Imago. Imago. Imago.
—Wallace Stevens
Like the Shroud of Turin, the disfigured shape in the photograph was a face waiting to be born. An inhuman face, in this instance. The Devil, abstracted, or a black-mouthed sunflower arrested mid-bloom. Definitely an object to be regarded with morbid appreciation, and then followed by a double scotch to quash the heebie-jeebies.
I went to Jacob Wilson's Christmas party to see his uncle's last acquisition, one that old man Theodore hadn't stuck around to enjoy. A natural Rorschach, Jacob said of the photo. It had been hanging in the Seattle Art Museum for months, pending release at the end of its show. Jacob was feeling enigmatic when he called about the invitation three days before Christmas and would say no more. No need—the hook was set.
I hadn't talked to Jacob since the funeral. I almost skipped his party despite that guilt, aware of the kind of people who would attend. Whip-thin socialites with quick, sharp tongues, iron-haired lawyers from colonial families and sardonic literati dredged from resident theater groups. Sleek, wealthy and voracious; they inhabited spheres far removed from mine. As per custom, I would occupy the post of the educated savage in Jacob's court. An orangutan dressed for a calendar shoot, propped in the corner to brood artfully. Perhaps I could entertain them with my rough charm, my lowbrow anecdotes. It wasn't appealing. Nonetheless, I went because I always went, and because Carol gave me her sweetest frown when I hesitated; the one that hinted of typhoons and earthquakes.
The ride from my loft in downtown Olympia served to prepare my game face. I took the 101 north, turned onto Delphi Road and followed it through the deep, dark Capitol Forest and up into the Black Hills. Carol chattered on her cell, ignoring me, so I drove too fast. I always drove too fast these days.
The party was at full steam as I rolled along the mansion's circle drive and angled my rusty, four-door Chrysler into a slot among the acres of Porsches, Jaguars and Mercedes. Teddy Wilson might've only been a couple of months in his grave, but Jacob was no neophyte host of galas. He attracted the cream, all right.
Bing Crosby and a big band were hitting their stride when the front doors gave way. A teenage hood in a spiffy white suit grabbed our coats. I automatically kept one hand over my wallet. The bluebloods congregated in a parlor dominated by a fiery synthetic tree. A slew of the doorman's white-tuxedoed brethren circulated with trays of champagne and hors d'oeuvres. The atmosphere was that of a cast party on the set of Casablanca. Jarring the illusion was Wayne Newton's body double slumped on the bench of the baby grand, his pinky ring winking against the keys. I didn't think he was playing; a haphazard pyramid of shot glasses teetered near his leg and he looked more or less dead.
Guests milled, mixing gleeful ennui with bad martinis. Many were sufficiently drunk to sand down the veneer of civility and start getting nasty. Jacob presided, half seas over, as the Cockney used to say, lolling before his subjects and sycophants in Byzantine splendor. I thought, Good god, he's wearing a cape! His attire was a silken clash of maroon and mustard, complete with ruffles, a V-neck shirt ripped from the back of a Portuguese corsair, billowing pantaloons and wooden sandals that hooked at the toe. A white and gold cape spread beneath his bulk, and he fanned himself with a tri-corner hat. Fortunately, he wasn't wearing the hat.
Carol glided off to mingle, stranding me without a backward glance. I tried not to take it personally. If not for a misfortune of birth, this could have been her tribe.
Meanwhile, I spotted the poster-sized photograph upon its easel, fixed in the center of the parlor. Heavy as a black hole, the photograph dragged me forward on wires. Shot on black and white, it detailed a slab of rock, which I assumed was subterranean. Lacking a broader frame of reference, it was impossible to know. The finer aspects of geology escaped me, but I was fascinated by the surreal quality of this glazed wall, its calcified ridges, webbed spirals and bubbles. The inkblot at its heart was humanoid, head twisted to regard the viewer. The ambient light had created a blur not unlike a halo, or horns, depending on the angle. This apish thing possessed a broad mouth slackened as an unequal ellipse. A horrible silhouette; lumpy, misshapen and dead for epochs. Hopefully dead. Other pockets of half-realized darkness orbited the formation; fragments splintered from the core. More cavemen, devils, or dragons.
Hosts occurred to me.
A chunky kid in a turtleneck said it actually resembled a monstrous jellyfish snared in flowstone, but was undoubtedly simple discoloration. Certainly not any figure—human or otherwise. He asked Jacob his opinion. Jacob squinted and declared he saw only the warp and woof of amber shaved bare and burned by a pop flash. Supposedly another guest had witnessed an image of Jesus on Golgotha. This might have been a joke; Jacob had demolished the contents of his late uncle's liquor cabinet and was acting surly.
I seldom drank at Jacob's cocktail socials, preferring to undertake such solemn duty in the privacy of my home. But I made a Christmas exception, and I paid. Tumblers began clicking in my head. A queasy jolt nearly loosened my grip on my drink, bringing sharper focus to the photograph and its spectral face in stone. The crowd shrank, shivered as dying leaves, became pictographs carved into a smoky cave wall.
A dung fire sputtered against the encroaching well of night, and farther along the cave wall, scored with its Paleolithic characters, a cleft sank into the humid earth. Flies buzzed, roaches scuttled. A reed pipe wheedled an almost familiar tune—
My gorge tasted alkaline; my knees buckled.
This moment of dislocation expanded and burst, revealing the parlor still full of low lamplight and cigarette smog, its mob of sullen revelers intact. Jacob sprawled on his leather sofa, regarding me. His expression instantly subsided into a mask of flabby diffidence. It happened so smoothly and I was so shaken I let it go. Carol didn't notice; she was curled up by the fireplace laughing too loudly with a guy in a Norwegian sweater. The roses in their cheeks were brick-red and the sweater guy kept slopping liquor on the rug when he gestured.
Jacob waved. "You look shitty, Marvin. Come on, I've got medicine in the study."
"And you look like the Sun King."
He laughed. "Seriously, there's some grass left. Or some Vicodin, if you prefer."
No way I was going to risk Jacob's weed if it had in any way influenced his fashion sense. On the other hand, Vicodin sounded too good to be true. "Thanks. My bones are giving me hell." The dull ache in my spine had sharpened to a railroad spike as it always did during the rainy season. After we had retreated to the library and poured fresh drinks, I leaned against a bookcase to support my back. "What's it called?"
He sloshed whiskey over yellow teeth. "Parallax Alpha. Part one of a trio entitled the Imago Sequence—if I could lay my hands on Parallax Beta and Imago I'd throw a real party." His voice reverberated in the rich, slurred tones of a professional speaker who'd shrugged off the worst body blows a bottle of malt scotch could offer.
"There are two others!"
"You like."
"Nope, I'm repulsed." I had gathered my nerves into one jangling bundle; sufficient to emote a semblance of calm.
"Yet fascinated." His left eyelid drooped in a wink. "Me too. I'd kill to see the rest. Each is a sister of this piece—subtle perspective variances, different fields of depth, but quite approximate."
"Who's got them—anybody I know?"
"Parallax Beta is on loan to a San Francisco gallery by the munificence of a collector named Anselm Thornton. A trust fund brat turned recluse. It's presumed he has Imago. Nobody is sure about that one, though. We'll get back to it in a minute."
"Jake—what do you see in that photo?"
"I'm not sure. A tech acquaintance of mine at UW analyzed it. 'Inconclusive,' she said. Something's there."
"Spill the tale."
"Heard of Maurice Ammon?"
I shook my head.
"He's obscure. The fellow was a photographer attached to the Royal University of London back in the '40s and '50s. He served as chief shutterbug for pissant expeditions in the West Indies and Africa. Competent work, though not Sotheby material. The old boy was a craftsman. He didn't pretend to be an artist."
"Except for the Imago series."
"Bingo. Parallax Alpha, for example, transcends journeyman photography, which is why Uncle Teddy was so, dare I say, obsessed." Jacob chortled, pressed the glass to his cheek. His giant, red-rimmed eye leered at me. "Cecil Eaton was the first to recognize what Ammon had accomplished. Eaton was a Texas oil baron and devoted chum of Ammon's. Like a few others, he suspected the photos were of a hominid. He purchased the series in '55. Apparently, misfortune befell him and his estate was auctioned. Since then the series has changed hands several times and gotten scattered from Hades to breakfast. Teddy located this piece last year at an exhibit in Seattle. The owner got committed to Grable and the family was eager to sell. Teddy caught it on the hop."
"Define obsession for me." I must've sounded hurt, being kept in the dark about one of Teddy's eccentric passions, of which he'd possessed legion, because Jacob looked slightly abashed.
"Sorry, Marvo. It wasn't a big deal—I never thought it was important, anyway. But . . .Teddy was on the hunt since 1987. He blew maybe a quarter mil traveling around following rumors and whatnot. The pieces moved way too often. He said it was like trying to grab water."
"Anybody ever try to buy the whole enchilada?"
"The series has been fragmented since Ammon originally sold two to Eaton and kept the last for himself—incidentally, no one knows much about the final photograph, Imago. Ammon never showed it around and it didn't turn up in his effects."
"Where'd they come from?"
"There's the weird part. Ammon kept the photos' origin a secret. He refused to say where he took them, or what they represented."
"Okay. Maybe he was pumping up interest by working the element of mystery." I'd watched enough artists in action to harbor my share of cynicism.
Jacob let it go. "Our man Maurice was an odd duck. Consorted with shady folks, had peculiar habits. There's no telling where his mind was."
"Peculiar habits? Do tell."
"I don't know the details. He was smitten with primitive culture, especially obscure primitive religions—and most especially the holy pharmaceuticals that accompany certain rites." He feigned taking a deep drag from a nonexistent pipe.
"Sounds like a funky dude. He lived happily ever after?"
"Alas, he died in a plane crash in '57. Well, his plane disappeared over Nairobi. Same difference. Bigwigs from the university examined his journals, but the journals didn't shed any light." Jacob knocked back his drink and lowered his voice for dramatic effect. "Indeed, some of those scholars hinted that the journals were extremely cryptic. Gave them the willies, as the campfire tales go. I gather Ammon was doubtful of humanity's long term survival; didn't believe we were equipped to adapt with technological and sociological changes looming on the horizon. He admired reptiles and insects—had a real fixation on them.
"The series went into private-collector limbo before it was subjected to much scrutiny. Experts debunked the hominid notion. Ammon's contemporaries suggested he was a misanthropic kook, that he created the illusion to perpetrate an intricate hoax."
Something in the way Jacob said this last part caused my ears to prick up. "The experts only satisfy four out of five customers," I said.
He studied his drink, smiled his dark smile. "Doubtless. However, several reputable anthropologists gave credence to its possible authenticity. They maintained official silence for fear of being ostracized by their peers, of being labeled crackpots. But if someone proved them correct . . ."
"The photos' value would soar. Their owner would be a celebrity, too, I suppose." Finally, Jacob's motives crystallized.
"Good god, yes! Imagine the scavenger hunt. Every swinging dick with a passport and a shovel would descend upon all the remote sites Ammon ever set foot. And let me say, he got around."
I sat back, calculating the angles through a thickening alcoholic haze. "Are the anthropologists alive; the guys who bought this theory?"
"I can beat that. Ammon kept an assistant, an American grad student. After Ammon died, the student faded into the woodwork. Guess who it turns out to be?—The hermit art collector in California. Anselm Thornton ditched the graduate program, jumped the counterculture wave in Cali—drove his upper-crust, Dixie-loving family nuts, too. If anybody knows the truth about the series I'm betting it's him."
"Thornton's a southern gentleman."
"He's of southern stock, anyhow. Texas Panhandle. His daddy was a cattle rancher."
"Longhorns?"
"Charbray."
"Ooh, classy." I crunched ice to distract myself from mounting tension in my back. "Think papa Thornton was thick with that Eaton guy? An oil baron and a cattle baron—real live American royalty. The wildcatter, a pal to the mysterious British photographer; the Duke, with a son as the photographer's protégé. Next we'll discover they're all Masons conspiring to hide the missing link. They aren't Masons, are they?"
"Money loves money. Maybe it's relevant, maybe not. The relevant thing is Thornton Jr. may have information I desire."
I didn't need to ask where he had gathered this data. Chuck Shepherd was the Wilson clan's pet investigator. He worked from an office in Seattle. Sober as a mortician, meticulous and smooth on the phone. I said, "Hermits aren't chatty folk."
"Enter Marvin Cortez, my favorite ambassador." Jacob leaned close enough to club me with his whiskey breath and squeezed my shoulder. "Two things. I want the location of this hominid, if there is a hominid. There probably isn't, but you know what I mean. Then, figure out if Thornton is connected to . . .the business with my uncle."
I raised my brows. "Does Shep think so?"
"I don't know what Shep thinks. I do know Teddy contacted Thornton. They briefly corresponded. A few weeks later, Teddy's gone."
