and suspicious. Still, for all his misbehavior,
he’s a very good student. He reads a great deal, especially
history and geography texts, and biography. I might add that he has
a rather morbid interest in Hitler. Once in the library I heard him
grinding his teeth. He was reading an old Life magazine
article on the Dachau ovens. He shut the magazine when he saw me
looking.”

Father Dunn grunted. “Well, I
suspect he’s more intelligent than he pretends to
be.”

“Sir?”

He tapped a finger on a page of the
file. “His standard test results give him a phenomenal IQ
score and still Father Robson, after examining the answer forms,
feels Jeffrey was hedging. Some of the answers, he feels, were
deliberate mistakes. Can you give me an answer to that?”

“No, sir.”

“I don’t understand it
myself,” he said, then muttered something under his
breath.

“Sir?” she asked, leaning
forward. She hadn’t heard him.

“Baal… Baal,” he
repeated softly. Then, as if he’d made up his mind about
something, he turned toward her once again. “He’s
playing a game with us, Sister Miriam. It’s a game he
subconsciously wants to lose; I’ll grant you that. Father
Robson has an aptitude with these… difficult cases.
I’ll have him speak with Jeffrey. But, Sister Miriam, we must
not give up. It’s for the child’s own welfare that
we’re as strong,” he paused, searching for the correct
phrasing, “as we have to be. All right?” He looked
questioningly at Sister Miriam.

“Yes, sir,” she said.
“I hope Father Robson can understand him much better than
I.”

“Agreed then. I’ll ask him
to talk with the child at the first opportunity. Good day, then,
Sister Miriam.”

“Good day, Father,” she
said, nodding her head respectfully and rising from her chair.

When Sister Miriam had closed the door
behind her, Father Dunn sat perfectly still for a moment more,
looking through the window at the yard where children flew in the
autumn sunlight like aimless tattered bats. He started to reach for
a cigar from the humidor in his desk drawer but stopped himself;
no, not another one until late afternoon. Doctor’s orders. He
reached instead for a book on mental disorders in preteenagers from
a shelf behind his desk. But as his eyes scanned the cold logical
information his mind sparred with the name Baal.

The prince of demons.

Father Dunn closed the book and peered
out the window. Such enigmas children are, he told himself. Leading
their secret lives and shutting the door on those who try to come
in; children are jealous of their mysterious identities, they
become different people after nightfall. So different even their
own parents wouldn’t know them.

7

THE CHILD WALKED slowly along the high mesh fence where the
playground and the thick belt of varicolored woodland met. He stood
for a moment, his back to the others who ran and screamed in the
dusty yard; he stood staring out to where the trees surrendered to
the highway that went through Albany and on to the city. Then he
turned and, leaning against the fence, watched the others
scrambling after a wildly thrown football.

Two other children approached him. One
was heavy-set with thick black hair and prominent teeth, the other
was a thinner child with hair the color of dirty sand and deep-set,
hollow blue eyes. The sandy-haired child said, “That
four-eyes is a bitch.”

Baal remained silent. He wove his thin
fingers through the metal mesh. “This place is a
prison,” he said after another moment. “They’re
frightened of us. Can’t you feel it? So in their fear they
hope to cage us. But they cannot keep us here much
longer.”

“How can we get away?” the
sandy-haired child asked.

His black eyes glittered.
“Already you doubt me?”

“No. No, Baal. I believe
you.”

“All in its time,” Baal
said quietly. “I will choose my friends and take them with
me. The rest will perish.”

“Take me with you, Baal,”
the heavy-set child whined. “Please.”

Baal grinned but his black eyes
remained lifeless. He reached out and, tangling his fingers in the
boy’s curly black hair, drew his face toward him until his
glistening eyes were only inches away. “Love me,
Thomas,” whispered Baal. “Love me and follow what I
say. If you do this I can save you.”

Thomas was trembling. Saliva dribbled
from his open mouth, hung from his chin by a silvery thread. His
eyes blinked back tears that threatened to break over his cheeks.
He said, “I love you, Baal. I don’t want you to leave
me.”

“Saying you love me is not
enough. You must show me; and you will.”

“I will,” Thomas said.
“I will.”

The two children stood transfixed. His
eyes would not free them.

Someone called, “Jeffrey!
Jeffrey!”

Baal blinked. The two boys lowered
their heads and ran away across the playground.

Someone approached him; a nun in a
flowing black habit, Sister Rosamond. She reached him and, smiling,
said, “Jeffrey, you’re going to be excused from your
reading class. Father Robson would like to see you.”

Baal nodded. He followed her silently
as she walked across the yard, through a screaming knot of boys who
instantly parted when they saw him, and into the dark corridors of
the rambling orphanage. He watched her buttocks as they swayed
beneath the material of the habit.

Sister Rosamond was probably in her
early thirties. She had a high-browed oval face and very clear
greenish-blue eyes. Her hair would probably be golden with a slight
tinge of red. She was very much unlike the other gray-fleshed,
thick-glassed women at the boys home; she was, in Baal’s
eyes, attainable. She was the one sister who encouraged the
children to come to her with their personal problems; with wide,
reassuring eyes, she would sit and listen to their stories of
drunken fathers and whorish mothers and beatings and drugs and on
and on. Baal wondered if she ever fucked.

They climbed the wide stairway. Sister
Rosamond looked to make sure he was following; she saw his eyes
flicker from her haunches up to her face and back again.

She didn’t want to look at him.
She could feel his eyes ripping away the habit and running up and
down her full thighs like fingers on a keyboard, pressure here,
pressure here, pressure here. Her lips were drawn and white; her
hands trembled at her sides. Beneath her habit the eyes of the
child reached her undergarments and slid relentlessly toward the
triangle between her legs. She whirled, finally unable to maintain
her composure, and said, “Stop that!”

“Stop what?” the child
asked.

Sister Rosamond stood shaking, her lips
moving without making sounds. She was new to the orphanage, yet she
understood the harmless pranks and dirty street language of the
children. She understood all that. But this child… this
child she could not understand. There was something intangible
about him that both attracted and repelled her. His incurious gaze
and coldly calculating eyes now sent chills of fear skittering
toward her throat.

They stood before the closed doors of
the upper-floor library. Wincing at the sound of her own strained
voice, Sister Rosamond said, “Father Robson wants to speak
with you.”

She watched as he stepped through the
doorway and then turned to smile faintly into her face, like the
cat that stalks a caged canary. She caught her breath and let the
door swing shut.

In the library Baal breathed the smell
of old paper and book bindings. Library period had not yet begun;
the bookshelves were undisturbed, everything in its proper place.
Chairs were arranged neatly around circular reading tables. After
sweeping the room, Baal’s eyes finally came to rest on the
back of a man who stood in a corner, his finger brushing the spines
of books on a shelf.

Father Robson had heard the door close.
He had watched the child from the corner of his eye; now he turned
slowly from his appraisal of the bookshelves and said,
“Hello, Jeffrey. How are you today?”

The child remained motionless.
Somewhere in the library a clock ticked; a pendulum swung back and
forth, back and forth.

“Come sit down, Jeffrey.
I’d like to talk with you.”

The child still didn’t move.
Father Robson had no indication at all that what he’d said
had even registered with Jeffrey.

“I won’t bite,”
Father Robson said. “Come over here.”

“Why?” the child asked.

“Because I don’t like to
talk over a distance. If I did I would’ve called you on the
downstairs telephone.”

“You should have. Then you
wouldn’t have wasted your time.”

Father Robson grunted. Damn. Hard as
nails. He managed another smile and said, “I understand
you’re quite interested in books. I thought you’d be
comfortable here.”

“I would be,” the child
said, “if you would leave.”

“Aren’t you at all curious
as to why I wanted to speak with you?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

The child didn’t answer for a
moment. Father Robson, peering through the shadows thrown across
the library floor, was almost certain he saw a brief flash of red
in the eyes of the child. It was so sharp and sudden that he was
momentarily dizzied. He blinked and looked again, but the child had
lowered his gaze. “I already know,” Baal said. He
stepped toward a bookshelf and began looking at the illustrations
on the dust jackets. “You were sent here to talk to me
because I am what you call an ‘incorrigible.’ Sister
Miriam calls me a ‘delinquent.’ Father Gary calls me a
‘troublemaker.’ Isn’t that right?”

“It’s right that they call
you those things, yes,” said Father Robson, moving a step
closer to the child. “But I don’t believe it’s
right that you are those things.”

Baal’s head swiveled around and
his eyes flashed briefly, an illumination so uncanny that Father
Rob-son stopped as surely as if he had walked into a wall.
“Don’t approach me,” the child said quietly. When
he saw that the man was going to obey, Baal turned back to the
bookshelves. “You’re a psychologist. What do you see in
me?”

“I’m a psychologist but not
a mind reader,” he said, his eyes narrowed. Had he imagined
that glimmer of red? Maybe the shadows had something to do with it,
playing tricks with his vision. “If I cannot move toward you
physically I certainly can’t move toward you
mentally.”

“Then I will tell you what you
see in me,” Baal said. “You think I have a mental
disorder; you think some experience or series of experiences in my
past has affected me. Is that correct?”

“Yes. How did you
know?”

“I’m quite interested in
books,” said Baal, glancing up. “Didn’t you say
so yourself?”

Father Robson nodded. This child was
different from any he had ever seen before. He wondered at the
strangeness of him; the body was that of a normal ten-year-old,
clad in patched jeans and a sweater, but the extraordinarily
intelligent mind was possessed of a clarity that suggested
extrasensory perception. And this aura around the child, this aura
of a heavy, demanding power. A presence, Father Robson told
himself, that was utterly without precedent in his own experience.
He said, “Why do you persist in denying your name, Jeffrey?
Do you wish to deny your past?”

“My name is Baal. That is my one
and only name. I do not deny it. You’re referring also to an
incident in my past that you believe has affected me. You believe I
underwent a trauma that made me want to bury any recollection of
the period in which it happened.”

Father Robson took note of something
behind the face of this child that, for all his years as a child
psychologist, he could not identify. “What incident do you
refer to?”

Baal looked at him steadily; a grin
flickered across his face, and then was gone. “I seem to
have… forgotten.”

“You’re playing games
now.”

“No,” Baal said.
“Only playing out the game you’ve begun.”

“You’re an intelligent
young man,” Father Robson said. “I won’t talk to
you as I would talk to the others. I’ll lay it on the line
for you. You’ve been with a half-dozen families and every
time you’ve been returned to a children’s home because
of your disruptive attitude. I don’t believe you want to go
out.”

Baal was silent, listening.

“What do you want? What is it
you’re waiting for? The time will come when you’re old
enough to leave the children’s home system. What
then?”

“Then…” said Baal,
and Father Robson thought he was going to continue but the
child’s mouth closed slowly; he stood without saying another
word, just watching the man across the shadow-dappled, musty
library-No, this will not work, Father Robson said to himself. This
child needs professional, full-time guidance. To build a bridge
toward the child was a futile hope. He was not getting through at
all. As a last effort, a throwaway attempt, he asked, “Why do
you not attend chapel with the others?”

“I choose not to,” Baal
said.

“You’re not
religious?”

“I’m religious.”

The answer surprised him. He had
expected a curse instead of a curt reply. “Then you believe
in God?” he asked.

“A god,” said Baal, his
eyes scanning the packed bookshelves. “Perhaps not
yours.”

“Is yours a different
God?”

The child’s head turned slowly.
His lips were twisted into a cold grin. “Your god,”
said the child, “is one of white-steepled churches.
That’s all; beyond the chapel doors He has no strength. Mine
is the god of the alley, the whorehouse, the world. Mine is the
true king.”

“My God, Jeffrey,” said
Father Robson, astonished at the outburst. “What’s made
you like this? Who planted these terrible things inside you?”
He took a step forward to see the child’s face more
clearly.

Baal growled, “Stay
back.”

But he would not listen. He was going
to move close enough to touch the child. He said,
“Jeffrey…”

And that was all he said, for in the
next second the child shrieked “Stay back I
said!” in a voice that slammed the man back into the
bookshelves, sending volumes toppling him to the floor. Father
Robson struggled against something that seemed to be choking him,
pinning him physically so that he could not move, could not
breathe, could not think.

With one hand the child ripped books
from their places and scattered them through the air, yellowed
pages flying, bindings breaking. His teeth clenched and his breath
rasping like that of an enraged animal, he tore into the shelves.
Father Robson saw that he had reached the section of the library
that housed religious books. As if in a mad frenzy, a terrible
uncontrolled anger because the man had not obeyed, he tore the
books to shreds and let their remains fall around him.

Father Robson tried to shout but his
voice, weakened and strangled by the force that held him, came out
only as a barely audible croak. His eyes were swimming in their
sockets and his head felt bloated with blood, distorted like a
freak’s, ballooning and ready to explode.

But the child stopped. He stood amid
the carnage of books and grinned at him with a savage ferocity that
froze the blood in Father Robson’s veins.

Baal slowly, gracefully, lifted his
arm. Clutched in the hand was a Bible with a white binding. As
Father Robson watched, the book seemed to smoke; vapors whirled
around the child’s head and moved up toward the ceiling
lights. Baal opened his hand and let the book fall into the
scattered heaps around him.

Baal said, “This conversation is
ended.” He turned abruptly and shut the doors behind him.

When the child left it seemed that the
heavy force fell away from Father Robson. He felt his neck, certain
that a hand had grasped his throat but knowing there would be no
bruises. He waited for a moment until a spasm of trembling had
passed and then he picked carefully through the litter of paper and
bindings. The smell of heat, of burned paper, was still strong. He
searched for its source.

He found the white-bound Bible the
child had held above his head. There, scorched brown and curled
around the front cover, was a sight that made him catch his breath
as sharply as if the floor had suddenly given way beneath him.

A handprint.

8

IN MOTTLED SHADOWS cast by the late-afternoon sun, Father Robson
thrust his hands into his pockets and walked the orphanage grounds.
He had completed what little paperwork he could concentrate on and
finally, after filing it away in his office, emerged to breathe the
crisp fall air that smelled of cold Canadian winds and leaves
burning in Albany backyards. The Bible he had locked securely away
in a safe.

He studied the ground as he walked.
Above him wind suddenly swept through the brilliant trees and
showered him with leaves that clung briefly to his coat before
falling to the ground.

In his years with the orphanage, in his
years as a man who observed the mentality of children, he had never
before encountered anything like this. The child’s hatred,
the name he had chosen, his savage unnatural intelligence, the
scorched handprint: perhaps they were, he thought, beyond any
experience. There had been a child a few years before whose hatred
was similar; this had been a child of the streets who had learned
early to fight for his survival. He had hated everything and
everybody. Father Robson could understand his motivation; in the
instance of Jeffrey Harper Raines, or Baal or whatever, there was
no simple explanation. Perhaps there was a persecution complex that
manifested itself in anger, a desire to strike out, but that
scorched handprint across the book… ? No, there was no
explanation.

He’d kept the incident to
himself. After he’d composed himself in the ravaged library
he calmly put as many books as he could back into their proper
places. He would talk later with the librarian about the books that
needed to be replaced. He had returned to his office with the Bible
underneath his arm. And after lighting a cigarette, he sat staring
at the handprint until his vision was clouded by smoke.

Now, walking the grounds, he decided he
could not yet tell Father Dunn. He would have to begin a quiet
examination of the child; then, when his findings were complete,
some explanation might offer itself. But until that moment arrived
the questions were knots that ate at his guts.

As he crossed the paved parking area
toward the administration building someone reached out a pale hand
from the shadow of a tree and grasped his arm.

He whirled to face a woman in black.
One of the sisters. “Oh!” he said, recognizing her.
“Sister Rosamond.”

“I’m sorry. Is something
bothering you? I saw you walking…”

“No, no.” He kept his head
down. They walked together, two figures in flowing black, along the
line of trees. “Aren’t you cold? The wind’s
coming up.”

She walked in silence. Ahead loomed the
dark structure of the orphanage; lights in the windows made it seem
like some kind of great dark bulldog, watching them with hooded
eyes, crouched on powerful hind legs. “I overheard you and
the Raines child in the library this afternoon,” she said
after a moment. “I didn’t mean to be
listening.”

Father Robson nodded. She glanced over
and saw the deep creases in his face, the spider-web lines around
his cautious eyes. He said, “I don’t know how to deal
with this child. Over a hundred children here and I can handle all
of them. All of them. But this one? No. I don’t even think he
wants any help.”

“I think he does. Down deep,
perhaps.”

He grunted. “Buried maybe. Well.
You’ve been with us two months now. Is this what you
expected?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Working with orphans appeals to
you?”

She smiled, thinking that his
psychologist’s curiosity was working overtime. He returned
her smile but his eyes were intent and watchful. “I’m
attracted to them because of their helplessness,” she said.
“They need a shoulder on which to lean and I enjoy providing
that shoulder. I couldn’t bear the thought of them turned out
in the world with nowhere to go.”

“And yet many of them would
prefer the street to being here,” he said.

“Because they’re still
afraid of us. It’s very difficult to shake our image of
severe, black-robed instructors who strike rulers across the palms
of children.”

Father Robson nodded, intrigued by her
passionate criticism of the sisterhood’s past. “Agreed.
You overheard the Raines child this afternoon; would you say a
ruler across the palm would work in his case?”

“No.”

“What, then?”

“Respect and understanding. He
has a human core but it’s going to take a great deal of
effort to uncover it.”

Yes, Father Robson thought, like
digging with a pickaxe. “You seem to be interested in him.
Are you?”

“Yes,” she said without
hesitation, “I am, and I don’t know why.” She
glanced over at the man. “He seems so out of place
here.”

“Oh?”

“All the others are simply
helpless, drifting; you can see it in their eyes. Jeffrey is
different. His eyes reflect, to me, some sort of purpose, something
he wants to keep hidden from any of us. If you ask any of the other
children what they might like to become when they grow up
you’ll get the usual answers: firemen, detectives, things
like that. But Jeffrey never says anything because for some reason
he doesn’t want us to know.”

Father Robson nodded. “Good
observation. Very good.”

They neared the broad porch of the
orphanage. Father Robson stopped walking and she looked at him.

“Would you like to help
me?” he asked. “Jeffrey is not going to communicate
with me at all. He’s shut the door on me. I need someone who
can talk with him, who can find out what’s troubling him.
I’d appreciate it very much if you would look in on him from
time to time, as your schedule permits.”

“Something torments him,”
she said. “He frightens me.”

“I think he frightens
everyone.”

“Do you feel he’s…
mentally unbalanced?”

“I can’t say. I need more
information and that’s where you can do me a great
favor.”

“Why do you think he might
respond to me?”

“He came with you to the library,
didn’t he? Believe me, if you’d been Sister Miriam the
best you could’ve hoped for was a curse or a rock. Anything
but obedience.”

The wind disturbed fallen leaves around
their feet, making them crackle with the sound of a sudden
brushfire. “Yes,” she said, the lights from windows
shining across her face. “I’ll try to make some sort of
contact with him.”

“Good,” he said.
“I’d appreciate it very much. I’ll say goodnight,
then.” He smiled at her and started back toward his office,
wishing that he could have told her more, and damning himself for
bringing her into this. He turned and said, “Be careful he
doesn’t… bite you,” and then he disappeared into
the deepening shadows.

She watched until she could no longer
see him. On the ground before her was a yellow square of light,
streaming from a window on the third floor, the floor that served
as a dormitory for the children. She was abruptly jolted from her
dreamy state of mind and stared at the square of light as a new
gust of whirling leaves blew past. She thought she had seen someone
move away from the window; a shadow had swept across the light at
her feet. She walked out into the yard and looked up at the window
as the wind wrenched violently at her habit. The curtains were open
but no one was there. She shivered, thinking how cold the air had
suddenly become, and climbed the steps to the doorway.

Sister Rosamond had almost seen him
where he stood watching from the window. He had seen both of them,
Sister Rosamond and Father Robson, as they approached across the
grounds. He had watched as they spoke, surrounded by a swirling
carpet of leaves. They had been talking about him. Father Robson
would have been intrigued by what he’d done to the book; he
was a stupid man, the child thought, who believed himself
intelligent. And Sister Rosamond was no better, she thought herself
a guiding angel of mercy when she was nothing but a whore in holy
black.

He stood amid the rows of metal-framed
bunk beds, cluttered with clothes and toys and comic books. He
stood staring into the night that fell like the blow of an axe.

Behind him one of the sisters called in
a shrill voice, “Jeffrey! Aren’t you going downstairs
for your dinner?”

He remained motionless. In another
moment he heard her walk heavily through the corridor and down the
staircase. Then the only sounds were of the wind and the muffled
voices of the children, downstairs in the dining hall.

From the other end of the room
someone, a child, said, “Baal?”

He turned slowly and saw that it was
Peter Francis, a pale-fleshed, frail child who walked with an
aggravated limp from an accident as an infant. The child, his eyes
wide and pleading, made his way through the tangle of beds toward
Baal.

Peter said, “You haven’t
talked to me today, Baal. Have I done something wrong?”

Baal said nothing.

“I have? What have I
done?”

Baal said softly, “Come
here.”

The child approached, fear swimming in
his eyes like darting red fish in dark waters.

Baal said, “You almost told,
didn’t you?”

“No! I swear I didn’t!
Whoever told you that is a liar! I swear I didn’t!”

“I was told by someone who did
not lie. He never lies to me. You almost told Sister Miriam,
didn’t you?”

Peter saw Baal’s eyes change,
from a thick terrible black through gray and on to a burning,
uncontrollable red that froze his blood and scorched his flesh at
the same time. He shuddered and, in a mindless panic, looked about
for help before realizing that everyone, the children and the
sisters, was now downstairs in the dining hall. He was beyond help.
Baal’s eyes became as red as pooling blood; they became
white-hot, like molten steel.

Peter said, “I swear she made me!
She wanted to know all about you and everything! She wanted to know
about you and she said she could trust me!”

The power and heat from those eyes made
his tongue bloat like a frog in a stagnant pond; it filled his
mouth so he could do nothing but blubber unintelligibly. He tried
desperately to cry out for the sisters, for anyone who would hear
him, but the words were strangled in his throat.

Baal said, “I’ve seen your
records, Peter. Did you know that? Yes, I have. They keep them in a
dark cave beneath this place. I broke in there once and read all
the records. Do you know how you got that limp, Peter?”

“No…”—the
child choked—“… please…” He fell to
his knees and wrapped his arms around Baal’s legs, but the
other stepped back quickly and let him drop forward. Peter
whimpered, waiting for the crack of the whip.

“They never told you, did
they?” Baal whispered. “Then remember, Peter…
remember… remember.”

“No…
please…”

“Yesssss. Remember. They never
wanted you at all, did they, Peter? And your father—your
drunken old father—picked you up… remember?”

“No…” He held his
hands over his ears and crouched down on the floor. In his
mind’s eye he saw a man with a leering crooked grin and
red-veined eyes lifting him up. Then, with a harsh and desperate
curse, the man threw him at a blank white expanse that would have
looked like snow but for the cracks. And then falling falling with
a searing pain in his hip and a smear of red across the white.
“No!” he screamed aloud, feeling again the pain of
broken bones tearing through infant flesh.

Peter sobbed on the floor, holding his
hands over his ears but knowing that alone would not stop the
pain.

“That never… that never
happened… happened,” he sobbed brokenly, in heaving
shudders. “It never did…”

Baal reached out and savagely clutched
the child’s face in one hand; until the flesh was white, the
eyes devoid of hope. “It happened,” Baal said,
“if I say it did. You are mine now. I have your past and your
future.”

Peter was hunched over, his crying now
without tears or noise.

Slowly, the red intensity drained from
Baal’s eyes and they went back to the deep black of a
bottomless cavern. His fierce grip softened; he stroked the child
as one would stroke a dog after whipping it. “No, Peter, now
you can forget those things that harmed you. You’re safe.
They can’t reach you here.”

The child grasped Baal’s legs.
“They can’t? They can’t?” he asked through
swollen, blubbering lips.

“No. Those shadows are gone. If
you belong to me they can never reach you.”

“I do… I
do…”

“Peter,” Baal said softly,
“Sister Miriam must not know. No one must know except us. If
they find out they’ll try to kill us. Do you
understand?”

“Yes.”

“And if Sister Miriam—if
anyone asks about me you must not tell them. I want you to stay
away from Sister Miriam. When she speaks to you again you will not
even answer. She is evil, Peter. She can bring the shadows
back.”

The child at his feet tensed.
“No!”

“It’s all right now,”
Baal said. “It’s all right. Stand up.”

The child stood on trembling legs. One
tear hung, ready to drop, from the point of his chin. Peter looked
up sharply, over Baal’s shoulder and past him, and Baal stood
as motionless as if he had suddenly turned to stone. Someone was
standing behind them; someone had been there for several moments,
watching.

Baal turned to gaze at Sister Rosamond
in the corridor doorway, her arms hanging limply by her sides and
her face questioning. He had been too engrossed with Peter to sense
her there.

“Jeffrey?” she asked.
“You didn’t come down for your dinner. I wanted to see
if anything was wrong.” There was the faintest tremor in her
voice, an uncertainty in the eyes.

“Peter… stumbled and hurt
himself,” Baal said. He held his hand beneath the
child’s chin to catch in his palm the falling teardrop. He
offered the glistening intact tear to Sister Rosamond.
“He’s been crying. You see?”

“Yes,” she said. “I
see. Peter, are you all right? Are you hurt?”

“I’m okay,” he said,
wiping his face with a shirtsleeve. “I tripped over
something.”

She moved closer so she could see the
two boys clearly beneath the globe lights that studded the ceiling.
She said, “You’re going to miss your dinner, Peter. Go
downstairs now and eat.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said
obediently, and with a final glance over his shoulder at Baal he
went past Sister Rosamond. In another moment they heard him
descending the corridor staircase.

“I’m missing my dinner
too,” Baal said. “I’d better go.”

“No,” she said quickly.

He looked her fully in the face, his
eyes narrowing. “Isn’t that what you’re here for?
To ask me to come downstairs to dinner?”

“That’s why I came here,
yes. But I saw you and Peter. And I know he didn’t
fall.”

“Didn’t I say he
fell?”

“I was standing there watching,
Jeffrey.”

“Then perhaps,” Baal
whispered, so low she had to strain to hear, “your eyes are
at fault.”

She realized that her breathing had
quickened. She felt suddenly cold though the window was closed. The
window; yes. This was the window she’d seen from the ground.
She rubbed her eyes because they’d filled with water; her
eyes stung as if she had rinsed them in sea brine. She said,
“My eyes…”

“Perhaps your vision is fading,
Sister,” Baal said. “Surely your sweet Jesus would not
rob the sight of one of his ladies-in-waiting?”

The pain was increasing. She gasped,
pushing her palms against her eye sockets. When she took her hands
away she found that her vision was hazy, confused, as if what she
saw was reflected by fun-house mirrors. Where the child’s
head should have been there was an intense white glow like the
globe lights on the ceiling. She blinked, water fell from her
lashes. I’ve gotten something in my eyes, she thought. Some
dust or something. When I wash them with water they’ll be all
right. But the pain… “My eyes,” she said aloud,
and her trembling voice shamed her as it echoed off the walls.

She reached out both arms to feel her
path through the beds and toward the doorway. But his hand clamped
itself firmly around her wrist. He would not let her go.

Through the murky tears she saw him
step forward and felt him run his fingers lightly across her
eyelids; she felt a strange heat that, penetrating her skull,
seemed to burn at the back of her head.

“There is no need to be
afraid,” he told her. “Not now.”

She blinked her eyes.

She was standing on a street corner.
No, it was a bus stop. Around her the city was absorbing the blue
tinge of early evening. Lights, garish neon, flickering bulbs, hot
white, gleamed off mounds of dirty snow piled in gutters and around
alleyways. She was dressed not in the black habit but, instead, in
a long dark coat and dark gloves. She knew what she wore under the
coat. A dark blue dress with a striped belt. Her birthday
present.

Christopher stood beside her. He blew
into his hands to warm them. His eyes, normally so carefree and
laughing, now were as cold as the bitter February wind that sliced
across the avenue. He said, “This is a hell of a time to tell
me. Jesus Christ what a time to tell me!”

“I’m sorry, Chris,”
she said, and instantly chided herself because she had said she was
sorry so many times. She was tired of explaining her decision. In
the last few days she had had endless long-distance telephone
conversations, tearful ones, with her parents in Hartford. They had
finally, she hoped, come to understand the reasons for her
decision. Now this man with whom she had fallen in and out of love
again and again demanded once more to know why.

“I was hoping you would
understand,” she said. “I really thought you
would.”

“Is it that you feel useless or
something? Do I make you feel useless? Is that it?”

“No,” she said, and
inwardly winced. Yes, that was part of it. The love she felt for
him was for the most part physical. Emotionally and intellectually,
she had come to realize, he left her untouched. “There are
things I want to do that perhaps I can do by making this vow.
We’ve talked about this before, Chris. You know we
have.”

“Talked about it, yes. Talked
about it. But now you’ve actually contacted them and
you’re going to go through with it? I mean, hell,
that’s putting your neck in the rope, isn’t
it?”

“Rope? I don’t consider it
a rope. I consider it an opportunity.”

He shook his head and kicked at a
frozen mound of snow with one foot. “Right. Right. An
opportunity. Listen, you want to be an old lady in a convent
somewhere? You want to give up everything? You want to give
up… us?”

She turned around and looked directly
into his face. My God, she thought. He’s actually serious.
“I have decided,” she said flatly, “that my life
belongs to me.”

“To throw away,” he
said.

“I will take the vows because I
believe in some small way I can do something for someone else.
I’ve been considering this for quite some time and it is the
right choice to make.”

He stood looking at her to see if she
would suddenly start laughing and nudge him in the ribs to let him
know this was all a joke. He mumbled, “I don’t
understand. You don’t have to run from anything.”

She glanced up the avenue. Her bus, its
tires throwing slush, had made its turn and would be there shortly.
“I am not running from anything, Chris. I’m running
toward something.”

“I don’t understand,”
he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “I never knew anybody
who wanted to be a nun before.”

Her bus came closer and slowed. She
could hear the crunch of the tires on packed gutter snow. She had
her fare ready, as she always did, clutched tightly in her hand.
Christopher kept his head down, seemingly absorbed by the pattern
the dirty slush made as it ran through a sewer grating. She
unconsciously jingled the coins in her hand.

He looked up suddenly.
“I’ll marry you. Is that what you want? Really. I mean
it. I’ll marry you.”

The bus braked to a halt. The doors
hissed open and the driver peered out at her.

She stepped up into the bus.

“I’ll marry you,” he
said again. “I’ll call you tonight, Rose. Okay?
We’ll get together for a little while. Okay?”

She dropped her coins into the fare
box; they fell like shells exploding on some foreign battlefield.
Behind her the doors closed, cutting off his voice as surely as if
they were cutting off his head. When she sat down and the bus
pulled away from the curb, she looked back again and saw
Christopher standing in a floating white cloud of bus exhaust.

The child dropped his hand from her
eyes; no, not the child. Christopher. She saw him standing beneath
the harsh white light of the ceiling globes. Christopher smiling,
his eyes clear and untroubled. He’d come to see her! After
all this time he’d finally found her!

Baal’s hand fell to his side.
Slowly her vision cleared until she recognized his black, slitted
eyes. Her breath was forced and rasping, her flesh cold as if she
had just stepped indoors from the snow.

He said, “You should have married
him. You broke his heart, Sister. He would have been good for
you.”

No, no, she screamed inwardly. This is
not happening. “He didn’t understand what I
needed,” she said weakly. “Not really.”

“That’s a shame,”
Baal said, “because he loved you so much. And now it’s
just too late.”

“What?” she asked, her head
throbbing. “What?”

“Didn’t you know?
That’s why he never looked for you. That’s why he never
called your parents to find you. He’s dead, Sister. He was
killed in an automobile accident—”

Her hand went to her mouth. She
choked.

“—that mangled him
horribly. Oh you wouldn’t have recognized him, the way he
was. He had to be cut… piece by piece… out of his
car.”

“You’re lying!” she
screamed. “You’re lying!”

“Then why,” Baal asked,
“do you believe me?”

“My parents would have called and
told me. You’re lying!” Clapping her hand over her
mouth because she knew her lips were as white, as brittle as dried
bones, she backed away from him toward the corridor. And she saw
him grinning and the grin became a wide smile on
Christopher’s face. Christopher held out his arms for her and
said in a soft, distant voice, “Rose? I’m here. I know
how much you need me now. And I need you, darling. I keep falling
asleep at the wheel.” She screamed, a long thin scream that
cracked and left her throat raw, and bolted from the dormitory into
the corridor. As she ran down the stairway, her habit flowing, her
feet missing stairs, she saw the faces of the sisters looking up
the stairwell at her. They were whispering.

She stopped to steady herself, her
hands gripping the banister to prevent a fall as a thick wave of
nausea suddenly shuddered its way through her. Am I going insane?
she wondered. Am I going insane? Her hands were clenched so tightly
around the banister she could see the blood as it raced through the
veins toward her wildly pumping heart.

9

SISTER ROSAMOND AVOIDED the child during the next few weeks; she
couldn’t bear to be near him because of the memory of
Christopher’s smiling face atop his body.

Sometimes, even while teaching her
basic history pupils or at chapel with the other nuns, she would
begin trembling uncontrollably. Once it happened during dinner and
she dropped her tray, shattering the plates on the floor. More and
more often she caught the inquisitive sidelong glances of her
colleagues.

She had telephoned her parents for any
news they might have about Christopher, but they’d heard
nothing from him in years. That left only one other person she
could call, his brother who lived in Detroit. But dialing the
Detroit information operator she caught herself and slammed the
receiver down. She was uncertain as to whether or not she really
wanted to know; perhaps finding out it was true would be too much
for her. She was caught between two poles—wanting to know yet
fearing the knowledge—and at night she tossed and turned in
her bed until the sheets were wet.

Perhaps this was wrong after all, she
told herself in the silent darkness so many times. Yes, she’d
turned her back on him when he needed her. Now she was tied in the
black bindings of her mistake. He’d been right. She’d
been running from something and, worse, had known it all along. She
had wished to avoid the harsh trappings of reality; she’d
wanted to find security somewhere, anywhere, and cling to it as if
it were her dying breath.

And now she realized how she missed the
physical intimacies of love. She missed the strong tender hands
touching her on a wide rumpled bed in his apartment; she missed
curling up in his arms while he tucked his face down and whispered
into her ear about how beautiful he thought her body was. She
missed the act almost as much as she missed him. This is so very
unfair, she told herself, to deny myself those things I need. And
here, surrounded by austere black and holy contemplation, she felt
suddenly out of place and lost; she was suddenly surrounded by
freaks who also denied themselves and who, if she were to dare to
tell them of her feelings, would scold her severely and probably
also send her to see Father Robson.

I am still young, she told herself in
the middle of the night. I am growing old here before it’s
time, and for the rest of my life I’ll wear black and have to
hide my feelings. Oh God oh God it isn’t fair.

Each day that drifted by reminded her
of the time she could never regain; she tried to immerse herself
totally in her work and she spent her free hours alone, reading,
but she couldn’t quell the rising insecurities. She expected
every morning to look into a mirror and see tiny lines
crisscrossing the plains beneath her eyes. She expected to find
herself resembling the older sisters who had forgotten anything
existed beyond the orphanage grounds. Soon she ate her meals in her
room, refusing to participate in the little birthday parties and
movie nights. She began to question the judgment of a God who would
trap her here like a sleek animal, to rot and die in a bleak-walled
cage.

One morning she dismissed her history
pupils and, after the children had filed from the room to go to
their next period class, Father Robson came through the door and
quietly shut it behind him.

She sat at her desk, watching him
approach. So, she thought, it’s finally come to this. When he
smiled she busied herself by arranging stacks of test papers.

He said, “Good morning, Sister
Rosamond. Are you busy?”

“We’ve had a test this
morning.”

“Yes, I see.” He looked
around at the bulletin board with its exhibit on Thomas Jefferson,
drawings done by the children. In one of the portraits of that
esteemed statesmen Father Robson saw that his hair was green and
his teeth blackened. On the blackboard were Sister Rosamond’s
handwritten questions on the American Constitution. He recognized
the stress in the squeezed, disarrayed lettering, in the sentences
that climbed from the middle of the board up toward the top. He
made a mental note. “You know, I was quite a history scholar
myself. Made all the history clubs in prep school, even won a few
scholastic awards. I was always interested in ancient history, the
beginnings of civilization and all that. Fascinating
subject.”

“I’m afraid the children
aren’t quite prepared for that.”

“Well,” he said,
“probably not.”

“I’m very busy,”
Sister Rosamond said. “My next class will be in a few
minutes.”

He nodded. “Can I talk with you
for just a moment?”

She didn’t reply.

He stood over her until she had glanced
up. Catching her eyes, he said, “Sister Rosamond, is
something bothering you?”

“Why should anything be bothering
me?”

“I didn’t say anything was
bothering you,” he said softly. “I only asked. And you
know it’s not fair to answer a question with a
question.”

“Things are not always
fair,” she said, and immediately dropped her eyes.

He had caught the sarcasm and now he
knew that the sisters’ concern for her behavior during the
past weeks had some sort of basis. “No,” he said.
“I don’t suppose so. Would you like to talk about
it?”

“You’re confusing me with
the children. Did someone ask you to talk with me? Father
Dunn?”

“No. I’ve noticed a sharp
change in your behavior. Everyone has, even the children. And I
simply wanted to know if I could be of help.”

“No,” she said flatly,
“you can’t.”

“All right then,” he said.
“I’m sorry if I disturbed you. One more thing and then
I’ll go. You remember I spoke with you about the Raines
child?”

She looked up from her papers and
Father Robson saw the blood drain from her face for a few
seconds.

The sight chilled him. “I’m
sorry,” she said after a moment. “I’d forgotten
that you’d asked me to look in on him.”

“No, no, don’t be. I
understand. You have enough work to do and, besides, the child
should really be my responsibility.”

She opened a drawer and began to file
the papers away.

Pursue this, Father Robson told
himself. Something is very wrong. “Have your feelings changed
about him? Do you still think he can be touched?”

She closed the drawer.
“He’s a… very difficult child.”

He grunted in agreement. The stress in
her face was so defined it could have been etched by a sculptor;
her fingers continually clenched and unclenched. He realized with a
sudden start that she had become, strangely, like the child,
distant and remote and bitterly cold. He said, “Does the
child have anything to do with your problem, Sister?” and
instantly regretted the bluntness of the question.

A gleam of heat flashed briefly in her
eyes. Just as suddenly she controlled herself and Father Robson
felt the boil of anger, of confusion, subsiding. For a moment he
thought she wouldn’t reply but then she said, “What
makes you think that?”

“There you are,” he said,
trying to maintain a smile, “answering a question with a
question. I asked you to speak with him; almost immediately after
that you began acting very… depressed and withdrawn. I
believe the child radiates a disturbing presence.
So…”

“I told you,” she said.
“I haven’t spoken with him.” She tried to look
him in the eye but her gaze wavered.

“You’re holding back on me,
Sister,” he said, “and if you can’t talk with me
about it then you might speak with one of the others. I don’t
like to see you upset.”

Several children had begun to come in
for the next period’s history class. They ground their
pencils into the sharpener on the wall and took their seats in the
classroom.

“I have to give a test,”
she said.

“Very well, then,” Father
Robson said, exploring her eyes once more in a final attempt to
discover what was hidden there. “If you need me you know
where I am.” He smiled one last time at her and then stepped
toward the door.

“Father Robson,” she said
as he reached for the knob.

The desperation in her voice stopped
him. There was something in it that was about to break like a
fragile bit of glass. The grinding of the pencil sharpener abruptly
ceased.

His hand on the doorknob, he turned to
look at her.

“Do you think I’m an
attractive woman?” she asked. She trembled; beneath her desk
her leg struck wood.

He said very softly, “Yes, Sister
Rosamond. I think you’re attractive in many different ways.
You’re a very kindhearted woman.”

The children sat still, listening.

“I don’t mean that. I
mean…” But suddenly she didn’t know what she
meant. She let the sentence falter and die on trembling lips. Her
face burned. Several of the children giggled.

Father Robson said,
“Yes?”

“I have a test to give,”
she said abruptly, looking away from him. “If you’ll
excuse me now…”

“Of course,” he said.
“Forgive me for taking up so much of your time.”

She shuffled through a stack of papers
and he knew she would say nothing else.

In the corridor he wondered if her
involvement with the children was too much of a responsibility for
her; perhaps her emotional nature was such that the orphans were
depressing her. Or it could be something else entirely… He
remembered the way her face had become ashen at the mention of the
child. Something was wrong, terribly, possibly irreversibly wrong.
All is not as it seems, he told himself. All is not as it seems. He
thrust his hands into his pockets and walked away down the dimly
lit corridor, unconsciously counting the linoleum tiles on the
floor.

And soon, locking herself away from the
curious stares and whispers of the others, Sister Rosamond began to
fear herself. She had trouble sleeping; often she dreamed that
Christopher was shrouded in a white robe and standing amid high
golden dunes in a swirling desert. His arms reached out for her
and, as she approached, she was nude and wet. As their fingers
entwined she saw his skin turn the cold gray of wet sand, his lips
draw back in an obscene grimace. And then he drew away his robe to
reveal his grotesque nakedness and, throwing her down across the
golden expanse, wrenched her thighs apart. And slowly slowly the
features changed from those of Christopher to someone else, someone
with pale flesh and burning dark eyes like fires at the bottom of
black wells. She recognized the child and awakened with her breast
heaving for air, he had been heavy as he lay across her belly with
slavering tongue lapping at her swollen nipples.

Autumn lost its colors for the
bleakness of winter. The trees gave up their leaves with a
desperate finality and stood fragile under gray snow-laden skies.
The grass became brown and harsh; the orphanage itself was a dark
stone capped with glistening frost.

She suspected she was losing her mind.
She was increasingly forgetful and would sometimes, in
mid-sentence, forget what she was talking about. Her dreams became
more intense; the child and Christopher became interchangeable.
Sometimes she thought she had always known Jeffrey’s face;
she dreamed she was stepping onto a bus on a street in some city
and as the bus pulled away she looked back to see the child, she
thought, waving from the curb, but she wasn’t certain. She
was never certain. She shuddered and burned and knew she was
insane.

Sister Rosamond would have to be
assigned somewhere else; Father Robson observed that her dark
moods, her preoccupation and listlessness, had affected the
children. Now it seemed to him that the children whispered behind
his back; it seemed to him that they had grown older, more
secretive, even in a few months. Their childish horseplay natural
at this age had almost entirely ceased. Now they spoke and moved as
if on the brink of manhood and their eyes mirrored a feverish
intelligence that seemed to him terribly, terribly out of
place.

And apart from them all, above them
all, was the child. He walked alone in the bitter wind on the
playground, his hands slowly clenching and unclenching at his
sides. He spoke to no one, at least as far as Father Robson could
tell, and no one spoke to him. But Father Robson saw the
child’s eyes sweep the faces of the others. When they drew
back, cowering, Father Robson dropped his own eyes and pretended
not to see.

There was only one word for it. Father
Robson knew it: power. He sat behind his desk in his
paper-cluttered office and chewed a pencil as he flipped through
psychological journals he had already read and reread. Power.
Power. Power. Rising, rising up like a shadow, intangible. Perhaps,
like—and the thought chilled him—the shadow he had seen
in the eyes of Sister Rosamond.

And the child’s power was
growing. Father Robson could sense it rising like a cobra from a
wicker basket, undulating in the dirty sunlight. Inevitably it
would strike. But… at what? At what?

He put aside his journals and sat with
his hands folded. The numb disbelief when the child had forced him
back with a single sentence, the cold terror when the child had
burned his handprint into the bookcover with an eerie inexplicable
force had returned. Perhaps now it was time to send the child into
New York for examination by a psychiatrist who had experience with
problem children, who could explain the things that had haunted
Father Robson for so long. And perhaps also it was time to unlock
the safe, to disclose the scorched Bible. Yes. It was time. It was
past time.

Out in the yard he stood alone.

The freezing wind whipped around him.
He watched them approach; two children, one limping, nearing him
from across the yard. They shivered in their coats and hunched to
warm themselves from the wind. He waited without moving.

The weather was wild, unsettled,
vicious. The thick layer of clouds alternated white and black, all
washed-out bright and deep bottomless pits. They reached him, the
wind tangling their hair.

They did not speak.

Baal caught their eyes. He said,
“Tonight.”

10

SISTER ROSAMOND WAS WET. She threw aside the blankets
feverishly, though across the room harsh wind scratched the
windows. Rolling and tossing between sodden sheets, she dreamed of
beautiful animals trapped in cages, pacing back and forth back and
forth until they were forgotten and their flesh rotted. Oh God oh
Christ my mistake my mistake where is my faith? Where is my
faith?

Your faith, someone said,
seeks now to save you. Your faith grows stronger now, stronger
now. Beyond these walls you will be strong and free.

Can I be? Can I be?

Yes. But not here. Oh misguided
misguided come to me.

Tangled in the sheets, she put her
hands to her ears.

Someone, very close to her now, said,
You try to hide. Your fear breeds another mistake. There is a
man here who wants you. He wants to take you away with him. His
name is…

Christopher.

Christopher. He waits here for you,
but he cannot wait long. His time is limited, as is yours. And in
this place of rot and dark walls you have no time at all. Come to
me.

The sheets, clinging to her, would not
let her go. She wrenched at them and the tearing of cloth awakened
her from sleep. She lay still until her breathing was measured and
calm. Who is calling me? Who is calling me?

There was no answer.

She knew the voice had come from the
opposite side of the floor, from the dormitory where the children
slept. She rose from her bed, quietly so as not to disturb any of
the others, and started to reach for the light switch but caught
herself. No, no, she thought. They’ll want to know what
I’m doing. They’ll want to stop me and they’ll
say I’m crazy and should not be up in the night. She fumbled
in a bureau drawer for a candle and matches; she lit the wick and
watched the small flame climb to the white point of a blade.
Barefoot and clad in her gray nightgown, she let the circle of the
candle lead her through the corridors toward the children’s
dormitory, toward… Christopher. Yes, yes. Christopher who
had come to take her away with him, back to life and the city.
He’d learned how unhappy she was and he’d come to take
her back with him. The candle, sputtering, dripped hot wax down
over her hand. She didn’t feel any pain.

Father Robson typed the final pages of
notes and rubbed his eyes. He reached for his cup of coffee and
realized, to his chagrin, that he must have finished it some time
before. The late-night work in his office had been rewarding;
he’d completed the compilation of notes on the behavior of
both Jeffrey Harper Raines and Sister Rosamond for presentation to
Father Dunn the following morning. He knew what Dunn was going to
say. What? Hogwash! And then it would be up to him to convince the
man that Sister Rosamond would best be helped by being given a
different assignment, and that, in the child’s case, a
thorough professional examination was necessary. The evidence of
the Bible would be a point in his favor; indeed, it was practically
the case itself. Even someone as stubborn and opinionated as Dunn
would see the need for outside aid when confronted by that
handprint on the Bible. They would have to send the child to the
city for a few weeks while the examinations were conducted. He felt
relieved to have come to a positive decision on the matter. At the
same time he realized his own shortcomings; he was just not able to
deal with this case as he would have liked. No, it was better this
way. Call for the services of a professional and send the child to
the city. Then, possibly, the dark mood that had descended on the
orphans with the winter would dissipate somewhat. Yes, he told
himself finally as he switched off the lights and locked his office
door, this is the right thing to do.

He left the brick building and made his
way against the cold swirling wind to his car in the parking lot.
Now an exhausting thirty-minute drive to his home; he’d lost
all track of time when he sat down to organize and write out his
thoughts. He realized that still he knew no more than when
he’d first begun, only now he could see the frightening
questions on the page in black type. He wished he’d had
another cup of coffee before starting the drive.

Reaching his car, he stopped
abruptly.

What was that he’d just seen?
Passing before the window up there? That was the third floor, the
children’s dormitory. There were no lights, everyone was
certainly sleeping at this hour of the morning, and yet… and
yet…

He’d seen something pass the
window, like a flashlight or the flame of a candle. And
now—or was it his imagination stirred by shadows thrown by
the moonlight on dancing bare limbs—did he see figures moving
there, darting past the dark glass? He stood motionless for a
moment and then, as the chill began to gnaw at him, he pulled his
coat up around his neck. Yes! There! The flame of a candle passing
the window!

He walked back across the parking area
and up onto the orphanage porch, where the wind sang through cracks
in the wood. He unlocked the doors with his master key.

There was no sound on the lower floor.
After his eyes had grown accustomed to the dark, the empty
corridors and classrooms seemed haunted by long shadows that
suddenly leaped from his path or slid soundlessly along the papered
walls. He climbed the stairs, past the second-floor landing with
its tattered carpet and mothball odor, on up the stairway toward
the third floor. He walked with one hand grasping the smooth
bannister, mindful of his footing in the dark. He was careful to
make as little noise as possible; he did not, for some reason he
was reluctant to admit, want to announce his presence to whomever
was walking amid the children as they slept.

On the third floor he could smell the
path in the air where a burning candle had passed; the thick odor
of wax led directly down the corridor to the dormitory’s
closed doors. He moved through the corridor, stopping once and
wincing as a loose board squealed beneath him, and then his hand
touched the dormitory doors. The crack at the bottom betrayed no
light and there was no sound of movement beyond. He listened. He
hoped to confront a sister who had perhaps gotten up to attend to a
sick child but the relentless hammering of his heart, the fearful
pounding of blood through his veins, reminded him that he already
knew this was not the case.

Behind that door something waited.
Behind that door was the child.

He thought he felt vibrations with his
hand, as if someone—or more than one?—were on the other
side of the door and heard his heartbeats, counted them while
laughing into cupped hands. Go away, he told himself, go away. Get
away from this door, this place. Get into your car and drive home
and come back in the morning as if nothing had happened, as if you
had never seen a white trace of flame flicker briefly by the glass.
Get away. Get away while you can.

But no. No.

He opened the doors and stepped through
into the dormitory.

It seemed darker than the corridor. His
eyes strained to make out the jigsaw of bunk beds. A thin silver of
moonlight zigzagged across the floor from a window, cut in thirds
and quarters by the shadows of tree limbs. A branch scraped across
glass and made the flesh crawl at the back of his neck; the sound
reminded him of fingernails on blackboards.

And then he noticed something—too
late, and with a sudden rush of fear that made his eyes widen
involuntarily, made him back toward the doors that had now shut
behind him.

The beds.

The beds were empty.

Hands clawed at his legs; dozens of
hands moved over him like cold ants. He tripped and threw out his
arms for support but he was falling, falling, falling to the floor
as the bodies leaped at him from the blackness around the doorway.
He saw gleaming teeth, eyes round and wild, fingers curled into
awful tearing claws. He opened his mouth to cry out but one of them
jammed a fist between his teeth; other hands grasped at his hair,
scratched at his eyes, held him down against the floor. He thrashed
wildly in an effort to escape but the bodies he shook off returned
like angry wasps. And finally, bruised and beaten, he lay quiet
knowing it was not yet over.

One of them wrenched his head to the
right.

In the corner, standing with his back
against the wall, was the child. He held a candle; Father Robson
watched wax splatter to the floor in a round puddle. The flame,
swaying to a silent rhythm, cast red shadows on the wall around the
child’s head. The child’s eyes were in shadow still,
but his lips were tight and grim in the dim candle glow. The lips,
Father Robson thought, of a man.

And then the child whispered,
“We’ve been waiting for you, Dog Father. Now we can
begin.”

The children waited. Eyes glittered in
the candlelight. Father Robson heard the boys’ harsh breath
and saw it beginning to fog the cold glass of the windows. Begin?
Begin? Now he knew; he was too late. The power and madness of this
child had taken them over, had mesmerized them until they were all
echoes of his own black rage. Father Robson wanted to scream,
loudly scream scream scream for help without shame. For anyone. For
God. But he was afraid to try to scream; he was afraid he would not
be heard and the realization of his fate would drive him mad.

Baal hadn’t moved. He stood
holding the candle, watching the pale face of the man on the floor
beneath him, as the thin flame sharpened into a burning knife and
illuminated a pair of eyes that tore bloodily through the soul of
the holy man and emerged, grinning, with his heart.

There was a movement from the other
side of the room, from among a jumble of metal bed frames. Someone
was being held there by three of the children, someone moving,
shaking a head from side to side, someone with eyes wide and
glistening. A woman. A woman in a gown with her hair tangled behind
her as she lay outstretched on a bed. Father Robson struggled to
see her face but he could not. Their grip on him was too strong. He
saw her fragile white limbs outspread; the hands clutched
helplessly at the metal bars above her head.

Baal said to one of the children,
“Richard. You will go through the corridor and lock the
sisters’ wing off from the stairway. Go.” The child
nodded and slipped away into the darkness. In a moment he had
returned and Baal saw that it had been done. “Good,” he
said. “My good Richard.”

Baal cast his eyes on the man and
Father Robson saw a thin smile on his lips, as if he had already
declared himself the victor in this vile game of blind-man’s
buff. Baal said, “The time for struggle is past, Dog Father.
Things are simply as they are. Each passing day has seen my
strength increase. Now these are my children. This has been my
testing ground; the ultimate test was this…” He held
forth the candle. “The minds of children are simple and
innocent. The mind of an adult is somewhat more… complex. My
angel of light came bearing gifts, Dog Father. The gift of life;
the gift of freedom. And I give freedom to my faithful. Oh yes. One
touch and I make them kings. One touch and I destroy them. I hold
them. I hold you.”

The man’s face was contorted with
fear. Tears began to well in his eyes and mucus dripped from his
nose to the floor. Baal said, “No tears, Dog Father. You will
go to your everlasting reward; isn’t that so? Or have you
sinned and been fucking the sisters in the closets? Man of God,
where is your God? Where is He?” Baal bent toward the
offered, blood-drained face. “Where is He now, Dog Father?
I’ll tell you… He cringes and hides. He holds up a
cross and hides in the darkness.”

Baal straightened. “And now I
consummate my angel of light,” he said mockingly, and the
children around him moved aside to let him pass. Father Robson
worked his head around to watch.

Baal, his face gaunt and purposeful in
the light of the flame, stood over the bed where the woman lay and
gave the candle to one of the others. Father Robson saw that the
woman had stopped moving. She lay still even when the children
released her. Baal unhurriedly removed his pants and with groping
hands spread apart the woman’s legs. He moved upon her and
then, with a maddened intensity, tore at her gown, clawing red
rents in her flesh. Father Robson ground his teeth and closed his
eyes to escape the awful moment but he could not shut out the
sounds; the flesh against flesh, the moaning of the woman, the
urgent breathing of the child. Then he exhaled finally with a noise
that made Father Robson sick to his stomach. The bedsprings creaked
as the child stood and put on his pants again. And there was
another sound, a sound that made Father Robson spray tears and
sweat as he jerked his head up against the force of the
children.

He had heard the sound of licking
flames. The child had set the mattress afire with the candle. Fire
crept toward the spent, naked body of the woman. Dark smoke began
to billow up. Oh God, the holy man thought, the child will kill us
all. He thrashed and bit his lips but to no purpose.

Baal stepped back, his red eyes
reflecting tongues of flame. He moved to another bed and, extending
both hands, grasped the sheets. Father Robson watched, horrified.
It had not been the candle that had set the bed afire, as
he’d thought. It had been the hands, the body of the child.
Baal grew rigid and the sheets began to char where his hands
touched. On the already burning mattress the woman hadn’t
moved; Father Robson turned his head away as he saw flames catch
the remnants of her gown and spread into her fan of hair.

The child moved through the dormitory,
his hands outspread as if conducting a symphony of flame, touching
the sheets and pillows and mattresses, setting hungry fires racing.
Smoke choked them. Father Robson had difficulty breathing and he
heard the children around him coughing, yet none of them moved to
extinguish the fires. A glass shattered with the heat. The ceiling
began to char and blacken. Flames weaved like cobras before Father
Robson’s face. He thought he could smell his own flesh
burning.

And he was aware, as well, that the
smoke was spreading through the cracks of the doors out into the
corridor. Soon the sisters would be alerted by the smoke and heat.
But something tensed in his throat, choking him. He gagged on his
wild hopes of rescue. The wing where they slept… had been
locked off from the corridor. They would not be able to smell the
smoke until flames had reached the stairway.

Baal, framed by wild raging fire, stood
over him. The eyes of the others were on him; their clothing
smoked. Baal said over the noise, “Rend him to pieces,”
and the children fell upon Father Robson like greedy rats on a
bloating carcass, savage teeth sinking for veins. When they had
finished they stood in crimson pools and held out their hands for
Baal’s approval.

The child moved among them, mindless of
the heat, searching their eyes. Some he touched gently, a finger to
the forehead. When he withdrew the finger, it left in its place a
small burned print like a whirling design. With the marking of each
uplifted face Baal spoke a name:

“Verin.”

“Cresil.”

“Ashtaroth.”

They seemed to feel no pain but rather
to welcome his searching touch. Their eyes glittered; the finger
descended.

“Carreau.”

“Sonneilton.”

“Asmodeus.”

Windows shattered from the heat all
along the dormitory. Flames pulsated like a great fiery
heartbeat.

“Olivier.”

“Verrier.”

“Carnivean.”

Those Baal passed unmarked cast down
their eyes and fell to their knees before him. He cast a final
glance along the mass of huddled bodies and threw open the doors;
smoke and sparks rushed past him, driven by the wind through broken
glass. The chosen nine followed him from the fiery dormitory and
the last one, a hobbling Sonneilton whose name had once been Peter,
quietly closed and locked the doors on the other children.

The chosen followed Baal to the
stairway. From the other wing came muffled cries for help; glass
broke as someone tried to climb from a window. Pulled by the wind,
the smoke whirled beneath locked doors to choke the trapped
women.

They crossed the porch and reached the
fringe of trees. Baal held up a hand and turned to watch the final
act of his performance of flame.

The wind, roaring in, spewed sparks
into the sky. Flames had completely engulfed the third floor; as
the children watched there was a sound of sagging timber and the
fourth floor, the library with its aged volumes, caved in, sending
new fire tongues lapping. The gabled roof caught; tiles burst into
flame, lighting a thin smile on the face of Baal. Someone from
inside the structure screamed, a long and piercing scream that
shattered, for an instant, the noise of the fires. Someone else
cried out for God and then there were no more cries.

The groaning roof collapsed. Burning
timbers exploded into the sky. Flames leaped at the roof of the
administration building and in another moment it too had caught
afire.

Against the cacophony of crashing
timber and bursting glass, against the framework of black sky and
whirling white smoke, Baal turned to his chosen nine. He did not
raise his voice but still they could hear him above the flames. He
said, “We are now men in a world of children. We will teach
them what to see, what to say, what to think. They will follow
because they have no choice; and if we choose we will set the world
afire.”

His black eyes passed from one to the
other; they stood in smoking garments and on their foreheads the
fingerprint glowed red. Baal moved into the dark veil of forest and
the others followed without a backward glance.

The orphanage shuddered on
fire-weakened legs; its blood had flowed away in the smoke that
leaped up and up, dancing like the smoke of pagan fires. With a
final hopeless cry as from a scorched open mouth, the structure
trembled and crashed down in an explosion of flames that would burn
the forest into ashes before the coming of dawn.

TWO

“…and who is able to war with
him?”

—Revelation 13:4

11

HE HAD WOKEN at six o’clock and was now sitting in the
breakfast nook of his quiet apartment, reading the morning
newspaper as the sun threw purple shadows along the cobblestoned
street below.

This was his time of the day, before
the noise of awakening Boston reached him, urging him forward with
a note-filled briefcase. Now he sipped at a cup of hot dark tea and
watched the day brighten, thinking how beautiful and distant the
furry cirrus clouds looked over the towers of the city. In the last
few years he had found that he enjoyed the little things so much.
The tea’s sharp taste, the blues and whites that stretched
the sky and gave it life, the peaceful silence of the apartment
with its shelves of books and busts of Moses and Solomon: he wished
so much, as he did always these early mornings, that Katherine
could be here to share these things with him. But death, he knew,
was never the end. Her death had made him reanalyze his own life;
he knew she was at a blessed peace that he had finally learned to
share.

He scanned the newspaper’s front
page. Here was a catalogue of what had happened in the world while
he’d slept. The headlines screamed of a world hungry for
either relief or destruction. Every morning it was the same; in
fact, the horrible had become commonplace. There had been more than
a dozen murders in Boston alone. Kidnappings, arson, robberies and
beatings spread across the nation like a thread of blood from a
ripped-open wound. A bombing in Los Angeles had killed ten and
wounded thrice that many, perhaps, he thought, at the same time
he’d rolled over in his sleep; a mass murder in Atlanta while
he pulled the blanket up around him; gang warfare in New York while
his eyes darted beneath closed lids in pursuit of dreams. Here at
the top of the page a suicide pact, in the lower column abandoned
children. A tramway explosion in London, a burning monk in the
streets of New Delhi, a terrorist group in Prague holding captives
and vowing to murder them slowly, one by one, in the name of
God.

During the night, while he slept, the
world had moved and agonized. It had writhed in fits of passion.
Old wounds had been reopened, old hatreds stirred, until bullets
and bombs were the only voices to be heard. Indeed, even the
bullets and bombs spoke softly now. Soon, perhaps, the loudest
voice of all, that blasting voice that rocked nations and burned
cities to rubble, would descend screaming through the night. And
when he awakened the next morning and looked at the headlines,
perhaps he would see no headlines there at all, just a question
mark because then all the words in the world would be
powerless.

He finished his tea and pushed the cup
aside. The pain of the night had settled within him. And the pain
of the nights ahead was already unbearable. He knew that his
feeling of awful frustration also tormented many of his colleagues
at the university, the frustration of speaking out but never being
heard.

Many years before he’d had great
hopes for his books on philosophy and theology, and though they had
been academic successes, they had all died quiet deaths in that
limited literary arena. He realized now that no book could ever
change a man, no book ever quiet the rush or violent fever on the
streets. Perhaps they’d been wrong; the sword now was much
mightier than the pen. The sword wrote in red passages of carnage
and violence that seemed now to outweigh by far the black words on
white pages. Soon, he thought, the time for thinking would be past
and men, like automatons, would grasp guns to scrawl their
signatures in flesh.

He looked at the grandfather clock in
the hallway and noted the time. Today, fittingly, he was lecturing
to his morning class on the Book of Job and the theme of human
suffering. It had begun to concern him that time was passing very
swiftly indeed; he’d been lecturing day in and day out for
almost sixteen years with only a few visits to the Holy Land to
break the routine. It had begun to concern him that he should
always be either traveling or working wholeheartedly on another
book. After all, he told himself, he was past sixty-five—he
would be sixty-seven in three months—and time was passing. He
was afraid of senility, that disease of old minds, that horrible
thing of drooling lips and uncaring eyes, partly because in the
last few years he’d already observed the aging process in
several of the theology professors at the university. As head of
the department, it had been his responsibility to cut back their
teaching assignments or, as tactfully as possible, suggest they
work on independent studies. He’d hated being administrative
hatchet-man but there was no use in arguing with the Board of
Review. He was afraid that, in a few years, he would find himself
on that scholarly chopping block.

He drove his accustomed route to the
university and saw it awakening in the golden morning as he walked,
briefcase in hand, up the wide stone steps, flanked by time-scarred
statues of angels about to spring toward the sky, of the Theology
and Philosophy Building. He walked across the marble-floored
hallway and took the elevator to his office on the third floor.

His secretary said good morning. She
was a good worker, always there before him in the morning to
straighten his papers and arrange his appointments around his
classroom schedule. He made small talk with her for a few moments,
asking her about the trip to Canada he knew she was going to take
in two weeks, and then went on through the frosted-glass door
bearing in black letters the name JAMES N. VIRGA and, in smaller
letters, PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY, DEPARTMENT HEAD. In his comfortable
dark-blue-carpeted office, he sat at his desk and arranged his
notes on the Book of Job. His secretary knocked at the door and
entered with his appointment agenda.

He scanned the names to get an idea of
what was ahead for the day. There was a coffee meeting with the
Rev. Thomas Griffith of the First Methodist Church of Boston; in
midmorning a session with the University Financial Board to compile
budget information for the coming fiscal year; in early afternoon a
special seminar on the Crucifixion with Professors Landon and
O’Dannis in preparation of a public television taping; in
late afternoon a conference with Donald Naughton, one of the
younger professors who was also a close personal friend. He thanked
his secretary and asked her if she would leave Friday afternoon
clear of appointments.

An hour later, he moved back and forth
behind his podium, framed by the blackboard that bore his
distinguished handwriting tracing the probable lineage of Job,
identifying him as Jobab the second king of Edom.

The faces of the students in the
amphitheater watched him, dipped as notes were made, watched him
again as he emphasized his words with sweeping gestures.

“It was at a very early
time,” he was saying, “that man began wondering why he
must suffer. Why?” He threw up his hands. “Why me,
Lord? I haven’t done anything wrong! So why should it be me?
Why not that guy who lives over across the chasm?”

There was a murmur of respectful
laughter.

“That’s right!” he
continued. “And that’s an attitude and question that
lingers today. We cannot understand the type of God who is
represented to us as a kind Father yet who does nothing—at
least in our limited perception—to turn back the tide of
suffering from innocents. Now look at Job, or Jobab. He maintained
he was always a moral, upright man, as much a sinner as anyone else
but certainly no more so. And yet when he was at the height of his
power he was struck with what we believe to be a form of leprosy,
complicated also by what was most probably elephantiasis. He was
afflicted with swollen flesh that broke and tore with every
movement; his herds of camels were stolen by Chaldean thieves; his
seven thousand sheep were killed in a thunderstorm, his ten
children were wiped out by a cyclone. And yet Job knows himself; he
proclaims his innocence. He says, “’Til I die I hold
fast my integrity.’ Our minds boggle at this vast reserve of
faith despite his ordeal.

“The Book of Job,” he said,
“is primarily a philosophic meditation on the mysterious ways
of God. It is also a book that explores the relationship between
God and Satan; God observes as Satan experiments with the strength
of Job’s faith. So then this is the question: Does human
suffering come about because of an eternal game between God and
Satan? Are we simply pawns in a game that would stagger the
imagination? Do we exist only as flesh to hold the
sores?”

Eyes flickered up from notebooks, then
back down again.

He held up a hand. “If this is
true then the whole world, the universe, the cosmos, is Job. And we
either endure the sores, which are certain to come, crying for
help, or we say, like the Biblical Job, integrity. And this
is the philosophic core of the book. Integrity. Bravery.
Self-knowledge.”

He lunched on a ham sandwich and a cup
of coffee in his office while he worked up an outline on the
Crucifixion seminar. After his last class he returned and began
reading a newly published work entitled The Christians versus
The Lions, a lengthy account of early Christianity in Rome,
written by a scholarly friend who taught at the College of the
Bible. He sat with the afternoon sun glinting through the window
over his shoulder, carefully reading page after page and wondering
how he’d let his communication with the man grow so lax.
He’d heard nothing about the publication of this book and
here it had shown up in the morning mails. He made a mental note to
telephone the man the following day.

His secretary looked in. “Dr.
Virga?”

“Yes?”

“Dr. Naughton is here.”

He glanced up from the book. “Oh?
Yes. Show him in, please.”

Naughton was in his mid-thirties, a
tall lean man with inquisitive blue eyes and fair hair that had
begun to retreat farther and farther up his forehead during three
years at the university. He was a quiet man who rarely attended
faculty luncheons or teas, preferring instead to work alone in his
office down the corridor. Virga liked him, seeing in him a
conservatism that made a steady, conscientious teacher. The man had
been working of late on a history of messianic cults; the research
involved was very time-consuming and Virga hadn’t seen much
of Naughton in the past few weeks.

“Hello, Donald,” said
Virga, motioning toward a chair before his desk. “How is
everything?”

“Fine, sir,” he said,
taking the seat.

Virga relit his pipe. “I’ve
been meaning to take you and Judith to lunch sometime soon, but it
seems you’re so busy these days even your own wife
can’t keep track of you.”

He smiled. “I’m afraid the
research has kept me tied up. I’ve been spending so much time
in libraries I’m beginning to feel like a fixture.”

“I know the feeling.” Virga
looked across the desk into the man’s eyes. “But I know
it’s worth it. When can I see a first draft?”

“Sometime soon, I hope. I also
hope that after you’ve read it you’ll still feel
it’s academically justified.”

“Oh?”

“Well,” he said, leaning
forward fractionally, “I’ve gathered a great deal of
information on latter-day cults, those originating toward the end
of the eighteenth century up until the present. Almost without fail
these cults are based not on the deeds of the messianic figure, but
instead on his personality, his ability to attract converts into
his flock. The mass worshiped his talent for domination instead of
any true God-given vision. So the more recent cults evolved around
strong-willed fanatics who were adept at impressing their beliefs
onto others.”

Virga grunted. “And you’ve
stumbled into a religious viper’s nest?”

“Viper is the correct
term,” Naughton said. “The ‘messiahs’
shared two common motives: money and sexual power. In Great Britain
in the early nineteenth century the Rev. Henry Prince announced he
was the prophet Elijah and became the master of a religious
movement that regarded all female disciples as members of a huge
harem; Aleister Crowley built a castle on Loch Ness and proclaimed
himself ‘The Great Beast,’ converting hundreds of women
into his concubines; Francis Pencovic, Krishna Venta, established
the Fountain of the World in the San Fernando Valley and was later
blown up by a rebellious disciple; Paul Baumann, Grand Master of
Methernitha, a cult based in Switzerland, advocated the
purification of female converts by sexual intercourse; Charles
Manson held his Family on a threat of sexuality and murder. The
list, unbelievably, goes on and on.”

A line of blue smoke rose from the bowl
of Virga’s pipe. Naughton continued: “It might interest
you to know that on one occasion Crowley pulled down his trousers
and defecated in the midst of a formal dinner; then he urged the
guests to preserve his excreta because, he said, it was
divine.”

“Mankind under the direction of
madmen,” Virga mused. “Well, Donald, it’s a book
that needs to be written. I’m afraid men are only too willing
to be led by those who proclaim themselves divine but who are, in
essence, only as divine as Mr. Crowley’s…
offerings.”

Naughton nodded. Virga’s cool
gray eyes were sharp and intelligent through a thin curtain of
smoke. Naughton was amazed, as always, at how little Virga
reflected his advancing age. There were heavy lines around the
eyes; a fringe of white was all that was left of his hair. But the
expression on the face, the way the man carried himself, the way he
expressed himself, all these were controlled and precise. There was
none of the confusion, both mental and physical, that plagued many
other men his age. Naughton respected him greatly. Virga smiled
faintly and placed his hands on the desk before him. “Did you
want to see me this afternoon about anything in particular?
Anything pressing?”

Naughton said, “Yes there is. A
mutual friend of ours, Dr. Deagan of the Holy Catholic Center, has
been helping me compile information in the last few
weeks.”

“Has he? How is
Raymond?”

“Fine. And he wishes you’d
call him. But I received a message from him two days ago concerning
a report from a missionary family in Iran. It seems they understand
a new messianic figure is being financed by oil money in Kuwait.
They weren’t able to supply details, but Dr. Deagan tells me
a great number of people are making pilgrimages into Kuwait
City.”

“I hadn’t heard anything
about that,” Virga said, “but I suppose it’s
because I have my nose in a book all the time.”

“So far the missionary family
believes it to be an underground movement,” Naughton said,
“with little or no publicity. They only learned of it when
they discovered the members of their own village were leaving for
Kuwait. These people simply left their belongings and that was
it.”

“Throughout history, as you well
know,” Virga said, “that sort of thing has gone on. A
powerful man gains financial backing and converts the unfortunately
ignorant to a religious fervor. It’s not new. What’s
this one teaching?”

“No information,” Naughton
said. “The missionaries can’t even supply a name or
nationality. Evidently, though, the movement involves children in
some way.”

“How do you know?”

“Our missionary friends report
that the influx of children into the area from Iran, Iraq, and
Saudi Arabia is phenomenal. But they’re at a loss to explain
how the children are involved. Anyway, the missionaries are
traveling to Kuwait themselves in order to report
further.”

“Well,” said Virga,
shrugging, “in the past these men have thrust children up as
the vanguard of their flock in imitation of Christ. The pattern
seems the same.”

“But intriguing, nonetheless, due
to the utter lack of publicity. You’ll recall that one of the
most recent messianic figures purchased a full-page advertisement
in the New York Times. In this case the man, if it is indeed
a man, prefers secrecy.”

“Yes,” Virga said. He
struck a match and held it above the bowl of his pipe. “Yes,
that’s intriguing. That doesn’t quite follow the usual
outburst of ‘spiritual resurgence’ when a
‘messiah’ begins to take some sort of control over the
mass. Usually the name is shouted from the lips of poor followers
who find out too late they’re being used.”

Naughton cleared his throat. “Up
until now I’ve buried myself in libraries, digging through
books for the observations of others on messianic cults. Up until
now I’ve only been able to compile secondhand information.
Now I feel this is an excellent opportunity to document a gathering
of this nature personally. So I’d like to request from you a
leave of absence.”

“Oh?”

“Yes sir. I want to go to Kuwait
myself. I’d like to request a leave now in order to make the
arrangements.”

Virga had leaned forward, his eyes
shining. He wished he could be undertaking the trip himself.
“Can you afford it?”

“Well,” Naughton said,
“Judith wanted to go as well but I told her no. I can afford
myself.”

Virga smiled and turned his chair
around slightly so the afternoon sun streaked across his face.
Beyond the window the sky was a muted blue that held pink-edged
clouds. “I’ll arrange a leave for you,” he said
after a moment. “Off into the sky.”

“Sir?”

“I’m thinking aloud.
I’d go with you if I could. I need some foreign air. But
someone’s got to mind the store.” He swung back around
to face Naughton. “Can I ask that you keep me informed of
your progress? I’ll be very interested in your
findings.”

“I will,” said the other
man, rising from his seat. “Thank you.”

“Just remember me in your
acknowledgments,” Virga said. “I’d like for my
name to appear in print again one last time. And I still want to
take you and Judith to lunch one day before you leave.”

“All right,” Naughton said.
“I’ll be in touch.” He moved toward the door and
reached for the knob. Virga reopened the book and leaned back in
his chair.

Naughton turned again and Virga looked
up. “You know, sir, I find myself puzzling over the same
question that men have asked themselves ever since the time of
Jesus Christ. What if this one is… different? What if this
one isn’t false? What then?”

“If this is a false
messiah,” Virga said after a moment, “you’ll be
there to see how men can be tricked. If this is not a false
messiah, then,” he smiled, “you’ll have a
fascinating last chapter for your book, won’t you?”

Naughton stood at the door for a few
seconds. He nodded and closed the door behind him.

12

IN THE DIRTY desert city with its fringe of tin-walled tenements
Naughton thought he was still asleep, that perhaps when he had
imagined awakening at the rude kiss of rubber tires on concrete
runway he had been sleeping and that was part of the nightmare as
well. But no. The blazing white sun in a diamond-blue sky told him
no. This was not a nightmare from which he could struggle away
through the watery folds of sleep. This was real. Very real.

His cab, driven by a middle-aged man
with blackened front teeth and dark sunken circles beneath the
eyes, had stopped on a suburban street where traffic was snarled by
an accident up ahead. Someone had been run off the road into a
gully and voices were raised in a frantic Arabic chatter. Hands
waved in the air. The two drivers involved, both as burly as black
slabs of meat, squared off in an argument that bordered on
hysteria. But Naughton was not concerned by all that. He was
staring fixedly out the back window at something on the side of the
street, a patchwork of broken concrete and sand that, beyond the
stinking sores of tenements, became a dark ribbon through the
towers of Kuwait City proper.

There in the gutter, held by sticks
planted into firm sand, the skinned carcass of a dog rotated over
and over, over and over above a fire of newspaper and rags. Two
half-naked children watched the meat turn, choosing a spot at which
to rip when the feast was done, and the eyes of the dog stared
back, popping from their sockets like white marbles. The smell of
it reached Naughton and he instinctively recoiled. He would have
rolled up the window but the heat was too much and the smell would
have finally reached him anyway through the cab’s broken
windshield.

A loud crack! like the
backfiring of a car very near made him start violently. Up ahead
there was a haze of smoke in the air.

The driver muttered an oath and pulled
out of the line of traffic and up over the curb. As they swept
around the accident Naughton looked out to see what had happened.
One of the drivers lay on the concrete, bleeding profusely from a
stomach wound. The other stood over him, one foot on each side of
the body, and in his right hand was a smoking pistol. The man on
the ground clutched out weakly for the tires of the cab as it
passed him to regain the street.

Naughton said over the howl of the
engine, “That man was shot back there!”

The driver half-turned his squat
head.

“Shot! Do you understand?
Can’t you stop and help him?”

The driver laughed harshly. “Ha!
You Americans!”

Naughton looked back and saw that the
man with the gun was still standing over his fallen victim. Cars
pulled around the accident to continue down the street and their
movement whirled smoke around the man’s head in a lazy blue
circle.

The cab moved over gouged concrete
toward the outskirts of the city, through a maze of makeshift
dwellings. There were people everywhere, dark people in flowing
rags who grinned at him and tried to reach him through the open
window before he could slide away. They sprawled in gutters, their
eyes open and cautious but their faces already dead They stepped
out into the street from between the tenement houses and eagerly
watched the approach of the cab, as if he rode the engine of
destruction and destruction here was the guest of honor.

Naughton had been prepared for the
poverty but not quite enough. This land bothered him greatly; he
felt as if something were about to crash down on his head without
warning. He seemed to sense it in the acid pall over the city. The
smoke began to drift in during the early-morning hours, out of the
west where the desert (lipped and swayed like a lissome brown
woman. And during the night he stood on the mosaic-tiled terrace of
his hotel room and saw them there; the thousands of blinking fire
eyes that matched the cold silver starlids above. He was amazed at
their number, he was awestruck. Some of the reports had counted
upward of three thousand and that had been days before. Now
Naughton felt certain that over five thousand people crowded
together there between the walls of sand.

He had immediately, on viewing the
great sprawling assembly, written to both Dr. Virga and Judith.

To Dr. Virga he had written of the
horrible paradox of this country: on one side the beggars pulled
and cried on the garments of tourists, on the other the thin spires
of oil derricks shot up from the desert and dishdashah-clad sheiks
drove gleaming Ferraris on palm-lined avenues. Here the line
dividing the rich and poor was so sharp as to be utterly appalling.
He had written Dr. Virga of the gathering people and the
still-nameless messiah figure, a man who was completely
unreachable; Naughton had still not even been able to learn his
nationality. But there on the desert they waited for him. Each day
saw them kneeling toward the sun and shrieking out lamentations
because he had not seen fit to address them yet.

To Judith he had written of the country
itself, its mysterious facelessness and the colors of the desert,
the gold shimmering waves of midday and the thick black snake
shadows cast by the setting sun.

But there was something he’d kept
to himself. The number of violent incidents he’d witnessed
since his arrival two weeks before unnerved him; it seemed that
this country seethed with growing hatred. There was the smoke of
guns and fires in the air; this was a land at war with itself.

He realized he was being affected as
well. He was being hardened by the unconcern with poverty and
violent death; at one time he would have demanded that the
cabdriver stop to call an ambulance for the wounded man
they’d left behind. Now—and he wondered why—he
really didn’t give a damn and felt no shame about it. It had
shocked him, yes, as any raw act of violence would shock him, but
he rationalized that there was nothing he could do and left it at
that. This land breeds violence, he told himself. This was a hard
land, so different from America that it made him feel truly alien,
cold, and detached. Perhaps the natives lived in poverty and died
by the gun or knife because it was their destiny; to order anything
else would cause a disharmony, a disorder in the world like ripples
spreading across a pond. People died here because they got in the
way. Their way of life nursed violence until it was as prevalent
and bitter as the hot overhead sun.

Now the cab had left the rows of
tenements. The road smoothed, stretching long and empty over a flat
expanse of shimmering desert. The country was still in the midst of
hurried growth. Oil derricks stood gaunt on the horizon.
Superhighways cut the desert only to die sand-covered deaths far
from where they had begun. Many roads led nowhere, just winding and
winding in circles as if someone had built them as playthings to
while away the hours and then, tiring of the game, simply abandoned
them unfinished.

Ahead, between desert dunes that
shifted like the tails of dragons, lay the encampment. He had
visited it daily, moving in among the goatskin tents and aluminum
huts with his tape recorder over his shoulder, watching his footing
on the hard-packed, excrement-covered sand and stopping now and
then to speak with the Bedouins and Kuwaitis who, after eying him
suspiciously, always turned their back on him. Packs of howling
dogs roamed the encampment fighting over scraps from garbage piles;
flies by the thousands had followed people from all parts of this
land and now circled in dark clouds, landing to pick at festered
sores. The sick who had hobbled from the desert villages kept to
themselves; Naughton had seen them kicked and beaten to the ground
when they begged food from others.

In the encampment, as in the city, a
firm line was drawn. On one side the poor made their beds in simple
tents or on the sand; on the other the wealthy sheiks constructed
elaborate flowing tents with rich carpets, employing servants with
fans to beat away the flies and servants with guns to beat away the
beggars. For one of the wealthy to cross that invisible line was
suicide. Naughton, on his fifth day as an observer, had seen one of
them, drunken with hashish, stumble over that boundary into the
realm of the poor. At once he had been seized and thrown to the
ground by a score of men as others watched with glaring eyes and
the women screamed in wild laughter. The man had tried to get away
but they tore his robes and kicked him back, naked and bruised,
like a thin dark dog turned from the house. Naughton watched it all
silently, realizing from the burning faces that his interference
would mean his death.

The cab turned onto a long unpaved road
that led directly into the midst of the encampment. Naughton could
see the sun glinting fiercely off the aluminum-walled huts. He
could smell the stench of the human specimens gathered there,
waiting for… whom?

Naughton asked his driver, “Who
is this man?”

He didn’t answer. His eyes in the
rearview mirror never acknowledged a question.

Naughton leaned forward. Perhaps the
man hadn’t heard. He said in a louder voice, “This man
they’ve assembled to see? What do you know of him?”

When there was still no answer Naughton
muttered a curse. Try another tack. “Is he a prophet?”
he asked.

Backward bunch of bastards, Naughton
thought. Bastards all. This bastard was just as uncommunicative as
the rest had been. He settled back on the seat, feeling the hard
springs beneath him, and watched the line of huts come up to meet
them.

It was worse than it had been the day
before. The huts were packed side by side like sudden slums
constructed in the desert. Lines of clothes hung from roof to roof.
The beggars assailed his cab as it wound its way through the
haphazard dwellings; they grinned through broken teeth and shouted
foul curses at him after he’d passed. The sand was churned as
two beggars fought, rolling over and over into the road as a crowd
of people screamed with delight and passed money from hand to hand.
Naughton’s driver blasted them with a horn and swerved. Naked
children moved through the tents in the quarters of the sick,
throwing rocks or sand at the bedridden. Everywhere clusters of
ragged people swarmed like mad frothing animals and Naughton saw a
man with a knife, stalking a woman who fell to her knees and
screamed for mercy. Naughton wanted to strike out at them, to wipe
them from the face of the earth as cleanly as if he had created
them to begin with.

The cab slowed as a group of beggars
hammered at the hood. The driver shouted, “Get away or
I’ll run you down!”

Naughton reached over to roll up his
window, heat or no. When he did someone caught his hand and
squeezed it tightly. He looked up into the pleading dark eyes of a
young girl, possibly fifteen or sixteen, who stood pressed against
the door of the cab.

She said in a faint, tired voice,
“Money, please.”

Naughton saw that she might have been
pretty but for her protruding bones, sunken gums, and listless eyes
that made her appear already a corpse. She must have gone without
food for days. She whined, “Money, please.”

Her fingers were digging viciously into
the flesh of his hand. He reached into a pocket for a few coins and
gave them to her. “Here,” he said. “For
food.”

The girl caught up the money and stared
directly into his eyes; he felt a tremor of panic at the
point-blank gaze. She suddenly hoisted up her long dirt-edged skirt
so that he was staring into the dark triangle between her bony
thighs. Across her legs were rough-handed scratches, blue-black
bruises; scores of open sores gave forth a yellowish liquid that
had flowed almost down to her knees. He started in horror and when
she saw his eyes she laughed wildly, spraying spittle. And she was
still laughing, her skirt up like a whore’s banner, as the
cab pulled away. Naughton shivered with the bestiality of this
place.

At the other side of the encampment
they came to the clean tents of the wealthy, scattered across the
flatland and up on a rock bluff over the assembly. Here there were
the odors of spices and rich perfumes, of burning incense and
flowing silks. Great gleaming cars, their back sides raked by the
rocks and bodies of the poor, stood attended by armed servants.
Naughton noticed the dented front grill and shattered headlamp of a
nearby Mercedes-Benz. Dried blood was smeared along a fender where
something or someone had been struck down.

Naughton paid the driver and asked him
to come back to pick him up at dusk. The driver’s eyes were
impassive and Naughton knew he would again have to walk back to the
highway before finding a ride. He slammed the door shut and the cab
roared away in a flurry of sand and dark exhaust.

You bastard, Naughton said to his back.
All of them bastards. He plugged the tape recorder’s
microphone into its jack and strung its cord around his hand.
Moving among the tents of the wealthy, he saw the suspicious eyes
of the armed servants. He started to approach one but when the man
dropped his hand to his pistol Naughton moved away toward the
stench of the packed dwellings.

It was then that he noticed a new
addition to the encampment, something that must have gone up during
the night. It was a huge oval tent staked out on a clean white spot
of sand, removed from the encampment’s dirty rectangle.
Trucks with electrical equipment had moved around it and Naughton
saw workmen fencing in a generator. The folds of the great tent
undulated sluggishly in a hot breeze from the Persian Gulf. There
were no other dwellings near it and Naughton was drawn by its
solitariness. His boots sinking in the sand, he started walking
toward the equipment trucks.

“Hey! Sorry, old boy! I’ve
already tried that. No luck.”

Naughton turned.

A man wearing a khaki desert suit had
come from between two of the tents. He was a stocky,
broad-shouldered specimen; his exposed arms showed cords of muscle.
Two cameras were slung around his neck and clicked together as he
approached Naughton. In his late thirties at least, the man had a
tangle of light hair and gray eyes that had become red-rimmed from
too much sun. He’d been badly sunburned; some sort of greasy
ointment was applied to his forehead and the bridge of his nose. He
said, “I’ve already tried the workmen. But they
don’t know anything. They’re only employees.”

Naughton said, “I was hoping they
might tell me something about what’s going on
here.”

The man shrugged. “They were sent
from the city. They don’t know anything.” He held out a
hand. “I’m George Kaspar from the BBC. Scouting a
documentary. About to burn alive in this damned sun. Who you
working for?”

“Working for?”

“Yes. Your paper. You’re an
American, aren’t you? Don’t tell me the networks want
something on this.”

“Oh. No, no. I’m Donald
Naughton; I’m a professor of theology at Boston City
University. I’m doing field research for a book on messianic
figures. And you’re right about the sun. I never thought it
would be like this.”

“The eye of the beast,”
said Kaspar, nodding up toward that blazing spot of fire.
“Look at me. Fried alive and raw in a dozen places.
You’re here with a group?”

“No, regrettably alone. Had to
finance the trip myself.”

Kaspar grunted. “Goddamn,”
he said, brushing at a fly that had attached itself to his forearm.
“Bloody things just suck at you until you’re as dry as
a bone.” He held out a canteen. “Here. Better take
this.”

“Thanks. I’ve got
water,” said Naughton, indicating the canteen beneath his
jacket.

Kaspar laughed and took a drink.
“Water, hell,” he said. “That’s good
whiskey. And God knows I need it. Here I am up to my ass in sand
and God knows where the rest of them are. A cameraman and two
assistants, out fucking around somewhere in our van. They up and
left me out here. Fucking buggers. Three days out here and
I’ve had it.” He narrowed his eyes seriously. “I
mean it. Fucking had it. All this sprawled out here, this stink
and… you’re a writer? You’re writing a book on
this bloody mess?”

“A professor,” Naughton
corrected him, shielding his eyes from the sun to look over his
shoulder at the men connecting the generator cables. “I
wonder what they’re up to over there. Have you
heard?”

“Hell, yes. I’ve heard this
and that and this and that and all of it lies.” Kaspar
slapped at a fly circling his head. “The BBC tried to find
out what was going on through diplomatic contacts. No luck. Then
through personal friends. Nothing. Just a great mess of these
buggers out in the desert waiting. That’s all they’re
doing… just waiting. I saw a couple of fellows from The
Times here yesterday, a correspondent from one of your
magazines, and a few others from area publications. But this mass
of humanity is sickening. I was told to get my ass out here; I
wouldn’t have fucking come if it were left to me. I’m
going to have to go to the hospital when I get back.”

Naughton started walking away from the
huge tent toward the smoking expanse of huts. Kaspar walked with
him. “You’re not going into that mess, are you? Hell,
it’s a risk of life in that bloody caldron.”