"Damn, Jake, that's a stretch—never mind. How'd they make contact?"
Jacob shrugged. "Teddy mentioned it in passing. I wasn't taking notes."
"Ever call Thornton yourself, do any follow up?"
"We searched Teddy's papers, pulled his phone records. No number for Thornton, no physical address, except for this card—the Weston Gallery, which is the one that has Parallax Beta. The director blew me off—some chump named Renfro. Sounded like a nut job, actually. I wrote Thornton a letter around Thanksgiving, sent it care of the gallery. He hasn't replied. I wanted the police to shake a few answers out of the gallery, but they gave me the runaround. Case closed, let's get some doughnuts, boys!"
"Turn Shep loose. A pro like him will do this a lot faster."
"Faster? I don't give a damn about faster. I want answers. The kind of answers you get by asking questions with a lead pipe. That isn't up Shep's alley."
I envisioned the investigator's soft, pink hands. Banker's hands. My own were broad and heavy, and hard as marble. Butcher's hands.
Jacob said, "I'll cover expenses. And that issue with King . . ."
"It'll dry up and blow away?" Rudolph King was a contractor on the West Side; he moonlighted as a loan shark, ran a pool hall and several neat little rackets from the local hippie college. I occasionally collected for him. A job went sour; he reneged on our arrangement, so I shut his fingers in a filing cabinet—a bit rough, but there were proprietary interests at stake. Jacob crossed certain palms with silver, saved me from making a return appearance at Walla Walla. Previously, I did nine months there on a vehicular assault charge for running over a wise-mouth pimp named Leon Berens. Berens had been muscling in on the wrong territory—a deputy sheriff's, in fact, which was the main reason I only did a short hitch. The kicker was, after he recovered, Berens landed the head bartender gig at the Happy Tiger, a prestigious lounge in the basement of the Sheraton. He was ecstatic because the Happy Tiger was in a prime spot three blocks from the Capitol Dome. Hustling a string of five-hundred-dollars-a-night call girls for the stuffed shirts was definitely a vertical career move. He fixed me up with dinner and drinks whenever I wandered in.
"Poof."
Silence stretched between us. Jacob pretended to stare at his glass and I pretended to consider his proposal. We knew there was no escape clause in our contract. I owed him and the marker was on the table. I said, "I'll make some calls, see if I can track him down. You still want me to visit him . . .well, we'll talk again. All right?"
"Thanks, Marvin."
"Also, I want to look at Teddy's papers myself. I'll swing by in a day or two."
"No problem."
We ambled back to the party. A five-piece band from the Capitol Theatre was gearing up for a set. I went to locate more scotch. When I returned, Jacob was surrounded by a school of liberal arts piranhas, the lot of them swimming in a pool of smoke from clove cigarettes.
I melted into the scenery and spent three hours nursing a bottle of Dewar's, avoiding eye contact with anyone who looked ready for conversation. I tried not to sneak too many glances at the photograph. No need to have worried on that score; by then, everyone else had lost complete interest.
Around midnight Carol keeled over beside the artificial tree. The guy in the Norwegian sweater moved on to a blonde in a shiny dress. I packed Carol in the car and drove home, grateful to escape another Jacob Wilson Christmas party without rearranging somebody's face.
Nobody knew if Theodore Wilson was dead, it was simply the safe way to bet. One knife-bright October morning the Coast Guard had received a truncated distress signal from his yacht, Pandora, north of the San Juans. He'd been on a day trip to his lover's island home. Divers combed the area for two weeks before calling it quits. They found no wreckage, no body. The odds of a man surviving more than forty minutes in that frigid water were minimal, however. Teddy never slowed down to raise a family, so Jacob inherited a thirteen-million-dollar estate for Christmas. It should've been a nice present for me as well—I'd been Jake's asshole buddy since our time at State.
College with Jacob had been movie-of-the-week material—the blue-collar superjock meets the royal wastrel. Me on a full wrestling scholarship and Jacob starring as the fat rich boy who had discovered superior financial status did not always garner what he craved most—adulation. Thick as ticks, we shared a dorm, went on road trips to Vegas, spent holidays at the Wilson House. Eventually he convinced his globetrotting uncle to support my Olympic bid. It was a hard sell—the elder Wilson had no use for contemporary athletic competition. Descended from nineteenth century New England gentry, he favored the refined pursuits of amateur archeology, ancient philology and sailing—but young Jacob was glib and the deal was made. Never mind that I was a second-rate talent blown up on steroids and hype, or that two of my collegiate titles were fixed by thick-jowled Irishmen who drank boilermakers for breakfast and insisted wrestling was a pansy sport.
Teddy dropped me more than ten years ago. He lost a bucket of cash and a serious amount of face among his peers when I tanked in '90 before the Olympic Trials. The Ukrainian super heavyweight champion broke my back in two places during an exhibition match. Sounded like an elephant stepping on a stick of wet kindling.
Bye, bye macho, patriotic career. Hello physician-prescribed dope, self-prescribed booze and a lifetime of migraines that would poleax a mule.
Really, it was a goddamned relief.
I got familiar with body casts, neck braces and pity. Lately, the bitter dregs of a savings account kept a roof over my head and steak in my belly. A piecemeal contract to unload trucks for a couple Thurston County museums satisfied a minor art fetish. Mama had majored in sculpture, got me hooked as a lad. Collecting debts for the local "moneylenders" was mainly a hobby—just like dear old pop before somebody capped him at a dogfight. I was a real Renaissance man.
I met Carol while I was politely leaning on her then boyfriend, a BMW salesman with a taste for long-shot ponies and hard luck basketball teams. Carol worked as a data specialist for the department of corrections. She found the whole failed-athlete turned arm-breaker routine erotic. What should've been a weekend fling developed into a bad habit that I hadn't decided the best way to quit.
The day after the party I asked her what she thought of Jacob's photograph. She was stepping out of the shower, dripping hair wrapped in a towel. "What photograph?" She asked.
I stared at her.
She didn't smile, too busy searching for her earrings. Probably as hung-over as I was. "Oh, that piece of crap his uncle bought off that crazy bitch in Seattle. I didn't like it. Piece of crap. Where are my goddamned earrings."
"Did you even look at it?"
"Sure."
"Notice anything unusual?"
"It was unusually crappy. Here we go." She retrieved her earrings from the carpet near her discarded stockings. "Why, he try to sell it to you? For god's sake, don't buy the ugly thing. It's crap."
"Not likely. Jacob wants me to do a little research."
Carol applied her lipstick with expert slashes, eyed me in her vanity while she worked. "Research, huh?"
"Research, baby," I said.
"Don't do anything too stupid." She shrugged on her coat, grabbed an umbrella. It was pouring out there.
"Yeah," I said.
"Yeah, right. And don't buy that crappy photo." She pecked my cheek, left me sneezing in a cloud of perfume and hairspray.
New Year's Eve sneaked up on me. I stopped dragging my feet and made calls to friends of friends in the Bay Area, hoping to get a line on the enigmatic Mr. Thornton. No dice. However, the name triggered interesting matches on the Internet. According to his former associates, a couple of whom were wards of the federal penal system, Thornton had been a flower child; an advocate of free love, free wine and free thinking. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Shep's intelligence was more thorough. After quitting grad school Thornton organized a commune in San Francisco in the '60s, penned psychedelic tracts about the nature of faith and divine cosmology, appeared on local talk radio and did cameos in film documentaries. He'd also gotten himself charged with kidnapping and contributing to the delinquency of minors. Disgruntled parents accused him of operating a cult and brainwashing runaway teens. Nothing stuck. His house burned down in '74 and the commune disbanded, or migrated; reports were fuzzy.
Thornton resurfaced in 1981 to purchase Parallax Beta at an estate sale in Manitoba. Its owner, a furrier named Robespierre, had come to an unfortunate fate—Robespierre got raving drunk at a party, roared off in his brand new Italian sports car and plunged into a ravine. Authorities located the smashed guardrail, but no further trace of the car or its drunken occupant.
Thornton's relatives were either dead or had disowned him. There was a loyal cousin in Cleveland, but the lady suffered from Alzheimer's, thus tracking him through family was a no-go. Shep confirmed getting stonewalled by the Weston Gallery. Ah, a dead end; my work here was done.
Except, it wasn't.
It began as the traditional New Year's routine. I drank and contemplated my navel about a wasted youth. I drank and contemplated the gutted carcass of my prospects. I drank and contemplated what Parallax Alpha was doing to my peace of mind.
Initially, I wrote it off as interest due on multiple fractures and damaged nerves. My lower back went into spasms; pain banged its Viking drum. I chased a bunch of pills with a bunch more eighty-proof and hallucinated. With sleep came ferocious nightmares that left welts under my eyes. Dinosaurs trumpeting, roaches clattering across the hulks of crumbling skyscrapers. Dead stars in a dead sky. Skull-yellow planets caught in amber—a vast, twinkling necklace of dried knuckles. The beast in the photograph opening its mouth to batten on my face. I was getting this nightmare, and ones like it, with increasing frequency.
I wasn't superstitious. Okay, the series had a bizarre history that got stranger the deeper I dug; bad things dogged its owners—early graves, retirement to asylums, disappearances. And yeah, the one picture I had viewed gave me a creepy vibe. But I wasn't buying into any sort of paranormal explanation. I didn't believe in curses. I believed in alcoholism, drug addiction and paranoid delusion. Put them in a shaker and you were bound to lose your marbles now and again.
Then one evening, while sifting Teddy's personal effects—going through the motions to get Jacob off my back—I found a dented ammo box. The box was stuffed with three decades' worth of photographs, although the majority were wartime shots.
Whenever he had a few drinks under his belt, Jacob was pleased to expound upon the grittier side of his favorite uncle. Jolly Saint Teddy had not always been a simple playboy multimillionaire. Oh, no, Teddy served in Vietnam as an intelligence officer; spooks, the boys called them. Predictable as taxes, really—he'd recently graduated from Dartmouth and there was a war on. A police action, if you wanted to get picky, but everybody knew what it was.
The snapshots were mainly of field hijinks with the troops and a few of Saigon R&R exploits. From what I could discern, when they were in the rear areas, all the intelligence guys dressed like Hollywood celebrities auditioning for a game show—tinted shooting glasses, Hawaiian shirts, frosty Coke bottles with teeny umbrellas at hand, a girl on each arm; the whole bit. Amusing, in a morbid sense. One of the field shots caught my attention and held it. It was not amusing in any sense.
The faded caption read, Mekong D. 1967. A platoon of marines decked out in full combat gear, mouths grinning in olive-black faces. Behind them were two men dressed in civilian clothes. I had no problem recognizing Anselm Thornton from Shep's portfolio, which included newspaper clippings, class albums from Texas A&M, and a jittery video-taped chronicle of the beatniks. Thornton's image was fuzzy—a pith helmet obscured his eyes, and a bulky, complicated camera was slung over one shoulder; sweat stains made half-moons under his armpits. Had he been with the press corps? No, the records didn't lie. During Nam Thornton had been dropping LSD and poaching chicks outside of Candlestick Park.
Teddy, the old, exquisitely corpulent Teddy I knew, stood near him, incomprehensibly juxtaposed with these child-warriors. He wore a double-breasted suit a South American tailor had made recently. The suit restrained a once powerful frame sliding to blubber. Below a prominent brow, his face shone a mottled ivory; his eyes were sockets. His mouth gaped happily, smoldering with dust and cobwebs. A structure loomed beyond the marines. Screened by foliage, a battered marquee took shape. The marquee spelled al d in. The building was canted at an alarming angle; greasy smoke mushroomed from the roof.
That gave me pause. The Aladdin used to be Teddy's residence of choice when he visited Vegas. It was in a back room of that sacred hotel he once shook hands with his hero, the inestimable Dean Martin—who, in his opinion, was the better half of the Lewis & Martin act—during a high-stakes poker game reserved for the crème de la crème of big-shot gamblers. Teddy didn't qualify as a whale, as they referred to those suckers who routinely lost half a mil in one night, but he dropped his share of iron at the tables, and he always did have a knack for being at the heart of the action. I squinted at that photo until my eyes crossed—it was the Aladdin, no question. Yet an Aladdin even Teddy might not have recognized. Gray smudges in the windows were faces gazing down upon the razed jungle. Many of them were laughing or screaming.
I couldn't figure out what the hell I was seeing. I pawed through the box by the light of a Tiffany lamp while a strong winter rain bashed at the windows. More of the same; nearly 300 pictures, all out of kilter, many in ways I never did quite understand. The latest seemed to contain medical imagery—some kind of surgery in progress. Overexposed, they formed a ruddy patina that was maddeningly obscure: Teddy's face streaked with blood as someone stitched his scalp in near darkness; coils of achromatic motion and pale hands with thick, dirty nails; a close-up of a wound, or a flower's corona; white, pink and black. It was impossible to identify the action.