They left the opulent tents and crossed
that invisible line over into the other side. The odors of
excrement, both animal and human, and the odor of something else,
indescribable in its baseness, hit them full in the face. Kaspar
drew back but then followed Naughton when he saw the other man was
going on.

“What’s this about a
book?” Kaspar asked. “You’re working on a
book?”

“Yes. I needed firsthand contact
with a mass religious assembly like this to—”

“Fucking buggers,” Kaspar
said. “Fucking buggers to leave me out here. I’ll fix
their asses.”

They walked shoulder to shoulder among
the walls of goatskin and hot blinding aluminum, hearing everywhere
sobs and shouts, screams of wrath and wild uncontained laughter.
They ran into a whirling black cloud of flies. The fires of burning
garbage piles glowed orange around them; the smoke drifted down
like a yellow door cutting off retreat. Rounding a cluster of
aluminum huts Kaspar gasped audibly and stepped back, bumping into
Naughton. Before them a pack of dogs spun in a mad death fight,
their slavering jaws snapping the air, over a thick piece of
tattered bloody meat. Neither Kaspar nor Naughton dared even guess
what the mauled bit of flesh had been; they made a wide circle of
the dogs and heard their growling fade in the distance.

“I’m going back,”
Kaspar said after another moment. “This is too bloody much
for me.”

“Go ahead. But it’ll be
easy to get lost back there,” Naughton replied.

“The hell with that,” the
other man said. He waved a hand and turned to retrace his steps in
the opposite direction.

But then he had stopped, frozen in the
sun, and Naughton heard the click-click-click of his cameras
bumping together.

Naughton looked to see what was wrong.
As he spun around, he was aware of figures darting amid the murky
haze of yellow smoke, shadows hiding behind walls and water
barrels. The smoke began to burn the back of Naughton’s
throat.

Kaspar said, “Great Jesus! Who is
that there? Did you see them?”

Naughton stood still and watched but
they were hiding. Around the two men the yellow walls dropped until
they were as close and tight as those of any prison.

“They’re following
us,” Naughton said finally. “Come on.” He grasped
the man’s shoulder and pulled him along as they ducked
through the narrow alleys. When Kaspar looked back Naughton felt
him go tense as he realized they—whoever they were—were
still behind them, following just out of reach and then hiding when
the two men turned to see.

And finally Kaspar turned and shouted,
“Get away you bloody bastards!” and was answered by a
thin piercing laugh that came to them through the silence of the
smoke.

They went on. At all sides they were
haunted by shrill laughter, mutterings, and screams. Dark faces
watched them; the dark faces held red eyes and had gleaming yellow
teeth as sharp as those of the dogs that battled for garbage and
human refuse.

At last they came to the far side of
the encampment where the sick were banished from the rest of the
assembly. The sun burned down on pitiful bodies coughing thick
liquids and blood into the sand. Some lay on cots, others sprawled
out on the ground as if claiming the right to die on a particular
spot. Stepping among the huts and bodies, the two men continued to
look back to make sure they were not still being tracked.

Kaspar said, “What is this place?
What’s going on here?”

“I don’t know,”
Naughton said. “Something’s gone wrong—this is
madness.”

“Madness?” someone asked.
“Madness? Who is there?”

Naughton looked around. An old man, so
thin his bones seemed to bear no flesh at all, sat in the sand with
his back to an aluminum wall. His skin was almost black while the
hair on his head was white and clean. The old man sat cross-legged,
his frail straw arms in his naked lap, and Naughton saw that he was
staring directly into the afternoon sun. His eyes were incredibly
black hollows. Naughton knew the eyeballs had retreated from the
sun’s power; the old man had been burned blind.

“Madness?” the old man
asked again, tilting his head to catch the voice he’d heard.
“Is someone there?”

Naughton bent down, squinting against
the sun reflected off the metal wall, and softly touched the old
man’s hard cheeks. The old man started at the touch and
jerked back but Naughton said, “I mean you no
harm.”

“Where’d those fucking
buggers go?” Kaspar asked.

“Who is there?” asked the
old man, fumbling weakly for Naughton’s hand, his own hard
fingers searching, searching, then finally lacing with the young
American’s.

“A soft man,” he said as he
felt Naughton’s hands. “No work against the weather.
I’m blind.”

“Yes,” said Naughton,
staring into those deep sockets. “You’ve blinded
yourself.”

“Just up and left my ass
here,” said Kaspar, his expensive Nikons cracking together
like pistol shots. “I’ll kill them.”

“There were men following
us,” Naughton said.

“Yes. I hear the beating of your
heart. I smell your fear.”

“I’m an American,”
Naughton said. “I want to know what’s happening here.
Have these people gone mad?”

The old man smiled, showing yellowed
teeth broken and ground into stubs, and shook his head as if he had
just heard a joke. “Mad? Mad? No. There is no longer any
madness. There is now only what is.” He turned his face
toward the heat of the sun and its golden fire settled in his
sightless eyes. “I can still see the sun; I am not yet blind
after all. And while I can still see there is no hope.”

“What?” Naughton asked.
“What?”

Kaspar said, “Let’s get out
of here, old boy. Take to the desert and get back to the
highway.”

“I came to this place with my
daughter and her husband,” the old man was saying. “A
new life, they said. Here we will find a new life, they said. And
here they left me. I don’t know where they are. She was my
daughter until she reached this place; then I knew her no longer. I
must burn it out. I must burn it out.”

“Huh?” Kaspar said.
“What’s that old cock talking about?”

Naughton leaned forward. “Who
have these people assembled to see? Who will give your daughter a
new life?”

The old man nodded. “Yes. A new
life is what she said.”

“Who will give her a new
life?”

The old man groped for
Naughton’s face; his fingers traced the lips and nose, felt
along his cheeks. “Can you help me find them? Perhaps they
will still go back with me. Help me.”

“Come on, Naughton. He’s
crazy.”

“No!” Naughton said harshly
over his shoulder. He turned back to the old man. “I’ll
help you. But who… what is the name of the man you’ve
come to find?”

The old man smiled again.
“Baal,” he said. “Baal.”

Something clattered off the wall of the
aluminum hut and fell to Naughton’s feet. A rock.

He looked up to see Kaspar ducking,
shielding the lens of his cameras with one hand. And beyond Kaspar
ragged hollow-eyed men and women stood in a semicircle. Naughton
could hear their breathing, coarse and hot. They held jagged
stones. A thin Bedouin in gaily colored rags reared back and threw
his weapon. Naughton dodged; the rock sang past his head and
cracked off the metal.

“Jesus Christ!” Kaspar
shouted. “Have you people gone fucking nuts? I’m a
British citizen!”

Someone else, a woman, threw her stone
and Naughton heard Kaspar grunt. Then the air was filled with them,
clattering off the metal wall and striking Naughton on the arms he
had brought up to protect his head. He looked down and saw that a
stone had struck the old man; his head was gashed above the empty
pools of his eyes. Kaspar shouted out in pain and staggered back,
holding his chest where a shattered camera dangled, the lens
dripping glass. Then Naughton saw another stone strike Kaspar
directly on the head and he fell to his knees, his head
dragging.

The beggars moved forward. Someone
threw an arm back to fling another stone and Naughton knew already
where it would strike, on the forehead over his right eye, as if he
had seen this in a dozen sweating dreams. He tensed his back
against the scorching metal wall.

A long gleaming black limousine roared
between Naughton and the beggars. Sand spattered across his shins.
He heard the solid thunk! as the stone, meant for him,
struck the window jamb of the car and bounced off. He dropped down
and saw that Kaspar was barely breathing.

The car doors opened. Two white-robed
Kuwaitis herded the beggars back. They obeyed, muttering in
menacing tones but subservient all the same. Someone took
Naughton’s arm and lifted him up.

“Are you injured?” the man
asked. Dark darting eyes beneath the traditional headdress, a thin
mustache above pouting feminine lips.

Naughton shook his head to clear it.
“No. No, I’m all right. Another thirty seconds and it
might have been different.”

The man grunted and nodded. He looked
across and saw the old man but did not move to give aid. He said,
“This scum is difficult. I am Haiber Talat Musallim.
You’re an American?”

“Yes. My friend there…
he’s hurt badly, I’m afraid.”

The man glanced down. Kaspar was lying
in a pool of blood. “This scum is difficult,” he said.
He motioned with a thick hand. “Please… my
car.”

Naughton shook his head; he felt
overcome and off balance. Leaning against Musallim, he staggered to
the limousine. In the air-conditioned, perfume-reeking car was a
white-uniformed driver and another man, blond and pale, in a dark
blue suit. Naughton said drunkenly, “My friend is hurt.
I’ve got to see about my friend.” He made a move to
climb out of the car, but Musallim grasped him clawlike on the
upper arm.

The man in the blue suit was staring at
him with vacant eyes. He slowly opened the car door, rose to his
feet, and said, “I’ll take care of your
friend.”

Naughton said, “No,
I…”

“I’ll take care of your
friend,” said the pale man in the blue suit, and as he
approached the figure on the ground Naughton saw that he walked
with an aggravated limp as if something was wrong with his hip
joint.

Musallim patted Naughton’s hand
and said calmly, “You’re all right now. You’re
among friends.”

And as the limousine roared off through
the tangle of blinding walls and emaciated bodies, Naughton turned
in his seat as weakly as if he had been suddenly drained of his
lifeblood. He was almost certain that he saw the group of beggars
moving forward again toward Kaspar, creeping creeping with their
hands tight around new stones.

And the man in the blue suit stood
watching.

13

“Here,” Musallim said as he took two thimble-sized
silver cups from a tray held by a white-uniformed servant,
“some tea would cool you. This heat, I know, must be
unbearable to foreigners. Me, I was born in the desert.”

Naughton took the proffered cup and
drank. The tea was black and very strong, with an aftertaste of
cloves. The two men sat within Musallim’s magnificent
gold-embroidered tent at the fringe of the encampment. Rich red and
gold carpets were spread across the sand. Musallim sat behind a
wide ornate desk and Naughton occupied one of two canvas armchairs
in the tent’s blessed shade. Naughton said, “This is
very good.”

“Someday I’ll control the
desert,” Musallim said. “Already I’ve cut across
it like the most skilled surgeon of your country. Water lines, gas
lines… I’ve strung them through the sand as if I
were,” he made a needle-and-thread gesture, “sewing
stitches. The people appreciate me for that.”

Naughton nodded. In the distance, over
Musallim’s droning voice, he could still hear the din of the
people bubbling in the pot of the encampment. “Could you find
out about my friend, please?” he asked.

“Your friend?”

“Yes, the man I was with. Mr.
Kaspar.”

Musallim waved a hand and leaned back
in his chair. Against the startling white of his dishdashah the
man’s flesh was the color of rust. “He’s well
taken care of. That rabble out there can be quite annoying. It is
hot, isn’t it?”

Naughton finished the tea and put the
cup down on a circular table beside his chair. He looked up into
the flat, hooded eyes of the man across the desk. “I
don’t understand what’s going on here,” he said.
“I’ve been researching my book for several weeks and
I’ve watched this crowd grow. Now it seems as though
they’ve finally gotten out of control. I don’t
know…” he ran a hand across his forehead to soak up
the droplets of sweat that hung, eager to break, over his eyebrows,
“I’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s
ugly. It—I don’t know.”

Musallim sat in silence for a moment,
his ring-laden fingers toying with the golden scrolls that
decorated the arms of his chair. “Mr. Naughton,” he
said finally, “there are many things in this life that seem
ugly. But later, on close and logical scrutiny, they begin to take
on a special beauty. You’re disturbed by what is happening
here because you do not yet understand. I’m at ease because I
do. And I would not have donated this land for such a purpose if I
did not feel it was worthwhile and very important. You’ll
see, Mr. Naughton. History will record this flat plain of sand as a
place of exquisite and divine purpose.”

Naughton had looked up sharply.
“You own this land?”

“Yes, this land and miles beyond.
Would you like more tea?”

“No. Thank you.” From the
corner of his eye Naughton caught the sudden brilliance of a
diamond as it gleamed from Musallim’s hand. “Please
explain this to me. I see madness and death here. Do you see
something else?”

“I see everything else,”
the other man said. He gazed at Naughton for a few seconds and then
his dark eyes flickered around the confines of the tent. He seemed
to be choosing the correct words. “My family was of very poor
stock, Mr. Naughton… or so I thought at the time.” He
held up a finger for emphasis. “They were Bedouins, nomads of
the desert. My father—oh I remember my father, his teeth
flashing in the sun, astride a great foaming white horse. He was a
strong-willed man who took what he wanted when he wanted and
who,” he glanced at Naughton and smiled self-consciously,
“beat his wife and children when he felt the need. He was a
man of the desert, Mr. Naughton, and more important, he was a man
of the spirit.”

“The spirit… ?”
Naughton asked.

“When he was still a young man he
controlled six families and their water wells. He was a man to be
reckoned with. Of course he… had his enemies. They despised
him as cowardly dogs fear all noble wolves. And even his own family
moved against him. I remember one night our camp was set up on
stone bluffs where he could stand and look out to the gulf…
I remember there was a full moon. And I remember our tents stirring
in the breeze and the gulf crashing beyond. It was his brother
Assaid who was the enemy… his own brother. He came to tell
my father that he’d gone too far. Too far, said Assaid. Like
telling the gulf to stop its gnawing of the land.

“My father had killed
someone—one of the well-keepers who had cheated him—and
he’d left his head on a stake to drip blood into the water,
to poison it as a message to those who would not give my father the
respect he deserved. And his brother had come to tell him that his
family was through with him. He had disgraced their name, said
Assaid. And he spit at my father’s feet. I remember that
because I saw the spit gleam in the moonlight.”

The man’s eyes were shining. He
leaned forward, his fingers tracing pictures in the air before
Naughton’s face.

“Assaid turned to walk back to
his horse,” Musallim said, “but that was not the end of
it. Oh no. That could never be the end of it My father, as I said,
was a strong-willed man. There was a knife at his belt. He
unsheathed it and my mother put her hands over my eyes but I pulled
away. And around the fire the rest of the men grinned as they saw
the naked Made. My father never drew a knife and sheathed it clean.
So he struck at his brother and the knife caught him here, up above
the shoulder blade. But Assaid was a strong man too, though weak in
the ways of the world. He turned and grasped my father around the
throat; they battled there in the moonlight, my father cursing and
Assaid gasping for air with the knife in him up to its black hilt.
They reached the edge of the bluff and my father, with a twist of
the knife that scraped against bone—I remember hearing
that—tossed Assaid over onto the rocks at the foot of the
gulf.” He looked up suddenly into Naughton’s eyes.
“With no regrets.”

Naughton was shocked by the unconcern
in Musallim’s tone of voice. The man didn’t seem to
realize he had been witness to a coldblooded murder. Naughton said,
“He killed his brother? Why?”

Musallim smiled faintly, cruelly, and
there was something about his smile that mirrored a strange
satisfaction. “Why? Why does a lion hunt a lamb? Why does a
vulture wait for the last gasp of death? It’s the nature of
the beast, Mr. Naughton; the glorious beast stalks, waits for the
right moment, then—” he reached out as if catching
something in the air “—the prize. The world spins on
that circle of victims, Mr. Naughton. All of us either stalk or are
stalked. It’s an inescapable fact.”

“But,” Naughton said,
“hopefully a man has progressed far enough over the lions and
vultures that he no longer needs to stalk.”

“Ah,” said Musallim,
holding up a hand. “The God that created this earth and all
on it was wise. He created the natural rhythm of life and death,
the circle of victim and survivor. We act in blasphemy if we fail
to observe His sacred wisdom.”

Naughton sat still. The din outside was
rising. It seemed to thrash the folds of the tent.

“What noble creatures the lions
are,” Musallim said, “to make themselves stronger over
the bodies of the weak. How wise and kind are the talons of
vultures, to rend away the dead and dying flesh and in so doing
clear the way for the strong. The struggle of life and death is not
a purposeless game, Mr. Naughton, it’s a thing of special
beauty. Do you understand?”

Naughton reached for the cup of tea and
swirled the residue at the bottom. He did not want to look into the
face of the man before him because a strange and terrible
philosophy glittered in Musallim’s eyes.

“The land my father left to me
wasn’t much,” Musallim said, “but the secrets
hidden from him were revealed to me. One day I found my land
swimming in a thick dark pool that had flowed up from the depths. I
scooped it up by the bucketful. I smeared it over my face and
rolled in it. On that day I traded my modest clothing for the
raiment of a wealthy man. On that day I finally knew the power my
father had left to me. And now I can build cities and move
mountains and change the course of water. Now I finally have the
opportunity to communicate to the world the logic of my
father.”

“I don’t
understand.”

Musallim motioned for the servant to
carry away the two silver cups. The man bowed and backed out of the
tent. “I have met a man,” Musallim said after another
moment, “who has taught me what I failed to see before.
Through him I have grasped the beauty of power. It’s so clear
to me, Mr. Naughton. He is the tooth of the lion, the talon of the
vulture. I have given myself to him in order to live in glorious
honor.”

The name the old man had spoken.
Naughton couldn’t remember it. What had it been?

“At first I thought him only a
prophet. Now I see him as so much more, so much more. The old
prophets spoke of a god who saw things as they could never be. Baal
sees what is and what shall always be.”

Naughton tensed involuntarily. Baal.
Baal. That was it. He’d read something about it somewhere
before. The word Canaan briefly came into his mind.

Naughton said, “Baal.”

“Yes,” Musallim said.
“Baal. The living Muhammad.”

The other man stood up abruptly and
walked to the tent opening. He could see the mad dancing figures in
the encampment beyond; the rising smoke dimmed the setting sun. He
was breathing heavily though he didn’t know why; he wondered
if it was safe to try to get back to the city. He said, “This
is madness. This is… madness.”

“No, my friend. The madness lies
in not accepting the reality of the world as it is. To suddenly
find oneself seeing life for the first time after so long being
deceived… that is a recovery from madness, isn’t
it?”

He was silent. He could see, in the
shadows cast by the dying sun, the great oval tent erected beyond
the encampment. He said, “This man has taken the name of a
heathen god. No more, no less.”

“Has he?” the other man
whispered. Musallim had moved quietly up behind Naughton. He
touched the American gently, up over the shoulder blade, and the
fingers reminded Naughton, oddly, of the touch of a knife.
“That was my reaction also, until I saw evidence of his
miracles. I’ve seen the holy fire leap from his fingers.
I’ve seen him kiss the sand and cause a flower to grow.
You’ll soon discover a truth that will silence all the lying
voices. The crowd waits for Baal. His disciples have roamed this
land whispering his name to those who would hear. I’ve seen
the converts arriving, in increasing numbers, day after day. But
this night, Mr. Naughton, Baal breaks his silence…
there.” He pointed beyond to the huge tent and the humming
generator. “And tomorrow will be the first day of a new
world.”

Naughton turned and said hurriedly,
“I need to send a cable immediately. Is there a telegraph
office this far from the city?”

Musallim held up his hand to quiet the
other man. “No time, my friend. No time.” And almost
with the end of his sentence there began the deep hollow clamor of
a bell somewhere in the encampment, over and over until it seemed
as if first one person moaned with the bell, then a dozen, then a
hundred, until the encampment reverberated with the sound.

“He is come,” said
Musallim, his voice trembling with excitement. “He is
come!”

14

THE DAY HELD ON to life by a thin red thread gashed along the
horizon. Above it the sky was starless as a lowered blackout
curtain.

All across the wide encampment the
fires flickered, the lights of a city perched on the brink of a
desert no-man’s-land. At the tolling of the bell the noise of
the assembly, their howls and curses, suddenly rumbled to a halt
until there was only the barking of the camp dogs.

And then, as Naughton stood cold and
transfixed at the mouth of Musallim’s tent, the mass of
humanity began to rise up from the smoke-enshrouded encampment.
They had thrown all consideration of dignity away; Naughton saw
them running for the tent beyond as if they were a pack of maddened
animals, snarling and snapping at each other, most of them in
filthy rags and many entirely nude. They called out the name over
and over, shrieking and begging, as they sent a cloud of sand that
spun whipping through tents like desert devil spirals. Naughton saw
many of them trampled; one would fall, tripping a score of others,
and then there would be a crush of bodies, all arms and legs and
heads, fighting to get free and find room inside the great tent
ahead. The wealthy ones, clad in shining gold robes and dazzling
jewelry, ran shrieking with the rabble; their servants, in the
lead, struck down people right and left with the butts of rifles.
And still the bell boomed on and on like a great commanding voice
and the assembly shrieked the answer Baal Baal Baal until it
became so loud and terrible Naughton put his hands to his ears.

Wherever the main body of the assembly
had passed, the torn ground was littered with the broken bodies of
those dead and dying. Then came the sick, struggling through the
thick sand on crutches and crawling on their bellies like snake
skeletons while angry-eyed dogs nipped at their heels and, taking
hold of ripped clothes, worried the wasted bodies mercilessly.

Musallim said quietly, “It is
time for us to go, Mr. Naughton. Our place is waiting.” He
opened a desk drawer and reached inside. His hand emerged with a
shining ruby-encrusted revolver.

Naughton was watching a fight that had
broken out at the tent’s aperture; men and women battled with
each other to gain entrance and finally vanished in a swirl of
sand. Musallim caught his elbow and urged him from his safe refuge
into a maddened horde beyond.

As they neared the tent Naughton saw
how huge it really was; its appearance had been deceptive. Now the
wind beat at its billowing sides and the entrance swallowed swarms
of ragged figures. Naughton heard a click! as Musallim eased
back the hammer of his revolver. Around them the masses churned
with glittering teeth and grasping hands, their voices calling out
the name even as they battered each other. Musallim shouted at a
group of beggars to make way and one of the men, a cruel savagery
in his eyes, leaped for Naughton. Musallim’s arm jerked out
and a pistol shot flung the man away.

They reached the tent entrance, which
was clogged by the shouting hordes, and to Naughton’s horror
Musallim began indiscriminately firing into the dark clot of bodies
until a path was made and the two men were able to slip
through.

Inside more than one thousand people
crowded shoulder to shoulder, kneeling in the sand. Glittering
golden chandeliers hung suspended by cables from the ceiling,
illuminating in harsh white a sea of heads and bodies in motion
like waves. Naughton followed Musallim as he elbowed his way
through the mob, brandishing his gun and shouting threats, but the
American kept a careful watch over his shoulder in case of an
attack from behind. They reached the front of the shouting, sobbing
mass and then Naughton saw the immense statue to which the assembly
seemed to be praying. High atop a pedestal of gold was a primitive
statue of a man. The arms were thrown across the chest in an
attitude of superiority and the elongated head, almost triangular,
showed thin slits of eyes and a cruel slash of lips. One of the
most remarkable, and certainly most disturbing, aspects of the
strange artifact was its sexual organs; the penis jutted forward
almost four feet and the testes were great black spheres. Naughton
stood motionless for a moment, staring at the figure; beside him
Musallim fell to his knees and blended his own pleading voice with
those of the others. The figure had been carved by a time-lost
master; beneath the black stone actual rippling muscles bulged. The
features were fierce and demanding. Its eyes seemed to follow
Naughton as he stepped forth from the throng and reached out to
touch the stone.

It was then that he almost tripped over
something that cried out and scuttled away. He looked down and saw
an Arab child in rags, its eyes wide and frightened and its body
reduced to the merest house of bone. The elbows looked as sharp as
daggers and the knees were flat pads on rails of legs. Naughton
decided the child was male and that he had probably fallen and been
injured in the rush of the crowd. As he looked closer he saw a
metal collar around the child’s neck, attached to a chain
that let out about three feet of slack, then joined to a metal
spike driven firmly into the sand. The child seemed on the verge of
hysteria; he cringed, holding up his hands for mercy from the man
towering over him.

Naughton stepped back a few paces,
realizing with a curious and alien sense of power that, if he had
so desired, he could have crushed the child with one well-placed
slam of his boot.

The great clamor of the bell stopped so
abruptly that the sudden silence made Naughton’s ears ring.
The assembly was quieted; figures lay prone on the ground or
kneeled in deference to the glowering statue. Naughton, breaking
out in a sweat of absolute fear, looked around for Musallim, but
the man had been sucked into the maelstrom. It was not so much the
man Naughton sought as the safety of his revolver. Now, standing
amid the sour smells of sweat and anticipation, Naughton again felt
compelled to seek the eyes of the idol. Its gaze rooted him to the
spot. He heard a roar in his head like someone shouting at him from
a great distance and he said, No no this cannot be!

He was awed by the utter power of the
figure as it stood triumphant over the child. How strong and firm
it was, he thought. It was the master of them all. When
they’d all died and their flesh had decayed back to the dust
it would still be there, haughty and sure, in its stone body that
had worn the coats of countless ages. He was suddenly ashamed of
his frailty. He wanted to fall to his knees and hide his face, but
he could not. He trembled, caught between the statue and the mob
and unable to turn his back on either.

Naughton was aware of a new sound. The
wind had risen to a high-pitched wail that ripped past the great
tent. Around him the walls were beaten by the fists of those who
had not found room inside. The tent shuddered and rippled. Ropes
and support beams groaned. Naughton thought for an instant that the
entire enclosure and all in it would be ravaged by the force of the
gathering sandstorm.

From behind him, at the rear of the
mass, someone screamed brokenly, a strangling sound. Naughton
turned to look over the assembly but he couldn’t see back as
far as the source of the sound. He thought another fight had broken
out. And then a Bedouin very near him cried out and put his hands
over his ears, throwing himself to the ground and rolling amid the
other bodies.

Naughton stood as if in a trance, the
sweat beading on his face and dripping softly to his collar.

He watched as the throes began to
spread. The wealthy Kuwaitis and Bedouin beggars alike took up the
same moan, the same terrible cry of hatred. Scattered fights
erupted. Naughton saw the gleam of bloodlust in their eyes as they
sprang at each other’s throats. He drew back against the
statue, feeling somehow protected by its bulk. When the men and
women struggled to their feet and attacked each other without
hesitation the screaming, moaning din rose and rose until Naughton
thought he was going mad. The noise pounded at his temples and he
cringed, unable to protect himself.

He saw men ripping the clothes from
women and then copulating with them in the churned sand. Women
threw their skirts over their heads and spread their legs for
anyone who would take them. Gradually the fighting altered itself
into an endless series of private sexual combats, but here and
there new fights began over partners. Naughton saw men and women
wildly hammering each other with no shame nor guilt; women used
brutally and then thrown aside for the next pair of ready thighs.
He was sickened but could not turn away; it was beyond his power to
turn away. A copulating pair rolled against him and he stepped back
out of their way. Someone, a Bedouin, screamed something in his ear
and leaped for him. He wrestled away from the man and saw the
Bedouin dragged down into a heap of struggling bodies. He moved
back to get away from sweating nude figures plastered with sand and
as he did he stumbled again over the child. He said,
“Goddammit!” and kicked out blindly, hearing a grunt as
his boot struck flesh. A hollow-eyed woman with gray decaying teeth
groped at his crotch. He swung out at her, his stomach reeling, and
caught her solidly beneath the chin. Another woman clutched at his
back, her nails raking open his shirt while her teeth tore at his
ear. Naughton cursed and pushed her off, his chest heaving and
blood dripping down from his ravaged earlobe. A gaunt man in
stained robes kicked at his groin, but Naughton caught the
man’s ankle and heaved him backward onto a stuporous nude
couple.

He had no time to think; the blood
boiled in his brain. Goddamn them, he said. Goddamn all of them to
hell. They were going to kill both themselves and him too; that was
it. This would go on until they were all dead. He heard pistol
shots and wondered if he could find Musalhm. He could hardly
breathe for the awful stink. He was choking. Goddamn them, he said.
They’re trying to kill me. He stumbled against two Bedouins
embroiled in a knife fight; one of the men bled from a long gash
across his chest and his weak eyes mirrored the loss of blood. The
draining man saw Naughton and, turning toward him with a foul
curse, lifted his arm to strike with his weapon. At once his
opponent took advantage; his arm flashed as he drove his weapon
into the small of the wounded man’s back.

Naughton picked up the fallen
man’s knife and backed away as the victor approached like a
dark juggernaut. Naughton screamed, “Get away!” but his
voice was lost in the raging din. He saw murder in the eyes of the
other man. Someone behind Naughton shrieked loudly into his ear,
and as he spun around to strike he tripped over a body and fell
heavily, at the same time tearing the knife back and forth with
newfound strength to save his own life.

And then the moaning ceased.

Those fighting in bloody sand stared as
if someone had abruptly startled them from their anger. The
copulating bodies slowed their sexual throes. Naughton saw Musallim
standing halfway across the tent, the gun still in his hand. Their
eyes met.

Naughton trembled in rage and
confusion. His arms and chest were sticky and warm, but he was only
dimly aware that he had bitten into his lower Up. He felt feverish,
on the verge of collapse. As the sweet smell of blood reached him
he dropped the knife and, like a wounded animal, pressed his face
against the wet sand.

He had slashed the throat of the
child.

With a cry Naughton pushed at the slack
body and dragged himself through the sand. The child’s eyes
were open above its horrible mauled throat; they stared blankly at
Naughton and the wound made him think the child was laughing
through blood-caked lips. Naughton dragged over bodies that sought
to touch him, to clutch at his drawn face and tear strips from his
tattered shirt. He hid his face from them and cringed at the kiss
of crawling hands.

And then the sound grew even louder,
they were calling the name over and over. He felt as if he were
encased in a vault with fleshy walls. He reached out and touched a
woman’s bare thigh. She sucked eagerly at his mouth. Around
him they lifted their arms to the ceiling and the name Baal Baal
Baal whirled about his head. When he took a breath it was the
breath of Baal. When he clutched at slippery flesh it was the flesh
of Baal. When he kissed a pair of straining lips they were the lips
of Baal.

Sweat filled his eyes. His vision
became cloudily dreamlike. He suddenly felt elated and free,
caressed intimately by a woman—or more than one
woman—he had never even seen before. The smell of blood had
seemed to heighten his general sensory awareness. He ripped at the
remnants of his shirt, suddenly wishing to be rid of it, and a
woman bit like a wild thing at his stomach. The voices around him
reached a fever pitch and he let the fever take him. The name
throbbed within him. It had already filled his mouth before he
could speak. He said, “Baal.”

Through his blurred eyes he saw men
moving among the assembly. One of them he seemed to recognize
though he couldn’t remember from where. The multitude
shrieked in a frenzy. He tried to rise up but was too weak; he
remained where he was, his head down. And then someone took his arm
and began to pull him steadily to his feet. The grip was tight and
strong. Naughton could feel nails biting into his flesh. He tried
to see who it was but he could not; the man towered over him like
the bulbous-organed statue.

A finger touched his forehead.

He felt a sensation like a mild
electric shock course through him; it set him on fire and made the
blood tingle. He opened his mouth to cry out in an ecstatic agony
as his blood turned to liquid fire. Then the man released him and
was gone in the crush of the assembly.

Someone else moved beside him and held
him as his knees sagged. He looked across and through the mist
could make out the placid, drained face of Musallim. His chest was
marked with the paths of riotous fingernails and his headdress had
been torn away. Naughton blinked. On the man’s forehead,
directly between his eyes, was a small red mark that looked like
some sort of stain. No, Naughton told himself, no stain. No stain.
A fingerprint. A fingerprint.

When he reached out to touch it with
grasping empty fingers his knees finally buckled.

15

WHILE HE WAS PACKING Virga came across the copy of Time
magazine that had arrived in the mail some days before. He had read
it cover to cover, concentrating on the article that had first
attracted his interest. Now he took the magazine and walked through
the gray-carpeted hallway into his study. He switched on the lights
and sat at his desk to reread the article because in the space of a
few days it had become more meaningful than he could have
imagined.

It was under the heading
Religion. Two words, in the magazine’s bold typeface,
began the article: The Messiah? There was a picture of ragged men
and women huddled around a fire, leering and gesturing toward the
camera. And another picture, enlarged and very grainy, showed a
figure standing on the balcony of a great turreted palace. The
caption read “Baal.”

Virga reached for a pipe from the rack
on his desk and lit it thoughtfully. The article contained a
piecemeal picture of the swarm of people who had flooded into
Kuwait and gathered at a religious shrine erected in the desert.
The correspondent had evidently been able to work only with
secondhand sources and thus the philosophy of the “Baalism
movement” was not clear; the article indicated that
“Baalism” sought to reinstate individual power. But the
primary figure, this mysterious man who called himself Baal,
granted no interviews and gave out no public relations material.
Kuwait City and its surrounding desert villages, said the article,
“are on the verge of an uncontained religious hysteria due to
the very presence of this man, whom some recognize as the living
Muhammad, the chosen one, the Messiah.” Virga closed the
magazine and pushed it across the desk.

He sat motionless. This was certainly a
madman who had taken the name of an ancient Canaanite god of
sexuality and sacrifice. But why? For what purpose? The worship of
Baal, some fifteen hundred years before Christ, involved
extravagant and loathsome orgies, child sacrifice, and the
transformation of the temple into a house of sodomy and
prostitution. It was unbelievable to Virga that any sane man should
hope to identify himself with a figure whom Jehovah had ordered
banished from the land of Canaan. Under the worship of Baal,
primarily a god of fertility, Canaan became a marketplace of flesh
and savagery; Virga knew that archaeologists who dug the ruined
Canaanite cities at Hazor and Megiddo found abominations shocking
to a modern world: skeletons of infants stuffed into rude earthen
jars for sacrificial burial, idols with warriorlike features and
hugely exaggerated sexual organs. There were other times and
places, as well, in which the name Baal had surfaced: about three
thousand years before Christ he was the “storm-god” of
the Amorites; in the sixteenth century, having fallen from grace by
the hand of Jehovah so long before, he preferred to cast his lot
with the darker fates and was identified by demonologist Jean Wier
as a demon prince with three heads: of a man, a toad, and a
cat.

And this man, this “Baal,”
was the one whom Naughton had gone to find.

Judith Naughton had telephoned Virga
one afternoon at his office.

“I was wondering,” she said
calmly, “if you had heard anything from Donald in the last
week or so?”

“No, I haven’t,” said
Virga. “I expected him to be back by now. He
isn’t?”

“No.”

Virga waited for her to say something
more. When she didn’t he said, uncomfortably, “Well,
he’s probably all wrapped up in his project. You know how we
so-called men of learning act like children when we’re
working. We lose all sense of time. By the way, wasn’t
Timmy’s birthday last week? What is he now? Seven?”

“Yes. Seven. Donald bought him a
present before he left.”

“Oh. Anyway, I really expected to
hear more from Donald by now. I received a few letters, just
general information on how he was progressing. But nothing in the
last three weeks. Actually I need him back to give me an idea of
the content of his courses for next semester. Any notion when
he’s returning?”

“No,” she said. Virga heard
her suddenly choke.

“Judith?” he asked.
“Is anything wrong?”

And when he met her at lunch the
following afternoon he noticed her trembling hands and the swollen
pouches beneath her eyes. He ordered a drink for her and said,
“Now. You haven’t told me what the problem is. Here I
am doing my best to cheer you and you won’t give me an
inch.” He smiled gently. “I don’t understand the
modern woman. I suppose I should give up trying.”

She returned his smile, awkwardly, and
Virga saw that she was extremely disturbed. He leaned forward
slightly and said, “I’d like to help you if I
can.”

Judith looked into her drink; Virga
knew she was deliberately avoiding his gaze. She toyed with the
stem of the glass and said, “I did receive a letter from
Donald. A week or so ago. I didn’t know what to do; I
didn’t know whom to talk to. I thought maybe it was some kind
of joke or something; I don’t know what I thought.” She
reached into her handbag. The letter was folded and refolded and
bore the stains of a long journey. She slid it across the table to
Virga. “Here,” she said.

He opened the envelope and carefully
unfolded a piece of tattered paper. There was only one word on it,
scribbled in an almost illegible handwriting. The word
Goodbye.

Virga said, “This isn’t
Donald’s handwriting. He didn’t send this.”

“Yes,” she said. “I
recognize the handwriting except it’s distorted and
hurried.” She put a hand to her face. “I don’t
know what I’ve done.” She began to tremble and caught
back a sob.

“Did he tell you where he was
staying?”

“Yes. I called them but they told
me he’d left all his clothes and suitcases and just…
gone.” She looked up, suddenly pleading with him. “We
never had any trouble. Honestly. Just, you know, arguments over
little things. But never anything to make him just decide to leave
me with no warning. This is not like him…” She dropped
her eyes, ashamed at having dragged him into this. “What am I
going to do?”

Virga sat with his hands folded beneath
his chin. The Time magazine lay on the desk beside him.
Judith’s eyes, lost and hopeless, had forced his decision. He
had discussed with Dr. Landon the possibilities of his assuming the
duties of department head for a week or so; he had made his airline
connections and hotel reservations in advance.

Judith had been correct; such an action
was not in line with Naughton’s cool, restrained character.
And Virga remembered the handwriting, like the mad scratching of an
animal’s claw on paper. And now this… this madman who
called himself Baal and who was perhaps responsible, directly or
indirectly, for Naughton’s letter. He felt the heat of
challenge course through his blood. A madman, a false messiah who
had encouraged thousands to pay homage to him there on the desert.
A man of reason and intelligence suddenly throwing away with a
scrawled word his wife, his work, his life. Was there a connection?
Virga stood up, filled with new resolve, and went back to his
bedroom to finish packing.

On the following day Virga was flying
into the rising sun in a TWA Boeing bound for Lisbon, still hours
away. From there would be a connection to Cairo, then across the
jutting triangle of Saudi Arabia to Kuwait. He drank two scotches
and tried to concentrate on The God-Myths, a book he had
brought along, to sharpen his recall of the pre-Christ Canaan
fertility rites and the significance of the warrior-god Baal. Baal,
as he’d remembered from his own education on pre-Christ
cults, was vanquished from the land by Jehovah, in that period of
history called Yahweh. From that time the people of Yahweh grew to
despise the memory of Baal.

It interested Virga how the god Baal
had become the demon Baal. Perhaps it was only man’s memory,
reacting to the vile orgies and sacrifices of children performed in
Baal’s temple; perhaps it was the memory of Yahweh’s
destruction of Canaan, passed down from mouth to mouth over tribal
campfires and finally depicted in Joshua in the Old Testament. But
a question haunted him: was Baal only a myth? If Jehovah was a true
entity, as Virga believed, then what about the minor gods, like
Baal and Seth, Mot and Mithras? But in any event, this man had
taken the name Baal for a purpose and Virga was intrigued to find
out why.

He was unprepared for the pandemonium
at Kuwait’s International Airport. Bone-weary and afflicted
with jet lag, he took his suitcases and hailed a taxi to get away
as soon as possible from the crush of journalists with their
cameras and sound rigs. On the highway into the city the sun
shimmered in hot waves that rolled and broke across the barren
flats. He had visited the Middle East many times before and was
well-versed in both customs and language; he found always that the
land looked either very old or very new, either ravaged by time or
just awakening from a sleep that had spanned the centuries. He
reached into his coat and from a tube spread a balm over his
forehead and the bridge of his nose to prevent sunburn. The highway
seemed congested with all manner of vehicles from limousine on
down, and Virga saw scattered accidents here and there. On each
side of the highway wrecked and abandoned car hulks had been set
afire. In the distance the towers of the city undulated in the heat
and, south of them, smoke rose up to the sky in a thousand dark
banners. Virga knew it was the encampment Naughton had
described.

As they neared the city Virga saw that
ramshackle tenements had been constructed to handle an overflow of
people. Prefabricated houses and goatskin tents simmered side by
side on the flat landscape. And in the sky there was always a slow
whirl of smoke that at times drifted across the concrete and made
the driver skitter into the sand to avoid heaps of rotting food and
bundles of clothing.

In the city Virga felt he had finally
caught up with the war; he was appalled. Groups of angry-eyed
beggars heaved stones through car windows and uniformed Kuwaiti
police officers, armed with revolvers and batons, surged into them
to force them away from the roadway. The beggars rocked parked
automobiles back and forth, flipped them over on their sides. Fires
burned through tenement sections; in the midst of the city several
buildings had been set afire. Twice Virga’s driver cursed and
swerved to miss a body sprawled in the car’s path.

The driver put his foot to the floor
and roared through a group of Arabs expecting him to slow. They
leaped back, cursing, and one of them threw a stone that glanced
off the fender. Virga knew that he had entered the land of the
insane. Here the insanity was brother to the smoke. Blown by the
wind off the gulf, it was everywhere, and he was fearful that if he
inhaled it too deeply it would bring on madness.

They arrived at his hotel. Virga took
his suitcases in through the shattered glass doors of the lobby.
Fragments glittered on the rich dark carpets. One wall, he noted,
was punctured by two neat round bulletholes.

The Kuwaiti at the reception desk, a
young man in a cream-colored suit, rang for a boy to carry the
cases. “Dr. Virga, yes? It’s good you reserved a suite.
The Americans have landed, yes?”

“I was unaware there was a war
on,” he said, motioning to the smashed windows.

“Last night the scum overflowed
the streets. The Holiday Inn and the Hilton were set afire. Nothing
left now but hulks. There’s not much we can do.”

“I see the police are
out.”

“They have to be,” said the
Kuwaiti, shrugging. “If they weren’t we’d have no
order at all. And three-fourths of the officers have deserted their
jobs. Military units are stationed in the city and there are
curfews, but there’s not much that can be done to stop the
property destruction. The jails and hospitals are crowded. What can
be done with these people? I’ve even started carrying a
gun.”

Virga looked around the lobby. It was
deserted. Chairs were overturned, mirrors broken, ornamental
pottery ground into bits. A gold and green tapestry had been ripped
down from the ceiling. A small fountain, now drained of water, was
filled with glass.

“I apologize for the condition of
our vestibule,” the man said. “Too many stones and no
one able to control these people.”

“No,” Virga said,
“that’s all right. I understand.”

“You have come, of course,”
he said, “to seek Baal?”

Virga raised his brow. Beside him a
slim young man bent to pick up his suitcases.

“All the rest of them have. The
airport has been jammed; the highways are almost impassable. I
understand the airport will be closed by military order soon.
They’ve come here from all over: Greece, Italy, Spain. The
wealthy ones arrived early. They moored their yachts in the harbor
or brought their own aircraft; the poor got here anyway they could.
Of course no one stays in the city. They’re all out…
there.”

“Have you seen this man
yourself?” Virga asked.

“Oh no. Not myself. But I know
people who have. And of course the place is packed with journalists
seeking interviews.”

Virga reached into the inside pocket of
his jacket and unfolded the Time magazine page with its
photograph of the man standing on a balcony. “Do you know
this place?”

The Kuwaiti leaned over and looked at
it carefully. In the far distance Virga heard gunfire that seemed
to go on and on, then stopped with disturbing suddenness. The man
said, “In the ancient section. The estate of Haiber Talat
Musallim. You’ve heard of him?”

“No.”

“Ah. The new prophet and disciple
of Baal. I’m surprised at this photograph. I didn’t
know the sentries allowed cameras near the walls.” He looked
up from the photograph. “So. You are here to seek
him.”

Virga said, “Yes,” and took
the key he was offered. “And now I want to take a hot bath
and wash this smell of smoke off me.”

“The flow of water is
erratic,” the man called. “Something’s wrong with
the pipes.”

Virga followed the young man across the
lobby to the elevators. He stopped suddenly, staring at a dark wide
crust of blood that spread out in a circle on the smooth marble
floor. The young man carrying the suitcases looked back at him
incuriously.

“Please forgive us,” said
the Kuwaiti behind the reception desk. “We haven’t been
able to be as clean as we would like. I was forced to shoot a man
last night. That is where he bled to death.”

Virga looked up. “Bled to
death?”

“There was no need to call an
ambulance. As I told you, the hospitals are crowded.” Virga
blinked, suddenly sick to his stomach. “If it offends you,
we’ll clean it up,” the man said. Behind Virga the
elevator doors opened.

16

FROM HIS ROOM Virga telephoned the hotel in which Naughton had
stayed. A man there explained to him basically what he’d
already learned from Judith. Naughton had simply left his
belongings and vanished. No word, no trace. Perhaps, the man
inquired, if he were a friend of Mr. Naughton he would care to pay
the remainder of his bill and pick up his suitcases? Virga said he
would be in touch again and hung up the receiver.

He tried to rest to alleviate his jet
lag but he couldn’t fall asleep. Instead he tossed in bed and
finally lay staring fixedly up at the ornate ceiling. Through the
open windows that looked out on a small balcony the waves of heat
were stubborn and brutal, but to close the windows would mean no
air circulation. The air conditioning wasn’t working. So he
lay on the bed, the sweat slowly gathering under his arms and at
his temples, and he listened to the raucous noise in the streets
below: the honking of automobile horns, the screech of tires, the
cursing and shouting, the occasional blast that might have been
either a backfire or the report of a gun. He watched the noise
swirl up at the ceiling, there among the ornate gilt-edged
scrollwork the Arabs use to excess. It hung there like cobwebs.