I stopped looking after that, hedged around the issue with Jacob, asked him in an oblique way if his uncle might've known Thornton, during the halcyon days. Jacob was skeptical; he was certain such a fact would've come to light during Teddy's quest for the Imago Sequence. I didn't tell him about the ammo box; at that point it seemed wiser to keep my mouth shut. Either I was losing my sanity, or something else was happening. Regardless, the pattern around Jacob's inherited art piece was woven much tighter than I had suspected. The whole mess stank and I could only speculate how ripe it would become.
I drove to Bellevue for an interview with Mrs. Florence Monson Chin, previous owner of Parallax Alpha. Her family had placed her in Grable, the best that money, a heap of money, could buy. Intimates referred to it as the Grable Hotel or Club Grable. These days, her presence there was an open secret thanks to the insatiable press. No matter; the hospital had a closed-doors policy and an iron fist in dealing with staff members who might choose to blab. Any news was old news.
Mrs. Chin was heiress to the estate of a naturalized Chinese businessman who'd made his fortune breeding rhesus monkeys for medical research. His associates called him the Monkey King. After her elderly husband passed on, Mrs. Chin resumed her debutante ways, club-hopping from Seattle to the French Riviera, screwing bullfighters, boxers and a couple foreign dignitaries, snorting coke and buying abstract art—the more abstract, the more exquisitely provincial, the better. The folks at Art News didn't take her seriously as a collector, but it seemed a black AmEx card and a mean streak opened plenty of doors. She partied on the wild and wooly side of high society right up until she flipped her wig and got clapped in the funny farm.
I knew this because it was in all the tabloids. What I didn't know was if she would talk to me. Jacob made nice with her father, got me a direct line to her at the institution. She preferred to meet in person, but gave no indication she was particularly interested in discussing Parallax Alpha. She didn't sound too whacko on the phone, thank god.
Grable loomed at the terminus of a long gravel lane. Massive and Victorian, the institution had been freshly updated in tones of green and brown. The grounds were hemmed by a fieldstone wall and a spiral maze of orchards, parks and vacant farmland. I'd picked a poor time of year to visit; everything was dead and moldering.
The staff oozed courtesy; it catered to a universally wealthy and powerful clientele. I might've looked like a schlep, nonetheless, far safer to kiss each and every ass that walked through the door. An androgynous receptionist processed my information, loaned me a visitor's tag and an escort named Hugo. Hugo deposited me in a cozy antechamber decorated with matching wicker chairs, an antique vase, prints of Mount Rainier and Puget Sound, and a worn Persian rug. The prints were remarkably cheap and crappy, in my humble opinion. Although, I was far from an art critic. I favored statues over paintings any day. I twiddled my thumbs and pondered how the miracle of electroshock therapy had been replaced by cable television and self-help manuals. The wicker chair put a crick in my neck, so I paced.
Mrs. Chin sauntered in, dressed in a superfluous baby-blue sports bra with matching headband and chromatic spandex pants. Her face gleamed, stiff as a native death mask; her rangy frame reminded me of an adolescent mummy without the wrapper. I read in US that she turned forty-five in the spring; her orange skin was speckled with plum-dark liver spots that formed clusters and constellations. She tested the air with predatory tongue-flicks. "Mr. Cortez, you are the most magnificently ugly man I have seen since papa had our gardener deported to Argentina. Let me tell you what a shame that was."
"Hey, the light isn't doing you any favors either, lady," I said.
She went into her suite, left the door ajar. "Tea?" She rummaged through kitchen drawers. A faucet gurgled and then a microwave hummed.
"No thanks." I glanced around. It was similar to the antechamber, except more furniture and artwork—she liked O'Keefe and Bosch. There were numerous oil paintings I didn't recognize; anonymous nature photographs, a Mayan calendar, and a smattering of southwestern pottery. She had a nice view of the grounds. Joggers trundled cobble paths; a peacock fan of pastel umbrellas cluttered the commons. The place definitely appeared more an English country club than a hospital. "Great digs, Mrs. Chin. I'm surprised they let you committed types handle sharp objects." I stood near a mahogany rolltop and played with a curved ceremonial knife that doubled as a paperweight.
"I'm rich. I do whatever I want." She returned with cups and a Tupperware dish of steaming water. "This isn't a prison, you know. Sit."
I sat across from her at a small table with a centerpiece of wilted geraniums and a fruit bowl containing a single overripe pear. A fat bluebottle fly crept about the weeping flesh of the pear.
Mrs. Chin crumbled green tea into china cups, added hot water, then honey from a stick with an expert motion, and leaned back without touching hers. "Hemorrhoids, Mr. Cortez?"
"Excuse me?"
"You look uncomfortable."
"Uh, back trouble. Aches and pains galore from a misspent youth."
"Try shark cartilage. It's all the rage. I have a taste every day."
"Nummy. I'll pass. New Age health regimens don't grab me."
"Sharks grow new teeth." Mrs. Chin said. "Replacements. Teeth are a problem for humans—dentistry helps, but if an otherwise healthy man has them all removed, say because of thin enamel, he loses a decade, perhaps more. The jaw shortens, the mouth cavity shrinks, the brain is fooled. A general shutdown begins to occur. How much happier our lives would be, with the shark's simple restorative capability." This spooled from her tongue like an infomercial clip.
"Wow." I gave her an indulgent smile, took a cautious sip of tea. "You didn't slip any in here, did you?"
"No, my stash is far too expensive to waste on the likes of you, Mr. Cortez. Delightful name—are you a ruthless, modern day conqueror? Did you come to ravish my secrets from me?"
"I'm a self-serving sonofabitch if that counts for anything. I don't even speak Spanish. English will get you by in most places, and that's good enough for me. What secrets?"
"I'm a sex addict."
"Now that's not exactly a secret, is it?" It wasn't. Her exploits were legendary among the worldwide underground, as I had learned. She was fortunate to be alive. "How do they treat that, anyway?"
"Pills, buckets of pills. Diversion therapy. They replace negative things with positive things. They watch me—there are cameras everywhere in this building. Does the treatment work?" Here she winked theatrically. "I am permitted to exercise whenever I please. I love to exercise—endorphins keep me going."
"Sad stuff. Tell me about Parallax Alpha." I produced a notebook, uncapped a pen.
"Are you so confident that I will?" She said, amused.
"You're a lonely woman, I've a sympathetic ear. Consider it free counseling."
"Pretty. Very pretty. Papa had to sell a few of my things, balance the books. Did you acquire the photograph?"
"A friend of mine. He wants me to find out more about it."
"You should tell your friend to go to hell."
"Really."
"Really." She picked up the pear, brushed the fly off, took a large bite. Juice glistened in her teeth, dripped from her chin. She dabbed it with a napkin. Very ladylike. "You don't have money, Mr. Cortez."
"I'm a pauper, it is true."
"Your friend has many uses for a man like you, I'm sure. Well, the history of the Imago Sequence is chock full of awful things befalling rich people. Does that interest you?"
"I'm not overly fond of the upper class. This is a favor."
"A big favor." Mrs. Chin took another huge bite, to accent the point. The lump traveled slowly down her throat—a pig disappearing into an anaconda. "I purchased Parallax Alpha on a lark at a seedy auction house in Mexico City. That was years ago; my husband was on his last legs—emphysema. The cigarette companies are making a killing in China. I was bored; a worldly stranger invited me to tour the galleries, take in a party. I didn't speak Spanish either, but my date knew the brokers, landed me a fair deal. The joke was on me, of course. My escort was a man named Anselm Thornton. Later, I learned of his connection to the series. You are aware that he owns the other two in the collection?"
"I am."
"They're bait. That's why he loans them to galleries, encourages people with lots of friends to buy them and put them on display."
"Bait?"
"Yes, bait. The photographs radiate a certain allure; they draw people like flies. He's always hunting for the sweetmeats." She chuckled ruefully. "I was sweet, but not quite sweet enough to end up in the fold. Alpha was mine, though. Not much later, I viewed Beta. By then the reaction, whatever it was, had started inside me, was consuming me, altering me in ways I could scarcely dream. I craved more. God, how I begged to see Imago! Anselm laughed—laughed, Mr. Cortez. He laughed and said that it was too early in the game for me to reintegrate. He also told me there's no Imago. No Imago, no El Dorado, no Santa Claus." Her eyes were hard and yellow. "The bastard was lying, though. Imago exists, perhaps not as a photograph. But it exists."
"Reintegrate with what, Mrs. Chin?"
"He wouldn't elaborate. He said, 'We are born, we absorb, we are absorbed. Therein lies the function of all sentient beings.' It's a mantra of his. Anselm held that thought doesn't originate in the mind. Our brains are rather like meaty receivers. Isn't that a wild concept? Humans as nothing more than complicated sensors, or mayhap walking sponges. Such is the path to ultimate, libertine anarchy. And one might as well live it up, because there is no escape from the cycle, no circumvention of the ultimate, messy conclusion; in fact, it's already happened a trillion times over. The glacier is coming and no power will hold it in abeyance."
I didn't bother writing any of that down; I was plenty spooked before she came across with that booby-hatch monologue. I said, "It sounds like extremely convenient rationale for psychopathic behavior. He dumped you after your romp?"
"Frankly, I'm a lucky girl. Anselm deemed me more useful at large, spreading his influence. I brought Parallax Alpha stateside—that was the bargain, my part in the grand drama. Life went on."
"You got together in Mexico?"
"Yes. The resort threw a ball, a singles event, and Roy Fulcher made the introductions. Fulcher was a radical, a former chemist—Caltech, I believe. Struck me as a naturalist gone feral. A little bird informed me the CIA had him under surveillance—he seemed primed to blow something up, maybe spike a city reservoir. At the outset I suspected Fulcher was approaching me about funding for some leftist cause. People warned me about him. Not that I needed their advice. I had oodles of card-carrying revolutionaries buzzing in my hair at the time. Soon, I absolutely abhorred the notion of traveling in Latin America. Fuck the guerillas, fuck the republic, I just want a margarita. Fulcher wasn't after cash, though. He was Anselm's closest friend. A disciple."
"Disciple, gotcha." I scribbled it in my trusty notebook. "What's Thornton call his philosophy? Cultist Christianity? Rogue Buddhism? Crystal worship? What's he into?"
She smiled, stretched, and tossed the remains of her fruit in a waste basket shaped like an elephant foot. "Anselm's into pleasure. I think it fair to designate him the reigning king of sybarites. I was moderately wicked when I met him. He finished me off. Go mucking about his business and he'll do for you too."
"Right. He's Satan, then. How did he ruin you, Mrs. Chin? Did he hook you on drugs, sex, or both?"
Her smile withered. "Satan may not exist, but Anselm surely does. Drugs were never the issue. I could always take them or leave them, and it's more profound than sex. I speak of a different thing entirely. There exists a quality of corruption you would not be familiar with—not on the level or to the degree that I have seen, have lived." She stopped, studied me. Her yellow eyes brightened. "Or, I'm mistaken. Did you enjoy it? Did you enjoy looking at Parallax Alpha? That's the first sign. It's a special person who does; the kind Anselm drools over."
"No, Mrs. Chin. I think it sucks."
"It frightened you. Poor baby. And why not? There are things to be frightened of in that picture. Enlightenment isn't necessarily a clean process. Enlightenment can be filthy, degenerate, dangerous. Enlightenment is its own reward, its own punishment. You begin to see so much more. And so much more sees you."
I said, "I take it this was in the late '80s, when you met Thornton? Rumor has it he's a hermit. Not much of a high-society player. Yet you say he was in Mexico, doing the playboy shtick."
"Even trapdoor spiders emerge from their lairs. Anselm travels in circles that will not publicize his movements."
"How would I go about contacting him? Maybe get things from the horse's mouth."
"We're not in touch. But those who wish to find him . . .find him. Be certain you wish to find him, Mr. Cortez."
"Okay. What about Fulcher? Do you know where he is?"
"Oh, ick. Creepy fellow. I pretended he didn't exist, I'm afraid."
"Thanks for your time, Mrs. Chin. And the tea." I started to rise.
"No more questions?"
"I'm fresh out, Mrs. Chin."
"Wait, if you please. There's a final item I'd like to show you." She went away and returned with a slim photo album. She pushed it across the table and watched me with a lizard smile to match her lizard eyes. "Can I trust you, Mr. Cortez?"
I shrugged.
She spoke softly. "The staff censors my mail, examines my belongings. There are periodic inspections. Backsliding will not be tolerated. They don't know about these. These are of my vacation in Mexico; a present from Anselm. Fulcher took them from the rafters of the cathedral. Go on, open it."