He rolled over and unfolded the
magazine photograph. The figure was thin and tall; the features
were only a shapeless blur. Virga wondered what this man who called
himself Baal looked like. He found himself mentally piecing
together fragments of faces, though none of them seemed quite
right. Whatever he looked like, whoever he was, his presence had
thrown this land crazily off balance. And, Virga realized, this
man’s strength was now stretching across the land’s
boundaries infecting, as the Kuwaiti had told him, those in other
countries as well. The idea of one man wielding the power to throw
people into savagery, like the god he had named himself after, was
as unsettling and frightening as a nightmare in which one must run
but is trapped in an invisible mire.

And another thing disturbed him. He
could see no good in this movement whatsoever. Behind the facade of
its promise of “individual power” was the extreme of
violence and rule by mob. All order in this land was on the verge
of being overthrown.

He rose up from the bed. He had
loosened his tie earlier, and now he took it off. He stripped off
his shirt and walked into the bathroom to draw bathwater. After he
had turned on the taps he caught a glimpse of himself in the
mirror: almost completely bald, dark circles of age under his eyes,
the mouth slack and tired. Age had crept upon him line by line,
night by night, year by year. He didn’t remember growing old.
Around his neck hung the small golden crucifix, a gift from
Katherine.

Katherine.

He took the crucifix off and laid it
carefully on a table on the other room. When he returned to the
bathroom he saw a residue of sand at the bottom of the tub.

When he had dressed in a cool blue suit
and reapplied the sunburn balm to his face he locked the door and
took the elevator down to the lobby. The pool of blood was still
there.

Outside the hotel he stood in the heat
and watched the erratic flow of traffic while waiting for a
taxi.

The cabdriver had a ragged gray beard
and wore a dirty white cap pulled low. Virga slipped into the rear
seat and showed him the magazine photograph. “Do you
recognize this place?”

“I recognize it,” the man
said.

“Can you take me
there?”

He re-entered the stream of traffic. He
drove for a while without speaking, sometimes detouring streets
that had been closed off by police officers. Here and there Virga
saw groups of uniformed soldiers on patrol; once they passed the
body of a soldier, sprawled and bloated on the sidewalk. Once the
cab was waved away from a street of ravaged, bullet-torn shops by
three soldiers who appeared to be fresh from battle; one of them
had a bandage wrapped around his head and another supported himself
weakly on his rifle.

They drove on through narrow deserted
side streets and alleys.

The driver said, “Everyone wants
to go out there. Why do you wish to see him?”

“I’m very curious,”
Virga said.

“You won’t get
in.”

“Why not?”

“He sees no one.”

“Have you taken many others
there?” Virga asked.

“And brought them back when they
were turned away. You’re no different. I’ll be bringing
you back as well.”

“Perhaps.”

The driver grunted. “No perhaps.
You’re an American? A journalist?”

“Yes, an American. But not a
journalist.”

“Then what do you want to see him
for?”

“I’m a professor of
theology,” Virga said. “I’ve heard a great deal
about him.”

“No one,” the driver said,
“sees him.”

Virga decided there was no point in
arguing. Something caught his eye, a white-painted slogan, in
Arabic, on the wall of an empty building: KILL THE JEWS.

They passed the jumble of
beggars’ shanties and continued out toward the city’s
edge. Then they were in the older part of the city where the stone
walls twisted like serpents and the stones of the road were rough
and broken. Beyond the square, flat dwellings Virga could see high
walls surrounding a structure with imposing, time-worn turrets. As
they neared he saw a cluster of automobiles and vans and a swarm of
men with cameras and microphones. Around the walls people, in all
manner of clothing, either milled about or sat on the ground with
their foreheads pressed against the stone. An iron gate was closed
across a driveway through the wall and Virga saw it was guarded by
two Bedouins in white dishdashahs. He also saw they carried
submachine guns.

The driver stopped the cab along the
wall and said without looking back, “I’ll leave the
meter running.”

Virga looked at him disdainfully and
walked the fifteen yards or so along the wall to where the main
body of journalists packed around the barred gate. He was able to
see the turreted structure beyond; he had the immediate impression
of great wealth and grandeur. The driveway continued on, split
around an island of carefully manicured shrubs, then became a short
stairway of stone leading up to a massive canopy-shaded doorway.
The structure was more tall than it was broad; windows in the
turrets gave no sign of life and Virga noted that much of the glass
had been broken out. On all sides the lawn was green and immaculate
and there was even a small pond. Beyond the landscaped shrubbery
there was a metal-walled hangar and a hint of heat waves rolling
across tarmac.

Someone jostled into him. Someone
dropped a camera; Virga heard it shatter on the stones. There were
curses and shouts and suddenly he realized he was in the midst of a
group of journalists, none of them appearing to be American.
Someone started shouting in French at the Bedouin guards and Virga
saw, with an alarm bordering on panic, one of the men swing his
submachine gun up, smoothly and coldly, with the air of a seasoned
killer. The angrily shouting Frenchman continued his verbal abuse.
One of the guards stepped forward and grabbed at a man in a loud
green jacket. Another man said something sharply in a language
Virga didn’t recognize, and a scuffle began between two or
three men at the front of the group. Fists were flying. The Bedouin
guard staggered back away from the gate and at that moment the
crowd of journalists saw their opportunity and surged forward with
their cameras ready, moving toward the gate in hopes of getting
through. The other guard backed away.

Virga struggled against them. He was
carried forward and almost went down. Someone beside him was
shrieking in Arabic, “One picture! One picture!” A man
ahead of Virga fell down and Virga tripped over his legs. He
reached out a hand for support and found himself grasping the bars
of the gate, his face pressed against the scorching iron.

He caught his breath and tried to pull
away but there were others behind him, pressed forward by the group
of wild journalists.

Something growled, low and with utter
menace.

Virga was looking into the bared maw of
a Doberman pinscher on the other side of the gate. Its eyes were
wide with a fury that signaled attack; the gleaming white teeth,
stake-sharp, were only inches from Virga’s face. The animal
strained on a chain leash.

“My God,” Virga said.

Behind him the journalists were
snapping pictures one after another. They pressed against the gate,
their cameras whirring.

The man holding the Doberman let his
grip go slack on the chain.

Virga jerked his head away just as the
animal charged the gate. It sprang up on its hind legs, snapping
and snarling at the men, who cringed but still kept taking pictures
even as they backed away. Another Doberman sprang from nowhere. It
remained crouched, growling, with eyes that watched for any new
threat.

The Bedouin guards tore into the
journalists, pushing them back with their weapons. One of them
fired his gun over their heads by only a few inches and spent
shells clattered to the ground. Another Bedouin reached down and
roughly grabbed Virga around the collar, dragging him back away
from the gate.

“No,” said a man standing
on the other side, the man whose fingers had released the dog
chain. “Not him.”

The Bedouin looked up. He immediately
let Virga go and turned to push the other men back with the butt of
his gun.

The man behind the gate grabbed hold of
the dangling chain and drew the dog toward him. Someone else,
another man, retrieved his animal as well.

Virga shook his head. He had bumped it
on the gate and he felt dizzy. He slowly brushed himself off and
got to his feet. He looked through the bars at a tall blond man
whose flesh was the color of paste. His eyes seemed dead; they
stared through Virga. Beside him stood a darker man with curly hair
and broad shoulders. Both of them shared the same incurious
expression, the same air of superiority. And both of them, Virga
saw, had some sort of mark on their foreheads. He couldn’t
tell what it was.

The blond man said in English, “I
heard you say something. You’re an American.”

“Yes,” Virga said, his head
beginning to ache. “I am.”

“You’re a
journalist?” the man asked. At his side the eyes of the
Doberman yearned for Virga.

“No.” He thought for a
moment of what he was but the ache in his head prevented him from
remembering.

“Your name?”

“Virga,” he said. “My
name is James Virga.”

The man nodded. He glanced over at the
darker man, who turned without a word and walked up the drive
toward the structure beyond.

And suddenly he remembered.
“I’m a professor of theology,” he said.

“I know,” the man replied.
He threw a bolt on the gate, then another, and finally he swung it
open.

Behind Virga the crowd surged forward
again toward the opened gate. The blond man grasped Virga’s
shoulder and pulled him through, then let the Doberman stand guard
while he unhurriedly rebolted the gate. The Bedouins were knocked
aside, cursing. Men crushed up against the iron bars, shouting and
pleading.

Over the noise of the journalists, the
man said, “Rashid. Kill three of them.”

The words took effect. The journalists
scrambled away from the gate, clawing at each other so as to get
someone in front of them in the line of fire. Several of them fell
to the ground and were trampled senseless.

But already one of the guards had
stepped forward, satisfaction and pleasure on his face. His weapon
came up with an excruciating delicacy. In the next moment it
rattled in an arc across the front line of the terrified men. Shell
casings hissed in all directions.

The blond man drew the Doberman close
and began walking up the drive. When he saw that Virga wasn’t
following he turned and said softly, “Are you
coming?”

Virga was staring at the dead men on
the other side of the bars. The crowd of journalists had scattered;
some were still taking pictures as they ran. One of the Bedouins
kicked a corpse squarely in the face. Virga turned away.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m coming.”

17

DOWN THE DIM CORRIDORS Virga followed the blond man who had
moments before ordered the execution of three men.

They climbed a long marble staircase
where Virga saw food and excrement smeared about; he wondered if
the dogs were allowed to run free. They reached a narrow hallway
that stretched on past a dozen closed doors. Here and there the
hallway turned off into huge rooms or widened into alcoves. They
moved through an area that had been decorated with elaborate
Islamic art; Virga saw the remnants of pictures, now shredded as if
by maddened claws, and of bits of ancient and probably priceless
pottery. Now the once beautiful objects crunched beneath their
feet.

Virga felt alarm at being in a hostile
environment. Everywhere eyes seemed to be following him; he was
conscious of being watched from all sides, though they never passed
anyone or saw anyone. He had felt, or rather sensed, the ominous
presence that was part of this place. The notion of something
lurking, something staring from the shadows at his back, was
unshakable. And he noticed, in the dankness of the hallway, things
scrawled on the walls, on the floor, on the ceiling. Triangles and
circles and strange scribblings that made no sense to him at all,
yet filled him with a dread he could not even begin to grasp. He
was trembling and he hoped the other man would not notice.

And there was something else. An odor,
a stench. Part of it was the excrement smeared everywhere, even on
the walls; part of it was rotted food. But there was something
else, something that was whirling around his head, clinging to his
clothes as if it were a solid but decaying presence. It was the
stench of death, of something perhaps long past death.

“Are you also an American?”
Virga asked the man. His voice echoed in the hallway.

“I was born in America,”
the man said without turning.

Virga had hoped he would. He wanted to
see what it was up on the man’s forehead. “What’s
your name?”

“Olivier,” the man
said.

“That’s all?”

“Yes. That’s
all.”

Ahead the hallway ended at a pair of
gold-ornamented closed doors. On the walls and ceiling were the
same strange symbols, triangles and circles. Centered directly
above the doorway, Virga noted, was an inverted cross.

The man turned abruptly. “I
assume we’ll be meeting again. I’ll leave you
now.” He opened the doors and Virga stepped through, his eyes
trying to pierce the gloom that leaped at him from the silent
chamber. The man firmly shut the doors behind him.

He felt, with the closing of the door,
a tremendous and awful sense of being imprisoned in a place from
which he had no chance of escape. He shivered; it was actually cold
in the room. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness he saw that
he stood in a library of some sort. Around him were shelves packed
with books, thousands and thousands of them. Not wanting to betray
his fear, he attempted to control his trembling. He checked his
initial impulse to turn toward the doorway and retrace his steps,
if that were possible, out into the sweet hot sun. In this room the
presence was fierce and heavy, bearing down on his back like the
teeth of the snarling Dobermans.

And he realized, as the flesh tingled
at the back of his neck, that he was not alone.

He heard the breathing, steady and
soft, from the opposite side of the room. A single thin beam of
sunlight was thrown through the narrow slit of a window. It fell
across the shoulders of a man.

The man sat motionless, his hands
folded before him on a wide desk topped with the alternating
squares of a chessboard. The two opposing camps had been set up;
they glowered at each other across their battlefield. Virga stepped
forward. He could not see the man’s face quite yet; it was
covered by a broad band of shadow. But he could see clearly the
man’s hands, skeletal and white as if carved of either ivory
or ice. They never moved, but as Virga approached he was aware of
the man’s head turning slightly, very slightly, to watch him.
He was aware of eyes cutting into his brain, though he
couldn’t see them at all. He felt open and defenseless.

Baal said softly, “Dr.
Virga?”

He was surprised. Had the man been
aware of his presence? He was fearful of moving any closer. He
stopped where he was.

“It is Dr. Virga, isn’t
it?” the man asked.

“Yes. That’s
right.”

The man was nodding. He gestured with a
thin finger to the shelves of books. “Your works are here.
I’ve read them. I’ve read every volume in this
library.”

Virga grunted. Impossible.

“Is it?”

He froze. Had he spoken the word? Had
he? The choking presence in the room made it difficult to think
clearly. Yes, he decided momentarily, he’d spoken aloud.

“Your colleague Dr.
Naughton,” Baal said, “has told me a great deal about
you. And of course your reputation as a man of intellect precedes
you.”

“Naughton? He’s
here?”

“Of course. Isn’t that why
you’ve come to this place? To seek Dr. Naughton? Yes, I think
it is. Dr. Naughton is also a man of great intellect, a man of
great foresight. He recognizes opportunities and thus controls his
destiny.”

Virga was straining to see through the
shadows that obscured the man’s face. He had the impression
of sharp features, of high cheekbones and narrow eyes.
“I’ve come a long way. I’d like to see
him.”

Baal smiled; Virga saw the teeth flash
in an obscene grimace. Something oppressive radiated from this man
that filled him with alarm. “Dr. Naughton has been working
day and night on his research. His book will be completed
shortly.”

“His book?”

“I believe he discussed it with
you before he left America. His book on the false messiahs that
distorted the truth before I came to cleanse it. His final chapter
is devoted to my philosophy.”

“I’d like to see him.
Surely you won’t turn me away after I’ve come all this
distance. He’s here, isn’t he?”

“He’s here,” Baal
said. “But working.”

Virga waited but Baal sat without
speaking. As a final effort Virga said, “I have a message
from his wife.”

“He has no wife.”

Virga had decided he would have to see
Baal more clearly. He stepped forward, almost to the edge of the
chessboard.

The power, the menace, in Baal’s
eyes almost staggered him. He found he couldn’t gaze into
them; he had to avert his own eyes. They were dark and deepset with
a cruel intelligence, a glimmer of utter hatred. The man was lean
but there was a suggestion of raw physical strength in his wide
firm shoulders. Virga guessed that he was in his late twenties,
possibly thirty but certainly no more. He spoke perfect English
with no trace of an accent. Indeed, his voice was as soft and
soothing as the first wave on the shore of sleep. It was only those
eyes, those terrible things moving in a white firm-jawed face, that
gave him the aspect of a death’s head.

“You’re an American?”
Virga asked.

“I am Baal,” the man said,
as if in some way this answered his question.

Virga suddenly noticed the chess
pieces, carved of a fine and lustrous stone. The white pieces, on
the side on which Virga stood, were monks in flowing robes, demure
nuns, somber priests, thin towers of cathedrals. The queen was
represented by a woman in a shawl, her eyes cast to heaven. The
king, a bearded image of Christ, stood with hands imploring the
Father. On the opposite side, and Virga saw now that the man had
moved some of the black pieces to begin the game, were sorcerers,
sword-wielding barbarians, hunch-backed demons; the king and queen
were, respectively, a thin crouching figure with a beckoning
forefinger and a woman with the tongue of a snake.

Baal had noticed his interest.
“You’re a chess player?” he asked.

“Occasionally. I see you’re
attacking. But you lack an opponent.”

“Attacking?” he asked
quietly. He leaned forward. His eyes were burning through
Virga’s forehead. “Oh no, not yet. I’m still
learning the art of maneuver.”

“A time-consuming art.”

“I have time.”

Virga raised his eyes from the
chessboard and looked into Baal’s face; he held his gaze as
long as he dared. “Tell me,” he said, “who you
really are. Why have you chosen the name of a god of savagery and
sacrifice?”

“My name is… my name. It
has always been Baal; Baal it will always be. And in this world, my
good Dr. Virga, savagery and sacrifice are the wine and bread of
the true God.”

“Then who is the true
God?”

Baal smiled again, as if he knew some
secret Virga could never hope to fathom. “You have eyes.
You’ve seen the forces at work in this land, even in the
entire world. Now you can answer your own senseless question. Who
is the true God?”

“I see here men becoming less
than men. I’ve seen brutality and murder and I want to know
the part you’re playing in it all. I want to know your
motives. Is it political power you seek? Money?”

Baal’s eyes had become more
threatening. Virga felt the need to back away a few paces. “I
have all the money I want at my disposal. Political power is
worthless. No. Mine is the power to reinforce the will of the true
God of this world. And reinforce it I will. They listen; they
listen. They’ve grown sick of a teaching for mindless
children. Real men must live in the real world and the real world
teaches one law—survive. Survive if you must break the bodies
of those who hope to break yours. It is a world of the living and
the dead, the wise and the foolish.”

“Yours is a dog-eat-dog
philosophy that leads to… what I’ve seen happening
here. This city has gone mad. I’ve seen what I never thought
was possible in a civilized country.”

“This city has regained its
senses.”

“Then,” Virga said,
“you’re the one who must be mad. You advocate death and
destruction, fire and hatred. Your name is well-chosen. The Baal
who preceded you was a festering sore to Jehovah.”

Baal sat without moving. Virga thought
he felt something clutch at his throat, something cold and solid.
Baal’s head slowly, slowly came up; in his white face were
the eyes of a snake. “No Baal,” he said,
“preceded me. I know Jehovah,” he spat the name out as
if it were pus, “better than you dream. Bethel, Ai, Jericho,
Hazor… all the glorious cities ash.” His face suddenly
distorted. His voice changed from silken smoothness to the rough
guttural voice of the storm. “War,” he breathed,
“war is the scepter of my God and he wields it so very very
well. To take the name of Jehovah and induce men to betray their
cardinal nature is the sin. To distort the world with lies is the
fall of Jehovah. He wishes to hide the truth.”

Baal’s eyes flashed.
“Enough games,” he said.

“My God,” Virga said,
transfixed. “You actually want havoc and death. Who are
you?”

“I am Baal,” said the man
across the chessboard, and Virga caught a brief, frightening
glimmer of red in the man’s gaze, “and I hold you
between my fingers.”

With one arm Baal swept across the
chessboard, scattering the white pieces around Virga’s feet.
Virga’s head pounded fiercely; he wondered vaguely if he
could have a concussion from striking the gate. But there was
something else, the thing that he thought had grasped him around
the throat. Now he was certain that something was there, squeezing
with icy disembodied fingers. He put his hand to his forehead; he
was sweating and seemed to be running a sudden fever. He staggered
and shook his head, aware of the man’s eyes burning, burning,
burning. Oh God the pain, the pain.

“Yes,” said the man softly.
“The pain.”

Black smoke whirled inside
Virga’s head. His brain had caught fire; the smoke clogged
his sight and breathing. He shook his head to clear it but it was
no good. He stumbled backward, away from Baal, and almost fell to
the floor.

“It is no accident,” Baal
said, “that you’re here. You were expected.
Naughton’s letter brought you.”

It seemed as though Baal were speaking
in more than one voice. The voices merged together and then split
into hundreds of distinct sounds, strained through the kaleidoscope
of whirling smoke that brought tears to Virga’s eyes.

Baal said, “You are a respected
theologian, known as a man of sound and logical intellect. I can
use you…”

The pounding within Virga’s head
continued. He could not free himself of it. The voice shouted into
his ears; he could hear nothing but the voice, the commands, of
Baal.

“… to bring others to me.
You will tell the story of how I was born in poverty in America,
how the image of God came to me in a dream and commanded that I
lead the people through the labyrinth of knowledge. This you will
do and more. Much much more. You will publicly proclaim your faith
to me and your rejection of the Jew disease. I am the cleansing
fire.”

“No,” said Virga,
struggling to keep his balance. He closed his eyes but still the
voices hammered at him brutally. “No… I…
won’t…”

“Yesssss,” hissed the
thousand voices. They echoed from the library walls and tore
through him like bullets from all directions.
“Yesssss.”

Virga struggled and shook his head. The
black smoke was choking him. No. No. “Yes,” he said,
falling to his knees. “Yes. The pain. The pain.”

Baal was standing. He moved around the
desk and Virga saw him reaching as if in a slow-motion nightmare,
his thin fingers outspread. “Yesssss,” said Baal,
almost in his ear. “Yesssss.”

Virga couldn’t breathe. He was
choking, gasping for air in the stinking chamber. He wrenched loose
his tie, tore open his collar, and the sunlight glinted from the
crucifix as it hung free.

Baal didn’t move. “Take
that off,” he said very quietly. “Did you hear what I
said?” There was something of the knife’s edge in his
voice.

Virga stirred, feeling that the
disembodied fingers around his throat had, at least fractionally,
weakened. He tried to rise but couldn’t.

Baal stood his ground but still did not
move. “Take that off,” he said, his eyes red and
widened.

“No,” said Virga, bile
burning within him. “No.”

“DOG! YOU DAMNED WHORESON
BASTARD!” Baal snarled, his teeth clenched like a ravening
animal. “DAMN YOU TO HELL! DAMN YOU!”

Virga frantically shook his head to
clear it. Baal kicked at him and then drew back; he would not move
any closer to the crucifix. Virga tore it from around his neck and
held it in the palm of his outstretched hand, defying Baal with the
object’s gleaming golden surface.

And he was aware too late that the
doors had been violently flung open, that two men, one dark and the
other fair, had burst behind him into the library. Baal motioned
with a hand and Virga turned to meet the fist that slammed solidly
into the side of his head. He groaned in pain and fell forward,
gripping the crucifix with ebbing strength.

“GET THAT OUT OF HIS HAND!”
commanded Baal, maintaining his distance.

The two disciples picked at
Virga’s closed hand as if it were red-hot; they worked at the
fingers, trying to loosen the man’s grip. Virga, in
semiconsciousness, held on to it knowing that if he lost it he too
was lost. The power of the man would swallow him into a bestial maw
without its protection.

Virga’s fingers would not open.
The dark-haired disciple cursed violently and stamped down on the
man’s hand with his booted foot. There was the sound of
shattering bone and Virga immediately lost consciousness. The man
who had broken his hand found the crucifix and with the toe of his
boot kicked it away into a dark corner.

“Bastard,” said Baal,
whispering close to Virga’s head. “You thought it would
be easy. No, my friend, it is not. You will come to love me and
despise that. Its touch, the mere sight of it, will be hot like the
diseased bowels from which it dropped. You weak bastard.”
Baal paused, glancing down to where a smear of blood showed on the
palm of Virga’s injured hand. Baal roughly spread the broken
fingers and stared into the wound inflicted when a booted foot had
smashed flesh against a golden object.

The wound was in the shape of a
crucifix.

Baal dropped the hand with a shouted
oath and wrenched away. “HIS HAND!” he said.
“CLOSE IT! CLOSE IT!”

The fair-haired disciple hauled Virga
up by his collar and then let him fall so he was lying on the
offending wound. Then he too backed away, trembling, from the
fallen man.

“We have come far,” Baal
said, “but not far enough. Someday we can withstand that, but
not now… not now. Our good Dr. Virga—our fucking
bastard Dr. Virga was to provide our passage. And
now…” his eyes narrowed. “There is another way.
There is another way.”

“What about him?” the
dark-haired disciple asked.

Baal turned, keeping his eyes averted
from the far corner of the library. He towered over the motionless
body. “He’s contaminated by that mark. With the stub of
a hand he’ll do us no good. I don’t want his corpse
found near this place. Do you understand, Verm?”

“Yes,” the other man
said.

“Then you and Cresil do what you
will with him; afterward leave the corpse for the vultures in the
desert.”

The fair-haired man, Cresil, bent and
dragged Virga across the floor and through the doorway, leaving a
trail of blood, while Verin followed like a jackal smelling
death.

18

VIRGA REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS when a sponge was thrown across his
face. No, not a sponge, he decided momentarily, but rather his
swollen and bloody hand. He remembered the awful sound of bones
giving way, like sticks broken by powerful hands, and wanted to be
sick but could not move. He forced down the bile that rose,
burning, to the top of his throat and tried to get his
bearings.

He looked up at the bright stars as
they whirled their divine patterns. But night was not old; a faint
tinge of purple in the sky showed the path on which the sun had
slipped the horizon. He was moving, being jostled and bounced on
thick tires, and there was the loud roar of an engine. There was no
longer the smell of gulf salt in the air. Now there was only the
dry, bitter smell of the desert cooling into night.

Virga’s knees were drawn up
tightly, his legs cramped. He had been slammed onto the rear
floorboard of a Land-Rover and it was only when he twisted his head
to the side that he realized his mouth was gagged with coarse
cloth. At the driver’s seat was a man Virga had to
concentrate to recognize. Yes. The fair-haired man from
Baal’s library. And in the other seat was the darker
disciple. He had seen them for only a split second before his
vision was blocked out by a fist. Both of the men wore pistols at
their belts.

How far into the desert they were Virga
had no way of knowing. He didn’t know where they were headed
or why, but he made no noise or motion to indicate to the disciples
that he had awakened.

His head pounded fiercely. It was a
fiery ache that raged just behind his eyes. The pain of his head
and the pain of his shattered hand were two brothers who met
somewhere at his shoulder.

He realized that the crucifix had saved
him, had amazingly repelled the man, as if he were a vampire.
Another moment and Virga would have been swept away by an awesome
combination of horror and euphoria, sweating and screaming. The
man’s eyes remained in his mind, circling in mockery of the
stars.

The Land-Rover dipped and swayed over
desert dunes like a craft at sea. The two men never spoke or moved;
the guns they wore spoke for them. Virga thought he was either
going to be killed or held somewhere until he agreed to aid Baal.
Perhaps he would even be tortured. These were men like their eerie
master, without shame, without guilt, without mercy.

Virga fought off a new wave of
unconsciousness that crept subtly over him. His fingers, crushed
and crooked, had turned blue. Veins throbbed in his wrist and the
injured hand had swollen hideously to twice its size. Like
Job’s disease, Virga thought, almost humored by that
recollection. The Land-Rover, jarred by rocks, brought him back
into the terrible present and the realization that he must at least
try to escape.

He stretched slowly, watching the
men’s profiles. There seemed to be no injuries other than the
hand. But his legs were very stiff. If he could leap from the
Land-Rover and find a hiding place in the darkness, perhaps…
but he feared that his legs might not hold against the shock. If
his knees buckled they would simply run him down, if they meant to
kill him, or jam him into the vehicle again if they meant to hold
him captive. He worked his shoulders free, painfully, and was able
to glance about in the darkness. On all sides the desert was bare
and forbidding. The only lights he saw were cast by the headlamps
of the vehicle, revealing flat sand and outcroppings of rock. He
drew his head back down.

He would not get two chances. The
element of surprise would have to carry him. He would have to take
the risk of not being able to find a hiding place. If they meant to
kill him it was the logical thing to do; if they meant to torture
him it was the logical thing to do because he would rather be dead
than help this madman who called himself Baal. His breath hissing
under the cloth, he worked his legs free. He tensed to jump and
then untensed, tensed and untensed, waiting for a rush of
adrenaline to boost him. His heart pounded almost audibly.

The Land-Rover was climbing a bluff.
Rocks thumped beneath the tires. This was the moment.

Virga gritted his teeth and, shoving
out with his legs, dived over the side of the vehicle.

He cradled his injured hand but his
elbows hit rocks when he fell, shredding his jacket. He cried out
involuntarily and knew that the muffled sound had carried. As he
slid across rocks to smooth sand at the base of the bluff, he saw
the two men look down at the Land-Rover’s empty rear
floorboard.

The Land-Rover turned sharply, its
yellow headlamps searching like spider eyes.

Virga scrambled to his feet, sweating
with the awful pain, and ran. The sand, sucking at his shoes,
slowed him. Behind him the vehicle roared louder and louder. He did
not dare took around. Suddenly there came the crack! of a
pistol shot and sand kicked up viciously to his right, less than a
foot away. Virga knew they meant to murder him. Before him
stretched a plain of sand and rock; the Land-Rover would soon reach
him on this terrain. Already his silhouette ran ahead of him,
framed in the headlamps that were rapidly gaining distance. He
cursed and felt cold panic rising. There was no place to hide!

But no! Virga ducked his head and ran,
smelling the swirl of sand from the heavy-ribbed tires. Ahead, the
plain suddenly dropped off into jagged darkness: a narrow chasm. If
he could reach it the Land-Rover couldn’t follow without
turning turtle. But there was no way of judging its depth. It could
be a fall of only ten feet to deep sand, or it could be a fall of
twenty-five feet to razor-edged rocks. There was no time to weigh a
death by bullet against a death in free-fall. The Land-Rover roared
at his heels; the next bullet screamed past his left ear. Virga
took a deep breath and, reaching the edge, leaped out into
space.

The length of the fall made him shriek
into the cloth. Brush and rocks ripped at him. And then, finally,
he hit sand peppered with stone. His knees and elbows scraped raw,
he rolled for cover against the chasm wall. With his good hand he
ripped away the gag and panted heavily, listening for another
shot.

Dozens of feet above him, the lights of
the Land-Rover prowled the opposite wall. He could see the men
looking over the precipice into the chasm’s depths. Virga
flattened himself against the wall of sand and stone, afraid that
they might pinpoint him by his heartbeat. He tried to control his
ragged breathing. After a few endless moments Virga watched the
Land-Rover’s headlamps move a dozen yards along the rim.

Virga’s senses stirred. Perhaps
they had lost him entirely. Perhaps they thought he was moving at
the bottom of the chasm, or perhaps they even thought that he might
be dead and now they were searching for the body. The Land-Rover
slowly, slowly followed the winding course of the chasm. Virga
watched the yellow headlamps move away. Yes! They’d lost him!
But still he crouched in the darkness, ignoring the swollen agony
of his hand; his eyes were narrowed and probing the depths around
him, wary of some kind of trick. Perhaps one of the men had come
down into the chasm and was now, gun in hand, stalking him.

But then he saw the two men begin to
fire randomly down from the Land-Rover, spraying bullets in
haphazard patterns. Slugs whined around him; he cringed and saw
sparks fly along the chasm wall as bullets ricocheted off the rock.
The men continued firing until Virga heard the clicking of empty
chambers. They arranged themselves back into their seats and the
Land-Rover tore away across the desert, leaving a tail of spinning
sand.

It was a very long time before Virga
reached the rim. Losing a foothold on rocks or a grip on brush, he
fell twice before hauling himself over the edge. Very far away but
still visible on the desert were the red taillights of the
vehicle.

Watching the Land-Rover vanish in the
night, Virga was aware of the pain that had crawled up his shoulder
and spread across his chest, sending out razors as reconnaissance
over the fields of flesh. It gradually and insidiously claimed his
neck, numbing it, and when it reached his temples he slumped
forward and lay with his lips pressed into the sand.

When he awakened he realized why they
had not made a stronger effort to find him. In the harsh crimson
light of the predawn sky he struggled to his feet, his hand hanging
like a sack of concrete, and saw the immense empty expanse of
desert that even now shifted and danced in veils of heat. For miles
and miles and miles beyond stretched only the white dunes and
sunbaked flats. God only knew how far it would be to a highway or a
Bedouin waterhole. Soon the sun would burst over the far dam of
land and drown him in an ocean of his own salt sweat. Around him,
with the first blinding arc, came a solid drone of insects
awakening in their sand nests. Flies began circling his head,
darting down to suck at the sweat; they smelled the blood and
attached themselves greedily to the crusted wound on his palm.

They had left him, not caring whether
he was dead or not, because out here it was only a matter of time.
He had no water and no hope of shade, though tire tracks were still
clear in the direction in which the Land-Rover traveled. He blessed
the deep indentations that stretched on, on, on out of sight,
seeing in them at least the correct direction in which to walk.
Virga pulled his jacket up like a makeshift Arab headdress to
protect his face and bald head. He started walking, squinting as
the sun whitened above the horizon.

The sun climbed. Maddening insects bit
at his exposed flesh. When he ducked his head to escape their
whirling cloud they descended too; they filled his eyes and clogged
his nostrils. They smashed themselves to death against his face. He
moved on, across rock flats and across dunes in which he sank to
his knees. Overhead the sun was both a staring inflamed eye and an
open bloody mouth.

Fever boiled in his brain. His legs
cramped and knotted again and again; he had to sit in the sand and
knead the muscles with his good hand until he could walk again.
Soon he found himself dazed by the heat and drifting off the tire
track. Shaking himself awake, he stared into the distance hoping to
see telephone lines or the rise of derricks, but nothing altered
the desolation. His lips cracked with the unbearable mid-day sun;
the thought of cool water was driving him mad but it was difficult
to think of anything else. He was past the point of either pain or
fear, he concentrated on what seemed to be the blue shimmer of a
river far, far ahead.

He remembered sailing the Charles with
Katherine clutching his arm, her nose and cheeks windburned, her
dark hair wild in the bracing wind. Above them the canvas billowed
dramatically and he caught the fresh scent of the wide wonderful
river; he wondered now, thousands of miles from that time and
place, why he hadn’t cupped his hand in the water and pressed
it to his lips, gently, just like… this.

And when he opened his eyes he
staggered and spat out sand.

Katherine, he said, closing his eyes
to blot away the sun. Katherine. The world had revolved around her
face, the center of the universe. He had watched her grow from a
tomboyish Irish girl into a woman of charm and grace. He remembered
that she spoke with her hands. They were always in motion like
white butterflies and it intrigued him to watch their performance.
She said it was a trait passed down from generation to generation
on her mother’s side, that constant conversation of weaving
fingers. Katherine had been a fine woman; the memory of her was
still fine. She had been energy and life, beauty and hope.

He remembered her joy at realizing she
was pregnant. When she’d first thought, after two
miscarriages, that she was destined to remain childless she had
purposefully kept a tight grip on her emotions. Maybe, she had
whispered to him while they lay beneath the blankets listening to
the crack of logs in the fireplace, the muted music of rain against
the windows, she was not meant to bear children.

“And how can you be a judge of
that?” he asked her.

“I don’t know. I feel it,
that’s all.”

“Mrs. Virga,” he said,
taking on the tone of mock gravity, “beware. You’re
dabbling in theories of predestination.”

“No. I’m
serious.”

He gazed into her placid eyes, those
orbs of fathomless blue, and saw that she was. He said, “They
say the third time is the charm.”

“This is the last time,”
she said. “If something happens this time I don’t know
what I’ll do. I don’t think I could go through that
again.”

“Nothing,” he said firmly,
“is going to happen.”

“I’m frightened,” she
said, drawing close to him. In the fireplace a log squealed.
“Really I am. I’ve never been so frightened about
anything before.”

“I’m not.” He looked
deep into her eyes. “I’m not frightened because I know
it’ll be all right. Whatever happens, everything will be all
right.”

But everything was not “all
right.” It ceased being all right when, months later as she
was swollen and radiant, she tripped on loose carpeting at the top
of the stairway and, screaming out, plunged helplessly down the
stairs.

He wondered what the child would have
been like. A boy. Perhaps like Naughton.

He opened his eyes, the movement of his
lids scattering flies. He’d been walking in his sleep. The
sun was still as hot; the desert was still as empty. He might have
been walking for days; he might have been walking in circles. He
didn’t know. Looking toward the horizon, he felt the knot of
tension in his stomach explode in a burst of bitter pain.

Ahead the sand was endless and
unchanging.

He had lost the Land-Rover trail.

In all directions there was only the
blinding white. Nothing else. He reached into a pocket of his
tattered jacket and found the small bottle of sunburn balm. He
applied it to his face, feeling cracked skin and the beginnings of
large watery blisters. Several broke when he touched them and
fluids leaked down his face, attracting new hordes of insects.
Still he moved on, stumbling along what he thought was a straight
line leading directly toward the gulf, but after a while he decided
no, this was not the right way. He turned and retraced his path;
after several minutes he decided this was again wrong and began
walking in yet another direction. His flesh burned, blistered,
burst and then reburned all over again.

The sun ate through his skull to the
brain. The great white circle darkened, darkened, darkened until it
was as black as the eye of Baal. Virga saw the man’s head as
huge as a solar system, with one eye the sun and the other the
moon. His captive planet was always beneath his gaze. Virga saw him
in black robes towering over the cities of man. And he grew larger
and larger, his shadow spreading across the face of the earth.
Finally his awful form darkened the stars and all creation was
pitched into the black stagnation of the abyss. Virga shook his
head to free himself of the maddening visions but he could still
see Baal’s gigantic head suspended in the sky and his mouth
opening to swallow museums and libraries and all the wonderful
works of man.

Virga fell to his hands and knees. The
flies swarmed thickly about his head; he waved them off weakly with
a hand swollen black. This is the moment. He saw it scrawled on the
sand, in the blazing sky, on the undulating horizon. Of all the
hundreds who had proclaimed themselves messiah, all the madmen, all
the cheats, this one was different.

Fluids from broken blisters dripped
down his chin. He watched the pattern they made as they splattered
in the sand.

This one was different. An animal and a
man. The intelligence and cunning of a man, the savagery and power
of a brute beast. This one… was different. He had already
infected thousands; how many more? And thus the slaughter and chaos
would continue until that final finger moved toward a button in an
unlocked steel cylinder. And the blast would moan on four winds
Baal Baal Baal. It would scrawl his name on ravaged concrete
and scorched flesh. And then it would be too late. Could it be too
late already? Could it? Virga trembled violently and shook his head
from side to side. The Antichrist. He looked up to the sun for
flaming mercy but it only burned him the more. The Antichrist. The
insects’ torment had his sanity hanging by a thread. Filled
with his blood, they would fly to their nests to disgorge it and
then return, newly hungry. They shrieked in his ears. Against the
silence of the desert was a great multitude of people shouting at
him from a distance: Antichrist Antichrist.

Virga could not hold on. Beneath his
face there was a puddle of liquid, his liquid. His life. He saw
himself reflected in it.

He loosened his grip on consciousness.
As he fell forward the noise of the multitude rose in his ears
until he was completely, totally deafened.

19

OUT OF THE DEPTHS of darkness came a hand that circled his face.
Its fingers were poised to rip out his eyes; Virga tried
desperately to move his head but he couldn’t. It seemed that
he was pinned down, helpless to protect himself. He thrashed and
moaned, trying to avoid the awful claw that now lowered itself,
twitching sporadically toward his open eyes. He could see nothing
but the hand as it gradually grew larger and larger, broader and
more sinewy, and he saw the shudder through the tendons that
foretold the coming pain of plucked-out eyes. He fought against
whatever was confining him and cried out “NO!” at the
top of his lungs.

The hand suddenly burst into flame.
Within seconds it had burned itself out and fallen into ashen
pieces. He saw the outline of another hand pressing against his
forehead. Its touch soothed him; he felt mercifully released from
the pain that tormented his every breath. He tried to see who it
was but the palm touched his eyelids and made him forget everything
but the softness of rest.

A man said, “The fever is gone.
Sleep now.”

And Virga slipped away to dream of
sailing the Charles with Katherine, smelling of cinnamon, clutching
tightly to his arm.

When he opened his eyes again it seemed
that he could still smell the warm timber of his sloop, the soft
suppleness of the river. But it was still dark and he thought at
first he was still dreaming. He lay, his eyes open, and
listened.

Insects hummed in the distance; the
thought of them made him wince. Something was burning. Virga heard
the gentle crackling of wood and smelled smoke. He was lying on a
frame cot within a tent of goatskin. He could see a small fire of
brush and sticks burning just outside the tent entrance. Night had
fallen but he had no idea how long it had been since he found
himself lost in the desert. When he tried to struggle up he
realized his hand had been splinted with sticks and wrapped in a
cloth bandage.

Virga quietly pushed back the blanket
and got to his feet. He staggered, drunk with the sudden rush of
blood to his head, and waited until he could walk steadily to the
tent entrance. Outside there was a battered jeep, its windshield
cobwebbed with cracks. On the fire there was a spit impaling the
roasting meat of some sort of fowl. He was about to cross through
the tent opening when a tall, slender man in a bush suit walked
into his field of vision. The man bent down over the fire, adding
to it bits of brush and sticks he’d been carrying in his
arms. He tended the meat, turning the spit to make certain it
wasn’t burning.

Virga watched, his eyes narrowed, as
the man sat before the flames, crossed his legs beneath him, and
stared motionlessly out toward the glittering fires that burned far
away across the desert.

The man seemed to be watching for
something. His expression, an intense composure, never altered. He
seemed to be a young man but in the flicker of the fires it was
hard for Virga to tell his exact age. He had light hair and a fair
complexion; he wasn’t Arabic, there was no doubt about that.
But for all this man’s fair, even fragile, appearance his
eyes were strangely disturbing and Virga was uncertain if he could
withstand his direct gaze. They glistened in the firelight; they
seemed to absorb the golden hue of the flames before becoming
darker, as if they were no fixed color at all. He reached out to
turn the spit again and at the same time his head came around a few
inches to the left. He looked directly at Virga as if he’d
known all along the other man had been standing there. The force
and abruptness of his gaze made Virga step back, his heart
hammering.

He rose up. The man was well over six
feet; his lean frame made him appear even taller. When he saw
Virga’s apprehension his fierce eyes slowly gave way to a
controlled concern. He turned and without speaking sat before the
fire again.

Virga stood at the mouth of the tent,
aware that his hand was throbbing painfully. The man had seemed not
to notice him; he sat staring out, as he had before, at the small
dots of fires in the black distance. Hunger was churning in
Virga’s stomach, enough to make him risk any threat this man
might pose. After another moment he said through still swollen
lips, “Are you going to eat that or let it burn?”

The man’s eyes flickered toward
the fire. He took the spit off and, with a knife from his belt, cut
a hunk of stringy meat. He said in a very distinct voice, “Be
careful. You’ve been throwing up everything I’ve fed
you.”

Virga took the meat and tore into it
thankfully. He wiped his greasy hands along the sides of his
trousers. He painfully sat down across from the man, shielding his
face from the flames because the heat made his blistered flesh feel
as if it were puckering.

“Your hand was infected,”
said the man, not looking at Virga but rather through him. “I
cleaned the wound and bound it.”

“Thank you.”

“I found you a few miles away.
What were you doing out here?”

Virga didn’t know if he could
trust this man or not. He averted his eyes from the man’s,
but that had little effect. He could feel the man watching him. He
said, “Someone left me there.”

The man said, “I see.”

He looked away from Virga, directing
his attention toward the fires. When Virga turned to look he saw a
great orange tongue of flame leap up amid the smaller fires.
“Is that an explosion?” he asked.

“They’re burning
books,” the man answered softly. “They began yesterday,
first raiding the libraries and then the private residences. Soon
they’ll turn to other things.”

Virga gave a tired sigh of frustration.
He fearfully touched the healing blisters on his cheeks and
forehead. “They’ve gone too far. There’s no
stopping them.”

“Who are you?”

“My name is James Virga.
I’m a professor of theology.”

The man raised a brow.
“Oh?”

“And you? I’d like to know
who saved my life.”

“I didn’t save your life. I
only found you.”

“Isn’t that the same
thing?”

The man paused and then said, “My
name is Michael.”

“You’re an American
also?”

“No,” he said, “not
an American.”

Virga chewed at a bone. The heat of the
fire made him draw away a few feet. He threw aside the bone and
said, “Why are you out here? Why aren’t you in the
city?”

The man smiled faintly and motioned
toward the jeep. “I did go into the city,” he said,
“but I couldn’t get through the crowd without…
injuring someone, and that was over two weeks ago. So I decided it
might be best to make camp out here. In the city the forces of
violence are building too rapidly.”

“I never saw anything like it
before. Never.”

“Then be prepared to see more of
it,” said the man with a bluntness that made Virga look up
from his new piece of meat, “because it’s only
begun.”

Virga stared at him.

“This place is not the worst,
only the most well-publicized. There are villages and settlements
all over the Middle East that have been burned to the ground by
their own inhabitants. After they’d turned on everything in
sight they finally, ultimately, turned on themselves and destroyed
each other. Al Ahmadi, Al Jahra, Safwan, even Abadan and Basra. Up
into Iran and Iraq, crawling toward Turkey. I know because
I’ve seen.”

“It’s all happened so
suddenly,” Virga said. “No one had any idea this was
going on.”