I did. There weren't many photos and I had to study them closely because each was a section of a larger whole. The cathedral must've been huge; an ancient vault lit by torches and lanterns. Obviously Fulcher had taken pains to get the sequence right—Mrs. Chin instructed me to remove eight of them from the protective plastic, place them in order on the table. An image took root and unfolded. A strange carpet, stained rose and peach, spread across shadowy counterchange tiles, snaked around immense gothic pillars and statuary. The carpet gleamed and blurred in patches, as if it were a living thing.
"That's me right about there," Mrs. Chin tapped the third photo from the top. "Thrilling, to enact the writhing of the Ouroboros!"
"Jesus Christ," I muttered. At least a thousand people coupled upon the cathedral floor. A great, quaking mass of oiled flesh, immortalized by Fulcher's lens. "Why did you show me this?" I looked away from the pictures and caught her smile, cruel as barbed wire. There was my answer. The institution was powerless to eradicate all of her pleasures.
"Goodbye, Mr. Cortez. Goodbye, now."
Leaving, I noticed another overripe pear in the fruit bowl, as if Mrs. Chin had replaced it by sleight of hand. A fly sat atop, rubbing its legs together, wearing my image in its prism eyes.
I wasn't feeling well.
I awoke at 2 a.m., slick and trembling, from yet another nightmare. My head roared with blood. I rose, trying to avoid disturbing Carol, who slept with her arm shielding her eyes, my dog-eared copy of The Prince clutched in her fingers. I staggered into the kitchen for a handful of aspirin and a glass of cold milk. There was a beer left over from dinner, so I drank that too. It was while standing there, washed in the unearthly radiance of the refrigerator light, that I realized the orgy in Mrs. Chin's photographs had been orchestrated to achieve a specific configuration. The monumental daisy chain made a nearly perfect double helix.
In the middle of January I decided to cruise down to San Francisco and spend a weekend beating the bushes.
I met Jacob for early dinner on the waterfront at an upscale grille called The Marlin. Back in the day, Teddy treated us there when he was being especially avuncular, although he had preferred to hang around the yacht club or fly to Seattle where his cronies played. Jacob handed me the Weston Gallery's business card and a roll of cash for expenses. We didn't discuss figures for Thornton's successful interrogation. The envelope would be fat and the goodwill of a wealthy, bored man would continue to flow freely. Nor did he question my sudden eagerness to locate the hermit art collector. Still, he must have noticed the damage to my appearance that suggested worse than a simple New Year's bender.
Following dinner, I drove out in the country to a farmhouse near Yelm for tequila and cigars with Earl Hutchinson, a buddy of mine since high school. He'd been a small, tough kid from Iowa; a so-called bad seed. He looked the part: slicked hair, switchblade in his sock, a cigarette behind his ear, a way of standing that suggested trouble. Hutch hadn't changed, only drank a little more and got harder around the eyes.
We relaxed on the porch; it was a decent night with icy stars sprinkled among the gaps. Hutch was an entrepreneur; while I was away in college he hooked up in the arms trade—he'd served as an artillery specialist in the Army, forged connections within the underbelly of America's war machine. He amassed an impressive stockpile before the anti-assault weapon laws put the kibosh on legal sales; there were dozens of AK-47s, M16s and Uzis buried in the pasture behind his house. I'd helped him dig.
These days it was guard dogs. He trained shepherds for security, did a comfortable business with local companies. I noticed his kennels were empty except for a brood bitch named Gerta and some pups. Hutch said demand was brisk, what with the rise of terrorism and the sagging economy. Burglaries always spiked during recessions. Eventually the conversation swung around to my California trip. He walked into the house, came out with a .357 and a box of shells. I peeled four hundred bucks from my brand new roll, watched him press the bills into his shirt pocket. Hutch poured more tequila and we finished our cigars, reminiscing about happy times. Lied about shit, mainly.
I went home and packed a suitcase from college, bringing the essentials—winter clothes, pain pills, toiletries. I watered the plants and left a terse message on Carol's answering service. She'd flown to Spokane to visit her mother. She generally found a good reason to bug out for the high country when I got piss-drunk and prowled the apartment like a bear with a toothache.
I told her I'd be gone for a few days, feed the fish. Then I headed south.
The truth is, I volunteered for the California job to see the rest of the Imago Sequence. As if viewing the first had not done ample harm. In addition to solving Teddy's vanishing act, I meant to ask Thornton some questions of my own.
I attempted to drive through the night. Tough sledding—my back knotted from hunching behind the wheel. A dose of Vicodin had no effect. I needed sleep. Unfortunately, the prospect of dreaming scared the hell out of me.
I drove as long as my nerve held. Not fast, but methodically as a nail sinking into heartwood, popping Yellowjackets and blasting the radio. In the end the pain beat me down. I took a short detour on a dirt road and rented a motel room south of Redding. I tried to catch a couple hours of rest. It was a terrible idea.
Parallax Alpha ate its way into my dreams again.
The motel ceiling jiggled, tapioca pudding with stars revolving in its depths. The blackened figure at Parallax Alpha's center seeped forth. I opened my mouth, but my mouth was already a rictus. The ceiling swallowed me, bones and all.
—I squatted in a cavernous vault, chilled despite the rank, humid darkness pressing my flesh. Stench burrowed into my nose and throat. Maggots, green meat, rotten bone. Thick, sloppy noises, as wet rope smacking rock drew closer. A cow gave birth, an eruption. The calf mewled—blind, terrified. Old, old water dripped. An army of roaches began to march; a battalion of worms plowed into a mountain of offal; the frenetic drone of flies in glass; an embryonic bulk uncoiling in its cyst—
I awakened, muscles twitching in metronome to the shuttering numbers of the radio clock. Since Christmas my longest stretch of uninterrupted sleep was three hours and change. I almost relished the notion of a grapeshot tumor gestating in my brain as the source of all that was evil. It didn't wash; too easy. So said my puckered balls, the bunched hackles of my neck. Paleontologists, anthropologists, ordained priests, or who-the-hell-ever could debate the authenticity of Ammon's handiwork until the cows came home. My clenched guts and arrhythmic heart harbored no doubt that he had snapped a photo of someone or something truly unpleasant. Worse, I couldn't shake the feeling that Mrs. Chin was correct: it had looked right back at me. It was looking for me now.
I got on the road; left a red fantail of dust hanging.
Midmorning crawled over the Frisco skyline, gin blossom clouds piling upon the bay. I drove to the address on the card, a homely warehouse across from a Mexican restaurant and a mortgage office that had been victimized by graffiti artists, and parked in the alley. Inside the warehouse were glass walls and blue shadows broken by giant ferns.
I lifted a brochure from a kiosk in the foyer; a slick, multicolored pamphlet with headshots of the director and his chief cronies. I slipped it into my blazer pocket and forged ahead. The lady behind the front desk wore a prison-orange jumpsuit. Her hair was pulled back so tightly it forced her to smile when she shook my hand. I asked for Director Stanley Renfro and was informed that Mr. Renfro was on vacation.
Could I please speak to the acting director? She motioned me beyond shadowbox panels to the rear of the gallery where a crew of Hispanic and Vietnamese day laborers sweated to dismantle an installation of a scale city park complete with fiberglass fruit trees, benches and a working gothic fountain. I picked my way across the mess of tarps, coax and sawdust. Motes hung in the too-bright wash of stage lights. A Teutonic symphony shrilled counterpoint to arc welders.
Acting director Clarke was a lanky man with a spade-shaped face. A serious whitebread bastard with no interest in fielding questions about Thornton or his photograph. Clarke was sated with the power rush of his new executive position; I sensed I wouldn't be able to slip him a few bills to grease the rails and I'd already decided to save breaking his head as a last resort.
I used charm, opening with a throwaway remark about the genius of Maurice Ammon.
Clarke gave my haggard, sloppy self the once-over. "Ammon was a hack." His eyes slightly crossed and he talked like a man punching typewriter keys. "Topless native women suckling their babies; bone-through-the-nose savages leaning on spears. Tourist swill. His specialty."
"Yeah? Don't tell me the Weston Gallery is in the business of showcasing hacks?"
"We feature only the highest-caliber work." Clarke paused to drone pidgin Spanish at one of the laborers. When he looked up at me again his sneer hardened. "I dislike the Imago Sequence. But one cannot deny its . . .resonance. Ammon got lucky. Doesn't overcome a portfolio of mediocrity."
No, he didn't like the series at all. I read that plainly from the brief bulge of his eyes similar to a horse getting a whiff of smoke for the first time. The reaction seemed reasonable. "A three-hit wonder." I tried to sound amiable.
It was wasted. "Are you a cop, Mr. Cortez?"
"What, I look like a cop to you?"
"Most citizens don't have so many busted knuckles. A private eye, then."
"I'm a tourist. Do you think Ammon actually photographed a fossilized cave man?"
"That's absurd. The so-called figures are geological formations. Ask the experts."
"Wish I had nothing else to do with my life. You don't buy it, eh?"
"The hominid theory is titillation." He smirked. "It does sell tickets."
"He got bored with native titties and went for abstract art? Sure looks like a troglodyte to me."
"Well, pardon my saying you don't know squat about photography and I think you're here on bad business. Did the toad send you?"
I chuckled. "You've met Teddy."
"Never had the pleasure. I saw him in September, sniffing around the photo, practically wetting his pants. Figured he was trying to collect the set. I'll tell you exactly what Renfro told him: Parallax Beta is not for sale and its owner is not interested in discussing the matter."
"Renfro said that to Teddy, did he? Seems I'm chasing my tail then." He had said what I hoped to hear. "By the way, where did Mr. Renfro go for his vacation? Somewhere warm, I hope."
Clarke's sneer broadened. "He's on sabbatical." From the pleasure in his tone he did not expect his former patron to return.
"Well, thanks for your time."
"Adios, Mr. Cortez. Since you came for a peek at Parallax Beta, stop by the Natural History display."
"Blessings to you and your children, Herr Director." I went where he pointed, trying to act casual. The prospect of viewing the second photograph filled me with elation and dread. There it was, hanging between the Grand Tetons and the caldera of slumbering Mt. Saint Helens.
Parallax Beta was the same photograph as Alpha, magnified tenfold. The amber background had acquired a coarser quality, its attendant clots and scars were more distinct, yet more distinctly ambiguous. They congealed to form asteroid belts, bell-shaped celestial gases, volcanic moons. The hominid's howling mouth encompassed the majority of the picture. It seemed capable of biting off my head, of blasting my eardrums with its guttural scream.
My vision tunneled and I tore myself away with the convulsive reflex of a man awakened from a dream of falling. Panpipes, clashing cymbals, strobes of meteoric rain. Dogs snarling, a bleating goat. Buzzing flies, worms snuggling in musty soil. All faded as I lurched away, routed from the field.
I made it to the lobby and drank from the water fountain, splashing my face until the floor stopped tilting. The lady in the jumpsuit perched behind her desk, vulture-talons poised near the phone. She extended another wintry smile as I retreated from the building into the hard white glare.
Eleven a.m. and next to zero accomplished, which meant I was basically on schedule. I was an amateur kneecap man, not a PI. My local connections were limited to a bookie, a sports agent who might or might not be under indictment for money laundering, and the owner of a modest chain of gymnasiums. I adjourned to a biker grille called the Hog and downed several weak Bloody Marys with a basket of deep-fried oysters. The lunch crowd consisted of two leathery old timers sipping draft beer, their Harley Davidson knockoffs parked on the curb; a brutish man in a wife beater t-shirt at the bar doing his taxes on a short form; and the bartender who had so much pomade in his hair it gleamed like a steel helmet. The geriatric bikers were sniping over the big NFC championship game coming up between the Niners and the Cowboys.
Between drinks, I borrowed the bartender's ratty phonebook. Half the pages were ripped out, but I found a listing for S. Renfro, which improved my mood for about three seconds. I tried ringing him from the payphone next to the men's room. A recorded message declared that the number was not in service, please try again. Following Hog tradition, I tore out the page and saved it for later.
I called Jacob collect. After he accepted charges, I said, "Were you around Teddy before he disappeared?"
"Eh? We've been over this."
"Be nice, I'm slow."
Several static-laden beats passed. Then, "Um, not so much. Teddy's always been secretive, though."
"Okay, was he more or less secretive those last few weeks?"
He coughed in a phlegmy way that suggested I had prodded him from the slumber of the indolent rich. "I don't know, Marv. I got used to him sneaking around. What's going on?"
"I haven't figured that out yet. Did his habits change? And I mean even an iota."
"No—wait. He dressed oddly. Yeah. Well, more than usual, if you want to split hairs."
"I'm listening."
"Give me a sec . . ." Jacob cursed, knocked something off a shelf, cursed again. A metallic snick was followed by a scratchy drag into the receiver. "He wore winter clothes a lot at the end. Inside, too, the few times I saw him. You know—sock cap, mackinaw and boots. He looked like a Canadian longshoreman. Said he was cold. But, what's that? Teddy dressed for safari half the time. He was eccentric."