“Suddenly?” Michael asked.
“No, not suddenly. This has been building since the beginning
of time, this mad last struggle, this legacy of destruction. No,
not suddenly.”

“What about the Holy
Land?”

Michael glanced over at him, through
him. “Soon,” he said.

“My God,” Virga said.
“If this insanity ever spread into America…”

The man was quiet for a moment,
watching the last embers of a million ideas. Then he said,
“You’ve been in delirium for the last four days. I
thought at first you were going to die but you were gradually able
to keep down small amounts of water. For that space of
time—four days—you hung on the edge of death. Yesterday
your fever broke and you regained consciousness for only a
moment.”

“Four days…” Virga
repeated.

“I’ve met stragglers here
and there,” Michael said. “Those who have somehow
maintained their senses in this onslaught and who are trying to
leave the country. But there are not very many. The police force
and the military have been severely weakened. Four days can be a
very long time; in this place there is not much more time left.
Having used all he could here, Baal will go elsewhere.”

At the mention of that obscene name,
Virga shuddered. He remembered the figure that sat in darkness on
the other side of a chessboard. “How do you know all
this?” he asked.

“I have my sources.”

“What sources?”

The man said, “You ask too many
questions.”

“Because I want to
understand,” Virga said. “I have to understand…
Dear God, I have to…”

Michael had leaned forward slightly.
His eyes cut Virga to the bone. “What you’ve seen here
pains you,” he stated matter-of-factly.

“Yes. I’ve seen murder and
savagery. I’ve met Baal and escaped with my life.”

Michael seemed surprised. He narrowed
his eyes very slightly. “You’ve met Baal?”

“He has one of my colleagues, a
Dr. Naughton.”

“As a disciple?”

“Hell, no!” cried Virga,
realizing as soon as he said it that he didn’t know for
certain. “He’s probably a prisoner… I
don’t know. But Baal told me he had Naughton.”

“If he’s not dead,”
Michael said, “he’s given his life to Baal. Those were
his two alternatives. How was it that you managed to get
away?” There was a hint of caution, of distrust, in the
man’s voice.

“I don’t know. I
can’t understand it. I had a crucifix—”

Michael nodded.

“—and he couldn’t
touch me as long as I held it where he could see it. Yet above his
doorway there was the drawing of a crucifix, in plain
view.”

“But,” Michael said,
“wasn’t it upside down?”

He remembered. “Yes. It
was.”

Michael sat back, seemingly
satisfied.

“I want to know,” Virga
said, “how you can know so much about this man.”

Virga waited for an answer. From the
corner of his eye he saw orange flames explode into the sky
again.

Michael said, “I’ve been
following Baal. I have been tracking him across the world. I
won’t stop, not until I have him. I know his past and
present; I will write his future.”

“For what purpose? To kill
him?”

The other man paused, his eyes still
guarded and wary. “No. No, not to kill him. But to stop him
before this Godless disease overpowers the centers of humanity. To
destroy is enough, justified perhaps, though that is not for me to
say. But to strip the creation of all intelligence and dignity,
like a cat that slowly strips a wounded mouse, is too
much.”

“Have you ever met the
man?”

“We’ve met,” Michael
said.

“Then you believe there are no
limits to his power?”

“He has his limits, though they
are only temporary. As his power develops he will be able to
overcome those limitations.”

“My God,” Virga breathed,
“you mean to say he hasn’t fully developed his
capabilities?”

The man looked up. “By no
means.”

“I felt his power even when I was
in the same room with him. I still don’t know what it was.
Some sort of hypnotism or something, some sort of brainwashing
technique.”

“Yes,” Michael said,
“that was what it was.”

“He almost had me,” Virga
said. “God only knows what he’s done to
Naughton.”

“Remember that moment. Remember
that Baal has no mercy. He exists only to shame the creation in the
sight of God.”

Virga noted the use of the word
creation again. He began to think that this man might be some sort
of fanatic. “If you won’t kill him,” he asked
after a moment, “how can you stop him? His disciples would
rip you to pieces if you even got near.”

Michael seemed to disregard the
question. He sat as motionless as if he were part of the desert
itself, perhaps a clump of camel’s-thorn. Then he said, very
quietly, “His influence must be contained.”

“It’s not quite that
simple.”

“No. Not quite.”

A taut, dry silence stretched between
them. Virga expected the man to say more, but he seemed preoccupied
with the book-burning miles away. He winced, almost imperceptibly,
with every new thrust of fire.

Virga’s hand was hurting. He
wanted to keep the conversation going so he wouldn’t have to
be alone with the pain. “You said you’ve been following
Baal. Where from?”

“It’s not important.
What’s important is the here and now.”

“I’d like to
know.”

“No you wouldn’t,”
the man said. Virga said, “Yes. I want to know.”

The man’s eyes shifted from the
fires to Virga and back again. With an effort he said, “I
came across his trail in California some years ago. He and his
disciples, a small group then, had taken control of a town called
Borja, near the Mexican border. The townspeople, the law officers,
the ministers, at first everyone thought them only a commune of
fanatics; they were affected by the same powers you see working
here. Soon they’d turned against each other. Some of them
Baal induced into his circle. The others he destroyed. Then it was
only a matter of time; the word spread underground to every madman
who would listen. The motorcycle gangs, the Satan-worshipers, the
drug- and power-obsessed: Baal held sway over all these. When Baal
was prepared, the commune, now over five hundred strong, split into
four groups, and all of them gained notoriety. They became
murderers and terrorists and they neither knew why nor cared. They
were tainted. But they were only part of Baal’s
education.”

“His education?” asked
Virga, watching the shadows the dying fire scrawled across the
man’s face.

“His power grew by degrees, as
his followers increased. And those he claimed added their forces to
the movement to make it possible to influence thousands of people
very quietly. He wanted no fanfare nor banners, not yet. He was not
prepared for that. His commune left California and in Nevada sought
out a group of Satanists financed on a desert estate by a woman
named Van Lynn. Within weeks he had taken control of both the group
and the money; they worshiped him as their master’s prince.
Baal remained with Mrs. Van Lynn for several years while his
followers quietly made more converts in both America and Europe.
From the very beginning he had always known what to do: appeal to
man’s baser desires, tap the capacity for violence and the
lust for power. Make them drunk with illusion. He impressed upon
his converts that the God they had been following is dead; His
ideas of peace and harmony are no longer valid in this world. Thus,
Baal said, the only recourse for the survival of man is a battle of
the animals, a survival of the strongest.”

“From reason to chaos,”
Virga said, “is not a very long step.”

Michael shook his head. “No,
unfortunately not. Baal took the remainder of Mrs. Van Lynn’s
money and left America. In Europe he began the same procedure of
selecting converts and spreading them out to influence others. But
he needed more money, more power, and thus he came to the oil
fields.”

“So in the midst of all this Baal
is the manipulator?”

“Yes.”

“Leading us toward…”
Virga let his voice trail off; the answer was too terrible to
consider.

“Yes,” Michael said.
“A complete breakdown of order. Death and
destruction.”

“But what is his motive? And why
has he named himself after a god of sacrifice?”

Michael did not answer.

“We have our sanity,” Virga
said, “and while we do we cannot just sit here and let these
things happen. There must be someone we can warn… there must
be someone we can tell.”

“We? We?” Michael looked
sharply at him over the last of the fire. “You have no part
in this.”

Virga leaned forward, defying the
man’s gaze. He said, “No. I owe Naughton that much.
I’m going to do what I can to help him.”

“You’re a fool. You
don’t understand what you’re dealing with
here.”

Virga said, “I’m a fool,
then.”

Michael fixed his gaze firmly on the
other man. After a moment Michael’s eyes softened only a
fraction. “All men are fools,” he said. “And
fools are dangerous.”

“You said you’ve met Baal
before,” Virga said. “Where?”

At first he thought the man would
refuse to answer. Then he, slowly unbuttoned the collar of his bush
jacket and thrust his chin into the dim light of the embers.
“Where is not your concern,” he said. “It’s
enough to say we’ve met.”

Virga recoiled.

Splayed across the fair flesh of
Michael’s throat, two deeply burned handprints sought to
strangle him.

20

IN THE MORNING Virga awakened with nerves on edge, afraid that
the nightmares he’d endured were about to become
realities.

He swung himself into a sitting
position on the cot and gingerly tested his injured hand. It was
completely numb from the wrist down. When he tried to move the
crushed fingers pain began somewhere deep within his forearm and
raced through agonized nerves up his shoulder and neck to the
brain. He was afraid the hand was beyond repair. He stepped through
the tent opening out into the white sunlight, where the desert
stretched flat and dry forever, and saw Michael sitting on the
ground in almost the same spot as the night before. The man’s
eyes were narrowed against the glare; he looked out across the vast
expanse.

Virga looked around. No words were
needed.

Far out, where they had watched the
fires, the sky was filled with a brooding black smoke that coiled
around and around like vipers twisting amid the clouds. It was like
the smoke of a gigantic bomb blast, thick and heavy. Virga shivered
at the ominous sight, the preview of things to come. He watched it
moving with the currents of air and knew the sickening odor of it
would soon reach them.

“What is it?” he asked.

“The city,” Michael
said.

“They’ve destroyed their
homes? How could they?”

“No man has a home any
longer,” the other man said quietly. “They’ve
gone to join Baal and the city has been set afire, possibly as an
offering.”

Virga stood, his arms at his sides, and
watched the smoke fill the sky. He had never in his life felt as
helpless as he did now; no, he corrected himself, there was one
other time, but he kept that so far back in his mind that it hardly
ever hurt anymore. Now he was one little speck on the world and he
was helpless against the man whose power grew against the heavens
like the columns of black smoke. No words could save them, not the
philosophic wisdom of the saints nor even the teachings of Christ.
Baal had given them what they wanted; they had been granted
permission to smash at the guiding forces of reason, and they would
snarl in the streets like wild dogs until they were mastered by the
frenzy.

The smoke had almost reached them. It
hovered across the desert. Virga watched it coming. He said,
“I’ve got to know whether Naughton is dead or
alive.”

“He’s dead.”

“How do you know that?”

“I know,” Michael said.
“Perhaps he still walks and breathes and perhaps his brain
still functions, but the man is dead.”

“I don’t believe
that,” said Virga, hearing the lie as he spoke it. If he had
fallen into Baal’s grasp there was nothing that could save
him.

Michael stood up, towering over Virga.
He said, “You know who Baal is, you know what he represents.
You sense it. Don’t look away; I can read it in your eyes.
Soon Baal will be capable of burning this land to a cinder. Can a
man stand against power of that nature?”

“Can a man turn his back?”
Virga asked. “No. To turn my back would be my surrender to
him. And if I can tear anything from him, even Naughton’s
corpse, I will.”

The smoke touched the white desert sand
and immediately blackened it with its filth. Soon the rolling
darkness would engulf them like a fog at sea. Virga smelled a high,
acrid odor that made his stomach churn.

Michael said, “You’re an
old man.”

“I’m a man!” Virga
said sharply. He trembled, trying to control himself.
“Don’t ever say that to me again.”

Michael paused to let the man’s
anger subside. Then he said, “You want to find your
friend?”

“I’m going to find my
friend.”

“All right then. We’ll go
into the city, or rather what’s left of it, and I don’t
think that’s much. Perhaps we’ll find your friend with
Baal.” He looked directly into Virga’s eyes. “Or
perhaps it will not be your friend we find.”

Michael stepped past Virga toward the
jeep. He started to climb in and then stopped, listening for
something. He looked around, his eyes scanning the horizon. Virga
looked also but could see nothing beyond the silent wall of smoke.
He felt the other man’s tension. Michael said, “This
place is haunted. I hear the mad gods shrieking for revenge.
Listen.”

Virga couldn’t hear anything. He
thought the man was insane. He said, “There’s
nothing.”

“Oh yes,” the other man
replied softly. “Oh yes there is.”

He took his place behind the wheel, and
Virga took the seat beside him. They roared away into the smoke,
throwing sand. Twenty minutes later, on the city’s outskirts,
they had not seen a living soul. Bodies of men and animals lay
scattered everywhere as if a terrible storm had ripped through, but
nothing moved. Ahead of them fires gutted the city, modern and
ancient sections alike, and the entire sky was a maelstrom of
searing red and whirling black smoke, a chaotic kaleidoscope.

The roar of the fires was deafening. It
was as if some giant with torch in hand had walked the streets
setting everything in sight ablaze. To Virga it was revolting; he
had never seen so much carnage and waste. Michael drove on, his
hands tight around the wheel, his narrowed eyes flickering right
and left to pierce the gloom. The human storm had torn through the
city’s commercial district without mercy. Windows were
shattered and stores had been looted. Merchandise littered the
streets and Michael swept through it as if running an obstacle
course.

Michael heard it first. Virga saw him
lean forward almost imperceptibly, and then he also heard the loud
static-garbled Arabic voice:

“… impossible to
accurately count this mass of people… also members of the
press from the United States, the Soviet Union, England, Germany,
and Japan… the officials cannot maintain order. Already the
ambulances have been… but the medical centers that have been
set up here are being ravaged by those in search of drugs. I
don’t know if transmission is getting
through…”

Michael swung the jeep to the curb and
cut the engine. In the broken window of a housewares store, amid
shattered goods and displays, were three televisions. Two of them
were overturned and useless but the third was still operating,
though the picture faded in and out. The volume had been turned up
to full. The voice of a man on the brink of panic blared out into
the street.

“… but we’ll try to
keep you informed.” The newsman, a slim sunglassed Arab,
stood on a platform over what appeared to be an endless sea of
heads. As he spoke into a microphone he kept looking over his
shoulder at the mass of humanity beneath him. Virga saw that the
platform shook as bodies crushed around its base.

The newsman said, “… some
call him the living Muhammad, some call him devil, but there is no
mistaking the strength of this man. He has declared himself the
unreachable, the untouchable savior of man and hundreds of
thousands have gathered here to pay him homage. Even now I can look
across and see… I can see the fires of the old city. On this
site he has proclaimed the beginnings of the new age of Baal and
the Baalians gathered here will soon strike the first stone into
the foundations of his city. Now he…” Static
overpowered the voice and Virga put his hands to his ears. When the
picture had cleared the camera was panning and he saw the horrible
mass of them, some groveling in the sand and others dancing wildly,
both clothed and nude. In the distance there were trucks with
emblems of both Middle Eastern and foreign television networks. The
camera towers rose up like derricks.

“… I have never witnessed
anything like this,” the newsman said. The platform shook. He
put a hand to the railing for support. “I feel a mixture of
elation and fear. I can’t describe it. I only pray that what
is happening here is indeed for the good of all
mankind…”

Michael sat rigid in his seat. He was
motionless, staring at the television. Behind the two men, across
the street, flames burst along the roof of a building and timbers
cracked.

“There are people here from
around the world,” the Arab was saying. “This is
totally without parallel. There are those who say that Baal was
born with the mark of heaven. From birth, they say, he was destined
to lead men to the gates of greatness. It is only for the future to
decide. This is without a doubt the beginning of a new
age…” He touched his earphones and listened for a
moment. The picture became unfocused as tubes cracked suddenly,
then regained its sharpness. “Yes… yes. It’s
been verified now. Yes. He is walking among the crowd now! Look at
them! You can see them falling to their knees, wave after wave of
them, as he passes into their midst! I can see him!” The
camera panned, jerking crazily, until it had picked up the tableau
of kneeling figures. People were lifting up their faces for his
touch as he passed. Virga recognized the tall frame of the man who
had faced him over the chessboard. Baal, though still in the
distance and almost obscured, touched his fingertip to upturned
faces and Virga saw the forms collapse in a writhing ecstasy.

“He’s out there among the
masses now!” the newsman said. “This is the first time
we’ve been able to get a good picture, though we still
can’t quite see—” The platform suddenly shook
violently. The newsman shouted, “Watch that boom! Get away
from there!” Someone in the background, a technician,
shouted, “Move away from the platform!”

The newsman was still trying to regain
his composure. “The officials cannot control this
crowd,” he was saying, “and to move among them is a
great risk… I saw someone fall a moment ago and he was
trampled; the power of the crowd is too much…” He
swung around and watched the moving figures as the camera
photographed over his shoulder.

Suddenly Michael leaned forward. His
eyes had caught something Virga had not seen.

“What was that?” the
newsman shrieked. The platform shook. The crowd was pushing forward
and Virga heard something like a low moan, growing in intensity.
“I’ve just heard something!” said the
newsman. “I don’t know what it was!” He
tapped on his earphones. “Hey! What was that? Hassan! Do you
hear me?”

He listened through the earphones.
Behind him the crowd surged forward. Screams and moans drowned out
the voice of the newsman as he frantically shouted into his
microphone. His face had suddenly become gaunt and ashen.

Virga was only peripherally aware that
the row of buildings on the opposite side of the street were
completely afire and smoking timbers were crashing down onto the
pavement all around.

“… a few moments ago. We
still don’t know who or why…” The newsman looked
up as if he were not certain he was still on the air. He nodded at
someone. “Hassan is out there with an audio unit but
he’s having trouble communicating… I can’t hear
very well. Right now… I think only two bullets were
fired… The crowd is still moving forward. GRAB THAT
EQUIPMENT!” The platform shuddered and swayed. Something
crashed. “IT’S GOING OVER!”

Behind Michael and Virga one of the
buildings exploded in a belch of black smoke. Bits of concrete
skittered along the broken sidewalk. Virga ducked his head
instinctively.

The newsman was leaning over the
railing. “THEY’RE TEARING HIM TO PIECES! THE MAN IS
BEGGING FOR MERCY BUT THEY’RE TEARING HIM TO PIECES!”
He put his hand to the headset. “What? Get out of there!
Those people will tear you apart!” Then, directed back into
the microphone, “Someone, a Jew, has fired two bullets into
Baal at point-blank range! They’re lifting Baal…
they’re taking him somewhere… I can’t see for
the people crowded around him… They’re putting him in
a car but the people are still crowded around. GET AWAY FROM HIM!
GIVE HIM ROOM!” The Arab stopped to catch his breath. Tears
of either rage or frustration were glittering on his cheeks. Static
blurred his voice when he spoke again.

“… I have a report…
he is seriously injured… I repeat, Baal is seriously
injured. There is no controlling this crowd now…
They’re ripping at each other… The Jew who held the
gun is—he’s been torn and scattered… We’re
going to have to radio a helicopter to get us out of here! The car
is pulling away… I don’t know where they’re
going to take him, I don’t know who fired the shots, I
don’t know…” He suddenly pitched forward and
caught the handrail again. Beneath him fights were erupting; the
screaming of the crowd was loud and bloodthirsty. The newsman cried
out, “GET AWAY FROM THE PLATFORM! WATCH THAT CABLE! GET AWAY
FROM THE—” and the television screen was suddenly a
solid blank, cracked occasionally with a black line of static.

Michael started the engine and jammed
it into gear. Across the street another building exploded. Ashes
were raining down. Virga had to grab hold of the dash with his good
hand to steady himself. Michael drove through the holocaust as if
pursuing something, or as if something were pursuing him. He drove
over curbs and down narrow stinking side streets and across the
charred remains of elegant homes. Virga gritted his teeth and held
on for life. The jeep plunged through the ruins of the modern
section into the ancient section of the city, where already the
ashes were cold and only occasional red flames lit the way in a
morass of black earth and gray sky. Virga glimpsed, for an instant,
the scorched walls and towers of Musallim’s palace in the
distance, above the burned remains of other dwellings.

They swerved onto a long street paved
with rough, broken squares of stone. On both sides were high walls,
veined with cracks and bearing painted Arabic slogans. Doorways
were cut directly into the stone; here and there Virga saw sprawled
corpses.

The engine suddenly screamed. Michael
was ramming his foot down on the accelerator. Virga cried out,
“What the hell are you doing?”

Ahead of them was a gleaming black
limousine with closed blinds across the rear window. It was racing
across the rough stones, its wheels trembling from the impact of
crashing down again and again. Michael was bearing down on the
limousine; his eyes were purposeful, his jaw clenched. They roared
up on the left side of the car and Virga saw that closed blinds
obscured the rear seat. The driver of the limousine had been
unaware of their presence; he looked over and his eyes widened.

And Virga saw it was the man named
Olivier.

Michael swerved the jeep to the right.
Metal crashed against metal. Rubber burned. Virga shouted out,
realizing that Michael was deliberately trying to run them into a
wall. Virga saw fingers pull down a blind. The eyes that stared
through were black, something from a nightmare. The fingers let go
and the blind snapped back.

Michael wrenched at the wheel over
Virga’s shouted protests. This time Olivier met him in the
middle of the street and the two vehicles, like bulls with locked
horns, roared together. Something, a small piece of metal like a
hubcap, flew up from beneath the limousine and went spinning past
Virga’s head. He crouched down, hearing the wail of metal
beside his ear.

Olivier was trying to drive the jeep
into the wall now. The limousine was screaming, forcing the other
vehicle closer and closer to those stones. They were going so fast
that the handwritten slogans on the ancient walls were now only a
solid smear of primary colors. Metal crashed again; the jeep
shuddered and Michael’s hands were bone-white on the wheel.
The limousine was driving them toward the wall. A headlamp smashed
and glass went flying. Virga caught a glimpse of Olivier’s
face, grinning like a bleached skull. The jeep hit the far wall and
the noise of rending metal sounded like the shrieking of a
man’s voice. And Virga realized it was his own.

Michael slammed on the brakes. The
limousine scraped along the side of the jeep, then regained the
middle of the street and roared away. The veins in his neck
throbbing, Michael fought the wheel to stave off a headlong crash;
he pulled the jeep away from the wall with only a slight reduction
of speed, then he too had reached the middle of the street. Far
ahead the limousine swerved sharply and disappeared around a
corner.

They followed, seeing the limousine as
it turned into a side street ahead. They lost sight of it again as
it made another sharp turn.

In another few moments they came into
full view of Musallim’s palace. Masonry had crumbled until
the place looked unused and decrepit; ashes had settled everywhere
like a layer of dust. It seemed to be deserted; Virga could see
neither guards nor dogs. The gate had been torn from its hinges.
The jeep raced through into the courtyard. Michael skidded the
vehicle up across the driveway and onto the scorched ground where
it spun in a fishtail circle. The engine died.

He took the key from the ignition and
looked around. There was no sign that anyone had ever been here. It
could have been a mass of charred brick and shattered glass a
thousand years before and no one would have known the difference.
Virga saw that the huge door of the palace had been wrenched open.
Now the entrance yawned obscenely.

Michael stepped out of the jeep. Before
he could move there came a whine of engines gathering power and in
another moment, before either Michael or Virga could cross the
grounds to the private airstrip, a gleaming white aircraft burst
along the black tarmac and took to the sky. A last correction of
the rudder, a minor shudder along the tail, and the banshee wail of
the engines had lifted, along with the aircraft, toward the
northwest.

Michael stared at its slipstream. Then
he said, as quietly as if he were speaking to himself,
“I’m too late.”

“What did you expect to find
here,” Virga asked. “This place has been destroyed.
They’ve all gone.”

“Yes. Now they’ve all
gone.”

“Where would they take Baal? With
the hospitals afire there would be no one to treat the
wounds.”

Michael seemed not to be listening. He
ran a hand along his forehead and then looked at the black ash his
fingers had accumulated.

“Did you hear me? We’ve got
to find where they’ve taken Baal.”

“What?” he asked, then
seemed to remember what Virga had said. “Baal was on board
that aircraft. Probably they’re leaving the country. Even the
continent.”

“What? How do you
know?”

“I know,” Michael said.

“Surely he’ll bleed to
death without medical attention. Where are they taking
him?”

Michael turned away without answering.
He walked back across the barren grounds to the open entrance with
Virga following. Michael stopped just short of the doorway and
stood peering into the dank, filth-walled interior.
“Something is wrong,” he said quietly.

“A trap?”

“I’m not sure. It seems
that no one is here… and yet… Follow directly behind
me and walk quietly. All right?”

“Yes,” Virga said.
“All right.”

Michael stepped through and Virga
followed, minding his footing on shards of broken glass and burned
tapestries. The interior was ruined. The walls were scarred and
burned black, carpets torn to pieces, huge mirrors shattered,
exquisitely ornamented furniture ripped apart as if by axes. There
was the heavy pall of smoke, the thick garbage stench of it; this
place had been murdered and already smelled of decaying flesh.
Michael turned to him to make certain he could go on and then they
continued together through the corridors past huge rooms and marble
staircases. Beneath them their feet slipped on human excrement and
glass.

There was no sound. They’re all
gone, Virga thought. All of them. The disciples as well as their
wounded master had vanished. They moved silently through the
darkness; the corridors wound about them as if they crawled in the
intestines of a burned carcass.

And then there was the sharp noise of
glass breaking from behind closed doors on one side of the
corridor. Michael tensed and waited, his hand gripping
Virga’s forearm to prevent him from moving, but the noise did
not repeat itself.

Michael set himself and kicked through
into the room beyond. The doors collapsed from their battered
hinges and fell with a resounding crash to a floor of cracked
stone.

They stood in the remains of what had
been a dining hall. Chairs were overturned, scattered wildly about
a charred, ash-topped table. There were still food-smeared dishes
and pewter goblets arranged as if for a banquet. Three of the
goblets had overturned and the liquid had collected in slimy
puddles. Blue clouds of smoke still wafted about the room, swirling
like spirits of the dead. Above the odors of smoke and decay there
was something else, something that made Virga grind his teeth
against its presence. It was the sickly sweet smell of the burial
vault. He felt Michael tense beside him.

Someone sat at the table.

Someone who had slumped forward,
overturning a crystal decanter, and whose face was now hidden in
shadows. The figure, dressed in a man’s ragged clothes, was
emaciated and pale-fleshed. Virga gasped as he saw the terrible
dark blotches on one of the exposed arms. The figure stirred,
turning his face toward the muddy light that streamed through
shattered doors.

“My God,” Virga said.
“It’s Naughton.”

But he knew immediately it was also not
Naughton. The man who sat there perhaps resembled Naughton, in a
high fine forehead now covered with festering sores, in the shape
of a nose now partially eaten away by some cancerous disease, in
fair hair that had been ripped away in spots to expose bloody
scalp, but this was also not Donald Naughton.

The man’s eyes glittered with a
savage ferocity. He scooped up a goblet and, shouting out in
incomprehensible rage, threw it directly at the two men.

Michael ducked. The goblet clattered
against the far wall. Naughton struggled to his feet. He lifted a
chair high and threw it at them; the effort made him stagger back
and he fell to all fours. He growled and scurried into a corner,
where his eyes glowed red in the midst of shadows.

“My God,” Virga said.
“They’ve made him into some sort of animal! Oh Jesus
Christ!”

“Stay back!” Michael
commanded. He stepped forward and Naughton howled like a maddened
dog.

Naughton reached out for dinnerware and
pieces of glass scattered about him, throwing them at the men.
Michael asked Virga quietly, “What was his first
name?”

“Donald,” Virga said.
‘Was’? Had the man said ‘was’?

Naughton settled down on his
haunches.

When Michael took another step forward
Naughton bared his teeth.

“Be quiet,” Michael said in
a voice that resounded with calm authority. “Be quiet. Your
name is Donald Naughton. Do you remember that name?”

Naughton cocked his head to one side,
listening. He put both hands to his ears and sank his chin down
against his chest.

“Donald Naughton, listen to
me,” Michael said. “You’re still a man. You can
still fight this; I want you to fight it. FIGHT IT!”

Naughton growled and looked for
something else to throw.

Michael stepped forward again and bent
to look across into the man’s eyes. “Fight it,”
he commanded. He thrust his arm out, offered his palm. “Trust
me. Trust me. You can fight it.”

Naughton seemed confused. He shook his
head back and forth in a mindless frenzy. He turned and scratched
at the walls, seeking some kind of escape.

“DONALD NAUGHTON!” Michael
said.

“NOOOOOO!” moaned the
animal on the floor. “NOT DONALD NAUGHTON ANYMORE!”

“Jesus Christ,” Virga said
under his breath.

Michael sprang up from his bent
position. As the diseased figure turned from the wall he was upon
him. Naughton screamed, a wild cry of rage and fear. Michael
clapped both hands to Naughton’s temples. Virga could see the
veins stand out in Michael’s hands. “DONALD
NAUGHTON!” he said.

The man shook himself; saliva drooled
from his open mouth. Slowly, very slowly, his eyes changed. There
was the brief glimmer of recognition. His entire body seemed to
unwind, as if giving itself up to Michael’s touch. Then he
breathed, a harsh awful rattle that filled the hall with stinking
breath, and collapsed in Michael’s arms. Michael held him as
he was racked with sobbing and gently, gently laid him down on the
stone. He motioned for Virga to come forward.

Virga leaned over his friend. The sores
were even more terrible than he had thought. Some unimaginable
disease had ripped across the flesh, tearing like the teeth of
dogs. Michael, cradling Naughton’s head, said, “This
man is dying. It will be his only release from the pain.”

“No help now,” Naughton
muttered, his eyes glazed. “Too late. Now too
late…” He looked up, unbelieving. “You…
are… Dr. Virga… ?”

“Yes. My God, my God. What have
they done to you?”

He moaned, tormented by the pain. He
could fight it off only for moments at a time and when it returned
it was always stronger. “All of them have left this
place,” he whispered weakly, haltingly. “Cresil, Verin,
Sonneilton, Carreau… all of them. Baal has taken them
away.”

“Baal was shot,” Virga
said. “Where was he taken?”

Naughton looked up. Virga thought the
man was smiling, just a trace of it, but he couldn’t be sure.
“Shot…” the man said. “No.”

“Where was he taken?” Virga
asked again.

Naughton was breathing harshly. The
pain was coming back. It caressed him with red-hot fingers. He
shuddered and Michael put his hand on the man’s forehead.

“Gone,” said Naughton,
gasping around the agony.

“What?” Michael bent his
head down to hear. “Gone where?”

“That child that child,”
Naughton was saying. Tears filled his eyes, streamed down his
cheeks. “Oh God I held the knife… I didn’t
know… I couldn’t think…” Michael brushed
the tears away with a fingertip. “No one can stop him
now,” Naughton whispered.

“Baal was shot,” Virga
said. He glanced over at Michael. “Wasn’t
he?”

“Twice…” Naughton
said, “shot twice. The Arabs will rise up to avenge the
murder of the living Mu—oh God the pain the pain the
pain—ooohhhhh!” He fought it, his teeth clenched.

Virga felt the tears on his face.
“For what purpose?” he heard himself asking. Naughton
looked up at him through a haze of pain.

“The destruction of the
Jews… total destruction… no Jew left alive…
terrorism across the world… total…”

“Why?”

Michael was staring at Virga.
“Revenge,” he said, answering even as Naughton
whispered the word.

The breath rattled in Naughton’s
throat. “He plans a resurrection from death… while his
disciples spread chaos and war… he waits… and…
oh Jesus the pain ooohhhhh!”

Dear God in Heaven, breathed Virga.
Dear God in Heaven.

“And when he returns the master
will come with him…”

The man was insane, his senses
destroyed. Dear God in Heaven. Vipers vipers vipers. “I
don’t understand,” Virga said, almost to himself.
“Baal was shot… he was shot…”

Michael asked softly, “Where has
Baal gone?”

“No one can find him,”
Naughton said. He choked and dribbled a vile-smelling liquid.
“Too far…”

“Where?” Michael asked. His
eyes frightened Virga; they had become fierce and weirdly golden in
the dim light.

Naughton blinked his eyes to regain
focus. Virga could see him slipping away. “I saw… the
maps,” he said finally. “I heard them talking. They
left me here to die… but I saw the maps…”

Michael leaned forward.

“Greenland,” Naughton said,
“gathering supplies at an Eskimo settlement…
Avatik… then across the ice cap…” He looked
away from Michael, searching for Virga. He touched Virga’s
hand. “Judith… she’s all right?”

“Yes. Judith is well.”

“They made me write the
letter… They were going to use you…”

“I know.”

The pale light in Naughton’s eyes
had almost burned away. His face was white and his lips barely
moved when he spoke. Whimpering in pain, he looked up suddenly,
appealingly, at Virga and his eyes were filled with tears. “I
don’t want to die like this,” he said, “not like
this…”

Virga couldn’t reply. The
helplessness on the man’s face had taken his breath away. He
stammered.

Michael pressed his hand against
Naughton’s forehead. “It’s all right,” he
whispered. “Rest now. Just close your eyes and rest for a
while.”

“Oh…” Naughton said.
He gave a small sigh and as Virga watched, the light of life
flickered and vanished from his eyes. Michael folded the
man’s arms across the chest.

He stood up. “You should take his
body back home with you. This place will be burned to the ground
and the ashes buried.”

“He was a very fine
man.”

“And now at peace.”

Virga suddenly looked up sharply.
“I’ll ship his body to his wife for proper burial.
I’m not going back yet.”

Michael slowly turned on the other man
and the force of his presence was almost palpable. He said,
“Your part in this is done. You’ve found your friend.
What lies ahead will not be for you.”

“And how can you track him alone?
Answer me that.”

“I have done so for… years
before this day. Alone.”

“I’m going with
you.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

Michael said, “I could make you
stay, you know.”

“I don’t know who you are
but I’ll tell you one thing. I am fully aware of Baal’s
capabilities and I am not going to go back to Boston and sit on my
ass.”

Michael looked at him through the gloom
for a silent moment. He abruptly shrugged his shoulders. “As
you wish. I don’t care, I’m not going to look after
you. And I repeat my sentiments that you’re a
fool.”

“So be it,” Virga said.

“Yes,” Michael said.
“The winter night is about to begin in Greenland—I
assume you’re aware of that fact—so I suggest you take
along more than what you’re wearing now. We will not be
traveling together. If you haven’t met me in the place called
Avatik in three days I leave without you.”

“I’ll meet you.”

“Yes. I believe you will. Then
you’d best make your air connections and leave this country
as soon as possible. I don’t think it has much future. Here.
I’ll help you carry your friend out of this place.”

THREE

“And I saw… a sea of glass mingled
with fire”

—Revelation 15:2

21

ACROSS SPRAWLING WHITE SANDS in the lands of simmering heat,
across winter-canopied Europe, across great blue threads of rivers
and wide valleys marked with man’s cities Virga thought of
Baal and Baal alone.

Baal was the disease of madness,
carried through the bodies of once-sane men to infect the world; he
was the end of man. And why Virga desired to confront Baal again
was a question he could not answer. Michael had been right. He had
no part in this, no place in what was to unfold. He was only a man,
yes, and an old man; he had the awesome and frightening premonition
that what was to come would be beyond his comprehension.
Michael’s glittering golden eyes disturbed him as much as the
darker visage of Baal. The two would finally meet face to face, if
not in Greenland then somewhere else, somewhere hidden from all
eyes but his own. He would have to see it; he had made up his mind
he would have to see it. and this, he concluded, was what drove him
on.

Through a succession of airline
connections he steadily moved toward the top of the world. He
watched the sun lower on the horizon; it hung blood-red and sinking
in a sky of ice. Through the airports and the flights that carried
him farther north he watched the faces of people and wondered how
they could be so unaware. The businessmen with their eternal black
briefcases and dark suits, the young tourists, the solitary
travelers: all of them so unaware. And everywhere, in every
language, he saw magazines and newspapers with front-page
photographs of murders and bombings and faces eager for war. Baal,
though hidden perhaps from even the eye of God, was still at work.
Virga turned his head from the smiling SAS stewardess in the aisle
and looked through the oval window at a sea of darkening clouds.
Where is God? he asked himself. Has man lost himself so hopelessly
now that God allows this moment without a single merciful breath?
Has Baal grown so strong that even He is struck with terror? The
thought chilled him. Now it seemed that the great mechanism that
governed the last moments of man had been set in motion; it ticked
the seconds away like a gigantic pendulum clock.

Virga was wasted. The constant pressure
of the travel schedule necessary to meet the time limit imposed by
Michael had worn him down until he was so tired he couldn’t
even sleep. The stubble of whiskers he’d seen in the lavatory
mirror made him look dismal and forlorn and the new lines around
his eyes added years to his appearance.

In glittering, frost-encrusted
Copenhagen he’d purchased boots and warm clothing for the
colder climate ahead. Now, in the final hours, there would be a
landing at Reykjavik and then at the commercial air facilities at
Søndre Strømfjord. From there he would have to
arrange a charter flight up the western coast to Avatik, a pinhead
on the map of Greenland.

When they had left Iceland, Virga saw
the sun vanish beneath the horizon, leaving only a faint trace of
angry red in the sky. They were outracing its brilliance, climbing
toward the dark Pole.

Virga drank a final scotch and wondered
if Michael had lied to him. Perhaps he would not wait at all;
perhaps he would be gone when Virga arrived there. Then the long
journey would have been for nothing. He would be lost and alone and
not know whether to remain in Avatik or return, without hope, to
the United States. Both of them would seem foreign to him now.

But he found himself wondering, while a
knot of tension steadily grew in his stomach, what they would do
when, and if, they found Baal. Short of murder, they could do
nothing to stop the man and, in murdering him, they would only be
strengthening the philosophy of violence that had grown in his
shadow. No, he was not yet prepared to view himself as a religious
assassin; there was enough bloodshed in the world already.

At the air facility at Søndre
Strømfjord, Virga found that the violence had arrived with
Baal. Danish authorities were carefully checking passports and
baggage. A bomb, one of them told a man ahead of Virga, had been
hidden in a suitcase and left among the seats in a waiting area.
The resultant blast had killed four people and wounded six more.
The authorities checked through the one bag Virga carried and waved
him through. Virga passed the area that had been damaged; he saw
the remaining metal stumps where seats had been ripped away. There
were dark stains on the linoleum floor. Virga wondered briefly who
the people had been.

With little difficulty, which surprised
him because he knew none of the language, Virga learned from the
attractive dark-haired girl at the information center that, yes,
there were private planes for charter up the coast but he would
have to arrange for a pilot some days in advance. No, Virga said,
that would not do. He would be willing to pay anything the man
asked. It was crucial that he get to Avatik by the following
morning, he said, and watched as she winced and reached for a
directory of charter agents. Virga chose one at random, Helmer
Ingestahl. It was only when he heard the sleepy voice on the other
end of the telephones that Virga realized he was calling in the
middle of the night; he was that disoriented and bone-weary.

“Avatik?” the man asked in
a thick Danish accent. “I know the settlement. There’s
an airstrip. Who has given you this number?”

“I’m at the airfield
now,” said Virga, speaking slowly so the man would
understand. “I cannot tell you how much it means to me to
reach Avatik immediately.”

“Why?” he asked.
“Something you’re doing is against the law?”

“No. I’ll pay as much as
you ask.”

Silence. Then, “You
will?”

“Yes,” Virga said.

The man grunted. “Well
then,” he said, “maybe I forgive you for awakening
me.”

Ingestahl was a burly, broad-shouldered
Dane with reddish-brown hair and a thick bull neck. Out on the
airfield, as they walked across the crust of snow toward his
hanger, he laughed at the wolfskin coat Virga had bought in
Copenhagen. “You going to wear that thing?” he asked.
“Ha! Your balls will freeze off!”

His plane was an old United States Army
recon job that Ingestahl said he’d bought from the junkpile
and refitted. Virga took little comfort in the way he kicked the
studded rubber tires and wrenched at the wing slats. “Fine
old lady,” Ingestahl said. “Good American
labor.”

Within twenty minutes they were lifting
off from the frozen airfield. With a final shudder and groan the
plane left the ground. Swirling snow threatened for a moment to
obscure visibility; then they were free of it and climbing,
climbing, climbing into the darkness.

Ingestahl cursed and slammed violently
at the heater; it sputtered and refused to operate. Virga pulled
his collar up around his frost-burning ears and breathed slowly and
shallowly to protect his lungs as the craft continued to gain
altitude. When they leveled off Ingestahl unscrewed a thermos of
coffee and drank from it. He offered a swig to Virga.

“You never said what you were
going there for,” the man said. “You don’t plan
to?”

Virga saw the dark caps of mountains
around them. The sun had completely gone now, though the sky still
clung to the faintest trace of gray at the horizon. Below them were
stretched miles and miles of snow-covered land, dotted infrequently
with the lights of settlements. The land was rough. Virga could see
its harshness even at this height. He pulled the hood of his coat
up and laced it beneath his chin. The cold across his cheeks lay as
heavy as freezing metal. In the darkness Virga could look over and
see the blinking light at the wingtip on his side; as he sat in the
cockpit steam rose from the open thermos in his hand and
Ingestahl’s face was daubed green by the glow of his
instrument panel.

“I’m going to meet
someone,” Virga said.

“Well. None of my business.
You’re paying me. Looks like you had a fall.”

“What?”

“Looks like you had a fall. Your
hand.”

“Oh. An accident.”

The man nodded. “Had a fall like
that once myself. Broke my shoulder, my collarbone and my left leg.
Ha!” His laugh was a clearing of the throat.
“Crash-landing when I was a bush pilot in
Manitoba.”

Virga drank from the thermos. The taste
was terrible. It had obviously been sitting for some time, but he
needed the warmth. He peered out through the ice-glazed window at
forbidding glaciers as they slid their inevitable way to the sea.
The expanse of snow was now completely unbroken except for dark
outcrop-pings of rock. And when they had passed over the
mountainous land, beneath them was nothing but a flat stretch of
solid ice. There seemed to be no end to it. It stretched in every
direction and at the horizon seemed to merge into the sky. Beyond
the wingtip light and the green of the panel Virga could see no
colors but black and white, black and white, black and white,
merging and yet startlingly separate.

“I don’t know what
you’re traveling to this place for,” Ingestahl said,
“but I’ll tell you something. This is a hard land. It
lulls you to sleep and when you fall asleep it kills you. I can
tell by your face you don’t live in the weather. And I
don’t know if you know the Eskimo or not. Do you?”

“No.”

“As I thought. You’re a
stranger, kraslunas. You have no place here. You’d
better keep your eyes open.”

Between them they drank the thermos
dry. On the last leg of the journey, over a new series of black
rock and white wind-tossed snow, the heater abruptly clicked on and
the glorious warmth filled the cockpit. Virga took off his gloves
and thrust his hands before the vent.

“You’re going to be
returning soon?” the man asked. “You’ll have to
pay me for my waiting time.”

“No,” Virga said.
“I’m not sure. It won’t be necessary for you to
wait.”

Ingestahl nodded. “There’s
a Danish family living with the Eskimos in Avatik. A Lutheran
minister and his wife who came up about four years ago.
You’ll be just in time for breakfast.” He motioned
ahead. Far below and off to the left there were lights on the
ice-pack. “That’s Avatik. The Eskimo there is in the
middle: too far south to be nomadic, too far north to be part of
modern Greenland. You’ll see.”

He swung the plane around in a wide
arc. Virga could see two rows of widely spaced oil drums, the
contents of which had been set afire, marking the boundaries of a
short airstrip. Ingestahl steadily lost altitude until Virga could
make out pale yellow lights in the windows of what appeared to be
shantylike dwellings. Beyond Avatik the ice mountains loomed like
bleached bodies, supine in the snow. Ingestahl hit the airstrip,
calmly corrected a threatening skid, and stopped the craft in a
wild flurry of snow and chips of ice.

Ingestahl kept the engine alive and
reached behind the cockpit for Virga’s case. He waited until
the other man had stepped out into the snow and then tossed it to
him. Ingestahl made a thumbs-up gesture, and shouted over the roar
of the prop, “Good luck!”

Virga stepped back out of the way and,
snow stinging his face, stood watching the old craft tear away
between the rows of bright burning drums until it finally lifted
from the ice and headed into the veil of darkness.

He pulled his coat up against the
bitter wind and, his boots crunching snow, walked toward the
settlement. A metal-walled supply hut, ringed with broken stones,
stood at one end of the airstrip. The doors had been thrown open
and empty crates were scattered about. Across the ice were the
prefabricated dwellings of Avatik. Lanterns gleamed behind windows
that Virga thought must be of double thickness to withstand the
below-zero temperatures.

Ahead he could hear dogs howling and
barking. There came a sudden series of yips as if one, or more than
one, had been injured. Then the dogs quieted and there was only the
sound of the wind as it hissed through the thick snow underneath
his feet.

A figure clad in furs appeared suddenly
from between two of the prefabricated dwellings. Startled, Virga
stood where he was and watched the bundled figure approach. Virga
heard the crunch of snow beneath heavy boots. Beyond the figure the
howling started up again; there was the sound of churning bodies as
if some of the dogs had begun fighting.

Michael reached him. He said,
“You’re late.”