"Thin blood. Too many years in the tropics," I said.
"You have anything yet?"
"Nope. I'm just trying to cover all the bases." I wondered if dear, departed Theodore had suffered night sweats, if he had ever lain in bed staring at a maw of darkness that grinned toothless as a sphincter. I wondered if Jacob did.
Jacob said, "You don't think he was mixing with a rough element, right?"
"Probably not. He was going batty, fell into the drink. Stuff like this happens to seniors. They find them wandering around race tracks or shopping malls. Happens every day."
"Keep digging anyway."
"I'll hit you back when I find more. Bye, bye." I broke the connection, rubbed sweat from my cheek. I needed a shave.
The last call was to my bookie friend. I took the Cowboys and the points because I hoped to counter the growing sense of inevitability hanging over my head like Damocles' least favorite pig sticker. Come Sunday night I owed the bookie fifteen hundred bucks.
Stanley Renfro's house drank the late afternoon glow. Far from imposing; simply one of many brick and timber colonials bunkered in the surrounding hills. It was painted in conservative tones and set back from the street, windows blank. A blue sedan was parked in the drive, splattered with enough seagull shit to make me suspect it hadn't moved lately. Half a dozen rolled newspapers decomposed on the shaggy lawn. The grass was shin-high and climbing.
I did not want to walk up the block and enter that house.
My belly churned with indigestion. A scream had recently interrupted my fitful doze. This scream devolved into the dwindling complaints of a bus horn. Minutes later when the sodium lamps caught fire and Renfro's house remained black, I decided he was dead.
This leap of intuition could not be proved by yellow papers or flourishing weeds. Nah, the illustrious director might be taking a nap. No need to turn the lights on. Maybe he's not even inside. Maybe he's in Borneo stealing objets d'art from the natives. He left his car because a crony gave him a lift to the airport. He forgot to cancel the newspaper. Somebody else forgot to cut the grass. Sure. The house reminded me of a corpse that hadn't quite begun to fester. I retrieved a flashlight from the glove compartment. Thick, and made of steel, like cops use. It felt nice in my hand.
I climbed from the Chrysler, leaned against the frame until my neck loosened and I could rotate my head without catching a fireworks show. No one appeared to notice when I hiked through Renfro's yard, although a small dog barked nearby. The alarm system was cake—being predicated on pressure, all I needed to do was smash a kitchen window and climb through without disturbing the frame. This turned out to be unnecessary. The power was down and the alarm's emergency battery had died.
The kitchen smelled foul despite its antiseptic appearance. Street light spread my shadow into monstrous proportions. Water drooled around the base of the refrigerator. Distant traffic vibrated china in its cabinet. Everything reeked of mildew and decaying fruit.
I clicked on the flashlight as I proceeded deeper into the house. The ceilings were low. I determined within a few steps that the man was a bachelor. That relieved me. Beyond the kitchen, a narrow hall of dusky paneling absorbed my light beam. The décor was not extraordinary considering it belonged to the director of an art gallery—obscure oil paintings, antique vases and ceramic sculptures. Undoubtedly the truly expensive bric-a-brac was stashed in a safe or strong room. I didn't care about that; I was hunting for a name, a name certain to be scribbled in Renfro's personal files.
The shipwrecked living room was a blow to my composure. However, even before I entered that demolished area, my wind was up. I felt as a man tiptoeing through a diorama blown to life-size. As if the outer reaches of the house were a façade that had not quite encompassed the yard.
Mr. Renfro had been on a working vacation, by the evidence. Mounds of wet dirt were heaped around a crater. Uprooted boards lay in haphazard stacks. Sawed joists gleamed like exposed ribs. The pit was deep and ugly—a cavity. I turned away and released a sluice of vodka, tomato juice and oyster chunks. Purged, I felt better than I had in days.
I skirted the destruction, mounted the stairs to the second floor. Naked footprints scarred the carpet, merging into a muddy path—the trail a beast might pound with its blundering mass. If Renfro made the prints, I figured him for around 6', 240. Not quite in my league, but hefty enough that I was happy to grip the sturdy flashlight. A metal bucket was discarded on the landing. Inside the upper bathroom, the clawfoot tub had cracked, overflowing dirt and nails. The sink was shattered. Symbols had been scrawled above the toilet with mud, but the flowery paper hung in shreds. I deciphered the letters MAG and MMON. A cockroach clambered up the wall, fell, started again. Its giant, horned silhouette crossed mine. I didn't linger.
I peeked in the master bedroom to be thorough. It too was victim of hurricane savagery. The bed was stripped, sheets wadded on the floor amid drifts of clothes. A set of designer luggage had barely survived; buckles and zippers sprung, meticulously packed articles disgorged like intestines. I got the distinct impression Renfro had planned a trip before whatever happened, happened.
Renfro had converted the spare bedroom to an office. Here were toppled oak file cabinets, contents strewn and stomped. My prize was a semi-collapsed desk, buried in a landslide of paper. Its sides bore gouges and impact marks. Thankfully Renfro hadn't filled this room with dirt. I searched for his Rolodex amid the chaos, keeping an eye on the door. The house was empty, obviously the house was empty. Renfro wasn't likely to be lurking in a closet. He wasn't likely to come shambling into the office, caked with mud and blood and fondling a hatchet. I still kept an eye on the door.
A drawer contained more file hangers. Inside the R-T folder was an index card with A. THORNTON (Imago Colony) written in precise block letters, a Purdon address which was probably a drop box, a list of names that meant nothing to me, and an unmarked cassette tape. Actually the label had been smudged. I stuck the card and the tape in my pocket. On impulse I checked the Ws and found a listing for T.WILSON. Parallax Alpha was penned in the margin. Below that, in fresher ink—Provender?
Mission accomplished, I was eager to saddle up and get the hell out of Tombstone. Then my light illuminated the edge of a wrinkled photograph of Stanford lacrosse players assembled on a field. A dated shot, but I recognized a younger Renfro from the brochure in my pocket. He knelt front and center, sporting a permed Afro and a butterfly collar. His eyes and mouth were holes. They reminded me of how Teddy's mouth looked in his war pictures. They also reminded me of the pit Renfro had excavated in his living room. Behind the team, where campus buildings should logically be, reared the basalt ridge of a mountain. A flinty spine wreathed by primordial steam.
This was Teddy's photo collection redux. And there were more delights. I considered vomiting again.
I stared for a bit, turning the photo this way and that. Concentration was difficult, because my fingers shook. I sorted the papers again, including the pile on the floor, examining the various photographs and postcards that were salted through the general mess. Some framed, some not. Wallet-sized, to the kind grandma hangs above the mantle. This time I actually looked and beheld a pattern that my subconscious had recognized already. Each picture was warped, each was distorted. Each was a fake, a fabrication designed to unnerve the viewer. What other purpose could they serve?
I checked for splice marks, hints of computer grafting, as if my untrained eye could've helped. Nothing to explain the mechanics of the hoax. The terrain was wrong in all of these. Very wrong. The sky was not quite the same sky we walked around under every day. No, the sky in the more peculiar photos appeared somewhat viscous with bubbles and spot discoloration—the sky was a solid. As a matter of fact, it kind of resembled amber. Shapes that might've been blimps hovered at the periphery, pressed against the fabric of the sky.
This was enough spooky bullshit for me. I beat feet.
Downstairs, I hesitated at the pit. I shined my lonely beam into the gloom. It was about twelve feet deep; the sides crumbled and seeped groundwater. A nasty thought had been ticking in my brain. Where is Renfro? In the hole, of course.
Which suggested he was hiding—or lying in wait. I didn't actually want to find him either way. Thornton's information was in my pocket. Assuming it panned out, there were many hours of driving ahead. But the nasty thought was ticking louder, getting closer. Why is Renfro digging a hole under his very nice house? Wow, I wonder if it's related to his screwed up picture collection? And, oh, do you think it has anything to do with a certain photograph on loan to his precious gallery? Do you suppose he spent long, long hours in front of that picture, fixated, neglecting his duties until his people sent him on a little vacation? Don't call us, we'll call you.
There was a lot of debris at the bottom of that hole. A lot of debris and the light was dimming as its batteries gave up the ghost and I couldn't be one hundred percent sure, but I glimpsed an earthen lump down there, right where the darkness thickened. A man-sized lump. At its head was a damp depression in which a small object glinted. When I hit it with the light, it flickered. Blinked, blinked.
I wanted to turn around and bolt for home, get back to my beer and cartoons. I headed for Purdon instead. A Mastodon sinking in a tar pit.
Purdon was a failed mill town several hours northeast of San Francisco—victim of the rise of environmentalism in the latter '90s. A mountainous region bracketed by a national park and a reservation. Rural and impoverished as all hell. Plenty of pot plantations, militia compounds and dead mining camps; all of it crisscrossed with a few thousand miles of logging roads slowly being eaten by forest. An easy place to vanish from the planet.
My mind had been switched off for the last hundred miles.
I switched it off because I was tired of thinking about the events at Renfro's house. Tired of considering the implications. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that I had fallen down the rabbit hole and would awaken at any moment. Unfortunately, I had brought a couple of the suspect photos and they remained steadfastly bizarre. Combined with Teddy's, did this not suggest a supernatural force at work?
Thoughts like that are why I shut my mind off.
Better to stick with problems at hand. Problems such as motoring into the sticks looking for a man I had seen in ancient clippings and a jerky movie frame shot three decades prior. A man who was probably a certifiable lunatic if he had owned the Imago Sequence for so many years. Whether he might know the whereabouts of a petrified hominid, or the truth about the disappearance of a thoroughly modern human, no longer seemed important. The only matter of importance was finding a way to kill the nightmares. And if Thornton couldn't help me? Best not to scrutinize that possibility too closely. I could almost taste the cold, oily barrel of my revolver.
I played Renfro's tape. The recording was damaged—portions were garbled, others were missing entirely, comprised of clicking and deep sea warbles. The intelligible segments featured a male lecturer. "—satiation is the natural inclination. One is likely to spend centuries glutting primitive appetites, wreaking havoc on enemies, and so forth. What then? That depends on the personality. Few would seek the godhead, I think. Such a pursuit would require tremendous imagination, determination . . .resources. Provender would be an issue. It is difficult to conceive the acquisition of so much ripe flesh. No, the majority will be content with leisurely hedonism—"
The Chrysler groaned as it climbed. Night paled and the rain slackened into gray drizzle. Big hills, big trees, everything dripping and foggy. Signs grew sparse and the road fell apart. I had to pay attention lest my car be hurled into a ravine.
"—consumption of accelerated brainmatter being one proven catalyst. Immersion in a protyle sink is significantly more efficacious, albeit infinitely more perilous. Best avoided." Laughter. The recording petered to static.
I reached Purdon in time for church. Instead, I filled my tank at the Union 76 next to the defunct lumber mill, washed and changed clothes in the cramped bathroom. At the liquor store I bought a bottle of cheap whiskey. Here was my indemnity from coming nightmares. Then I ate a huge breakfast at the Hardpan Café. The waitress, who might also have been the proprietor, was a shrewd-eyed Russian. There were a lot of Russian immigrants in the area, I discovered. She didn't care for my looks, but she kept my coffee cup level and her thoughts to herself while I stared out the window and plotted my next move.
Not much to see—narrow streets crowded with warped 1920s salt box houses. for lease signs plastered dark windows. A few people, mostly hung-over men, prowled the sidewalks. Everybody appeared to wear flannel and drive dented pickups. Most of the trucks had full gun racks.
I asked the Russian woman about finding a room and was directed to the Pine Valley Motel, which was less lovely than it sounded—unless you were thinking pine box, and then, yeah, that was more accurate, in an esthetic sense. The motel sprawled in a gravel lot at the edge of town, northernmost wing gutted by a recent fire and draped with rust-stained tarps. Mine was the sole car parked in front.
A stoic senior citizen missing two fingers of his right hand took my money and produced the key. His stained ballcap read: PURDON MILL—AN AMERICAN COMPANY! For fun, I asked if he knew anything about Anselm Thornton or the Imago Colony and received a glassy stare as he honked his nose into a handkerchief.
The walls of No. 32 were balsa-thin and the bed creaked ominously, but I didn't see any cockroaches. I counted myself lucky as I cracked the seal on the whiskey. I made it to within a pinky of the bottom before the curtain dropped.
Ants.
I shared a picnic with a woman who was the composite of several women, all of them attractive, all of them wanton yet motherly, like the new Betty Crocker. She spoke words that held no weight and so fluttered away on the breeze with a vapor trail of pollen. Our feast was laid upon the requisite checkerboard blanket beneath a flowering tree with the grass and the sun and all that. With all that and the chirping birds and the painfully blue sky and the goddamned ants; I didn't notice the ants until the woman held a slice of bread to my lips and as I opened my mouth to accept the bread I saw an ant trapped in the honey. Too late, my mouth closed and I swallowed and I looked down and beheld them everywhere upon the checker cloth, these ants. Formicating. I rose up, a behemoth enraged, and trampled them in shallow puffs of dust. They died in their numbers, complaining in small voices as their works were conculcated—their wagon trains and caravans, their miniature Hippodromes and coliseums, their monuments and toy superstructures, all crashed, all toppled, all ablaze. I threw my head back to bellow curses and noticed the sun had become a pinhole. The hole openedopendopened—
Open.
I stared at the ceiling and realized that I now slept with my eyes wide and glazed. Marbles, the last of my marbles.
Shadows flowed swiftly along the decrepit wallpaper of No. 32, shrinking from the muzzy glare of the sun as it wallowed behind clouds. The thermostat was set at body temperature and the room steamed. I didn't recall waking to do that. I had slept for eighteen hours. Eighteen hours! It was a bloody miracle! I dressed, avoiding the mirror.
There were various stratagems available, a couple of them clever. I wasn't feeling clever, though. In fact, my skull felt like a pot of mush.
I flashed a snapshot of Teddy at the locals, finally got a bite from the mechanic at the gas station. He remembered Teddy from the previous September—Heavy guy, yeah; drivin' a foreign car, passin' through. North, I suppose, 'cause he asked where Little Egypt was. We get that a lot. Tourists want to fool around the mines. Ain't shit-all left, though. I checked his brakes—these roads are hell on brakes. He paid cash.
No surprises, the jigsaw was taking its form.
I measured the dwindling girth of my money clip and dealt a portion of it to Rod, the pimply badger of a clerk at the post office. It went down smoothly after I told him I was working for a family who believed their baby girl had joined a cult. Oh, this sweaty, mutton-chopped fellow became a regular Samaritan once the folding green was in his pocket. He came across with the goods—names and descriptions of the people who regularly accessed Thornton's box. He'd never seen Thornton, didn't know much about him and didn't want to. The Imago Colony? Zip. Thornton's group numbered about forty, although who knew?—what with tourist season and the influx of visitors come spring. They occupied mining claims somewhere on Little Egypt; kept to themselves. Mormons, or some shit. Weird folk, but nobody had heard about them causing trouble before. He let me look at a topographical map that showed Little Egypt was, in fact, a sizeable chunk of real estate. Thornton's camp could be any one of a dozen claims scattered throughout the area. I slipped him another fifty bucks to keep mum about our conversation.
Satisfied, I retreated to the Hardpan Café, which commanded an unobstructed view of the post office. I settled in to wait for my hippie friends to make the scene. The Russian lady was overjoyed.
Thornton's people arrived on Thursday. Two rough men dressed in greatcoats; they drove around town in a clanking two-ton truck with a canvas top. A military surplus vehicle capable of serious off-road travel. The U.S. Army star was mud-splattered.
I compared them to my list. One, a redhead, was a nobody. The other man was middling sized, with a dented forehead, pebbly eyes and a long beard that would've made Fidel Castro jealous. Roy Fulcher, larger and uglier than life. Still playing henchman to Thornton in the new century. Loyal as a dog; how sweet.
If any of the locals tipped the men that I had been asking about their operation, it was not evident. They nonchalantly gathered supplies while I lurked in the background. Toward evening Fulcher pointed the truck north and rumbled off with a load of dry goods, fuel, and mail. I trailed.
Eventually, the truck turned onto a gravel road. A bullet-raddled sign read: little egypt rd. The metal pole was bent nearly double, victim of unknown violence. Rough country here; patches of concrete-hard snow gleamed under scraggly trees. In a few miles gravel gave way to a mud track and the ruts were too deep for the Chrysler. I pulled over, shouldered a satchel I'd bought at the Purdon Thrifty Saver and started walking, carefully picking my way as twilight grew moss and the stars glittered like caltrops. As the air cooled, mist cloaked the branches and brambles.
The hills got steep fast, draining the strength from my legs. My back protested. I shook most of the bottle of aspirin into my mouth to stay on the safe side, and rested frequently. When the track forked, I shined my flashlight to orient on the freshest ruts. It wasn't difficult; it was like following a bulldozer up the mountain. I clicked the light off quickly, hoping to conceal my position, and continued trudging.
I checked my watch to gauge the mileage and discovered it had died at 6:32 p.m. Much later, my legs got too heavy and I slumped under a lonely pine. Clouds snuffed the stars.
The gray light swam as it brightened; rocks and brush solidified all around. Two inches of snow dusted the landscape like the face of a corpse.
My back had seized up. It hurt in a profound way. Like a bitch, as my pop would've said. The aspirin was gone, the whiskey too. It seemed impossible that I would ever stand. But I rose, among a shower of black motes and silvery comets. Rose with the chuffing sob of a steer as it is goaded onto the gangway. Then I hugged my homely little tree, pissed on my boots and trembled with nausea. I needed a drink.
The road curved upward in a series of switchbacks. The snow disintegrated to brown sludge. I staggered along the shoulder, avoiding the quagmire. My feet got wet anyway. I clutched at exposed roots and outcroppings. A bird scolded me.
Cresting a saddle in the hills I gazed upon the flank of a mountain about a quarter mile off. Shacks were scattered beneath the crags—tin roofs bled orange tracks in the snow. The truck Fulcher had driven was parked alongside two battered jeeps near a Quonset hut. Wood smoke coiled above the camp, chugged forth from several stacks. A knot of muddy pigs huddled in a paddock. Nothing else moved.
My glance fell upon a trio of silhouetted formations farther along the mountainside; too far to discern clearly. Pylons? The instant I spotted them a whisper of unease urged me to look elsewhere. To flee, yes. I patted the bulk of the revolver in my pocket and the whispers died away.
I gulped air and wished I'd thought to bring field glasses for this expedition. Keeping to the brush, I swung a wide northwest circle. Drawing closer to the pylons it registered that about a dozen jutted randomly above the stony field. Crows danced atop them, squawking their hideous argot. An unpleasant sensation of primitive familiarity rooted me in my tracks. The objects were made of milled poles planted at angles like king-sized Xs, each twice the height of a man. Symbols were carved into them. Latin? The farthest structure had something caught at its apex—a bundle of rags.
"Marvin!"
I turned. A man in a billowing poncho strode from the direction of the camp. He waved and I waved back automatically. The brush must not have concealed me so well after all. He walked swiftly, a stop-motion figure on grainy film. The haze had a spaghetti-western effect—it made him taller and shorter by turns and cast his face in gloom.
"Mr. Thornton?" I said when he halted before me. God, he was tall. I was no midget and I had to crane my neck at him.
"Welcome to the Pleasure Dome. Glad you could make it. We seldom receive visitors during the winter season." He sounded British and wore an Australian-style drover's hat pulled low over jagged brows and scaly eyes. Potbellied and thick through the hips, yet gangly and muscular the way a well-fed raptor is muscular. His enormous hands hung loosely. A thin-lipped mouth threatened to bisect his broad, sallow face. Lots and lots of stained, crooked teeth were revealed by his huge smile. "It has you, I see. Ticktock go the mitochondria—a nova in bloom. Marvelous, marvelous."
I stared at him and decided he was far too spry for a fellow pushing seventy-five. His movements were quick and powerful. His doll-smooth flesh radiated youthful heat. "Who told you I was coming?" I suspected someone at the Weston Gallery had phoned with the news. Were there phones up here?
Thornton hesitated as if he actually meant to answer the question. "Come back to the house. The ground is unsafe."
"Unsafe, how?"
"Not all the shafts are properly sealed. Holes everywhere. Periodically someone disappears—they come poking around for souvenirs or gold and . . .well one misstep is all it takes. Teenagers, usually. Or tourists."
I nodded in idiot silence, grappling with my instincts—my mind was a cacophony of ghostly exhortations to rap this man's head while we were away from his presumed horde of disciples, to put him on his knees with the gun barrel under his jaw and pry loose the answers to a dozen pertinent questions. I recalled the lumpish shape at the bottom of Renfro's hole, how it shuddered and quaked, and my hand dipped into my pocket—
"How's Jacob, anyway?" Thornton had already turned his back. Maybe he was grinning. His dry, Victorian accent quavered up the register toward that of a crone's.
"Jacob." It seemed to be getting darker by the second in that desolate valley.
"The fellow who sent you to break my legs and whatnot. He misses his uncle. Kidding, kidding. Do you miss Teddy? Does anyone? It would be decent."
"You know Jacob?"
"Not really. His uncle and I were friends, once. Teddy lived on the edge of my circle. I never gathered the impression he spoke of me to anyone . . .uninitiated. Jacob would not suit my purposes."
"I'm here to find out what happened to Teddy."
"Truly? I supposed you came because of the Sequence."
"See, I'm kind of stuck on the chicken or the egg theory. I'll take whatever I can get. So give."
"Teddy vanished. A boating accident, wasn't it?"
"After visiting you."
"Teddy was a big boy. Big enough for both of us. Remove your hand from the gun, Marvin. Harm me and you'll never get what you came for."
My lungs burned. "Harm you. There's no reason. Is there?"
"For some men, there is always a reason. It's what you do well, hurting. You're a terrier. I know everything about you, Marvin. I smell meanness cooking in your blood. The blood on your hands. I ask, do you want blood from me, or knowledge? Here is a crossroads."
"I want to know about the photographs. I need to understand what's happening to me." I said this simply, even humbly. I removed my hand from the revolver.
"It's not only happening to you. It's happening to everyone, everywhere. You're tuned in to the correct frequency, and therein lies the difference." Thornton twisted his oversized head to regard me without shifting his shoulders. His face was milky. A face of unwholesome flexibility; and yes, his grin fetched to mind sickles and horns. "Let's amble—we'll do lunch, we'll chat. I'll show you my gallery. It's an amazing gallery. I'll show you Imago. You'll enjoy it, Marvin. You'll sleep again. Sleep without nightmares." He was walking before he finished, beckoning with a casual twitch of his hand. His oilskin poncho slithered in his wake not unlike a tail.
I followed on wooden legs. Crows argued behind us.
The Quonset hut was so old its floor was a sunken mass of caramelized wood and dirt. An arch in the rear opened to darkness. Moth-eaten banners of curiously medieval design hung from the rafters, casting fluttery shadows upon the long table where I mechanically chewed a ham sandwich and drank a sour beer that Roy Fulcher had fetched. Thornton had departed, promising a swift return. He asked Fulcher to attend my needs.
Light oozed through window glass that sagged and pooled at the bottom of rotten frames. Crates made pyramids against the walls, alongside boxes, barrels and stacks of curling newspapers. Homey.
Fulcher watched me eat. His features were vulpine and his lank beard was stained yellow-brown around the mouth. He smelled ripe. Farther off, a group of fellow colonists played at a ping-pong table. They cast sly glances our way and chuckled with suppressed brutality. Four men, two women, ages indeterminate. They were scrawny, haggard and unwashed. Several more came and went, shuffling. Zombies but for a merry spark in their eyes, satisfied smirks.
I said, "Here's the million-dollar question—where's the caveman buried?"
"Caveman? I don't think there's a caveman." Fulcher's was an earthy accent, a nasal drawl that smacked of coal mines and tarpaper shanties.
"All this trouble and no caveman?"
"Sorry."
"It's okay. Jacob will get over it," I said. "I don't suppose you'll tell me where Ammon took the Imago Sequence? That won't hurt anything, if there's no caveman."
Fulcher leaned in. "Take a spoon and dig a hole in your chest. That's where he made his pictures."
I pushed my plate aside. I wiped my lips with a dingy cloth towel. I stared at him, long and steadily. I said, "If you won't talk about Ammon, tell me about your colony. Love what you've done with the place. What do you guys do for fun in these parts?" I'd cultivated a talent for reading people, weighing them at a glance, separating shepherds from sheep. It was nothing special; a basic survival technique—but it came up dry now. These people confounded my expectations. Was I in a commune or a militia compound? Were these hippie cultists, leftwing anarchists, or something else? I gave one of the more brazen ping-pong players— the redhead from town—a hard look. Fulcher had called him Clint. Clint's grin vanished and he concentrated on his game. Human, at least.
"You know," Fulcher said.
"I hate word games, Roy. They make me hostile."
"Ask Anselm."
"I'm asking you."
"It brought you to us—one from multitudes. You still question what our work is here?"
"It? If you mean the Imago Sequence, then yeah, I'm full of questions."
"Anselm will answer your questions in due course."
"Well, Roy, problem is, I'm kind of stupid. People usually need to repeat stuff."