22

THEY WALKED TOGETHER between the crude huts. Virga saw that if
the ground had not been smoothed by heavy snow it would have turned
his stomach. Everywhere there was frozen garbage, frayed ropes, dog
excrement, cans and crates. They stepped across pools of icy blood
that glimmered black in the lantern light shining through hut
windows; Virga was startled by the frozen gaping maw of a huge seal
whose puckered protuberant eyes looked like softballs.

Near many of the prefab huts dogs were
tied to steel poles driven into the ground. As the two men passed,
the huge, intelligent-eyed animals struggled to their feet,
tangling each other in their ropes as they did so. Virga saw that
several of them were sick and several had been severely bitten in
dogfights; these misfits curled up into balls of white fur and let
the stronger animals walk about over their bodies as they
pleased.

“How long have you been
here?” he asked Michael.

“Yesterday. I arrived by charter
flight. I had them set up the oil drums for you.”

Virga nodded. He was aware now of the
eyes that peered through windows and then darted away. He heard the
creaking of doors; he turned once and a door slammed shut with a
noise that made a pack of sledge dogs nearby leap to their feet,
expecting the hiss of the whip.

Ahead there was the tall timber spire
of a church, battered by the subzero winds. A plaster image of
Jesus had been nailed above the arched doorway and the
figure’s eyes looked plaintively down at the approaching men.
With only the traditional robes of Nazareth to shield it from the
awful wind, the image looked odd to Virga.

To the left of the church was a prefab
dwelling with a number of windows and a stone chimney that now
showed a brief column of white smoke. Someone passed a window and
in another moment the door was opened.

A lean-framed elderly man in a dark
brown sweater said, “Dr. Virga, yes? We’ve been waiting
for you. Please come in.”

Virga entered a room lit with kerosene
lamps. The walls were plastered with newspaper for extra
insulation; there was a crude painting of a halo-crowned Jesus. On
the floor were animal skins. There was a fire in a wide stone
hearth and Virga immediately stepped to it to soak up the warmth.
The man took Virga’s coat and gloves and said,
“You’ve come a long way?”

“Yes. A very long way.”

“My name is Thomas Lahr; I am
minister to the Eskimo in this settlement.”

Virga shook the offered hand, finding
that the man’s palm was as hard as the toughest leather. He
said, “You’re a Lutheran minister?”

“That is right. We came here when
the man before me took ill and died. His grave is just beyond the
village.” He called into the next room, “Dorte, we have
a new visitor. Is the tea brewing?”

A woman as old as Lahr came into the
room and said hello. Her face was weather-beaten and heavily lined,
though in her eyes there was a tremendous and refreshing hope.
“Dr. Virga?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Can I prepare something for you
to eat? Some broth?”

“Yes, that would be fine. Thank
you.”

She smiled and, nodding, stepped back
into what Virga presumed was a small kitchen.

Michael was slowly and methodically
peeling off first his bulky fur coat and then a lighter parka. He
hung them to dry over a wooden rack near the fire.

Through a window Virga saw beams of
light and shadowy figures moving in the darkness. He stared.

“They’re very curious
people,” Lahr said. “They mean no offense; they were
frightened of you and now they feel safe to gather up ice to melt
for water. It’s just that the noise of the airplane and the
activity in this area has unsettled them.”

“They won’t harm the crate,
will they?” Michael asked.

“Oh no, oh no,” Lahr said.
“Don’t worry about that.”

“What crate?” asked Virga,
looking around at Michael.

“Something I brought with
me.”

“I didn’t see
it.”

Lahr said, “It’s perfectly
safe where we left it, out in the storage shed. No one will harm
it.”

Virga was still looking at Michael.
“What is it?” he asked.

Lahr’s wife came through the
doorway with tea. It was thick, black stuff that clung to the sides
of clay cups. Michael and Virga drank it in silence.

Lahr stretched out in a chair before
the fire and said, “So. Your friend and I have been
discussing the problems of teaching Christianity to the nomadic
Eskimo, Dr. Virga. I find his views very interesting.”

“You’re the only Danish
family here?” Virga asked.

“Oh yes. Actually the Eskimos
have taken to us quite well and vice versa. They’re
fascinating people. When I decided I would like to be a missionary
in the North I read books and books on their customs; I even
attended classes on Eskimo culture in Copenhagen. But nothing is as
revealing as observing their way of life first hand. They have a
perfect communion with the land.”

“In some ways,” said
Michael from his position in the corner of the room,
“they’ve been damaged by the white men who came here to
teach Christianity.”

The elderly minister smiled and waved a
hand. “Yes, yes. I couldn’t agree with you more. There
were some unscrupulous men posing as missionaries. With them,
unfortunately, came venereal disease and alcoholism. Now the Danish
government has to ration beer and liquor on a monthly basis to
these people: one bottle of spirits, two bottles of wine, or twenty
small bottles of beer. That’s the Greenlandic disease, that
and suicide. This year we’ve had six. I don’t know what
it is. Their moods change so quickly. They’re difficult to
predict. Did you know,” he turned to Virga, “that many
many years ago, after listening to the Christian missionaries from
the Netherlands, some Eskimo fathers killed their sons to make a
religious gesture? Yes, it’s true. Unbelievable. But of
course then the Eskimo was much more naive.

“Still,” he continued,
“there are elements of the primitive that linger. During the
summer months when the sun begins to thaw the bay the
piniartorssuit—the best hunters—pray to their
individual and very personal deities before taking to the ice. The
animals, the winds, the tides: all of them have spirits. And all of
them, like the Eskimo, have their moods.”

“Your task must be very
difficult,” said Virga, finishing his tea and putting the cup
aside.

“I consider it a learning
experience. We’ll be here until we die. I couldn’t
conceive of living again in Copenhagen. Now all that seems too
distant to be real. This,” he motioned in a circle with his
hard brown hands, “is real. These are the real people. For
four years I’ve settled family disputes, I’ve laughed
and cried with them, I’ve seen them give birth and lower
coffins. Yes; we’ll die here. It would be a fine place. Ah!
Here’s your broth. Drink it while it’s hot.”

As Virga lifted the steaming mug to his
lips Lahr leaned forward in his chair and said quietly, “So
you two men are going northward, uh? That’s the way their
helicopters went.”

Virga looked up. Michael had not moved
from his corner.

Lahr said, “Oh,” and
glanced over at Michael. “You didn’t tell him, did
you?”

“No.”

“Well.” He turned back
around to Virga. “They came less than seven days ago. They
dropped prefab materials and supplies down and built that shed out
on the airstrip to keep them dry. I don’t know who they were
but… well, I kept to my business and advised the elders to
do the same. I had a very strange feeling about these men. The
Eskimos stayed in their huts and even the dogs cringed from them. I
thought about sending a message to the Ice Patrol that maybe these
men were up to no good, but one of the younger hunters, Ingsavik,
came to me and said he had spoken with these men, that they were
part of a weather-research team. He said everything was all right
and I should not try to alert the authorities. I did as he asked
and the men left soon afterward.

“I thought nothing more of
it,” the minister said, “but they returned only a few
days ago and recovered their supplies. Then the helicopters flew to
the north, toward the barren ice flats, and that was the end of it
except…”

The man paused. Virga said,
“Yes?”

“Perhaps there’s no
connection. I had noticed he was drinking heavily and beating his
wife and that probably had a great deal to do with it. But Ingsavik
stripped and walked away into the snow. His wife screamed and
begged him not to go but he struck her in the face until she was
senseless and let her drop. I walked with him for almost a
kilometer asking him if I could help, but he turned on me in a
rage. Then he begged my forgiveness and ran away across the flat.
It’s a time-honored method of suicide.”

Virga sat motionless. Behind him the
fire cracked.

Lahr said, “Who were these men?
You know, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Michael replied,
“we know.”

“And you cannot tell
me?”

“No. We cannot tell you. But if
you understand that our search is just, then possibly you can help
us. Dr. Virga and I want to leave as soon as we can; it may even be
too late now. We need someone who knows the ice flats to guide us.
We need a sledge and dogs.”

The other man shrugged. “All of
them know the ice flats, but they’re wary of strangers by
nature. And certainly no one would take the trouble of guiding two
kraslunas into the North. Bad country. You men don’t
know the ice; the man who took you would be considered a fool by
his peers.”

“We can bargain with
them?”

“Perhaps.” Lahr looked over
as the door opened and a young Eskimo boy entered, glancing
nervously at Virga and Michael. He was carrying two buckets of
chunk ice. Lahr said, “Come on, don’t be afraid. This
is Chinauganuk, a young man who brings us fresh ice every morning.
Yes, take those into the kitchen, will you? Dorte helped deliver
Chinauganuk’s little brother a year ago and in this way he
hopes to repay the debt.”

The boy, buried in thick dirty furs and
his eyes rolling in fleshy folds, said a few words to Lahr in the
Eskimo language that sounded to Virga like clickings of the tongue
and a sudden clearing of the throat. Lahr shook his head and
replied. The boy looked at the two strangers and backed warily
toward the door. Lahr said, “He’s afraid you’re
piktaungitok—evil—as he believes the men with
the helicopters were.” He said something in a soothing voice
to calm Chinauganuk, and the Eskimo, after glancing with visible
fear into Michael’s radiant eyes, scurried through the door
and into the darkness.

“Well,” Lahr said after
another moment, “the old superstitions persist and there is
not much I can do to change them. I can tell them about a forgiving
and powerful God and the glory of Christ but I cannot take away the
teachings of the ancients. And I do not know if it is wise to
try.”

Lahr looked into the fire as if
attempting to read there some answer to the question he had asked
himself. Then he turned again toward Virga. “I’ve asked
Chinauganuk to send his father, Migatuk, around to see us.
He’s one of the settlement elders and he may suggest a guide
for you, though I doubt seriously that he will wish to regard your
journey as anything but a hazard. That may sound rude, but
unfortunately it’s a reality.”

“We understand,” Michael
said.

“I expect my friend Migatuk will
take his time in paying us a visit,” the elderly minister
said. He took the empty cups and stepped toward the kitchen.
“I’ll pour more tea and then you men can tell me
what’s happening down below. I’m afraid most of the
news I get here is very dated.”

When Lahr left the room Virga said to
Michael, “I don’t see how you reached this place before
me.”

Michael looked at him and said
nothing.

“Thank you for waiting,”
Virga said, and the other man nodded his head.

After another round of tea and more
conversation between the three men, Lahr listening and then
reacting with disgust at the news of murders and bombings, the door
came open again.

With the bitter gust of wind and snow
that blew in across the floor came a heavyset Eskimo man,
bareheaded, with narrow inquisitive eyes and cautious lips
compressed tight. The stub of a cigarette burned at his mouth and
Virga caught the scent of harsh tobacco and sweat. The man closed
the door behind him and nodded respectfully to Lahr. “My son
brought your request,” the man said in a stiff
Danish-influenced English.

“Sit down, Migatuk. Over by the
fire. That’s right. Would you like a brew?”

“No.” The man’s eyes
flickered back and forth between the two strangers.

“Your family is well?”

“Yes.”

“And your wife no longer has her
trouble sleeping?”

“No.”

Lahr said to Virga,
“Migatuk’s wife was experiencing some very upsetting
nightmares there for a while.” He turned again to the stocky
Eskimo. “You’re my friend, Migatuk. I value your
friendship highly. Because you’re my friend I know I can make
a request of you that I ask you to consider carefully.”

Migatuk cocked his head to one
side.

“These men want to journey up
into the flats,” Lahr said. The Eskimo nodded. Now there was
the beginning of a mocking smile, though the eyes remained
carefully controlled. He took his cigarette stub and flicked it
into the hearth. “These men have come a very long way,”
the minister was saying. “They know nothing about ice
travel.”

“Nuna sutakasuitok,”
the Eskimo said. “Why do you wish to go up there? Nothing is
there but a few small settlements and ice. In the darkness the
hunting is bad. So why?”

“It has to do with the men who
gathered their supplies here,” Michael said. “We must
find them.”

Migatuk shrugged. “They left.
They flew into the north, yes, but can you be certain they did not
fly also in some other direction?”

“A possibility. But someone in a
northward settlement might have seen their helicopters.”

Lahr said, “What I would like to
ask of you, Migatuk, is that you recommend someone as a guide to
these men. Yes, I know. Their not knowing the ice would make it
very dangerous. But I have faith in their cause, though
they’ve felt it best to keep their reasons to
themselves.”

“There is something I do not
understand about this,” Migatuk said in a firm voice. He
looked for a few seconds at Michael and then back at Lahr. “I
would not ask any other man to do this thing; I would not do it
myself.”

Lahr looked disappointed. He nodded and
said after a pause, “All right then. I understand your
feelings. But I have another request to make, if my friends allow.
Perhaps the two-headed man can help them?”

The mocking smile vanished off
Migatuk’s face. He slowly lit another cigarette and
shrugged.

“Would you take them to the
two-headed man?” Lahr asked. “I would consider it the
greatest personal favor.”

The man muttered something in his
native language and Lahr replied. They talked back and forth for a
few moments and Virga could see the restrained fear in the
Eskimo’s dark eyes. Migatuk sat examining his calloused
knuckles for a long while, then he looked around at Virga and
Michael and said in an authoritative tone, “I will take you
to the two-headed man. But no further. We leave in the morning. I
will ask the women to find for you kamiks and dogskin mitts.”
He took a final drag at the cigarette and flicked it with the other
smoldering butt. Then he nodded at Lahr and went through the
door.

“He’s a very fine
man,” Lahr said. “Not many of them would have done this
for you.”

“What’s this about a
two-headed man?” Virga asked.

“A shaman,” Michael said.
“A sorcerer.”

Lahr looked at him in surprise.
“I didn’t know you knew the language. Well then, as you
overheard, these people hold the two-headed man in great esteem. He
lives a few kilometers to the north and has for several years, all
alone. One rarely hears the word shaman anymore. It’s rather
something the elders talk about when they relive the ancient past.
I’ve never seen the man, though once last summer I went up
there with a group of very reluctant hunters. I saw his hut but his
dogs and sledge were gone.”

“Why is he called
that?”

“I don’t know. A shaman,
according to the legends, is traditionally deformed in some way or
another, but I draw the line at believing he actually has two
heads. I do understand that he’s a very fine hunter. Once a
year, before the thaw, a chosen elder is allowed to visit him to
ask his opinion of what the season’s hunting will produce.
Perhaps he can help you in determining the route of the
helicopters; his eye, they say, is everywhere. But there is also
the possibility that he will refuse to talk with you because you
are white men, and therefore considered less than perfect by the
Eskimo.”

Lahr looked out the window. Following
his gaze, Virga saw someone approaching through the gloom, a
kerosene lamp swinging from one hand. “Ah!” Lahr said.
“Chinauganuk is coming to take you to be fitted. Please
don’t be offended by any sexual comments the women may make
about you to each other. They see kraslunas so
rarely.”

23

FOR HOURS they traveled into harsh winds wailing down from the
bitter icecap. They were slowed to a crawl by its force and now
Migatuk only cracked his whip over the heads of the struggling dogs
to change their course a few degrees. Piled atop the wide
iron-runnered Eskimo sledge were enough supplies to maintain them
should an ice storm pin them down. There were fresh parkas and
kamiks, boots of seal flesh with dog-skin liners, and a tent of
sewn polar-bear hides that could be hammered into the ice with
small steel pegs. Lashed down as well was the long canvas-covered
crate Michael had brought along with him. The three men had
strained against its weight as they lifted it onto the sledge;
Migatuk had voiced his displeasure at forcing his dogs to haul such
an impediment, but Michael remained silent as to its contents.
Ahead of them was only blackness as if they were either climbing or
falling headlong into a gigantic hole. Even the ice seemed black.
Migatuk had warned them to rub their cheeks and the bridge of the
nose vigorously if the flesh felt as if it might be deadening.
That, he said, was the first sign of frostbite. The small white
sores would come later. So after every fierce howl of wind swept
past, staggering him, Virga gingerly felt his exposed flesh,
fearful of what he might discover.

At Avatik the strong-armed,
heavy-bellied Eskimo women had giggled and made snide comments
about the men as they were fitted with the kamiks. They were given
thermal underwear and heavier trousers, though not nearly so warm
as the polar-bear pants worn proudly by the Eskimo men. Then, while
they sat with Migatuk and he carefully cleaned his rifle,
explaining how the oil and grit would freeze in only a few moments
on the ice flats, he told them bluntly what he expected. They would
not talk without purpose, they would not stray out from behind the
sledge track, and they would under no circumstances go near the
dogs. Michael agreed and, after the men and a group of other
Eskimos had loaded the sledge, they had slept soundly before the
fire in Lahr’s hut.

In the morning—and the only way
Virga could tell it was morning was because Lahr said it
was—the winds had increased, slapping intermittent snow
against the windows. After a fortifying cup of tea the two men
stepped into the cold and found Migatuk and his son untangling the
dogs’ traces before hooking them in place on the sledge.
Then, with a final wave from Lahr and Migatuk’s cry of
“Gamma! Gamma!” to his team, they moved away
from the settlement until its warm lights were lost across the
plain.

The cold was numbing but not as bad as
Virga had expected. The subzero winds could not penetrate either
his trousers or parka. His feet and hands were warm with the
coverings provided by Migatuk; his face was the only flesh exposed
to the weather and he felt ice collecting in his eyebrows and in
the stubble on his chin.

Michael, walking beside and a pace in
front of Virga, seemed oblivious to the cold.

After a while Virga thought that
Migatuk had lost the way. Virga himself had no sense of direction
here. Everything was bleak and alien; there were no landmarks, not
even rocks or abandoned huts, on which to base a path. But
occasionally the dogs would yip at the crack of the whip and the
sledge, its runners hissing through the packed snow, would slide a
fraction to the left or right. And still they climbed, without
speaking, into the wind.

Without warning the land erupted from a
flat plain to rocks dappled with ice. They seemed to be going down
an incline and the dogs slowed to keep their footing on the slope.
Great black rocks rose up on all sides. They were shielded from the
direct blast of the wind but Virga could hear it whining eerily
through cracks and crevices, to explode high over their heads.
Migatuk snapped his whip and called to the dogs to give them
confidence.

Virga looked into the distance. There
seemed to be a glimmering light very far ahead. He could feel his
heart racing. Migatuk called to the dogs again and Virga thought,
but was not certain, that he heard the man’s voice tremble.
They continued on, the Eskimo’s whip cracking on all sides to
keep the dogs on a straight path.

At the base of the incline they were
again on a solid sheet of smooth snow and ice, but here the wind
was not so fierce. Ahead on the plain, Virga could recognize the
squat rectangular shape of a prefab hut. A light shone through a
solitary window. Beyond the hut there was nothing but a solid black
curtain.

Migatuk called out and the sledge
ground to a halt far short of the prefab dwelling. Then there was
no sound but the breathing of the dog team and the distant
otherworldly whine of wind in the rocks. Migatuk said to the two
men, “This is as far as I dare go. Beyond is the hut of the
two-headed man.”

And in the next second Virga’s
eardrums reverberated with a crack! that made the dogs howl
in fear. Migatuk spun around. Just ahead of the sledge a spiral of
snow kicked up, ice chips spraying back into the men’s faces.
The sound of the shot stretched out loud and hollow across the
plain, rolling on to the frozen sea.

Migatuk shouted,
“Maiksuk!” and lashed his whip full into the
side of the lead dog, at the same time wrenching bodily on the
sledge to spin it around in the direction from which they had come.
Virga, thrown backward and off the sledge, saw Michael also knocked
to the ground by the sudden momentum of the dogs. Migatuk cracked
his whip; the sledge shuddered fiercely, gathering speed. As the
sledge reached the incline and started up Virga saw a knife in the
Eskimo’s hand, glittering in the light from the hut window.
He was cutting their supplies loose to gain more speed. The
equipment and the heavy canvas-covered thing were thrown off; they
slid down to the base of the incline. Freed of the weight, the
sledge took wings. Snow was thrown up by the churning legs of the
dogs; in another moment the sledge disappeared among the rocks in
Migatuk’s headlong journey back to the safety of Avatik.

Michael rolled over on his stomach, his
eyes narrowed, his senses combing the darkness. The sound of the
shot had not yet died away; the men could still hear it moving like
a thunderclap in the far distance. Over by the prefab hut there
came a tremendous barking and baying of dogs.

Virga was lost. He stood looking around
helplessly, knowing he made a perfect target but unable, somehow,
to recall what it was he should do.

“Stay where you are,” said
a man’s harsh voice. The sound reached them as a command but
it had been spoken softly, almost casually.

Virga looked toward the source of the
voice, off to his right. From the corner of his eye he saw a
movement. Someone rose up from a prone position on the ice. Virga
thought at first his legs were chopped off at the knee but then he
realized the man had been crouched behind a small white screen. The
man walked away from the camouflage and stood with a rifle aimed at
a spot somewhere between Virga and Michael. He said something in
Danish and waited. Then he said in English, “You! Down on the
ice with the other one. Both of you spread your arms and legs and
don’t move. Good, you speak the language. That’s right,
very easy.”

The man slowly moved toward them. Virga
saw his boots, battered sealskin with a fringe of yellowed
polar-bear fur. The man methodically slapped their waists and
underarms in a search for weapons. Then, satisfied, he stepped back
a few paces and said quietly, “Turn over very slowly.
I’ll kill you if I don’t like the way you
breathe.”

They did as he said. In his furs and
polar-bear pants the man was a shapeless, faceless bulk that
towered over them. He was silent, examining their faces in the
darkness. “You’re neither Eskimo nor Danish. Who are
you?”

“We’ve come from Avatik to
find you,” Michael said, and in his voice there was a strange
soothing quality. “We mean you no harm. We only wish to talk
with you.”

The rifle barrel dipped down an inch or
so. “Some men came to talk with me once,” he said.
“They wanted my haul of bearskins. Before they were through
talking I’d killed them. What are you after?”

Michael said calmly, “Your
help.”

The man was quiet.

“Can we stand up?” Michael
asked.

The rifle barrel swung up again and he
stepped back. “Stand up, then,” he told them.
“But remember that I can see in the dark.”

They got to their feet and brushed away
the snow. Michael said, “We can talk more comfortably out of
the cold.”

“It doesn’t bother
me.”

“It bothers me,” Michael
said.

The man grunted and motioned with his
rifle. “Walk ahead. But don’t even think of trying to
trick me. Don’t even think it.”

Near the prefab hut there were dogs
staked out on chain leaders. They were large beautiful animals with
eyes like burning coals; they rose up, rumbling a welcome, as the
men approached. An Eskimo-style sledge stood on one side of the hut
and around it were empty tin cans and garbage, similar to the
debris Virga had noted in Avatik. The man said, “Stop,”
and with his rifle still aimed in their direction, he walked around
in front of them and pushed open the door. He stepped back to watch
them carefully as they entered.

Inside, a portable stove hissed,
flooding the hut with warmth. Two kerosene lamps emitted a dim
yellow glow. A sleeping rack, covered with polar-bear skins, stood
in one corner. The floor of the single-room dwelling was dirty and
stained with blood. Across the bearskin-lined walls were strung
pinup-girl posters. They lay in nude abandon on beds, on sofas, and
on sun-warmed beaches.

“Ha!” the man barked
abruptly. “You like my little companions, huh?”

Virga turned to face him.

The man was shedding his great
bloodstained coat. He was bearlike himself, huge and wide. Almost
as tall as Michael, his head was within a foot of the ceiling. He
had long unkempt black hair and a black beard that turned the color
of frost around his mouth. His eyes, cobalt-blue, glittered in a
face ravaged by the elements. Lines traced his forehead and
gathered around his eyes. Virga saw small, pitted scars that he
thought were the remnants of frostbite sores that the man might
have cut away himself. His eyes were narrowed slightly from years
of squinting into the sun as it glanced dazzlingly off blue-green
ice. There was a trace of Eskimo blood in the high cheekbones and
tawny color of the skin, but he was certainly a mixture of other
races as well. It occurred to Virga that he spoke with a slight
Russian accent, though his English seemed tinged with other, less
identifiable, accents.

Michael said, “We were expecting
someone with two heads.”

The man nodded slightly. He put his
rifle down in the corner but his cautious, intelligent eyes never
left them. He eased down into a battered chair and threw his feet
up onto the lip of the stove. “The Eskimo have their own way
of saying things,” the man said. “You’ve found me
now. Who the hell are you?”

“My name is Michael; this is Dr.
James Virga. And yours?”

“I’m asking the questions.
What’re you doing up here?”

“I’ve already answered. We
were told about you in Avatik and we sought you out.”

“And almost caught a slug in the
bargain,” the man said. “You should be careful you
don’t catch one yet.”

“You saw us on the
incline?” Michael asked.

“Saw you, hell,” the man
said. He leaned forward slightly and stared up at the other.
“I smelled you.”

Michael grunted and looked around at
the walls.

“My name is Ryan Zark,” the
man said after a silent moment spent appraising the two strangers.
“You men are not ice travelers; you have no business here.
Why do you search for me?”

Michael drew up another chair and sat
warming himself before the stove. He said, “We have
information that helicopters flew over this area some days ago. We
want to know where they landed.”

Zark’s eyes narrowed
fractionally. He said in a cautious voice, “They were seen by
a group of hunters from a settlement further north. The birds
veered off to the east. Why?”

“We want to know where they
landed,” Michael repeated in a flat, even voice, swinging his
gaze from the stove into the eyes of the other man.

Zark held it for a few seconds, then
grunted and leaned back. He reached in his parka and brought out a
pipe that seemed to be a hollowed-out bone. In another moment he
had filled it with a black, oily-looking tobacco, and blue smoke
was curling from his mouth and nostrils. “I don’t know
where they landed. I don’t want to know where they landed.
It’s not my business.”

“We understood,” Michael
said, “that you were a man of wisdom, a shaman.”

“Shaman? Shit. I’m a good
hunter and sometimes I tell the Eskimo where to look for the seal
and bear. I hear the wind sing and I see the clouds that mean a
storm on the ice. I know the land and I know men and most of all I
know myself. But I am not a shaman.” He sucked vigorously at
the pipe, looking from Michael to Virga and back again. “Did
you know that there are some Eskimos who follow me because they say
that where I walk is a path of good fortune? They say I never have
to find the bear; the bear will find me. If that were true
I’d march down to Copenhagen and take them all with me.
Shaman; I haven’t heard that word for a long
while.”

“If you know yourself you have
more power than most men possess,” Michael said.

“Maybe. When I first came to this
land, many years ago, I almost starved. The Eskimo saved me; they
fed me and taught me how to feed myself. So sometimes when I go out
for bear or seal I tell the Eskimo hunters where I believe
they’re going to be found. I always repay my
debts.”

“Do you keep in contact with the
rest of the world here? Do you know what’s going on
below?”

“The rest of the world? Ha! There
is no other world but this.”

Michael said, “A man has arrived
here with those helicopters. That man has grave power, he has power
to do what he wants with whomever he wants. That is the man we must
find, and we must find him quickly.”

Zark had been smoking his pipe and
listening. “Why should I care? I can’t help
you.”

“But you can. You know the land.
You’ve said so yourself. Dr. Virga and I need someone to take
us into the Northeast.”

“What? Are you crazy? I’m
not in the business of tourist guides. To make a journey with men
who have no knowledge of this country would be suicide. Is this
what you sought me for?”

“Yes,” Michael said.

“Then go back to Avatik. Go back
to wherever you came from. I don’t travel across the ice on
the errands of fools.”

“I’ll pay you.”

“I’ve said no.”

Michael glanced over at Virga and then
back into the eyes of Zark. “We have no way of getting
back.”

“That coward,” Zark said.
“One bullet and he runs like an old woman. I should have shot
him in the ass. All right, then. I’ll take you in the morning
to Sagitak; the Eskimos there will see that you return safely to
Avatik. But you’ll pay me for my time and trouble.”

“We seek a man named Baal,”
Michael said after another moment. “It is vital that we find
him. We will not return. We will go on from Sagitak into the
Northeast.”

“Not with me. Maybe you can pay
one of the Eskimos up there to go on with you. Give them a couple
of bottles of good whiskey and they’ll do anything. Did you
bring any with you?”

“No.”

“Well then,” said Zark,
shrugging, “you’re in a shit of a shape.”

His eyes glittering, Michael opened his
mouth to say something, but then he thought better of it and sat
relaxed in the chair. He said, “You won’t help
us?”

“I won’t help you.
I’ve got my own self to take care of. Look. That route you
just came over from Avatik is a trade route; an old woman with one
bad leg could get over it. But you get up higher than this, on
rocks and pressure ridges and ice chunks as big as goddamned
battleships, and then, my friend, you need good eyes and good lungs
and you’d sure better have some ice experience under your
belt.”

He stopped speaking abruptly and seemed
to listen to the silence in the room. In a few seconds more the dog
team staked outside began barking. Zark picked up his rifle. He
whispered, “We have a visitor.”

As Zark stood peering out the window,
Virga could see nothing but total blackness. Then Zark stepped
toward the hut door and opened it to admit a rotund but hawk-eyed
Eskimo man with a scar across the bridge of his nose. The man shook
snow from his furs and looked cautiously over at Michael and Virga.
The Eskimo seemed to ask a question in his native language and Zark
motioned to the two men and nodded his head. Then the Eskimo spoke
again, fixing his eyes on the floor at Zark’s feet and
rounding his shoulders to appear humble, though he was obviously
older than Zark. When he had finished his plaintive-sounding
recitation he continued staring fixedly at the floor.

Zark turned to look at the two men.
Then he nodded and said something to the Eskimo. The other man
grasped Zark’s hand and then went back out into the
night.

Virga said, “What was all that
about?”

“The man,” Zark told him,
“is a hunter from an eastern settlement. His new bride wishes
a child; he has sadly and regretfully lost the fire. So he’s
brought her here for me.”

“What?”

“Hell, I’ve probably got
kids all up and down the Arctic Circle. I don’t know; they
seem to think it’s some sort of honor if I can give their
wives a child. The women aren’t so bad. All that fat makes
them like big soft pillows.”

“The man feels you have the
qualities of a shaman,” Michael said. “Since he feels
disgraced at being unable to father a child he hopes a son with the
qualities of a shaman will bring honor back to his name.”

“I guess that’s it,”
Zark said. “Anyway, I don’t mind. Well now,
what’s this? A young one.”

The Eskimo had brought his woman in
from the sledge outside. He took off her fur-lined parka and put
his hand beneath her chin to indicate her beauty. She was very
young, probably only just out of her teens, yet her face showed the
hardships she had already endured. She stood like the man had,
staring directly at the floor, not daring to meet Zark’s
intense gaze. Virga supposed she was very beautiful indeed by
Eskimo standards; her full lips were trembling though her round
dark eyes seemed to reflect a remarkable inner calm. The
girl’s lustrous black hair, freed of the parka’s
confining hood, hung loose and full about her shoulders.

As the Eskimo spoke, Zark examined the
girl’s face. Zark nodded and the man beamed with happiness.
The Eskimo touched her cheek gently, with scarred brown fingers,
and spoke to her. Then he nuzzled her as if sniffing at her flesh.
When he turned to leave she clung to his arm, but he spoke sharply
to her and she let go her grasp. The Eskimo went through the
doorway and in another moment the men heard his shouts as he urged
his dog team up the incline.

The young girl stood trembling in the
center of the hut, her eyes downcast. Zark walked around her and
said to the men, “A fine-looking woman. Very fine. Good
strong arms and thighs. Look at those muscles right here. You see?
She hasn’t yet got a lot of fat on her.”

Virga’s face was reddening. He
said, “Are we going to watch this?”

Zark’s surprised eyes left the
girl’s firm buttocks and looked up at him. He said,
“What else? You going to freeze your asses outside? Hell, I
don’t care. You can close your eyes if you like. You can have
a go at her if you like. Do you want to?” He swung his gaze
around to Michael.

“No,” Michael said,
“thank you.”

The man shrugged. “Suit
yourself.” He walked around and said something in a quiet
voice to the girl. She didn’t reply. He put his hand under
her chin and raised her head but she still kept her eyes on the
floor. Slowly and softly, Zark nuzzled her as the other man had,
sniffing gently at her nose and across her cheeks and eyes.
Finally, reassured by his caress, she raised her eyes to meet his
and Zark smiled.

24

VIRGA STIRRED. Something was jabbing him sharply and repeatedly
in the ribs.

He rolled over from his curled-up
position on the dirty floor and after a few seconds recognized Zark
standing over him. He had been nudging Virga in the side with the
toe of his boot. Zark bent down and put a mug of steaming dark
liquid in Virga’s hand. “Here,” he said,
“this’ll wake you up.”

Michael was already awake, drinking
from a mug and taking his clothes off a rack above the stove where
he had hung them to dry the night before. Virga sipped at the
beverage, finding it to be a brackish black beer, and saw that the
Eskimo girl was gone. He’d barely been able to sleep for the
noise they had made, rolling and thrashing on the sleeping rack
like a couple of wild beasts. But he was grateful in one respect
for having been able to find out something about Zark: before the
man had lowered the kerosene flame to join the girl in the
bearskins Virga had caught a glimpse of his broad naked back.
Across it was a beautiful tattoo of the head of a Chinese ancient,
done with such clarity and grace that it would have made Virga
envious if he were an advocate of tattooing.

“Where’s the girl?”
he asked.

“Her husband came for her,”
said Zark, cutting pieces of meat off a larger black slab
he’d taken from an ice-packed oil drum at the rear of the
hut. “They’re always a little jealous the morning
after. You ever try walrus meat?”

“No.”

“You’d better get used to
it.”

Virga and Michael took the pieces of
black, tough-grained meat that Zark had cut for them. Michael ate
his wholeheartedly, but the taste of it coupled with the beer was
almost more than Virga could take: it was oily with a strong smell
of fermentation. Nevertheless, he was glad to get something in his
stomach. When he swallowed the last hunk without gagging he felt
pretty damned proud of himself, but shook his head when Zark
offered him a second piece.

Zark shrugged and tore into it himself.
He said, “What’s that you brought along covered with
canvas? Prefab materials in a crate?”

“No,” Michael said.
“It’s some of my belongings.”

“Christ. You must have brought
along everything you own. I walked out there and took a look at
that junk the Eskimo cut off his sledge. You didn’t plan to
move very fast, did you?”

“We carried what was
necessary.”

“Necessary, hell. All a man needs
is a good solid sledge and eight strong dogs and he can go to the
Pole and back, living off the land. You can forget about the
prefabs and build ice shelters like the old hunters did. But
you’re kraslunas and you don’t even know what
I’m talking about.” He looked over at Virga.
“What kind of doctor are you?”

“A professor. Of
theology.”

“What’s that?”

“Religious concepts.”

“You live by the Book,
huh?”

“I suppose I do,” Virga
said, “in a manner of speaking.”

Zark nodded. “Yeah, there’s
always more room in the world for another holy man.” He took
the leftover walrus meat back to the oil drum. “Perverting
everything, talking about things you don’t even understand
yourselves. You look at something and say it’s bad in the
name of God because you don’t like it.” He took the
drum lid off and wrapped the meat in newspaper before putting it in
the ice amid other bundles. “You use God as an excuse.”
He snapped the lid shut.

Virga felt that this man was trying to
pick an argument. He said irritably, “Some people
do.”

The other man grunted and shifted his
attention to Michael. He said, “And I suppose you use God as
an excuse too, huh?”

“No,” said Michael, his
eyes glittering in the dim kerosene-lamp glow. “I only blame
men.”

Zark stood looking into his face as if
he were not quite certain of what he was seeing. His nostrils
flared briefly, catching a scent. Then he smiled slightly and said,
“You ever killed anyone, boy?”

“Not to my knowledge,”

“You look like you could. You
look like you could shoot a man down and never even wince. Killing
a man is not so different from killing any other kind of animal,
not really. Especially if he’s about to kill you. Does talk
about killing a man bother you, Holy Man?”

“I’m very
broadminded,” Virga said.

“Good,” Zark said.
“That’s good.”

Michael said, “You won’t
reconsider about taking us into the Northeast from
Sagitak?”

“No. I won’t reconsider.
Now I’ll go harness the team; you be ready to help me lift
that gear of yours up onto the sledge when I get back.” He
went through the doorway, admitting a blast of icy air, and
momentarily Virga and Michael could hear him shouting to his dogs
as he worked with them.

“What should we do?” Virga
asked. “Go back to Avatik and pay someone to guide us up?
We’re going to lose three days.”

“Yes, three days. Perhaps too
late.” He looked directly at the other man. “But if
I’m too late here then there will be another place.
I’ll go on. What will you do?”

“I don’t know. I
haven’t read a newspaper or heard a newscast in two days.
I’m afraid to learn what’s happening.”

“The worst,” Michael said
softly. “Always prepare for the worst.”

“How did you come to be so
desperately pursuing Baal?” Virga asked. “How can you,
how can we, do anything to stop him short of murder?”

“We must find him first. Then
I’ll deal with Baal… in my own way.”

The door came open again and Zark said,
“All right. I need some muscle.”

In the bitter darkness the three men
heaved together to lift the shrouded crate onto Zark’s
weather-beaten sledge. He cursed violently and said,
“You’re going to break the backs of my dogs with this
goddamned thing!”

They lashed down the rest of the
scattered equipment and then followed Zark back to his hut to
gather up a few more things. Zark carefully cleaned his rifle and a
rubber-gripped flare gun and stored ammunition and flares in a
sealskin bag. Then he tied up a hunk of the walrus meat and checked
one of the lamps to make certain the kerosene was brimming. Michael
said, “You’re taking an ice-axe?”

“Yes,” Zark said.
“Why?”

Michael gathered his parka hood around
his head without answering.

Outside, Zark rubbed snow all along the
sledge runners and Virga had an opportunity to appraise his dogs as
they stood in the glare of the lamp. They were broad and thick,
powerful beasts that even now tugged at their rope leaders. The
lead dog was a one-eyed black with numerous scars on his sides; the
other dogs gave him a wide berth and, though they snarled
menacingly among each other, never bared a tooth in his
direction.

Zark checked the lashed-down equipment
and cursed at its bulk. He said suddenly, “We’re
moving,” and almost before Virga realized he had called to
the dogs, the sledge shuddered and tore away up the incline with
Michael running alongside and Zark cracking his whip over the head
of the lead animal.

The beasts climbed the incline with a
burst of power. They seemed eager and happy to be running in the
snow. The sledge passed between the sharp outcroppings of rock and
in a few moments they were running out on the open ice plain with
the wind howling maddeningly about them.

Virga noted that Zark seemed much more
skilled with his team than Migatuk had been. The man only
occasionally used his whip or shouted to the team; they seemed to
understand his commands even when his broad hands only tightened on
the guiding handlebars. The man and the team were at one with each
other, Virga thought, through long hard years of companionship.
He’d heard stories of the fierceness of Arctic dogs, of their
sudden savage attacks on both their own kind and Eskimo children,
but here they were part of a beautiful living machine that awed him
with its primal grace.

Michael did not seem disturbed at
Zark’s refusal to take them on, but Virga was downcast. He
felt a childish frustration and a simmering resentment at the way
Zark had tried to bait him at the hut. Zark didn’t understand
the importance of their search for Baal; probably he was the kind
of stubborn man who would act no differently even if he did
understand. But Virga felt useless and afraid. His long travel and
the great expense it had incurred was now wasted because one
man—one man—refused to show them the way. He cursed. If
Baal could not be found how could he, Virga, return to the
university and his day-to-day life knowing the full extent of
Baal’s power, knowing that for a brief instant he had almost
been ensnared by that power, knowing that he could possibly still
be. What could he say to Judith? What would he feel when he
awakened in his Boston apartment in the middle of a restless night,
more alone and frightened of the future than he had ever been
before?

He glanced over and saw that
Michael’s sharp features had become a taut, determined mask.
Here in this bitter land, traveling under skies as black as the
door of death, there was no way to go but forward.

They reached a pressure ridge after a
mile or so. Great chunks of ice were scattered in disarray like
concrete blocks. Zark lowered his head against the wind and chopped
with his ice-axe until he had cleared a narrow place for the dogs
to struggle over. Then they were across the rough terrain and
moving over smooth ice with the splash of the lantern leading them
on. Zark corrected their course by a few degrees from time to time,
though Virga could not determine how he sighted the path.

Sometime later, when ice had frozen in
Virga’s eyebrows and his new beard and he saw nothing but the
dark wastes beyond, Zark waved a hand and slowly braked the team
with his heels. “We’ll rest here for a while,” he
said against the wind. “This is the halfway point.”

Zark unpacked the bearskin tent and
staked it out with metal anchors, keeping it loose to absorb the
wind’s force. As the dogs voided themselves in the snow and
Zark unceremoniously followed suit, Michael and Virga crawled
through the tent opening with Zark’s lantern and warmed
themselves in its glow.

Inside the tent they were still cold
but at least shielded from the harsh wind. Zark crawled in and lit
his bone pipe, then checked his exposed flesh for frostbite sores.
He held the lamp up to examine the faces of the other men and,
satisfied that they had suffered no damage, he set the lamp in the
midst of them, where it cast their broad black shadows on the
walls.

Virga painfully rubbed the warmth back
into his hands. “How cold is it out there?” he asked
Zark.

“Warm compared to some I’ve
known. Maybe forty below but not any more than that.”

“How can you tell?”

Zark grunted. “When it’s
forty below your piss freezes as it hits the ground. At fifty below
it freezes on the way down. At sixty you try to piss and your dick
falls off.” He blew a billowing cloud of blue smoke and
watched as it rose to the conical top of the tent and hung
there.

“You’re not a full
Eskimo,” Michael said after a few moments. “What are
you doing here?”

He rubbed his hands around the warmth
of the bone pipe as if he hadn’t heard the question. There
was no indication that he was going to answer. Virga was about to
ask him how the dogs withstood the weather when Zark said,
“I’m part Eskimo. Enough to feel the ice in my blood;
enough to know I belong here.”

“You were born in
Greenland?”

“Hell, I’m not a Dane. I
was born in Gor’kiy. My father was a breed, Eskimo and
Russian. My grandfather was an Eskimo and damned if I can remember
his name, but he was a powerful hunter, a great leader in his
tribe. I don’t remember anything about him, but my father
once told me he was lost in the bergs hunting narwhal with a bone
harpoon. We had a small flat in Gor’kiy and my father was a
welder; that place we had, that place was so small we
couldn’t even wipe our noses. My father couldn’t stand
it but he wanted to please my mother. He wanted to live on the
northern coast and she loved the city.”

The smoke whirled around Zark’s
head. His eyes were cold and blue, glistening, Virga thought, like
the ice must glisten beneath a white summer sun.

“He tried to please her,”
Zark said, “but you can’t please women. You
can’t. And he started drinking and finally lost her. I
remember him glaring at her, wide-eyed, in that place. She was
leaving, she said, and he could keep the child because they were
both alike. Both of them were wild and vicious and didn’t
belong around people. That was just after I almost killed another
boy in a streetfight, but that’s another story. And she was
right. My father and I were alike; we shared a love of freedom.
Inside us the Eskimo wanted a return to the ice.”

Zark was quiet for a moment. The
north-born wind shook the tent; Zark seemed to be listening to it.
He looked warily at the faces of the two men, uncertain as to
whether he should continue.

“And so you both came
here?” Virga asked, both interested in the man and fearful of
returning into that cold blast.

“No,” Zark said. “He
went from place to place, from job to job, and I followed along.
And every place we went was closer to the northern sea. There was
where we were headed; he didn’t have to say it. I knew it
already. But before we reached the coast he took sick, something
wrong with his lungs. I worked full-time at whatever I could find,
which wasn’t much but roadwork and pouring concrete. I fought
for a while in men’s clubs. That was bare-knuckled fighting
and I saw a lot of strong men go down. You ever see a bare-knuckle
match?” He looked at Virga.

“No, I haven’t.”

“I didn’t think so. Too
brutal for your blood, uh? Some of those men scarred their hands
and let the calluses thicken until they might’ve been wearing
brass knucks. They could punch into brick. Those fights would go on
until neither of us knew where we were; we’d just stumble
around looking for something to hit. The last man standing was the
winner and the money was good in those days. But my father became
worse. He was always coughing, always pleading with me to get him
up to the ice. I found him dead one morning, just like he’d
fallen asleep the night before. That was the only night he
didn’t cough until he’d choked, and I remember thinking
that soon maybe he would be well enough to travel. It snowed on the
day he was buried. Well,” Zark shrugged his shoulders and
sucked furiously at the pipe to clear his vision, “I reached
the sea. I landed a job on a freighter hauling scrap iron. Holy
Man, you ever work on the sea?”

“No.”

“It’s tough work. But it
teaches you a hell of a lot. It teaches you when to fight and when
to lay back, when to plant your feet and when to run like hell. I
worked in and out of the freight docks for a few years hauling on
old buckets that almost came apart at the rivets out in the Baltic.
I like the ways of the sea; it moves at its own pace. Nothing
hurries it, nothing weakens that thunder. But then I landed a
mate’s slot on a tub hauling snowplows from Riga up into the
White Sea. I didn’t get along with the bosun. He was a lying
sonofabitch and a card cheat; I can’t even remember what he
looked like though God knows I had to look at him enough. He was
always picking something, anything at all, to get at me. And damned
if he didn’t.”

Zark laughed suddenly, a hoarse bark
that might have issued from the throat of one of the dogs.
“Damned if he didn’t. I killed that man right on the
foredeck under a half-moon. Two blows to the head. Two fine blows I
would’ve been proud of in any ring.” He made the motion
of a thrust with his huge fist. “He went down like a fucking
sack of grain. They were going to put me in the brig and head into
Rusanova to give me up. But there were other men who had taken
trouble off that bastard, and they were damned grateful to me for
cleaning him off. So one night out in the Barents Sea they turned
their backs and I lowered myself a lifeboat and headed out into the
bergs. They thought I’d died out there, that maybe I was
going out to commit suicide or some shit like that. Hell, no. I was
getting away as fast as I could row.”

He regarded Michael and Virga through
his whirling blue smoke curtain. Over the black bush of beard his
eyes had become dark and hollow. “You don’t know what
it’s like to be alone in the sea, surrounded by nothing but
ice, great huge pieces like frozen cities. Nothing around but the
deep water and the bergs that blinded you with their colors:
bone-white, deep blue, pale green. You could see the depths of the
ocean reflected in that ice. And sometimes you’d likely as
not hear a growl as ice crushed against ice and broke off into a
smaller berg. Sometimes ice as big as my boat would rise up almost
under me. That was maybe what I feared most: ice breaking up in the
depths and rising to capsize me in that cold water.

“On the third day,” Zark
went on, “I was lost. I couldn’t smell the wind. And
then the bergs against the white sky looked like gray slabs of
dirty concrete. I was going in fucking circles; everything looked
the same. My food ran out. I went without anything to eat for three
more days. There was never anything but the low clouds and the
white sea and those berg mountains. And on the seventh day I woke
up and saw him.”

Zark sat motionless, his pipe clenched
between his teeth, his eyes black and brooding.

“Him?” Virga asked.
“Who?”

He shrugged abruptly. “I
don’t know. I don’t know who the hell it was but he was
off my starboard between two bergs, an Eskimo in a kayak. I started
rowing after him but he never let me get near enough to see his
face. Never. But it was a man, all right; I could tell by the way
he handled that kayak. Even though I grit my teeth and rowed after
him until I was almost dead, he paddled Eskimo-style, always ahead
of me. I followed that kayak for two days. He never said a word
though I shouted and cursed for him to speak; he’d turn to
make sure I was following and then he’d go on. He wound me
through ice tunnels and bergs as high as buildings in Moscow. He
knew those fucking waters, that’s for sure. But after three
days I lost him. He slipped away into a pocket between two bergs
and when I rounded them he was gone. That’s when I saw, over
my port and far off, a group of Eskimos hunting from kayaks. They
took me with them to Edge Island and I got a good meal of broth and
walrus meat and slept for two days. When I asked them who had led
me out they didn’t seem to know. They didn’t have any
idea; they told me they knew of no hunter who had ever gone that
far from land before. So I still have no damned idea who that was.
I wonder about him.”

Michael was nodding. He said,
“The vision of a shaman.”

“Huh? Hell with that. Anyway, I
followed the nomad Eskimos over the ice plains into Greenland and
here I’ve stayed. The hunting is damned good and a man
answers to no one but himself. That’s as it should
be.”

The three men sat for a while without
speaking. Tobacco burned in Zark’s pipe with a faint
crackling sound. After a few moments he stirred and said,
“Time to move on. I want to have you at Sagitak in another
couple of hours.”

25

WITHOUT WARNING the wind died away and was replaced by an utter
calm that, oddly, played on Virga’s nerves until they were as
raw as the flesh across his windburned cheeks. Even the harsh
breathing of the team quieted until all Virga could hear was the
sound of runners on the ice, a smooth hissing as if they were
nearing the nest of a coiled white reptile.

They continued on into the North, Zark
correcting their course with only a slight movement on the
handlebars. Looking up, Virga could see stars clearly and
individually against a backdrop of total darkness. There was no
moon, but the stars seemed to radiate a dim silvery glimmer that
splashed down across the plain and painted it in deepest blue.

They reached a point where the land
gradually began to slope down. Zark halted the team with a single
soft command, and as the dogs milled about he stood with his
lantern at his side and looked out to where the distance became a
drawn curtain.

Michael stepped beside him. “Is
something wrong?”

“Be quiet,” Zark said. He
was listening for something. He narrowed his eyes and swept them
back and forth along the horizon. He looked briefly to the stars
and then back at the far landscape.

“There are no lights,” Zark
said.

“What?” Virga asked.

“No lights,” the man
repeated. “Sagitak is on the horizon. There should be lights
in windows.”

“They’re nomads? Maybe
they’ve left,” Virga suggested hopefully. The man would
have to take them on.

“Shit,” Zark muttered. He
walked to the sledge and retrieved his flare gun and the sealskin
bag. Virga watched as he popped open the breech and inserted a red
cartridge. Holding it at arm’s length over his head, he fired
it with a soft plop! in the direction of the settlement. In
another few seconds they could see, bathed in red light as the
flare arced in the sky, the dim outlines of huts far away and
something else, something like a dark semicircular scrawl. Zark
tightened; Virga felt the response repeated in Michael. The hunter
bent on one knee in the snow and waited for either a light or the
reply of another flare.

There was nothing.

One of the dogs whined. Another
answered. The black animal stood grim and unyielding; when another
animal began to whine the big black snapped in its direction.

Zark shook his head. “I
don’t know,” he said quietly, almost to himself. He
said, “Gamma!” to the dogs and the sledge moved
off again toward the lower plain.

In another fifteen minutes they had
reached the flat. The flare had faded, returning them to darkness.
Virga was aware Zark’s breathing had become heavier. The dogs
strained at their leads, perhaps recognizing by habit a place of
food and rest. Virga tried to pierce the gloom but his eyes were
not good enough. He cursed his weakness.

And suddenly the dogs yelped, stopping
and then tangling together as if they had run collectively into a
wall of glass.

Zark cursed. He tightened his grip on
the handlebars and cracked his whip over the head of the lead dog.
It wanted to go on and pulled mightily at its lead, but the other
animals balked, thrusting their tails between their legs and
digging in with their paws. Zark struck his whip directly into
their midst, but still they refused to move.

The ground was rutted with the marks of
sledges that had passed in the same direction, so Virga reasoned
that they had not run into rocks or some obstruction. The
settlement, if he had estimated the distance correctly, still lay
some hundred yards ahead.

Throwing his whip down, Zark cursed the
animals and retrieved his rifle from the sledge. He said to the two
men, “These animals are not moving. I’m going ahead.
Are you coming?”

“What’s wrong?” asked
Virga, afraid to know. Beyond Zark the darkness was awesome and
absolute.

The man’s eyes blazed briefly.
“I’m going to find out.” He held the lantern with
one hand and followed its yellow track on the scarred snow. Virga
and Michael followed behind. Zark stopped twice to bend down and
examine the sledge tracks.

As they walked toward the settlement,
the dogs still whimpered behind them. Zark stopped abruptly and
sniffed the air, his face intent in the yellow light. “Can
you smell it?” he asked Michael.

“No. What do you
smell?”

“Blood,” the man said. He
raised his lantern and walked on.

Patches of it, black and frozen, were
scattered about on the snow. Virga avoided it, feeling his heart
hammering in his chest. They could no longer hear the dogs. Virga
longed for any sound, even the wind’s piercing wail.

Zark stopped again. He held out the
lantern. Its illumination splashed onto the bloody snow and crept
along a narrow path that broadened and broadened until it fell upon
something that made Virga gasp and stiffened Zark as if he were
suddenly frozen.

It was the body of an Eskimo, clad in
bloody furs, bound with rawhide thongs to a cross of splintered
wood. The cross had been hammered upside down into the permafrost,
so the man’s staring eyes were near ground level. Virga had a
sudden recollection of having seen an inverted cross over a
doorway, but the frantic rush of blood in his brain prevented him
from remembering exactly where.

As Zark moved the lantern slightly its
glow revealed a deep gash across the man’s throat. Bone
glinted; the blood made a black oily pool beneath a face
open-mouthed in absolute, primal terror.

And he was not alone.

Zark swung the lantern to both sides.
The three men saw a row of bodies, some disemboweled, some
decapitated, hanging from obscene crosses and stretching on both
sides into the darkness beyond the range of the lantern, seemingly
into infinity. Virga caught the scent of blood that Zark had
mentioned and noticed with a dulled sense of alarm that he was
standing in a frozen puddle. The red snow covered his boots.

“Thirty-six men,” Zark said
suddenly. He spoke as if he were totally drained of strength.
“Twenty-eight women. All of them have been
murdered.”

“A barrier.” It was Michael
speaking.

“What?” asked Virga,
tearing his gaze away from those terrible agonized corpses.

“This is a warning to anyone who
has reached this point. An example of what lies beyond for anyone
crossing the barrier.”

“All of them,” Zark was
saying. He shifted the lantern and looked, disbelieving, down the
line of gruesome crucifixions. Faces caught the yellow light and
stared back through ice-filmed eyes. Open straining mouths screamed
at death blows. Curled fingers of outthrust hands clawed at the
last remnants of life. They had died in much pain and, worse, a
terrible certainly of what lay before them.

Zark stepped forward and shined the
light on an upturned face, here another, another, another. Some he
touched gently. Some he stood over and spoke to, quietly, in their
native tongue. Virga shuddered and, glancing toward Michael,
realized that the man was looking beyond the row of corpses out
toward the black wastes.

“These were good people,”
Zark said. “They were good hunters with loyal wives. And
now…” He turned suddenly upon Michael. “Who did
this thing?”

“Baal,” Michael said
softly.

“The man you seek?”

“The man we seek.”

“One man did this? One man
murdered these people and left them staked out like dog
meat?”

“He’s not alone. There are
others with him.”

“How many?”

“Three or four.”

Zark cursed bitterly. “How can a
man do anything like this?”

“They were your
friends?”

“I knew them,” Zark said.
“They asked my advice. They trusted me. I knew
them.”

Zark’s anger was wild and
churning behind his eyes; it seemed on the verge of breaking free.
Virga shifted his weight, crunching through blood-caked snow.

“What kind of man,” Zark
said, “is this Baal?”

“The thing Baal has done here is
nothing compared with what he’s done below,” Michael
replied. “It’s nothing compared to what he can do. We
must find him very soon.”

The hunter turned, his eyes sweeping
along the row of crosses. He shook his head at the awful carnage.
“This has the stink of evil,” Zark said.

“Yes,” Michael said in a
voice Virga had to strain to hear.

Zark said, “This is the final
settlement before the great plain. I’ll guide you along the
route taken by their birds. But I must ask one thing. I want to
deal with this man Baal.”

Michael regarded the other man and
finally shook his head. “No. That I can’t promise you
and I will not explain why. I know you want revenge. Revenge can be
noble. But in this case revenge is a lost cause.”

Revenge. Revenge. Revenge. The word
thudded inside Virga’s head. He’d heard it before and
it had terrified him. Where? Where?

“Lost or not,” Zark
thundered. “I’ll have it!”

“No,” the other man said.
“You will not because you cannot.”

“Do you want him for yourself?
Then I’ll tell you something right now. You’ll have to
fight me for him. And I’ll break you in half.”

“Perhaps.”

The two men glared at each other as if
expecting a confrontation.

“We should be leaving this
place,” Virga said. “We can’t do anything
here.”

Zark blinked. His gaze flickered over
toward Virga. He fired a last red stare in Michael’s
direction and then turned away. He stood for a moment, the lantern
down at his side and blood all over his boots. “Something is
wrong,” he said. “Damn me if something isn’t
wrong!” He stalked down the row of corpses, shining the light
on agonized faces. “There were over twenty children in this
settlement. There are none here. There are no bodies.”

“We should be leaving,”
Michael said.

“Where are their bodies?”
demanded Zark, pacing up and down the barrier like a great hulking
beast.

“Zark!” It was a command
for attention, sharp and cold. The hunter stood in his tracks and
very slowly turned his head toward the lean, authoritative figure
standing beside him. Michael put his hand on the man’s
shoulder. “We are leaving now.”

Zark drew himself up to curse in
Michael’s face but, seeing the grim determination on the
other’s features, let his anger subside before he spoke. He
shook the hand off and wheeled around in the direction of the
sledge. “We’re leaving,” he said.

Walking back, Michael stepped beside
Virga and said quietly, “Prepare for the worst.”

“What do you mean?”

“The children’s bodies were
taken for a purpose, the same purpose for which children by the
thousands were induced into Kuwait.”

When Virga did not reply Michael said,
“No matter. We shall see what we shall see. To attempt to
explain to Zark the depth of Baal’s power would be
futile.”

Walking fifteen yards ahead, Zark
turned and said, “You talking about me back there? Come on.
I’m not waiting for you.”

Zark cracked his whip into the left
side of the lead dog to guide the team around the grisly barrier.
The dogs were still shy but the ferocious head animal strained at
its lead and growled until the others, sensing that they were not
headed any further into that death-smelling place, shared the
weight. The sledge tore away on a horizontal line a hundred yards
beyond the barrier. Though Zark cursed and whipped them, the team
refused to turn on a northern path for what seemed like almost an
hour. Finally Zark cracked his whip over the lead’s head and
wrenched with all his strength at the handlebars. The sledge
shuddered as the dogs began to turn and, minutes later, they had
regained the correct course and left the visage of death
behind.

They traveled in silence. Zark was grim
and brooding, his eyes fixed on the indefinable, at least to
Virga’s untrained vision, horizon. The air was still and
calm; it yet smelled of blood even though the settlement was far
behind.

On all sides there was nothing but
empty black and the ever-present stars. Virga saw the red and blue
trails of particles streaking across the heavens, burning in
Earth’s atmosphere. Once a meteor flashed along the horizon
and burned itself out in dazzling red hundreds of miles to the
east. To primitive peoples, Virga thought, it would be a sign from
God, perhaps a warning that the entity of the skies was displeased.
The priests would sit over ceremonial fires for days debating the
meaning of the flaming skywriting. Drought, famine, or even a war
yet to come: the priests would argue as to which it was. And the
mysterious result was that a great percentage of ancient
predictions based on sky observation came about. There was no fall
from heaven, the priests said, that did not foretell a fall on
terra firma.

Another two hours—or so Virga
thought—passed before Michael turned to him. “Are you
tired? Do you need rest?”

Virga shook his head. It was a lie but
he didn’t want to delay them. He felt weak and hollow-eyed
but he didn’t want to sleep. The images of the frozen dead
faces were too sharp in his memory to allow peace; he knew he would
dream of them and in his dream he would be one of them, struggling
to escape over bloody snow but knowing always he could never get
far enough away.

Several times Zark stopped the sledge
and walked a few yards ahead, where he would bend down on one knee
and just stare without moving, his eyes fierce slits. Then he would
walk back and systematically make certain everything was still
lashed securely to the sledge. He checked the rifle repeatedly and
refilled his lantern with kerosene from a small metal
container.

“How far would you say?”
Virga asked.

“Can’t say. Maybe one
kilometer, maybe ten. Maybe one hundred. But I’ll know. This
is land that even the Eskimo avoids. There’s nothing
here.”

“You’re sure we’re
headed in the right direction?”

“We’re swinging east, the
same route as the birds. You trust me and I’ll trust
these.” He touched the corner of one eye and his nose.

The stars disappeared. The harsh
breathing of the dogs, the crack of Zark’s whip became a
regular rhythm. Virga, his eyes and limbs heavy, hung on to the
sledge and let it pull him. Soon the terrain about them began to
change; ice-crusted black rocks tore their way out of the
permafrost and huge mountains of ice, veined in deep green,
squatted like Eskimo attempts at skyscrapers.

The sledge began to slide, slowly at
first then roller-coasterlike, up and over the slopes. Zark kept
control by holding back on the handlebars and dragging his heels
along the ground.

Then the ground simply fell away with
breathtaking abruptness. Its runners hissing, the sledge came up a
slope and hurtled down like a rocket-sled over glimmering blue ice.
Michael was thrown to one side, sliding down the incline on his
belly. Zark scrabbled for a foothold but there was none. He lost
his grip and fell, cursing.

Virga, hanging on, saw the dogs trying
to scramble out of the way or, impossibly, outrun the vehicle with
its overload of equipment. The sledge slipped to the right,
throwing the team off balance and scattering them into their leads.
A wall of snow and ice fragments collapsed over Virga’s head,
blinding him. He heard Zark shout, “Jump
clear!”

At the base of the steep slope was a
flat ice plain. The sledge was going to crash down on it. The dogs
were yelping in fear. Virga released his hold on wood and threw
himself to the left, wide of the hurtling sledge. He landed on his
side and spun around and around on a surface of glass, trying to
protect his injured hand. Below him, on the plain, there was a
sound of metal grinding over rocks. Sparks flew up. The team
whimpered, a chorus of pain. Then Virga slid to the base and lay
there, breathing heavily, on his stomach.

Zark had regained his footing and was
walking carefully down the lower third of the slope. Beyond him,
Michael struggled to his feet.

Virga cleared his vision and cursed.
Damn! Possibly three or four dogs had been injured. The dark hulk
of the sledge lay ahead and the dogs, though still bound by their
leads, were scattered everywhere. Most had already regained their
footing to wait for instructions, but a few had not stirred.

And, as Virga counted the remaining
uninjured dogs, he saw a light flash perhaps half a mile away.

He tensed. Michael had almost reached
him. Virga stood, heedless of the new pain that throbbed in his
hand, and motioned. “A light,” he said. “I saw a
light out there.”

“Damn it to hell!” Zark
said from behind them. He was brushing snow off his furs as he
walked. Ice had completely caked his beard and made him appear an
old man. “That probably tore a fucking runner loose! And my
dogs—”

“Zark,” Michael said
quietly. He pointed into the distance and the hunter looked along
the finger toward the flashing light.

The man grunted. He whispered,
“Could be another group of hunters on the ice. But hunting
isn’t good here. Still…”

“How far is that?” Virga
asked. “About a half-mile?”

“Maybe,” Zark said.
“No, more than that. You can be sure the sound of that sledge
hitting bottom carried over there. Looks like someone with a
lantern walking… moving too slow to be on a sledge.”
He watched the light for a few more seconds and then quickly
stepped to check his sledge and dogs. He moved among the team,
speaking softly to them.

“You’re all right?”
Michael asked Virga.

“Yes. I’m fine.”

“Good. I believe that light is
shining in Baal’s camp. There is a possibility that Baal
himself may already be gone. If that’s the case I’ll go
back to Avatik and continue somewhere else. Will you go back to
America?”

“I don’t know. I
don’t know what I’ll do.”

One of the dogs cried out sharply. They
turned to see Zark raising his rifle and clubbing a second dog in
the head. Then a third and a fourth. He bent down and with a knife
from his coat cut loose the leaders of the dead animals. Then he
carefully checked the runners and walked back to the two men.
“Three dogs with broken legs, one with a broken back,”
he said. “The sledge has a damaged runner. We’ll be
slowed but I don’t have the means of repairing it. Both of
you are okay? No broken bones? Good.” Zark gathered up a few
supplies that had been thrown free and relashed them to the sledge
frame. He coiled the whip around his hand and made certain all the
leads were free. “From here on in,” he said, “I
want no talking. None. Don’t even breathe hard. Someone up
there knows we’re here. He may not know who we are or how
many but he has heard us. We won’t be showing our
light.” He grasped the handlebars and said very quietly,
“Gamma.”

26

WHEN THERE IS no sound for the brain to register it must invent
one of its own, a fierce dry buzzing, to keep the nerves active,
the electric impulses crackling.

In Virga’s ears the buzzing had
become a roar of deprived nerve endings. He and Michael walked a
few dozen yards behind Zark, who would occasionally hold up his
hand for them to remain still and then crouch down on the ice
plain, sniffing the air, his head moving from side to side to catch
any trace of sound.

They had left the sledge when the light
beyond flickered and vanished. They had covered more than a hundred
yards on foot and still there was no break in the blackness ahead.
Virga felt his flesh crawling; fear had filled his mouth with the
taste of blood. Beside him, Michael moved as quietly as a
shadow.

Zark held up his hand, crouched, and
listened. Virga could hear nothing. Around them the rocks and
upturned ice chunks were ominous markers on a path that fell off
into the dark. They were large enough to hide a building; they were
large enough to conceal any number of men who might be even now
watching their progress. In fact, Virga suddenly had the feeling of
being observed, though he thrust it aside as a fancy of his fearful
imagination. Around him there was angry black rock and smooth
glistening ice, nothing more.

Zark rose to his feet.

There was the sound of metal against
metal.

At first Virga thought the sound had
come from Zark but when the hunter turned his head violently to the
left, Virga realized there was a man hidden in the rocks.

The men threw themselves to the ground
even as the shot echoed back and forth, off blue ice and jagged
stone. Ice kicked up less than a foot to Zark’s left and the
man rolled for cover. Michael was on his feet and running. He
reached out and with one hand wrenched Virga up, dragging him along
into an outcropping of ice-glazed rock. Another shot rang out.
Sparks exploded over Michael’s head. In another moment Zark,
holding his rifle before him and crawling on his stomach, had
reached them. He worked his way into a crevice so his entire body
was protected. “One man to the left,” Zark said,
“and another moving in behind us. We’ll have to worry
about the man on the left first; the other bastard won’t be
within range for a minute more.”

A rifle cracked. The bullet, whining
wildly, scattered ice chips. “Ha!” Zark shouted,
then lowered his voice. “That cocksucker can’t get us,
but he’s pinning us here for the man behind.” He eased
up over the rock and positioned his rifle so the barrel was firmly
supported. He did not fire; he was waiting.

The man on the left fired again. Virga
could see the orange flame spit from the muzzle. The bullet sang
over their heads and on toward the Pole.

“All right,” Zark said
softly. “Once more, you bastard. Once more.”

Fire exploded again from the
man’s rifle. Before it had vanished Zark had it pinpointed.
Even as the bullet hit rock in front of him and screamed off,
Zark’s finger pulled the trigger. His rifle bucked. Then he
whirled about, firing at the fur-clad man who had been climbing on
the rocks behind them. The man, twenty feet away, was thrown
backward and fell, open-mouthed, into a cluster of ice and rock.
His rifle clattered down and slid, spinning, onto the ground a few
feet from Virga.

Zark waited, his eyes narrowed and his
senses throbbing. He said, “That’s it,” and stood
up. He reached beneath his furs and felt for the kerosene lamp he
was carrying from a short rope at his waist. The glass was cracked
but no fuel had escaped.

“You knew they were there,”
Michael said.

“I knew they were there. I had to
offer myself as a target. And that bastard nearly blew my head off,
too.” The man laughed abruptly at the expressions on Virga
and Michael’s faces. “You can’t shoot a man if
you can’t see him. If you can’t see him you take the
next best target—the muzzle flash. You care to stroll over
there? I’ll show you the hole at his heart.”

“I’ll take your word for
it”

“I thought you would. All right.
We’re all in one piece. Holy Man, if you’ll pick up our
friend’s rifle and carry it along we can move on. It
won’t bite. Good. Just strap it across your
shoulder.”

They moved onward around the
outcroppings of rock. Everywhere Virga thought he saw black shadows
sliding around them, men looking for clear shots. He had only fired
a gun, a pistol, long ago and then only at paper targets. He
understood very little about firearms but he felt somehow more
secure with the weapon slung across his shoulder. Its weight
reassured him.

No one spoke. Snow crunched dryly
beneath their boots. Around them the great slabs of ice grew
larger. Here jagged fingers of rock swept up toward the sky; here
skeletal blue ice, phantom faces, watched them pass. Zark still
crouched and listened at intervals; Virga looked from side to side
as Michael watched the rear.

Like an animal sniffing game, Zark
stopped. Michael stepped beside him.

Ahead, as the great hulks of ice and
stone gave way to a new smooth plain, was a long high-roofed prefab
structure. The walls and roof were coated with ice. There were wide
doors, like those of an aircraft hangar, that opened outward. The
doors were cracked and there was a dim glimmer of light from
within. To the right of the prefab structure was a thin-spired
radio tower. Beyond that an ice pathway led off into a new burst of
rock.

Motioning for the others to remain
silent, Zark paused for a moment. He took the kerosene lamp from
around his waist and relit it. Then he tied the lamp to the barrel
of his rifle, holding it at arm’s length ahead of him. They
followed its light across snow pitted by many boots. Zark reached
the long structure and carefully, quietly, pulled at one of the
doors until they could slip through. Ice along the door seam
cracked.

He stood on the threshold and shined
the lantern inside. There was an unmarked black helicopter amid
rows of stacked crates. At the far side of the structure was a
small room, lit by three kerosene lamps, and the men could hear the
crackling static of a transceiver. Zark took the lantern from the
rifle muzzle and walked beneath the fan of helicopter rotors toward
the radio room with the men following behind.

Virga’s eyes were so accustomed
to darkness that, once inside the room, he squinted. A chair stood
before the transceiver and there was a small table with a coffeepot
and a cup.

Zark touched the pot. “Still
warm,” he said.

There came the sound of someone running
across the hangar floor. Zark pushed roughly past the two men and
stood in the radio room doorway with his rifle upraised. Beyond him
a man had just reached the hanger entrance and was running out into
the snow. Zark’s weapon barked hollowly. The man cried out
before he fell.

Michael reached him first. He rolled
the body over and saw that the bullet had torn away the top of the
man’s head. The face was gaunt and terror-struck. It was no
one he had ever seen before. “Do you recognize him?” he
asked Virga over his shoulder.

“No.”

“The bastard must have been
hiding behind a pile of crates,” Zark said. “That was
the radio operator.”

“Killing him was
unnecessary,” said Michael, rising to his feet. For the first
time Virga saw a deep red glimmer of anger burning in his gaze.
“He could have told us where to find Baal.”

Zark was startled by the fierceness in
Michael’s face. He regained his composure, his muscles
coiling beneath his thick furs. “Shit!” he said.
“If he’s one of the men who destroyed that Eskimo
settlement he deserved to die! I don’t ask questions of dead
men!”

“It seems to me,” Michael
said firmly, “that you do most of your thinking with your
trigger finger.”

The hunter’s face darkened. His
hands curled into fists and he started to step forward.

“Baal is still here,” Virga
said sharply. “There’s no need for argument. If the
helicopter and radio operator were still needed then Baal is
here.”

Zark looked at Virga for a few seconds
and then back at Michael. “He’s right. So back
off.”

The anger drained visibly from Michael.
He seemed displeased that he had shown any emotion. He said,
“All right. If he’s here we’ll find
him.”

Zark gestured toward the path that led
away into the forbidding rocks. He started up it, mindful of his
footing on the slick surface. They had gone no more than a hundred
feet when Zark held up a hand for them to stop. The hand
trembled.

Ahead there was a maze of ice and
prefab materials. Huge ice blocks supported a roof glazed with
snow. Corridors wound off in all directions. It was a sprawling,
nightmarish structure that seemed to have neither shape nor
purpose; it was a winding labyrinth of ice-walled tunnels.

But it was not the structure itself
that had stopped Zark. He had thrust his lantern forward; the light
glared off the ice on both sides of the pathway. Now he stared
wild-eyed past the light, unable to move.

Something was buried in the ice.

It was a small dark form; its shape
chilled Virga to the marrow. He dared not look but was forced to
all the same, hypnotized by its obscenity. Zark was stepping
forward, the breath ragged between his teeth. He held the lantern
against the ice. The yellow light showed clearly the open eyes, the
gaping dark-spattered mouth, the curled fingers of an Eskimo child.
And the light showed bodies to the right, bodies to the left. The
ice was filled with corpses of children, frozen like butterflies
under glass. The men had walked into a horrible museum of death.
Virga felt weak and sick; he staggered backward before Michael
turned and caught him. It seemed that the eyes were all imploring
his mercy, the mouths shrieking the word revenge.

Revenge.

Revenge.

Virga shook his head violently to clear
it.

“Christ!” Zark breathed
hoarsely, putting a hand against the ice to steady himself and then
jerking it away as he realized his fingers had covered a glaring
pair of eyes. “Christ!”

“I told you,” Michael said,
still with a grip on Virga’s arm, “to prepare yourself
for this. The ancient cults of Baal sacrificed children and buried
their bodies in the walls of dwellings as a pagan protection from
harm. I told you to be ready.”

Zark shook his head in disbelief. He
couldn’t tear his eyes away from the awful scattered forms.
It was beyond anything in his experience. Caught off balance, his
senses reeled.

“We must go on!” Michael
said. “They’re dead and beyond help.” He took the
lantern from Zark and continued along the pathway, then stopped to
wait for the men to compose themselves. Virga was quietly sick. He
wiped his face and then went on.

They entered the ice corridors. The
lantern threw a solitary splash of light on the prefab floor and
glimmered from the open eyes of the children on each side. Zark
cringed from the bodies and kept to the center. They continued on,
reaching countless dead ends and retracing their steps through one
death-littered hall after another. The corridors wound in circles,
split into twos and threes, ended in empty vaultlike rooms. The
determination in Michael’s face became more dark and grim
with each blank wall they reached. And on and on they searched,
avoiding the imploring faces, through the halls and through a
hundred more until Virga knew they could never find their way out
again. They would be lost forever, searching, and no man would find
their frozen corpses even in a thousand years. Virga felt that the
walls were closing in, the corridors steadily narrowing until the
frozen fingers would reach from the ice and drag them into it with
them. His nerve was breaking; he feared for his sanity. I
can’t go on, he said to himself. Oh dear God, I can’t
go on.

And then the corridor turned sharply to
the right and there was someone sitting in a chair in a huge
ice-gleaming room.

Michael stopped, the frozen breath
bursting in clouds from his nostrils.

The man was sitting in darkness.
Michael held his arm out and the lantern illuminated burning eyes
above a savagely twisted mouth. He wore a heavy coat of dark fur.
His hands rested along the arms of the chair.

Baal said softly, “So.
You’ve found me.”

“No, you sonofabitch!”
raged Zark, bursting past Michael and raising his rifle to fire
point-blank. “I’ve found you!”

“WAIT!” Michael said. The
command rocked Zark back on his heels. He shook his head as if
he’d been struck. Slowly he brought the rifle barrel down and
stood looking across at Michael.

Baal laughed, a cold quiet laugh
without mirth. “Go ahead, Michael. Let him use his weapon.
You! Come here!”

Zark stirred. He blinked his eyes and
looked into Baal’s dark gaze. He stepped forward and
immediately Michael turned in front of him to hold him back.
Michael said forcefully, “You will not go forward. Both of
you will stand exactly as you are, do you understand? I want this
very clear. You will always keep yourselves at a distance from
Baal; keep myself between you and him. You will avoid looking into
his eyes. You will by no means touch him or let him touch you. Do
you understand?” He shook Zark. “Do you?”

“Yes,” Zark said thickly.
“I understand.”

“And the same for you, Dr.
Virga.”

“All right. Yes.”

“Dr. Virga?” Baal had
looked in his direction but the other man cast his eyes away. He
laughed harshly. “Well, well. My good Dr. Virga. I see you
injured your hand. Isn’t that unfortunate? You probably
won’t ever be able to use it again. Tell me, can you beat off
with your left?”

Above the lantern Michael’s eyes
were glittering gold and alert. He said, “Your time has
finished. I’ve seen your name spread a burning evil trail.
Now it is finished.”

Baal bent forward slightly. He said,
“Never. You’re too late. Oh, you’ve found me. But
now that you’ve found me, what can you do? Nothing, you
goddamned whoreson fool, nothing! Even now my disciples are in
America, Africa, South America; they spread the news of the
Messiah’s resurrection. In the Middle East the crowds clamor
for war against the bastard Jews in retribution for what they
thought was my assassination. Soon the superpowers will be
involved. There is no way they can avoid involvement; the area is
too strategically important, the oil fields too necessary for the
continuation of their civilization. It will start with only a few
rockets, perhaps, or a heated rush of infantry…” He
smiled, slowly and mockingly. “So you see? You can do
nothing. I will have my pleasure dealing with the bastard Jews; my
master will strike in the midst of chaos.”

“Who was the man sacrificed to
the crowd in Kuwait?”

“An American Jew, a newsmagazine
correspondent. We were able to ‘persuade’ him to fire
the shots. Then my disciples spread the word through the mass that
it was a Jewish-American plot. On the following day the television
and radio networks released the news that Baal had died of two
gunshot wounds at the hands of a Jew assassin. Response in Beirut
was predictable anguish, peaking now toward holy revenge. The
body—a body—was cremated and the ashes placed in a
golden urn. The Arabs are armed with what I taught them; there will
be no stopping their fury at the death of the living Muhammad. No,
Michael… you’re too late.”

“I’ve come prepared this
time,” Michael said.

Baal nodded. “Yes?
How?”

“Like all those who have given
themselves to the dark forces, you cannot withstand the power of
the Cross. It burns you with its purity. You’re reduced, like
all Satanists, to make mockery of it by inverting it.”

“Oh?” Baal said quietly.
“Watch yourself. You underestimate me. You judge my present
strength by my past weaknesses.”

“I won’t underestimate
you,” Michael said. “Not again.”

“What are you going to do? Burn a
cross in my flesh? Stake me to one and leave me in the snow? No
good, Michael. I wouldn’t make a very good Jesus. I will only
find a different method of approach.”

“I know that.”

Zark had recovered himself. He said in
a still-weakened voice, “Leave him to me. I’ll rip out
his guts.”

Baal laughed. “Yes, Michael. Yes.
Leave me to this stupid man. Then turn your back with the assurance
that you’ll never again have to deal with me. He’ll do
a good job, Michael.”

“No. You’re coming with us.
You’re going to lead us out of here.”

“Why? I could refuse to go and
let you wander here until you become too weak to go on.
Then…” He grinned, his cold stare unyielding.

“You’ll lead us out because
one of your great weaknesses is curiosity. You want to know how
I’ve readied myself for you.”

“When last we met, in Nevada, I
was weak compared to this,” Baal said menacingly. “I am
warning you now. I have the strength of a million—no, more
than a million. Are you very sure you wish to challenge
me?”

Michael remained silent.

“Think,” Baal said.
“Think. If you were to aid me instead of opposing me. Think
what we would have! Everything! Instead of being the mercenary of
bastards like these, you would be the master! How can you turn your
back on such power?”

“And what of your master? When
you have given him what he desires do you actually think he will
share the spoils with you? Do you actually think Israel will be
yours for the taking?”

Baal spoke in a guttural growl.
“It will be mine again.”

“Stand up,” Michael
commanded.

Baal remained seated. His black eyes
began to take on a tinge of deep red. They glowed in his white
skull-like face. Very slowly and carefully he rose from the chair,
his gaze flickering between Zark and Virga. “I am in need of
amusement,” he said.

Michael stepped forward until his face
was only a few inches away from Baal’s. He said grimly,
“You will show us the way out of here. You will walk ahead of
us.”

“And if I refuse?”

“Then the end will come
here.”

Baal nodded. “So finally
you’ve decided it has come to that? Like the noble pissing
martyrs you try to emulate, you would do it that way?”

“If need be.”

“You stinking sonofabitch,”
Baal said in a low growl. “You cocksucker, you
coward.”

“I said you will move ahead of
us. Dr. Virga, step aside and let us pass.”

Virga gave Michael and Baal a wide
berth. As Baal passed him he felt a terrible repulsion and, yet, a
sudden sharp impulse to reach out and touch the man. Michael
stepped beside Baal and Virga felt the impulse fade. Baal had
seemingly been aware of the reaction he’d caused. He turned
and grinned, his eyes bright and scorching-red, into Virga’s
face before moving out into the corridor.

As Michael held the lantern to watch
Baal, Virga and Zark followed behind. Zark kept shaking his head,
as if struggling from a daze, and muttering to himself.

“Are you all right?” Virga
asked him.

“Leave him to me,” he said.
“Leave him to me.”

They reached the clean cold air outside
the awful death-frozen maze. Passing the radio tower and hangar,
they started through the rocks on the path that would lead them
back to Zark’s sledge. In the cold Zark’s senses
sharpened. He kept his rifle at the ready and watched the rear for
another attack. When they reached the sledge the dogs growled a
greeting to Zark before they caught Baal’s scent. Instantly
they whimpered, backing away from the approaching figures. The dogs
cowered, their tails dragging, and even the lead dog trembled.

Zark walked ahead to calm the
animals.

“Beasts of burden,” Baal
said. “That’s what you are, Michael. And you’ll
be a beast of burden until you have the courage not to
be.”

Michael retrieved a canvas bag from the
load of equipment on the sledge. From it he withdraw a pair of
manacles joined together with a short chain. He approached Baal,
who watched him incuriously and even thrust out his wrists to be
bound. Michael clamped the manacles on and snapped them shut.

“You fool,” Baal said into
Michael’s face. “You stupid, pitiful fool.”

27

ZARK COILED HIS WHIP around his hand. He looked over at Michael.
“What did you say?”

“I said,” the other man
replied, “that we are not going back to Avatik.”

“Where then?”

“The sea. I want you to take us
to the frozen sea.”

“What?” Zark asked.
“It’ll take us at least two days to reach the coast. I
don’t want to travel with that man.”

“Don’t be afraid,”
Michael said. “You need not be afraid so long as you do as I
ask.”

“Why the sea?” Virga
asked.

“Because it suits my purpose.
That’s all I’ll say.” Beyond Michael, Baal was
watching them, his eyes glaring across the ice.

There was still hesitation on
Zark’s frost-crusted face. He shook his head. “I
don’t understand this. I don’t understand that man you
call Baal, nor do I understand you.”

“You don’t have to
understand. Just trust me and do as I ask.”

Michael held Zark’s gaze for a
few seconds. Then the hunter nodded and said, “All right,
dammit. The sea. But just to the coast and not onto the ice. Why
not kill that man here and now?”

Michael didn’t answer. He
purposefully turned his back and neared Baal so as to shield the
other men from him.

Zark cursed and cracked the whip over
the heads of the team. The dogs started, pulling heavily at the
sledge with its damaged runner. Virga saw that the sledge was
leaving a deep, crooked track.

“I don’t like this,”
Zark said to Virga. “We should kill that man here and leave
his body. He deserves to die.”

Virga said nothing. He was haunted by
confusion and insecurity; now, finally facing Baal, he wasn’t
sure that even Michael could control him. The sudden burst of panic
he’d felt when Baal had glared at him still gnawed at the pit
of his stomach. He would see those terrible red eyes forever. He
couldn’t even venture a guess as to why Michael wanted to
reach the sea. He had the unshakable feeling that Baal’s
power was always on the verge of breaking wildly free, of turning
on them all and reducing them to cinders. And at that point even
Michael couldn’t help them. He shivered though the sweat of
fear burned on his face. He felt alone and helpless, wrenched from
his life at the university, destined never to be the same again.
And there were so many questions he wanted to ask, things that
whirled around his head and left him staggering…

“You sonofabitch!” Baal was
shouting at Michael where they walked off to the right of the
crawling sledge. “You fucking bastard!”

Virga rested his chin on his chest and
grabbed hold of the sledge for support, trying to shut his mind to
the awful obscenities that now poured from Baal’s mouth. They
did not stop but instead grew in both intensity and vulgarity. Baal
was shrieking in Michael’s ear and Virga wondered how the man
could stand it. Then Baal’s voice changed in pitch, changed
from a low hoarse shout to the piercing scream of a small child:
“You cocksucker! You priest-sucking bastard! I’ll kill
you! You’ll rot before you destroy me!” And then,
incredibly, the voice of a young woman. Virga turned his head and
Zark made an effort to keep his attention on the ice plain ahead.
“Your eyes will fall from your head, you sonofabitch!
I’ll command you to go blind! Goddamn you! Goddamn
you!”

Virga put his hands to his ears.

Zark whirled around. “SHUT UP!
SHUT UP!”

And the voices, Baal’s voice,
quieted. The laugh that reached them across the ice was low and
lazy, gratified and pleased, as if from a man who has just won a
game of chess.

The dogs strained, whimpering, on their
leads; the sledge was dragging ice. As he walked Virga was aware of
the hiss of runners on the snow, the grind against outcropping
rock, the hiss, the grind, the hiss, the grind until his head was
pounding with those alternating sounds. He could distinguish
hard-packed snow and smooth ice plain, rocks the size of a fist and
rocks with razor edges that could slash the paws of the team, all
without opening his eyes, just listening to the sounds they made
underneath the runners. Once, testing his newly developed
abilities, he fell asleep while walking. When he jerked his eyes
open he was looking to the right, toward Baal. With an effort he
looked away, his nerves screaming alarm and new sweat freezing into
his eyebrows.

When Virga stumbled and fell Zark
halted the team. He helped the man to his feet and called to
Michael, “We’ve got to rest. The fatigue will kill
us.”

Michael considered the request. After a
moment he said, “Very well. We’ll rest here.”

Zark staked down the bearskin tent and
crawled through its opening. Virga, his joints throbbing and his
face a mask of painful cold, followed him and lay slumped against a
wall, his breath coming in harsh gasps. Outside the dogs whined
anew as Baal and Michael passed. Michael entered first and waited
for Baal to crawl through, then he deliberately sat between Baal
and the others.

Zark opened his package of walrus meat
and cut a slice for Virga, who tore into it ravenously. He offered
a piece to Michael, who refused it, and then cut a piece for
himself before wrapping it away. Taking out his pipe and lighting
it, Zark leaned back against the tent’s firm wall, closed his
eyes, and smoked.

Virga curled up for warmth and laid his
head down.

Michael did not attempt to sleep.
Baal’s gaze was burning into the back of his neck. He sat
cross-legged and watched the two exhausted men as they drifted
toward a deep, empty sleep.

And suddenly the tent was filled with a
terrible rising scream that made even Michael’s flesh crawl.
His eyes bloodshot, Virga wrenched himself up because he thought
he’d heard Naughton screaming from the shadows of an
evil-smelling hall. Zark’s eyes came open and in a blurred
instant he had grasped his rifle and hurtled through the opening in
a flurry of snow.

Virga shook his head when he realized
where he actually was. The tent reeked of rancid breath. Baal
laughed quietly from his corner, his teeth bared, his eyes
coals.

In another few seconds Zark burst back
in, his eyes rimmed with white and his beard ice-caked and dirty,
and said, “There was a bear outside! I heard it! Damn me if I
didn’t…” He stopped, hearing the mocking
laughter, and his face flamed with rage. “You
sonofa-bitch!” he shouted, reaching across Michael for Baal.
“I’ll kill you!”

Michael grasped Zark’s arm.

The laughter abruptly stopped.

Baal said, “Touch me. Go ahead.
Go ahead.”

“Sit down,” Michael
said.

“I’ll kill him.” The
breath clouds were fumed from Zark’s nostrils and mouth.
“I swear I’ll kill him!”

“Sit down,” Michael
repeated, his voice sharp. He tightened his grip on the man’s
arm and Zark’s eyes slowly cleared. Zark fell back against
the wall and sat, motionless and drained.

“You won’t sleep,”
Baal whispered. “If you try, the same thing will happen
again. And soon your nerves will be shot and you’ll be
jumping at my every breath. Go ahead.” He grinned at them.
“Close your eyes.”

In Virga’s frost-numbed mind was
still the image of Naughton, lying on his back in a littered
chamber, whispering something, whispering…

“Kill him now,” Zark
muttered. “Now.”

What was it? What had he said? What had
he said?

“There is only one way. You!
Eskimo! No, don’t turn your face away. I need you. You and I
together will leave this place… we’ll leave both of
them out here and we’ll get back to Avatik. I’ll let
you sleep once we’ve left them behind. Listen to me,”
Baal hissed. “Listen to me!”

Michael reached over and clamped his
hand firmly about the hunter’s thick shoulder. “Stay
where you are,” he said softly.

“You can’t continue without
sleep. You’ll never make the sea. You’ll fall dead in
your tracks.”

Virga was trembling. He saw
Naughton’s mouth opening, opening, opening…

“Let me go,” Baal
hissed.

Naughton whispered,
“Re…”

“… venge,” Virga
said.

Michael looked over at him, his eyes
blank and incurious. Baal was silent.

Virga said, “What did you mean by
that? It was something both you and Naughton said to me when I
asked what Baal’s purpose was. You said the word
revenge.”

“Naughton?” Baal whispered
from the corner. “You found Naughton? Bastard! Cocksucking
traitor! We should have torn out his eyes and tongue before we left
him to die!”