Fulcher's expression grew rigid. "You don't want to see. Surprise—it's too late. The fictions you've invented, your false assumptions, your pretenses, will soon be blown apart. I doubt it will profit you in the least. You're a thug."
"Story of my life; nobody likes me. I guess you'd be willing to show me the big picture. Shoot me down with your intellectual superiority."
"Anselm will show you the cosmic picture, Mr. Cortez."
"Isn't it customary for you religious zealots to have pamphlets lying around? Betcha there's a printing press somewhere in this Taj Mahal. Surely you've got propaganda for the recruits? And beads? I like beads."
"No pamphlets, no recruits. This is Imago Colony. Religion doesn't apply."
"Oh, no? What's with all the faux Roman crucifixes in the back forty?"
"The crucifixes? Those are authentic. Anselm imported them."
I tried to wrap my mind around that concept. The implications eluded me. I said, "Bullshit. What the hell for?"
"The obvious—sport. Anselm has exotic tastes. He enjoys aspects of cultural antiquity."
"Yeah, so I hear. And he has a thing about bugs, I guess; sort of similar to his mentor. Seems to be a reliable pattern with lunatics. An imago is an insect, right?"
"It's symbolic."
"Oh. I thought the bug thing was cute."
"An imago is not any insect. The final instar of an insect, its supreme incarnation. Care for another beer?"
"I'm good." I gestured at the ping-pong tournament. "Weedy crowd, Roy. Somebody told me there were forty, fifty of you in this camp."
"Far less, these days. Attrition."
"Uh, huh."
"You've come during harvest season, Mr. Cortez. That's what we do in the cold months. The others are engaged, those who remain. Things will quicken in the spring. People seem to be more driven to enlightenment during sandal weather. Spiritualists, nature enthusiasts, software engineers on holiday with wives and kiddies. We get all kinds."
"Thornton is off to play plantation overseer, eh? I wonder what you kids harvest in these parts—poppies? Opium is Afghanistan's chief export—ask the Taliban what it paid for its military hardware, the light bills in its palaces. The climate around here is about goddamned ideal. You'd be millionaires. I've got a couple pals, line you right out for a piece of the pie."
Fulcher rubbed his dented brow, smiled. "What wonderful irony! We do love to trip. You have me there. Poppies, that's very funny. I almost miss those days. I stick with cigarettes anymore."
"Lay your gimmick on me."
"Evolution."
"You and everybody else."
"What do people want?" Fulcher raised his grimy hand to forestall my answer. "What do people truly want—what would induce a man to sell his soul?"
"To be healthy, wealthy and wise." I said with mild sarcasm. Mild because as I uttered the punch line to the children's rhyme, coldness began to unfold in my bones. The tumblers in my head were turning again.
"Bravo, Mr. Cortez. Power, wisdom, immortality." His expression altered. "We have found something that will afford us . . .longevity, at least. With longevity comes everything else."
"The Fountain of Youth?" In the deep mountain woods a mossy statue spurted black water. Congregations of hillbillies in coveralls bathed in its viscid pool. A bonfire, a forest of uncured pelts swaying. A piper. I shuddered. "Dancing girls, winning lotto tickets?"
"A catalyst. A mechanism that compresses aeons of future human evolution. Although future is a relative term."
"Ammon's photographs." It seemed obvious. Everything seemed patently obvious, except that the room was undulating and I couldn't figure out who was playing the flute. A panpipe, actually; high, thin, discordant. It pierced my brain.
Fulcher ignored the music. He flushed, warming to my edification. "The Imago Sequence is a trigger. If you've got the right genes you might already be a winner."
I rubbed my ear; the pipe raised unpleasant specters to mind, set them gibbering. The monstrous hominid opened its mouth wider, wider. "How does that shit work?"
"Take a picture of God, tack it on the wall and see who bows. Recognition is the key. It doesn't make a difference what you comprehend intellectually, only what stirs on a cellular level, what awakens when it recognizes the wellspring of creation."
"Don't tell me you believe the caveman is God."
"I said there's no caveman. Look deeper, friend. Reality lies beyond the surface. It's not the Devil in the details, it's God."
"Aha! You are a bunch of Christian cultists."
"We do not exist to worship an incomprehensible being. A being which assuredly lacks the means to appreciate slavish devotion."
"Seems pointless to have a god at all, when you put it like that."
"Do you supplicate plutonium? Do you sing hymns to uranium? We bask in the corona of an insensate majesty. In its sway we seek to lay the foundation blocks of a new city, a new civilization. We're pioneers. Our frontier is the grand wasteland between Alpha and Omega."
"Will you transform into a being of pure energy and migrate to Alpha Centauri?"
"Quite opposite. Successful animal organisms are enduring organisms. Enduring organisms are extremely basic, extremely efficient. Tarantulas. Scorpions. Reptiles. Flies."
"Don't forget cockroaches. They're going to inherit the earth." I laughed, began coughing. The room wobbled. "So Thornton is what—the messiah helping you become the best imago you can be?"
"Anselm is the Imago. We are maggots. We are provender."
"I get it. He does the transcending and you get the slops."
"It is good to have a purpose in life. To be an integral part of the great and terrible cycle." Fulcher shook his head. "As I serve him, he served Ammon and Ammon served the one before him down through time gone to dust. 'By sating the image of the Power they fulfill their fleshly contract. By suckling the teat of godliness the worthy shall earn their reward.' Thus it is written in a book much more venerable than the Bible. For we who survive to remake ourselves in the image of the Power, all risks are acceptable."
"Reverend Jones rides again! Pass the grape Kool-Aid!"
"Hysterical, much?"
"Naw, just lately." I took a breath. "I wonder though, what does a guy do after he reaches the top of the ol' ladder? Live in a cave and compose epic poetry? Answer riddles? Pick up a sword and lay waste to Rome?"
"Caligula was one of us, actually."
I didn't know what to say to that. I plowed ahead. "Well?"
"Basic organisms require basic pleasures."
"Basic pleasures?" The chilly sensation linked hands with vertigo and did a Scottish jig. I was as a figurine in that enormous room.
"Subsistence and copulation. That's what the good life boils down to, my friend. Eating and fucking. Whoever you want, whatever you want, whenever you want."
The mouth opening, opening—
"Power to the people." I was slurring. Why was I slurring?
"Ready to go?" Fulcher rose, still smiling through his matted beard. We walked through the tall archway. He lightly gripped my elbow to steady me. One beer and I was drunk as a sailor on the third day of shore leave. The corridor expanded in the best Escher fashion, telescoping into infinite shadow. There were ragged tapestries at intervals, disfigured statues, a well-trammeled carpet with astrological designs. The corridor branched and branched again at grand arches marred by ages of smoke. At one fork, a kerosene lamp swung on a sooty chain. Behind a massive iron door the piping shrilled, died, shrilled. Hoarse screams of the primordial sex act, exhausted sobs, laughter and applause. Mrs. Chin's photograph haunted me.
"The gallery," Fulcher said.
I recognized the musk upon him, finally. For a horrible moment I thought we would go through that door. We continued down the other hall.
Fulcher brought me to a dingy chamber lit by a single dirty bulb in an overhead cage. The room was windowless and bare except for a large chair made of wood and iron. The chair had arm straps and leg shackles; an artifact from the Spanish Inquisition. It was not difficult to picture the fallen bishops, the heretical nobles who had shrieked in its embrace.
"Please, make yourself comfortable." Fulcher helped me along with a shove.
I slumped in the strange chair, my head heavy as a wrecking ball, and watched as he produced a nasty looking bowie knife and expertly sliced off my clothes. When he encountered the revolver he emptied the cylinder, slid the weapon into his waistband without comment. He cinched my arms and legs; his fingers glowed, dragging tracers as they adjusted buckles and straps. Seemingly he had grown extra arms. I could only gawk at this phantasm; I felt quite docile. "Wow, Roy. What was in my beer? I feel terrific."
"One should hope. You ingested several hundred milligrams of synthetic mescaline—enough to launch a rhinoceros into orbit."
"Party foul, and on the first date too. I thought you didn't do dope anymore."
"I dabble in the manufacturing end of the spectrum. Frankly, all that metaphysical mumbo-jumbo about hallucinogens affecting perception in a meaningful way is wishful thinking. Poor Huxley." Fulcher stepped back, surveyed his handiwork while rolling a cigarette. The yellow flare of his lighter painted his face, made him a devil. "Oh, except for you. You're special. You've seen Alpha and Beta. As my pappy would say, you've got the taint, boy." He blurred around the edges. With each inhalation the cherry of his cigarette brightened, became Jupiter's red sore.
I noticed the walls were metallic—whorls whorled, pits and pocks formed. Condensation trickled. Smoke made arabesques and demons. The walls were a tapestry from a palace in Hell.
The panpipe started wheedling again and Thornton entered the room on cue. He pushed a rickety hospital tray with a domed cover. The cover was scalloped, silver finish flaking. A maroon handprint smeared its curve.
"This is a bad sign," I said.
Thornton was efficient. He produced an electric razor and shaved a portion of my head to stubble, dug a thumb under my carotid artery and traced veins in my skull with a felt-tip pen. He tweaked my nose in a fatherly manner, stripped off his coat and rolled his sleeves to the elbows. His skin gleamed like coral, cast faint reflections upon the walls and ceiling. Shoals of phantom fish scattered above, regrouped and swam into an abyss; a superhighway and its endless traffic looped beneath my feet; it rippled and collapsed into a trench of unimaginable depths.
I watched him remove a headpiece from the tray—a clumsy framework of clamps and screws; a dunce cap with a collar. Parts had never been cleaned. I wanted to scream when he fitted it over my head and neck, locked it in place with a screwdriver. I sighed.
Fulcher stubbed his cigarette, produced a palm-sized digital camera and aimed it at me. He gave Thornton a thumbs-up.
Thornton selected a scalpel from the instruments on the tray, weighed it in his hand. "Teddy was a friend—I would never use him as provender, but neither could I set him on the path to Olympus. There's limited room in the boat, you see. Weak, genetically flawed, but a jolly nice fellow. A gentleman. Imagine my disappointment when he showed up on my doorstep last fall. Not only had the old goat bought Parallax Alpha, he'd viewed Beta as well. He demanded to see Imago. As if I could simply snap my fingers and show him. Wouldn't listen to reason, wouldn't go home and fall to pieces quietly like a good boy. So I enlightened him. It was out of my hands after that. Now, we come to you." He sliced my forehead, peeled back a flap of skin. Fulcher taped it down.
"What?" I said. "What?"
Thornton raised a circular saw with a greasy wooden handle. He attached it to a socket in my headpiece. "Trephination. An ancient method to open the so-called Third Eye. Fairly crude; Ammon taught me how and a Polynesian tribe showed him—he wasn't a surgeon either. He performed his own in a Bangkok opium den with a serrated knife and a corkscrew while a stoned whore held a mirror. Fortunately, medical expertise is not a requisite in this procedure."
The dent in Fulcher's brow drew my gaze. I sighed again, saddened by wisdom acquired too late in the day.
Thornton patted me kindly. His touch lingered as a caress. "Don't fret, it's not a lobotomy. You wished to behold Imago, this is the way. What an extraordinary specimen you are, Marvin, my boy. Your transformation will be a most satisfying conquest as I have not savored in years. I am sure to delay your reintegration for the span of many delightful hours. I will have compensation for your temerity."
"Mr. Thornton," I gasped; trembled with the effort of rolling my eye to meet his. "Mrs. Chin said the glacier is coming. I dream it every night; flies buzzing in my brain. It's killing me. That's why I came."
Thornton nodded. "Of course. I've seen it a thousand times. Everyone who has crawled into my lair wanted to satisfy one desire or another. What will satisfy you, O juicy morsel? To hear, to know?" He yawned. "Would you be happy to learn there is but one God and that all things come from Him? Existence is infinitely simple, Marvin—cells within cells, dreams within dreams, from the molten Fingertip of God Almighty, to the antenna of a roach, on this frequency and each of a billion after. Thus it goes until the circuit completes its ambit of the core, a protean-reality where dwells an intellect of surpassing might, yet impotent, bound as it is in the well of its own gravity. Cognition does not flourish in that limitless quagmire, the cosmic repository of information. The lightning of Heaven is reduced to torpid impulses that spiral outward, seeking gratification by osmosis. And by proxy. We are bags of nerves and electrolytes, fragile and weak and we decompose so quickly. Which is the purpose, the very cunning design. Our experiences are readily digested to serve the biological imperative of a blind, vast sponge. Does it please you? Do you require more?"
A spike glinted within the ring of saw-teeth. Thornton casually pressed this spike into my skull, seated it with a few taps of a rubber mallet. He put his lips next to my ear. His breath reeked copper. "The prophets proclaim the end is near. I'll whisper to you something they don't know—the world ended this morning as you were sleeping, half-frozen on the mountainside. It ended aeons before your father squirted his genetic material into your mother. It will end tomorrow as it ends every day, same time, same station." He started cranking.
Listening to the rhythmic burr of metal on bone I was thankful the mescaline had soldered my nerve endings. Thornton divided and divided again until he crowded the room. Pith helmets, top hats, arctic coats, khakis, corporate suits, each double dressed for a singular occasion, each one animated by separate experience, but all of them smiling with tremendous pleasure as they turned the handle, turned the handle, turned the handle. Their faces sloughed, dough swelling and splitting. Beneath was something raw, and moist, and dark.
I glimpsed the face of the future and failed to comprehend its shape. Blood poured into my eyes. The panpipe went mad.
The world ends every day.
Picture me walking in a rock garden under the dipping branches of cherry blossom trees. I love stones and there are heavy examples scattered across the garden; olive-bearded, embedded in the tough sod. God's voice echoes as through a gigantic gramophone horn, but softly from the lead plate of sky, and not God, it's Thornton guiding the progression, driving an auger into my skull while the music plays. Push it aside, keep moving toward a mound in the distance . . . .
No Thornton, auger, no music; only God, the garden, and I. Where is God? Everywhere, but especially in the earth, the dark, warm earth that opens as a cave mouth in the side of a hill. God calls from the hill, in voices of grinding rock and gurgling water.
I walk toward the cave. Sleet falls, captured betwixt burning and freezing precisely as I am caught. Nor is the sleet truly sleet. A swirl of images falling, million-million shards fractured from a vast hoary mirror. There am I, and I and I a million-million times, broken, melting . . . .
I walk through God's rock garden, trampling incarnations of myself . . . .
Watery images flickered on the wall. A home movie with the volume lowered. Choppy because the cameraman kept adjusting to peer over the shoulder of a tall figure who attended a third person in the awful chair—my chair. The victim was not I; it was a mirror casting a false reflection. And it wasn't a movie in the strictest sense; I detected no camera, nor aperture to project the film. More hallucinations then. More something.
Teddy's face, trapped in the conical helm; his feet scuffed and rattled the shackles. Thornton blocked the view, elbow pumping with the practiced ease of a farmer's wife churning butter. Muffled laughter, walnuts being cracked. The image went dark, but the dim sounds persisted.
Claustrophobia gagged me. I was still strapped in the chair, the helm fixed to my head. There was a hole in my head. My right eye was crusted and blind. I was shuddering with chills. How much time had passed? Where had Fulcher and Thornton gone? Had they shown me Imago as promised? My memories balked.
As my faculties reengaged, my fear swelled. They had shredded my clothes, confiscated my belongings, tortured me. They would kill me. That was scarcely my fear. I dreaded what else would happen first.
The wall brightened with new images. Sperm wriggled, hungry and fast. A wasp made love to a tarantula, thrusting, thrusting with its stinger. Mastiffs flung themselves upon a threshing stag, dangled from its antlers like ornaments. Fire ants swarmed over a gourd half-buried in desert earth—
Fulcher drifted through the door, Clint at his heel. I remained limp when Fulcher scrutinized me briefly; he flashed a penlight in my good eye, checked my pulse. He murmured to his partner, and began unbuckling my straps. Clint hung back, perhaps to guard against a revival of my aggressive philosophy. Even so, he appeared bored, distracted.
I did not stir until Fulcher freed my arms. It occurred to me that the mescaline cocktail must've worn off because I wasn't feeling docile anymore. Nothing was premeditated; my mind was well below a rational state. I pawed his face—weakly, a drunken gesture, which he brushed aside. I became more insistent, got a fistful of his beard on the next half-hearted swipe, my left hand slithered behind his neck. Fulcher pried at my wrist, twisted his head. Frantic, he braced his boot against the chair and tried to push off. His back bowed and contorted.
A ghostly spider mounted a beetle; they clinched.
Growing stronger, more purposeful, I yanked him into my lap, and his beard ripped, but that was fine. I squeezed his throat and vertebrate popped the way it happens when you lift a heavy salmon by the tail. Stuff separates.
Clint tried to pull Fulcher, exactly as a man will pull a comrade from quicksand. Failing, he snatched up a screwdriver and stabbed me in the ribs. No harm, my ribs were covered with a nice slab of gristle and suet. Punch a side a beef hanging from a hook and see what you get.
A truck careened across a strange field riddled with holes. The vehicle juked and jived and nose-dived into the biggest hole of them all—
I dropped Fulcher and staggered from the chair. Clint stabbed me in the shoulder. I laughed; it felt good. I palmed his face, clamped down with full strength. He bit me, began a thick, red stream down my arm. He choked and gargled. Bubbles foamed between my finger webs. I waltzed him on tiptoes and banged his head against a support beam. Bonk, bonk, bonk, just like the cartoons. Just like Jackson Pollack. I stopped when his facial bones sort of collapsed and sank into the general confusion of his skull.
I fumbled with the screws of my helm, gave it up as a hopeless cause. I left the cell and wandered along the hall, trailing one hand against the rough surfaces. People met me, passed me without recognition, without interest. These people were versions of myself. I saw a younger me dressed in a tropical shirt and a girl on my arm; me in a funeral suit and a sawed-off shotgun in my hand; another me pale and bruised, a doughnut brace on my neck, hunched on crutches; still another me, gray-haired, dead drunk, wild glare fixed upon the middle distance. And others, too many others coming faster until it hurt my eyes. They flowed around me, collided, disappeared into the deep, lightless throat of the hall until all possibilities were lost.
Weight shifted within the bowels of Thornton's Pleasure Dome. A ponderous door was flung wide and a chorus of damned cries echoed up the corridors. The muscles between my shoulder blades tightened. I picked up the pace.
The main area was deserted but for a woman sweeping ashes from the barrel stove and a sturdy man in too-loose long johns eating dinner at a table. The woman was an automaton; she regarded me without emotion, resumed her mechanical duties. The man put aside his spoon, considering whether to challenge me. He remained undecided as I stumbled outside, bloody and birth-naked. The icy breeze plucked at my scalp, caused my wound to throb with the threat of a migraine. I was in a place far removed from such concerns.
A better man would've set a match to the drums of diesel, blown the place to smithereens Hollywood style. No action star, I headed for the vehicles.
Twilight cocooned the valley. The sky was smooth as opal. A crimson band pulsed at the horizon—the sun elongated to its breaking point. Clouds scudded from invisible distances, flew by at unnatural velocity.
"Don't go," Thornton said. A whisper, a shout.
I glanced back.
He filled the doorway of the Quonset hut, which was tiny, was receding. His many selves had merged, yet flickered beneath his skin, ready to burst forth. His voice had relinquished its command, now waned fragile, as it traveled across the gulf to find me. "You're opening doors without any idea of where they lead. It's a waste. Sweet God, what a waste!"
I kept walking, limping.
"Marvin!" A hot lash of hatred and appetite throbbed from his dwindling voice. "Say hello to Teddy!" He shrank to a speck, was lost.
A fleet of canvas-top trucks shimmered upon an island in a sea of velvet. They warped and ran with the fluidity of quicksilver, a kaleidoscope revolving around the original. I picked the closest truck and dragged myself inside. Keys dangled from the ignition. The helm was too tall for the cab; I was forced to drive with my head on my shoulder. Fresh blood seeped from the wound and obscured my vision.
The truck bucked and crow-hopped as I clanged gears, stomped the accelerator and sent it hurtling across the rugged valley. One road multiplied, became three roads, now six. Now, I was off the road, or the road had melted. Bizarre changes were altering the scenery, toying with my feeble perception. The mountains doubled and redoubled and underwent the transformations of millennia—a range exploding forward, rounding and shortening, another backward, rearing into a toothy crown—in the span of heartbeats. It was a rough ride.
I found the knob for the headlights in time to illuminate the sinkhole a few dozen yards ahead. A rapidly widening maw. I slammed the brakes. The cab exploded with dust and smoking rubber. There was a tin-can-under-a-boot crunch and the truck yawed, paused at the rim and toppled in, nose-first. I performed a lazy belly flop through the windshield.
I didn't lose consciousness, unfortunately. I bounced and bones cracked along old fault lines. Eventually I stopped with a terrific jolt; a feather mattress dropped on a cavern floor. At least the truck didn't come down on top of me—it had lodged in a bottleneck. Its engine shrieked momentarily, sputtered and died. I stared up at the rapidly dulling headlights, as bits of sensation returned to my extremities. Ages passed. When I finally managed to gain my knees, the world was in darkness. What was broken? Ribs, definitely. A sprained knee that swelled as I breathed. Possibly a bone in my back had snapped; insufficient to immobilize me, yet neither could I straighten fully. Cuts on my face and hands. The pain was minor, and that worried me. Why not worse? I had landed in deep, spongy moss, was nearly buried from the impact. It sucked at me as I clambered to solid footing.
The darkness wasn't complete. Aqueous light leaked from slimy surfaces, the low ceiling of sweating rock. As my vision adjusted I saw moss claimed everything. Stinking moss filled crevices and fissures, was habitat of beetles and other things. Sloppy from the eternal drip of water, it squelched between my toes, sucked my ankles. This was a relatively small cave, with a single chimney jammed by the crashed truck. This wasn't a mine shaft; my animal self was positive about that. Nor did it require much heavy thinking to conclude that climbing out of there was impossible. I couldn't raise my left arm above waist level. A single note from the panpipe came faintly. From below. A voice may have murmured my name—I was gasping too loudly and it did not repeat.
A fissure split the rear of the cave, a cramped tunnel descended. Mastering my instincts, I followed it down. The cool air warmed, was soon moist as a panting mouth. Pungent odors clogged my nostrils, watered my eyes. Gradually, the passage widened, opening into a larger area, a cavern of great dimensions. The light strengthened, or my eyes got better, because pieces of the cavern joined as Mrs. Chin's photos had joined. And I beheld Imago.
Here was the threshold of the Beginning and End.
The roof was invisible but for the tips of gargantuan stalactites, all else shrouded. Moss, more moss, a garden, a forest of moss. But was it moss? I doubted that. Moss didn't quiver where it met flesh, didn't contract as a muscle contracts.
The walls glistened; they glowed not unlike the glow which seeped from Thornton's skin. Shadows of the world dwelt in the walls. Those most familiar to me rose from the depths like champagne bubbles. I passed Teddy's yacht near the surface, its lines quite clean despite being encased. Further along, a seaplane was suspended on high, partially obscured by gloom. It hung, fossilized, an inverted crucifix. There were faces, a frieze of ghastly spectators massed in the tiers of an amphitheater. I averted my gaze, afraid of who I might see pithed in the bell jar. Deeper, inside folds of rock that was not rock, were glimpses of Things to Come. Houses, onion domes and turrets, utopian skylines, the graceful arcs of bridges, rainforests and jagged mountains. And deeper, deeper yet, solar systems of pregnant globes of smothered dirt and vine, and charred stars in endless procession.
I caught myself humming The Doors' "This Is the End." I stood upon a shattered slope, weeping and laughing, and humming the song of death. Thinking probably the same thoughts any lesser primate does when confronted with apocalyptic forces. To these I added, Damn you, anyway, Jacob! You can shove this favor in your big, flabby ass! And, I wonder if Carol is feeding the fish?
Before me lay the cavern's boundary; another translucent wall. This area was subtly different, it bulged with murky reefs of dubious matter—I conjured the image of coiled organs, the calcified ganglia of some Biblical colossus. Dead roots snaked from an abyss to end abysses—a primordial sea from which all life had been egurgitated. My ears popped with a sudden pressure change. I detected movement.
I tried to run, but my legs were unresponsive, as if they had fallen asleep, and the moss shifted beneath my nerveless feet, dumped me on my backside. I flailed down the slope, which I realized was a funnel, or a trough. This occurred with excruciating slowness, but it was impossible to halt my weight once it got moving. Wherever my skin made contact with the moss I lost sensation. This was because the moss that was not moss stung with tiny barbs, stung me as a jellyfish stings. My legs, my back, right hand, then left, until everything from the neck down was anesthetized.
At the bottom, by some trick of geometry, I pitched forward to lie spread eagle against the curve of the wall. The rock softened, was vaguely gelatinous. I began to sink. Despite my numbed state, it was cold compared to the rank jungle of a cavern. Frigid.
As I sank, I thought, Not a wall, a membrane. Engulfed in amber jelly, tremendous pressure built upon my body, flattened my features. Wrenching my head to free it from imminent suffocation, to scream as an animal screams, dying alone in the wilderness, I saw a blossom of fire in the near distance. An abrupt blue-white flare that seemed to expand forever, then shrink into itself. I opened my mouth, opened my mouth—
The second flash was far smaller, far more remote. It faded swiftly.
I don't know if there was a third.