“But,” Michael said,
“you didn’t.” He said to Virga, “Yes, that
was what I said. That is the truth.”

“Your truth, perhaps. But beyond
my understanding. And there are things here so far from my
understanding that I’m afraid I’m losing my
mind.”

Zark said, “We should kill that
man here and now.” He lapsed into a low, coarse
muttering.

“I told you from the
beginning,” Michael said to Virga, “that there would be
things beyond your understanding.”

Virga said, “I want to know. I
have to know.”

“Then know one thing first. You
can never go back; you can never be what you once were.
You’ll be hung between life-in-death and death-in-life. If
you choose to speak no one will ever listen; you’ll be
branded a madman.”

“I can never go back now,”
Virga said.

Michael paused for a moment, searching
the man’s eyes relentlessly. Behind him Baal breathed like a
beast in heat.

Michael said, “You’ll
listen to what I’m going to say, but you won’t hear. It
will be beyond your comprehension. Do you believe in
Jehovah?”

The question startled Virga. He said,
“Yes. Of course.”

“And then you also believe in
Satan?”

Virga said, somewhat more uncertainly,
“Yes…”

“The great powers. The light and
the dark. One patient and tolerant, the other reckless and cruel;
but both of them warriors. Between them is a mixing of the
elements, the All. There is a completeness in the combination of
good and evil. Do you see? Without one the other could not
exist—that is a Law. And balanced on that Law of All is the
cosmos; to tip the balance of power would result in chaos and
madness. It would result in what you see taking place at this
moment.”

“Dog!” Baal whispered.

“Satan has never been a secondary
power; he is the equalizing darkness to Jehovah’s light. At
the beginnings the cosmos was created by both Jehovah and Satan.
The cosmos was, and is, a combination of celestial and demonic
energy. Your ancestors were part of that energy. You are part of
that energy. Baal is part of that energy.”

“The pagan god this man has named
himself after,” Virga said.

Baal laughed quietly, a rumbling in the
throat.

Michael said, “No. What you see
is a human body, but the entity itself is a formless mass of
energy. He is Baal, within a form to make himself visually
acceptable to those he wishes to influence.”

Virga sat motionless. Beside him Zark
had closed his eyes and was breathing harshly.

“The light and the dark were not
always enemies. As I’ve said, Satan is reckless. He is
concerned only with the accumulation of power. If the Law of All is
destroyed he is destroyed as well, but like a spittle-mouthed dog
he cares only for the moment. At the beginnings the creation
recognized only the god of light and the god of darkness, each
equal. But Satan saw advantages in increasing his strength through
the use of demons as pagan gods. Baal was one of the most
successful; he was already strong, with an unreasonable lust for
power and grandeur. Under Satan’s influence Baal became a
Canaanite deity, urging the sacrifice of children, sodomy and
prostitution, the sacrilege of the temple. Satan was pleased with
the result: he urged more and more of his demons to claim
themselves as gods before a creation now confused and tormented. It
was the only way Satan could claim more power than Jehovah. All
these things Jehovah endured until Satan began to influence the
Hebrews, Jehovah’s chosen own, into darkness and black
sorcery. The balance was overthrown. As an example He turned on
Baal, the most successful of Satan’s vanguard, and with the
aid of the Israelites drove Canaan into the ground. His wrath was
furious; He ordered His celestial armies to burn the wicked cities
to ash, that the land should be fiery rock and nothing should grow.
The idols and temples of Baal were destroyed; those who had
worshipped the demon entity were wiped off the face of the earth.
Baal was a combination of both powers, the light and the dark, but
he’d betrayed one and now sought refuge in the
other.”

“Lies,” hissed the figure
behind Michael. “Liesssss.”

“The damage was done. Satan had
tasted blood. And so began then the battle that would determine the
continuation or destruction of the Law of All. It rages here and
now. Satan uses Baal to throw havoc into the creation; Baal seeks
his own revenge, destruction of the Israelites who destroyed his
kingdom of Canaan. He has existed in many physical forms, before
this moment. And in each incarnation he’s come a step closer
to achieving both his goal and the goal of his master. Baal is a
mad god, possessed by the forces of darkness.”

Virga was trembling. He was aware of it
but he couldn’t stop it. He tried to concentrate on stopping
it. He said in a halting voice, “Baal is a man…
he’s only a man…”

“Have it as you will,”
Michael said softly. “You asked, I answered.”

“Let me go,” Baal said in
the voice of a child.

“We must continue. Can you go
on?” Michael gazed at Virga.

Beside Virga, Zark had opened his eyes
and was rubbing his neck and shoulders, working the blood.

“I don’t know. I
don’t know. I’m so tired.”

“That’s not what I’m
asking. Can you go on?”

“They can’t continue,
Michael,” Baal said. “Give it up. Let me go. Join
me.”

Michael looked over at the hunter.
“Can you travel?”

Zark rubbed his hands together. He
looked from Michael to Virga and back again. “Yes,” he
said.

“Good. Dr. Virga?”

He didn’t know. It seemed
difficult to breathe. He said, “I’m so
tired.”

“I warned you. Didn’t I
warn you?” Michael said. “We must reach the sea as soon
as possible. You have two choices. You can continue with us or we
will leave you here.”

Virga looked up, startled at the
ultimatum. He ran his hands over his face. “That’s not
a choice. I’ll go on.”

Michael nodded. “All right. Baal
and I will crawl first through the opening. Then you and
Zark.”

The bearskin tent was lashed away and
the dogs, curled in tight balls against the cold, were urged to
their feet by Zark’s insistent whip. The team strained
against their leads, the tautening ropes sending ice flying, and
the sledge again began to wind its ragged way across the wastes.
They walked as they had before, Zark and Virga close to the sledge
and Michael shielding Baal far to the right. The cold ripped across
Virga’s ravaged face. It didn’t serve to keep him alert
but instead aggravated his exhaustion, and soon his chin was
lowered to his chest again. He staggered on without knowing where
he was.

Moments—or hours—later,
someone whispered, “Virga.”

He shook his head. He was dreaming. In
the snow his boots sounded a continuous unbroken tattoo. He hung
between sleep and wakefulness, fearful of both.

“Virga,” someone
whispered.

He opened his eyes.

Zark stood at the front of the sledge,
his back broad and bearlike in his furs. The dogs moved at their
rhythmic pace, ice whirling beneath their paws. Virga slowly turned
his head to the right, toward the two men walking in the gloom
beyond. He couldn’t see their faces. He narrowed his
eyes.

Baal’s red eyes were glowing
fiercely over Michael’s shoulder. The other man hadn’t
seen. Virga felt himself spinning, spinning, spinning down a great
distance.

The red eyes, like terrible siren
beacons, flashed.

“James,” she said.
“James.”

He called out, “Who is
that?” but he knew the voice and it choked him inside as if
he were gagging on something lodged in his throat. His heart
pounded with a violent intensity. I want to hear your voice, he
told her. I want to hear your voice.

“James,” she said again,
only now it was a pleading voice that almost killed him. Tears
sprang to his eyes and he wiped them away before they could freeze.
“I’m here beside you. Can’t you see
me?”

“No,” he whispered.
“I can’t.”

“Here. I need you, James. I
don’t want to go back.”

“Go back? Go back
where?”

“Where I’ve been,”
she replied, almost sobbing. “A terrible cold place with gray
walls. I don’t understand this, James. I don’t I
remember falling; I remember a hospital and people standing over
me. Then nothing. Everything faded… everything turned to
gray like the walls of that place. I can’t go back. Please
don’t make me go back.”

He strained to see into the distance,
but there was nothing. He couldn’t see her. The bite of the
cold reminded him that he was still awake but he moved across the
ice sluggishly, as if it were turning into a vicious paste over the
tops of his kamiks. It was her voice, yes, incredibly her voice.
But where was she? Where was she? Her voice. Yes. Her voice.

“Answer me, James,” she
pleaded. “Please let me know you hear me.”

“I hear you,” he called.
“Where are you?”

“Here beside you. I’m
walking beside you but something separates us and I can’t
quite touch you. Oh God, you’re so close. Why can’t you
see me?” The voice was on the edge of panic; it ate into
him.

He turned and thrust his arms out in
all directions, flailing, flailing, finding nothing. He choked back
a bitter cry of rage and frustration. “There’s nothing
here!” he said.

She began to cry. The tears overflowed
and ran down his own face. “I don’t want to go back! I
don’t want to go back!”

“Then stay! Help me find you!
Reach out and touch my hand! Can you?”

“Almost. I almost can. Something
is between us. Help me!”

“How? How can I help you?”
He looked around feverishly for her. The tears froze on his face,
left thin crusts of ice in the lines around his mouth.

Her voice, moaning for him, died away.
With a new determination he searched the darkness, his fingers
grasping for a form that had seemed to be speaking just to the
right of him.

And then she said, sobbing, “They
want me to go back, James. They say I have to and that I
can’t stay. Touch me. I don’t want to go!”

His breathing was harsh and ragged. He
cried out, “I can’t find you!”

“I do want to stay. I do. Help
me!”

“Yes. How?”

“That man,” she said, her
voice almost cracking, “walking ahead of you. He keeps us
apart. As long as he is there I can’t reach through. If he
were gone then they would let me touch you…”

The images of her were flashing
kaleidoscopically through his brain. There was a roaring in his
head; a tremendous weight was pressing down on the back of his
neck. “If he were gone… ?” he asked weakly, a
voice not his own.

She sobbed. “Around your
shoulder. The rifle…”

“Where are you?” Virga
cried out. “I don’t see you!”

“The rifle… Oh God,
they’re calling me back!”

Virga was weak and off balance. He was
afraid he would stumble. He saw the offered target of Zark’s
back only a few feet in front of him. The man was crude and cruel,
a beast, a killer. Why should he live and make her suffer? Why
should he live?

“The rifle,” she said.
“James…” Her voice began to fade.

“No! Don’t go… not
yet!” He hefted the weapon up with his injured hand and
placed his finger on the trigger. The bastard was making her
suffer! He was torturing her!

“James,” she said, calling
from such a distance now that it made new tears course over his
cheeks.

He took no aim. From this distance he
couldn’t miss. He squeezed the trigger.

Someone wheeled in front of him and
wrenched the barrel toward the sky. The explosion of the shot
deafened him and rocked him back. Flame exposed, briefly,
Zark’s incredulous face as the hunter dodged down to avoid a
bullet that whizzed over his right shoulder into the darkness.

“Christ!” Zark said.

Michael wrenched the rifle away from
Virga, his golden gaze unflinching. Virga felt his knees begin to
give way but before he could fall the other man caught him and
lowered him gently. Beyond Michael, Baal stood without moving, arms
chained before him.

“Has he gone crazy?” Zark
said. “That almost took my head off!”

“She was there,” Virga
whispered to Michael, the hot tears of shame and regret already
freezing down his face. “She was standing right beside me all
the time and I couldn’t even touch her…”

Michael said softly, “She was
never there.”

“She was! I heard her! She tried
to touch me!”

“No. She was never
there.”

“She was…” he began,
and the terrible sound of his pleading voice stopped him.

Slowly, with a hesitation born of deep
and awful emptiness, Virga let her go. Her voice had been swept
away by the rifle’s blast but her image remained in his mind.
Now, as he blinked away the tears, as he remembered who stood over
him, he saw the beautiful face lose its color and life. The light,
gleaming softly from the eyes he remembered through a thousand dim
nights alone in his apartment, that place that smelled of musty
books and useless pottery and rancid smoke, faded until it was only
a hollow shade of reality. And now she was receding back through a
gray wall of mist and he felt the fear of losing her again throb at
his temples.

He reached out a hand for her.

Michael grasped his wrist. “She
is dead.”

“No,” said Virga, begging.
“No.”

And beyond Michael, Baal laughed like
the shriek of a woman.

Michael’s eyes blazed. Virga
instinctively cringed from the fire that seemed to glow from the
man’s face. The younger man rose up, up, towering as he
walked across the ice, finally standing with his face inches from
Baal’s. There the two men, like cunning animals, weighed the
possibilities of battle.

Michael’s hands were curled into
claws at his sides.

“Do it,” said Baal,
grinning. “Do it and destroy yourself too. You’d
destroy yourself forever for the sake of an old man? No, I think
not. Like me, you find this incarnation suitable.”

Michael’s teeth clenched. A
muscle spasmed in his jaw. Where the gaze of the two men met the
air seemed to glow white-hot.

“Do it,” Baal
whispered.

Michael turned abruptly and
disdainfully and walked back to Virga. He helped the man to his
feet and gave him the rifle again. “I want both of you
walking side by side,” he told them. “I want you to
know always what the other is doing.”

“Coward,” Baal said over
Michael’s shoulder. “You stupid bag of scum. You
priest-fucking bastard.”

“You’re all right
now?” Michael asked Virga. “You can
continue?”

“Yes. I think I can.”

Zark said, “For Christ’s
sake, watch him. I don’t want a bullet in my back.”

Virga could now fully recognize his
surroundings; he could remember why he was here. For a black
instant he’d been caught in an amnesiac solitude. He felt
weakened and drained as he’d never been before.

“You’re very
certain?” Michael asked.

Virga bent down and gathered up a
handful of snow. He rubbed it across his eyes, then wiped it away
with his sleeve before it could freeze his lids shut. His skin felt
raw. “I’m all right,” he said, “but I swear
before God I heard my wife speaking to me.”

“If you hear her voice again
you’ll recognize it for what it is. If you’d killed
Zark, as Baal wished you to, we would have no guide to the
sea.”

“My God,” Zark breathed. He
glanced over at Baal. “What kind of man are you?” He
immediately lowered his eyes, remembering Michael’s
instructions.

“A better man than any of
you,” Baal said. “You think you’re going to stop
me, Michael, contain me, kill me? You know you can’t do that.
If anyone falls it will be you.” His eyes swept toward the
other two men. “And what will you do then? When I finish with
him, where will you hide? Hear me well. There is nowhere on this
earth you’ll be able to go. I’ll find you, and I have
ten million eyes to help me search.”

Virga shivered. The man’s voice
cracked through the darkness and stung him.

“I’ve got a gun,”
Zark said. “You remember that.”

“On the contrary. I won’t
forget.”

“Move the team on, Zark,”
Michael commanded. “Remember, I want both of you walking side
by side. That’s right.”

The sledge continued its ragged course.
The dogs seemed tired and Zark stopped repeatedly to feed them
hunks of dwindling meat. Michael thrust his hands inside his furs
for warmth and watched the men at the sledge for any sign of
trouble.

“I won’t be stopped,”
Baal said. “I’ve come too far. I’ve never been
this strong before.”

“And that is exactly why I must
stop you. You’re on the verge of overpowering me. I realize
that. And for that reason your time must come to an end.”

“I warn you,” Baal said
very quietly. “Watch yourself. You’ve thought all along
you could master me. Me—one to whom hundreds of thousands
have proclaimed their loyalty. And there will be more. And more.
And then I will crush my enemies and take the place that was meant
for me. You stupid cock-sucker, you filthy piece of shit, you
overstep your bounds.”

“I overstep mine to force you
back over yours.”

“Too late,” Baal said.

“We’ll see.”

“Damn you!” Baal spat at
him. “Hiding behind a cross of shit! You hope to win, knowing
you cannot. You meddle with the future.”

“No. I preserve it. Their wars
will come, yes. Their famines, their droughts. Their crops will
turn to dust and their flesh will dry beneath a burning sun, but it
will not be by your hand. You’ve begun the decay. I will not
allow your power to warp them beyond all redemption.”

Baal’s eyes burned, mirroring an
insatiable greed and lust. He said mockingly, “My master and
I offer them hate. They take it gladly. They murder and loot and
spit on everything you hold sacred. They take our hand and not
yours. They praise our name and not yours. They are ours and not
yours.”

“Be silent!” Michael
said.

Baal laughed coldly. “Ah. You
smell the stench of truth.”

Michael didn’t look at him.

Ahead the ice plains stretched to the
lip of the sea.

28

THE DOGS WERE HUNGRY. Zark could only lash his whip into the
midst of the swirling pack as they turned on one of their number
that had slashed a paw on jagged rocks. Fur flying and teeth bared,
they bore the injured dog to the ground, while Zark shouted curses
at them. The lead animal, now powerless to control against hunger,
stood apart from the pack as if disdaining their cannibalism. The
weaker animal fell beneath their combined weight but still guarded
its throat with snapping teeth. The pack, their leads tangled
around legs and throats, stood in a tight circle, waiting for an
opening. And then a stout gray-flecked dog leaped in for the kill,
followed by two more, and together they bore down with jaws
straining for the jugular.

“Damn you!” shrieked Zark,
laying in with his whip. “Back off!”

But they were hungry beyond the
comprehension of pain. There was a final cry from the dying
dog.

Baal was laughing. “The law of
the world,” he said.

Zark could do nothing. He lowered his
whip and shook his head from side to side, sickened. “That
was a good dog,” he muttered. “A damned good
dog.”

“How far to the sea?”
Michael asked.

Zark shrugged. “A couple of
hours. Maybe more. If I lose any more dogs we’ll never make
it. Hell, I’m not so certain we can even make it back
ourselves. Our food is gone; there won’t be another refill
for the lantern. We’ll be moving in total darkness—very
dangerous.”

Virga braced himself against the
sledge, fighting off another wave of numbing exhaustion. His beard
stubble was laced with ice and he had difficulty breathing, so
sharp was the cold. Hours before, Zark had told him he had the
first white patches of frostbite across his cheeks and, feeling his
battered flesh, Virga felt them growing there like cold cancers.
But there was nothing he could do. His feet, even in the sturdy
dog-skin socks and kamiks, were rapidly growing numb. His fingers
had frozen the day before. Now he kept walking only by a reserve of
sheer willpower.

Nor had Zark escaped frostbite. It
pocked his cheeks and the bridge of his nose. Ice matted his beard,
the weight of it making him stoop over, as if he were aging with
every step. Virga had tried to keep a conversation going with the
man in order to stay awake, but Zark seemed not to want to talk. He
preferred silence, answering Virga in a low mutter that disdained
communication.

Beyond them, far to the right and
behind the lantern’s yellow track, were the two dark figures
of Michael and Baal. They would walk in silence for what seemed
like hours, then Baal would suddenly spray a string of terrible
oaths directly into Michael’s face. And always, always, Baal
would taunt Virga and Zark, reminding them that soon they would be
his, that after he’d finished with Michael he would rip them
to pieces, that after Michael could no longer give them protection
they could never run far enough to hide.

“Virga,” Baal called
suddenly over the growling of the dogs, “you stumbling sack
of shit, you’re going to die out here, do you know that? You
think I don’t know you’re slowly freezing to death?
What good will you do your precious God when your body is a solid
lump of ice? Answer me that.”

“Shut up, you bastard,”
Virga said weakly, not knowing if Baal heard him or not. He raised
his voice. “Shut up.”

“Virga,” Baal said through
the dark curtain that separated them. “Virga, pray to your
precious God that He freezes you to death before I can have my
revenge. Come over here to me, Virga. I’ll keep you
warm.”

“God help us all,” Zark
muttered. “We should have killed that man a long time
ago.”

“Zark,” Michael called out.
“Do you need help with the dogs?”

“No. I can take care of
them.” He saw that they’d almost finished with the
carcass. He took his rifle from the sledge and with the butt began
to shove the animals back from the dead dog. He reached down and
pulled the torn mass of flesh away. He waded among them, watching
for any bared teeth or upraised tails, and calmly straightened the
leads. The one-eyed black brute turned to face the rest of the
team, ready if need be to protect his master. In a few moments Zark
had disentangled the leads and they were free to continue.

As they neared the coastal shelf the
land began to rise up in winding hulks of rock and ice. Forbidding
masses of stone, all agonized edges, suddenly materialized out of
the gloom to bar their path. Zark corrected their course, taking a
smoother but longer route to avoid any more injuries to his
animals. A strong wind whined in from the sea; it began high above
their heads, where they could hear it screaming, turning upon
itself in blasting convolutions, and then dropped directly into
their faces. Virga huddled for warmth but it was no use; he was
slowly, as Baal had said, freezing to death.

They crawled against the wind through a
wide black band of scabbish rocks to face a sight that froze the
breath in Virga’s lungs.

Balanced on the precipice of the
ice-bound horizon was the moon, huge and blood-red, a bullet hole
in ebon flesh. The ice reflected its brilliant crimson back onto
the faces of the fur-clad men. For miles and miles the ground was
smooth and bloody, bright and distant as a foreign desert.

Zark said over his shoulder,
“Melville Bay,” and Michael nodded.

There was no sea noise, no sound of
breakers over rock; the thick layer of ice acted as a muffler. The
only noise was that of the fierce wind, wailing now from the Pole,
as it lashed across the bay and whirled through coastal rock on
toward Greenland’s interior.

Michael said, “I want to find a
place to cut through the ice.”

“What?” Zark twisted
around. “Now you want to go chopping holes?
Christ!”

“How thick is it?”

“Several meters. This coastal ice
is like iron except during summer thaw.”

“It’s thinner ice further
out?”

“Hell!” Zark said.
“My agreement was to bring you to the sea and no further. Not
onto the ice.”

Michael ignored him. “I seek a
place of great depth. I presume that would be a kilometer or more
out?”

Beside him Baal’s eyes were
burning slits. He looked from Michael to the hunter and back
again.

“Maybe it would be,” Zark
said. He swore. “Maybe a kilometer or so.”

“Will you take us?”

Zark laughed harshly.
“Hell,” he said, “do I have a choice?” He
called to the dogs over the rush of wind and they pushed ahead,
dragging the crippled sledge over a last fringe of rock-dappled
land before reaching the bay’s bleak smoothness.

“What are you going to do?”
Baal asked.

Michael was silent.

“Doesn’t the condemned man
deserve to know?”

Michael fixed his gaze on the
red-streaked horizon. The moon hung before him like a frozen
sun.

“You bastard,” Baal said,
barely loud enough to be heard. “I warn you. Soon you
can’t turn back. Let me go while you still can.”

Baal waited for the other man to reply.
Michael seemed not to be listening. “You must want to be
destroyed very badly,” Baal said. “And what will it be
for? Nothing. You will be scattered like dust in the stars and for
what? Look at those two. Look at them! Fine examples of what you
want to save. Weak, crawling, begging slabs of filth, no more. One
already dead on his feet and the other soon to be.”

Michael turned his head slightly.
“You cannot save yourself.”

Baal’s lips curled back in a
travesty of a grin. He thrust his face forward, spittle shining on
his mouth. “And who will save you, Michael?”

The wind howled into their faces. Virga
could hardly walk against its blast. The team was extremely
irritable now that they’d left land behind. Zark’s whip
cracked continually over their heads; the lead animal, snapping and
growling, bullied the others to keep them moving.

The sea ice beneath the men’s
feet was treacherous. It was worse than glass, blue- and
white-veined with deep threads of green. Virga, one hand always on
the sledge for support, could feel a vibration through the soles of
his boots. It was the sea thrashing beneath him, its tidal currents
wrenching back and forth on the underside of the ice. He wondered
at its depth, at its fury. He was gripped with a sudden fear of
plunging through a weak spot to freeze almost instantly in the
waters. His legs were shaking and uncertain. Go on, he told
himself. Another step. Another. Another.

Walking on the other side of the
sledge, Zark halted the team every few moments to chop at the ice
with his axe. Then he would straighten and they would continue on a
few more yards into the wind before he again knelt to test the
thickness.

Beyond Michael, Baal burst into a wild
scream that echoed around Virga’s head like the whirl of
wind. His scream grew in intensity and volume until Virga cringed
to escape its terrible rage. It bore off into the distance; it
vibrated against the far ice mountains. The dogs churned,
whining.

Baal said in a low growl,
“I’ll kill all of you slowly. So slowly, so slowly, so
very very slowly. You’ll cry out for death but it will be on
my side. I promise you a century of pain.”

Zark stood up, his axe dangling at his
side. “This is as far as I go,” he said. “I can
feel the sea just beneath my feet. Further on, the ice won’t
support my sledge.”

Michael walked toward him, taking the
axe and bending down beside the sledge. He chopped for a moment and
then rose to his feet. “How deep is the sea here?”

“Damned if I know. Deep
enough.”

“And we cannot go on?”

“No. Too dangerous.”

Michael turned, contemplating the
crated object still lashed to Zark’s sledge. With an air of
resignation he gave the axe back to the other man and said,
“The hole should be large enough for the contents of that
crate to slide through. You begin it; I’ll finish.”

Zark motioned at the canvas.
“What is that thing?”

Michael silently walked back and began
working at the lashings, glancing up occasionally into Baal’s
gleaming eyes. Zark and Virga helped him slide it from the bindings
and then Virga stepped back, breathing heavily from the exertion,
to let Zark tear away the canvas covering. He began breaking it
open with the axe. When he’d cut part of it away he tore
feverishly at the wood and Michael helped him break open the sides
to expose an oblong object inside.

A coffin.

But not so much a coffin as a simple
chamber. It was dark and austere, plated with undecorated metal.
There were no inscriptions, no flowing scrollwork, only a great
dark bulk designed to hold a terrible, raging power.

Baal’s laughter cut them to the
bone. His mouth grinned below derelict eyes; his tongue flashed
along the lips. “You play games with me, Michael.”

“No games,” said the other.
“To destroy you totally would be my destruction as well.
There are still your disciples with which to deal. They are demon
entities within human bodies, carriers of your disease. You will be
lowered into the sea and covered with ice. There your hideous soul
will be trapped, unable to return in another Satan-seeded
incarnation. No man will find you, no man will free you.”

Baal drooled saliva like an enraged
animal. “Nothing can hold me! You’re a fool to think
otherwise!”

“This can hold you,”
Michael said. “And this will hold you.” Taking
off his mitten, he held his right hand motionless, fingers
together, over the coffin’s lid. Very slowly he moved his arm
downward. Virga felt the hair at the back of his neck tingle, rise,
rise, rise. Zark breathed a curse, his eyes wide and
protuberant.

The man’s hand was leaving a
trail that melded, electric-blue and seemingly solid, with the
metal. It glowed with enough energy to cause Virga to thrust a hand
before his eyes and stagger back a few paces. Michael’s hand
continued downward in a straight, thick blue line the length of the
coffin. Then he brought the hand up to the middle of the line and
crossed it with another. There, pulsating on the coffin’s
metal lid, was an electric-blue crucifix, drawn from
Michael’s bodily energy.

Baal held both hands before his face,
his chains clattering. He growled through gritted teeth, “You
sonofabitch! I’ll kill you!”

But something was wrong; Virga sensed
it. Baal’s eyes glittered behind the hands. Michael let his
arm drop and turned slowly, his eyes narrowed.

Baal backed away from the glowing blue
crucifix. “I’ll kill you for this!” he shouted.
“All of you!”

“God in Heaven,” Zark
whispered. His face, bathed in blue light, was tired and haggard.
There were dark circles beneath the eyes. “God in Heaven.
You’re not a man.”

Michael took the ice axe from
Zark’s hand. He bent down and, with tremendous force,
steadily chopped at the sea ice. Over to the right Baal cursed
slowly, his voice intermittently rising and falling.

Slabs of ice scattered out around the
sledge. Virga, watching Michael work, felt writhing within him a
new fear from being so close to something awesome and intangible.
His mind reeled at the recognition of the only possible link
between Michael and Baal. The answer was in the form of a glowing
blue crucifix shaped by a hand of flesh. Virga felt he had so much
to ask, so much to learn. And so little time. He thought for a
sudden terrifying instant that here, in this land of ice and barren
plains, he stood poised on the brink of insanity.

The axe rose and fell, rose and fell.
Zark stood dazed, his mouth moving but making no sound. And beyond
the men Baal’s eyes shined for a fraction of a second, bright
and hideously red.

Michael, water-spattered from the sea
that churned black and fathomless in the wide hole before him, rose
to his full height. He threw open the latches on the coffin lid and
opened it to expose a bare metal interior. He looked toward Baal.
“Come here,” he commanded.

Baal growled. “You
bastard!”

“Come here!” The voice
shook Zark and Virga. Its power, like the report of a gun or the
explosion of a cannon, echoed off across the frozen bay.

Even Baal seemed to tremble, but still
he refused to obey.

And suddenly Michael’s eyes began
to change, to lighten through brown to hazel to hazel-flecked gold.
In another instant, only time enough for Virga to draw a ragged
breath, Michael’s eyes were whirling gold, freezing and
burning. Zark cried out and threw his arm over his face, staggering
back into the cringing dogs. Virga’s knees sagged. Something
pounded at his temples. Again. Again. Again.

“Come here!” Michael
said.

Shielding his eyes, Baal roared like an
enraged animal. He took a step back, confused and wary.

And then Michael had reached him. He
grasped the chain between Baal’s wrists and flung him to the
ground. Baal grunted in pain and began to crawl toward the sledge
on his belly.

“Crawl,” Michael said.
“Crawl back to the pit, you thing of slime. Crawl!”

Baal staggered to his feet, hissing and
cursing, and Michael flung him down again, forcing him to remain on
his stomach. Michael said, “By the power granted me I force
you to crawl as you have forced others, innocent ones, weaker ones.
The brute blind force in both yourself and your master sickens me.
You’ve murdered and burned, raped and
ravaged…”

Baal reached up to grasp at Michael and
the other man thrust his groping hand away.

“… you attack the weak,
the mindless, the helpless. Never the strong.”
Michael’s eyes blazed. “By the will of Jehovah your
black soul will be confined for eternity.” They had almost
reached the open coffin. He grasped the wrist chains and dragged
Baal up.

Baal’s own eyes were fierce and
red. It was an unbearable sight. Zark cried out again and Virga put
his hands to his face.

Michael struck Baal across the cheek, a
backhanded blow, and bore him down into the coffin.

Baal whispered harshly, “My
master will win yet. On the Megiddo plain. Sweet lost
Megiddo.” And Michael slammed shut the lid. As he carefully
latched it he seemed weakened by the confrontation. The blue glow
illuminated dark hollows under his eyes. He staggered when he
motioned for the two men to help him.

The three men heaved until they thought
their spines would break. Slowly, slowly, the coffin inched over
the edge of the hole and tilted toward the sea. Finally the sound
of metal grinding over ice was no more, and it slipped from their
grasp and sank down into the black water. The crucifix remained
visible for a time, shrinking until it had been swallowed in the
maw of Melville Bay.

“Finis,” Michael said
tonelessly. He ran a hand over his face. “I’m tired.
I’m so tired.”

“He’s gone,” Virga
whispered. “Thank God.”

Zark stood peering down into the hole
as if uncertain that all of it had ever taken place. “Who was
he?” he asked in a weak, listless voice.

“Someone who will never
die,” Michael said, “but will only wait.”

Zark looked toward Michael, the ice in
his beard glittering red from the bullet-hole moon. With an effort
he walked away from the other men and began to calm his dogs,
checking to see that all the leads were untangled. “We should
be on our way,” he said after a moment. “We’ve
got a long journey.”

“Yes,” Michael said.
“We do.”

Zark cracked his whip over the team and
the dogs, still nervous, began to stir. The sledge inched forward.
Virga clasped his arms beneath his furs for enough warmth to get
himself moving.

His eyes afire again, Michael twisted
around toward the hole where dark water churned.

The dogs stumbled into each other,
tangling themselves in the leads. The huge one-eyed black howled in
fear.

Virga looked around, every breath a
knife tearing his lungs. What had it been? That sound that sound
that sound. What had it been? Beside him Zark stood motionless, his
fisted hands white-knuckled at his sides.

And there it was again, that sound.

The sound of foot-thick ice cracking
with pistol-shot intensity.

And then the crack that had begun at
the lip of the hole widened, widened, veining out in blue and
green, streaking across the ice plain beside them, behind them, in
front of them, crisscrossing like jigsaw puzzle pieces.

The sea thrashed. Steam rose up,
ghostly blood-red wraiths. Melville Bay, maddened black fury,
overflowed the edges of the hole and sloshed around the men’s
boots. Virga felt its rage underneath the ice on which he stood. He
struggled to keep his balance against a force thrusting against the
frozen surface, threatening to burst through.

“What the hell is it?”
shouted Zark, one hand on the sledge and his feet wide for
balance.

But Michael would not, or could not,
answer.

A great slab of ice cracked in half
with a tremendous splitting sound and the coffin shot up from the
water and bobbed once, twice. Its lid had been ripped away. The
coffin turned on its side, filled with water, and sank again.

And then the ice at their feet
exploded.

It lifted up around them, groaning with
the sea’s power. Black waves burst free. The veiny cracks
widened into fissures, widened into gaps, widened into chasms. The
men struggled for balance on pitching ice platforms, the sea
crashing on every side. Virga, his arms flailing for some kind of
support, staggered back and fell to his knees. The rifle around his
shoulder slipped away, spun on the ice. Virga grabbed for it and
saw it vanish through a fissure. Michael stood where he was on a
wide slab, his fists clenched at his sides. Zark, hanging onto his
sledge, muttered a continuous guttural cry.

They saw the fingers first.

Reaching from the hole where the coffin
had gone down.

Grasping at ice, curling, the naked
fingers thawed a hold, pulled from the black water forearms,
shoulders, the top of a head. And Virga, on his knees, saw
Baal’s face break the surface, saw the red reflections of the
moon in the eyes, saw the mouth grin wide and soundlessly in grim
revenge.

And Virga knew. Hearing Michael cry
out, he knew. And in knowing he knew the first seconds of
death.

Michael was too late. Baal’s
power had doubled, tripled; he could overpower the Cross.
He’d allowed himself to be brought to this place knowing that
here there was no escape for them. Here he was the Messiah, and
they disloyal.

Baal, steam swirling from his body,
stepped free of the pitching waves onto solid ice.

Zark’s footing gave way. Great
fissures opened around him, the ice dividing with the noise of
splitting timber. The dogs, scrambling for safety, wrenched at
their leads. The sledge overturned, scattering equipment. Much of
it, including Zark’s weapon, went spinning by Baal’s
legs and into the sea.

Baal opened his mouth and emitted a
high piercing shriek that threatened to burst Virga’s
eardrums. He clasped his hands to the sides of his head and
cringed.

The huge one-eyed black, within range
of Baal, leaped for the man’s throat. Bound by the lead, the
animal fell short, his slavering jaws gripping only empty air. But
Baal, his mouth wide in the terrible shriek of vengeance, caught
the animal around the neck and squeezed with both hands. The dog
kicked and clawed. Virga smelled something burning. The one-eyed
black burst into flame. It cried out once in agony and then Baal
let the mass of fire drop. The other animals, with no leader now,
pitched forward in the flight of terror, dragging the overturned
sledge. The ice beneath them split open and, with a single terrible
moan, the team fell through, borne down by the weight.

Someone, a hulk of furs, crashed into
Baal even as the team disappeared. Baal staggered back, his eyes
glinting. Trailing steam from his fingertips, he swung a blow that
Zark dodged.

Michael started for Baal, weaving from
platform to platform.

Zark struck Baal full in the face with
the same sound as the blow of an ice-axe. Baal fell back only two
steps before regaining himself, and this time he came up beneath
another blow and caught the hunter around the throat. He lifted
Zark bodily and held him at arm’s length. Zark screamed, his
eyes imploring Virga, before his furs caught fire. Then his hair.
His body caught in a mass of yellow fire, the smoke of burning
flesh mingling with steam from Baal’s body. But Michael had
almost reached them and, with the abrupt unconcern of a child
turning to another plaything, Baal tossed the body to one side.
Grinning, he whirled to face his adversary.

The two clashed with the sound of
crunching bone. Michael drove his elbow into Baal’s chin,
knocking him back across the writhing plain. Baal’s knee came
up into Michael’s stomach as the other man advanced. Then
Baal struck a downward blow on Michael’s head that resounded
across to Virga, still huddled on his knees some yards away.
Michael fell onto his hands and knees, and Baal struck him in the
face before he could regain his feet. Michael shook his head from
side to side, stunned, and as Virga watched in mind-reeling fear
Baal’s claw-fingered hands reached Michael’s
throat.

A red mist had fallen before
Virga’s vision. MOVE! He couldn’t move. YOU OLD MAN!
YOU WEAK PITIFUL OLD MAN, MOVE!

When he did it was with agonizing
slowness. His muscles screamed. He searched about for a weapon.
Something, anything, a jagged clump of ice, anything. Dear God, he
shrieked, help me help me help me! Beyond him Baal’s hands
burned at Michael’s throat. Michael clutched at him weakly,
his eyes lost and defeated.

And then Virga saw the flare gun and
cartridges that had scattered with the overturning of the sledge.
They lay on the other side of Baal and to reach them Virga must
pass him. He had no choice. He leaped up, moving low to keep his
balance, and ran toward the two figures ahead.

Baal’s head wrenched up.

His eyes blazed. He dropped his gaze
around to where the flare gun lay. Virga knew that Baal already
realized what he was going to attempt. Baal released Michael and
spun around, his hands outstretched to destroy Virga as he had
Zark.

At the last second, inches beyond
Baal’s grasping fingers, Virga dropped to his belly, He slid
beneath the grip of the thing that walked as a man, slid with the
ice spinning into his face, slid with his good hand groping for the
flare gun. He reached it and grasped a cartridge, whirling to guard
against an attack from behind.

Already Baal was almost on him, his
teeth bared and his eyes bottomless pools of holocaustic energy.
Steam swirled from his reddened fingertips.

Virga, in desperation, slammed the gun
against the ice to open its breach.

Baal reached, reached.

Virga rammed in the cartridge.

Baal growled, thrusting out his
arms.

Virga whirled, a finger on the trigger,
and saw Baal’s fingertips inches away. A blood-lust cry
vibrated in Baal’s throat.

And Virga fired point-blank into
Baal’s face.

The flare exploded in a mass of red and
yellow incandescence, streaking across Baal’s flesh into his
hair. His clothes caught fire and he towered over Virga, his arms
outspread, a single burst of flame in the form of a man. Baal
grinned.

Fire leaping out of his black-scorched
lips, he bellowed in expectation of what was to come. Still he
reached for Virga’s throat. Virga opened his mouth to cry out
in helplessness, knowing he could never reload in time.

But there was a blur of motion to
Baal’s left and fingers entwined around the man’s
throat. Michael had recovered himself. They struggled in silence,
like animals, and Baal gripped Michael’s neck as they
staggered back and forth over the ravaged field.

Something like electricity, white
rimmed with blue, seemed to spark between the combatants. The two
figures, still engrossed in fierce battle, were outlined by a glow
that built in intensity, pulsating, pulsating, pulsating like the
beat of a huge heart.

And then there was an explosion that
seemed like the end of the world.

It lifted Virga up and threw him more
than thirty yards over the ice. He grasped onto fragments, the
terrible blast-thunder ripping at his eardrums, the sea crashing
against him again and again. He gripped the ice until his fingers
were bloody. Around him there was nothing but the white of plunging
ice, the black of rising water. The sound of the blast would not
die away; it echoed off to the distant coast and came back full
force. He cried out against it. Great chunks of ice, raining back
from where they’d been thrown into the sky, clattered down
around him, some striking him and glancing off. He strained to hold
on to his senses.

Slowly the sound of the blast died
away. The sea fell back within its limits. Across the broken field
huge fragments groaned as they crushed others. Then there was only
the noise of the high wind and the sea as its tides churned about
far below the surface.

After a while Virga, wet and freezing,
struggled up. The ice was broken all the way to the horizon. Jagged
holes gaped. A greater hole, the center of the blast, was devoid of
ice. He felt with dead fingers the burns on his face and realized,
with a sudden strange humor, that he’d lost his eyebrows and
stubble of beard. There were no corpses. It had seemed to Virga
that, an instant before the explosion, he’d seen Baal and
Michael simply swept away. Zark’s body had probably been
blown into the bay. No matter, Virga thought as he shivered with
the piercing cold, I shall soon be dead as well.

He fell back and waited, his eyes
closed. What did they say about freezing to death? That it is only
like falling asleep, that one is indeed very warm when just about
to die? Perhaps. He felt the folds closing about him. There were so
many questions he’d wanted to ask. Now, very soon, he hoped
to have those questions answered. The wind swept over him,
whistling past his head, and he welcomed the first signs of
death.

Baal’s disciples.

Virga waited, poised with his last
strength before slipping away. Someone had spoken, whispering close
to his ear, but he didn’t recognize the voice.

Baal’s disciples.

There are more, Virga said. Baal is
gone but they remain to walk as men, to spread contamination and
brutality, blasphemy and war. They hope to deny man his mind, rob
him of his thinking processes and in so doing rob him of his final
chance. Baal is gone but they remain.

Something burned in his brain. He
envisioned murders, gang warfare in the streets, jet fighters
shrieking over flat plains where armies battled face to face, the
high columns of mushroom explosions, the blasted bodies, the roar
of wind through cracked city towers. Very slowly, very slowly, he
climbed from the warm depths back toward the cold rim of life. He
was aware, finally, of a noise over the screech of the wind.
Something hovering above him. Thock thock thock thock thock
thock.

He opened his eyes and they filled with
tears.

It was a helicopter. A Danish flag was
painted on the gray metal underbelly. Two men in heavy furs bent
from the open cargo doors, staring down at him, and one of them
lifted a bullhorn to his lips and spoke in Danish.

When Virga had neither stirred nor
replied the man spoke again, in English. “This is the Ice
Patrol. Lift your hand as a signal. We will lower a
lifeline,”

Virga blinked his eyes and lay still.
His body felt old and useless, something that had been drained and
discarded. He was afraid he would not be able to move and,
realizing his fear, he realized also that he desperately wanted to
signal. He wanted to cling to life.

Someone, whispering very close to his
ear, said, Baal’s disciples.

And Virga raised his arm.

Afterword

Robert McCammon Tells How He

Wrote Baal

Baal is my Angry Young Man novel. It was also my first
published novel, and the first book I ever tried to write. I think
that in Baal you can feel the friction of shoulders being
squeezed by iron walls: my shoulders, pressing against the walls of
a dead-end job.

You see, I never thought I could be a
writer. Write? For money? Like… really say
something? That was someone else’s dream. I went to the
University of Alabama and majored in journalism, because
that’s what I figured writers did. As a kid, I played around
with a typewriter, and I did ghost stories, mysteries, westerns,
science fiction… but those were creations to entertain
myself. I was a shy kid, gawky, not very good at sports. You know
the type—they never go out of style. Somewhere there’s
a heaven where revenge is exacted, and all those jocks who burned
bright and handsome now have beer guts and have to wait to
be… the… very… last… one…
chosen.

So maybe I’m still a little angry
after all.

Baal is about power, written at
a time when I had none. I was twenty-five years old when I wrote
Baal, and working at a department store in my hometown of
Birmingham, Alabama. My job was ferrying advertising proofs between
the local newspaper and the various department heads:
“traffic control,” they called it. When I went home at
night, I sat down at my old Royal typewriter—long since
deceased—and worked on the novel that would become
Baal.

People often ask me where I get my
ideas for characters. I always say that each character, whether
male or female, is put together from observation, memory, and is
part of the author too. I really believe there’s part of me
in all my characters—and not only the good ones. The
character of Baal—with his unleashed wild power and his
ability to do just about anything he pleases—is certainly
part of what I was feeling at that time in my life. I was an
electric plug, and I couldn’t seem to find the right socket,
until I began writing.

One character in Baal
particularly stands out to me, and that’s the elderly and
very innocent Virga. I used to have lunch at the same place every
day, a restaurant called the Molton Grill that’s no longer in
Birmingham, and an elderly Catholic priest would come in almost
every day as well. He had his favorite table, he always seemed to
order the same thing, and he ate alone. I watched the man, and I
created the character of Virga in his image. I never knew the
priest’s name, but I have his face in my mind. And maybe some
of his spirit in Virga.

You always hear this said to young
writers: “Write what you know.” I wanted to write about
things I didn’t know, so I consciously set Baal in
locations as far from the South as possible: Boston, the Middle
East, and Greenland. I wanted a global scale and a story that would
take the reader to the very edge of Armageddon, and I hope I
succeeded.

As I said, Baal was my first
novel. My first step into the unknown. Whatever I am today, and
wherever I’m going, Baal started me on the path. Ten
years since Baal was first published, I’m still on the
journey.

Robert McCammon

June 1988

DON’T MISS HIS NEXT

TERRIFYING NOVEL

One man’s lifelong curse

becomes the Allies’ only hope

to destroy the Nazi evil.

To be Published by Pocket Books

March 1, 1989

Available wherever paperbacks are sold.

eBook Info

Creator:

Robert R. McCammon

Title:

Baal

Date:

10/1/1988

Language:

en-us

Subject:

Horror

Identifier:

ISBN: 0-671-66484-0

Publisher:

Pocket Books

Source:

Original Scan, v1.0