Blame Edmond Fanning. The American sea captain may have used up any good luck concerning Palmyra Island when he discovered it on a voyage to Asia back in 1798. The good captain was sleeping in his cabin one night when he found himself awakened by a strong premonition of doom. Not once, not twice, but three times he found his sleep disturbed by an overwhelming sense of dread. More than disturbed: he awoke having left his bunk and walked about the ship while still asleep—something he had never done on any other occasion in his life! Out on the deck of the Betsy, all was calm and quiet, though it was too dark to see any distance in any direction. Still, the charts showed empty ocean: they were near the center of the Pacific, about a thousand nautical miles south-southwest of Hawaii—about halfway between Hawaii and American Samoa. Nothing was evidently wrong but he gave orders to the helmsman on duty to heave to until daybreak in hopes that he might sleep more peacefully.
At sunrise Captain Fanning and his crew stood at the railing and looked out over the killer reef lying before them, now revealed by the early light of day. Had they continued on their original course during the night, the ship would have been ripped to pieces and all hands lost in the darkness. Fanning and his crew were doubly lucky: not only did they narrowly avoid disaster on the northern portion of the reef encompassing Palmyra Island, but they continued on their way without stopping to make landfall. And though he did note the position of the unknown and unnamed island in his ship's log, he failed to file a timely report. Credit for the unnamed island's discovery went to another American sea captain.
A Captain Swale had the "good" fortune to become the official discoverer of the island and give it its name when his ship was caught in a storm in 1802. Blown off course and into the hungry jaws of the island's voracious reefs, Swale's new find took on the name of his shattered vessel: the Palmyra.
Fourteen years later a Spanish pirate vessel named the Esperanza foundered on those selfsame reefs. Already holed and broken from a fierce battle that had crippled her and killed most of her crew, she remained afloat long enough for the few survivors to transfer their treasure—Inca gold and silver—to the island. A year passed without rescue. The remaining crew buried their loot beneath a tree on Palmyra and then constructed rafts, attempting to return to civilization. A single survivor was picked up by an American whaling ship but exposure, dehydration, and pneumonia had taken their toll: he survived only long enough to tell a sketchy story before the secret of the treasure died along with him. None of the other rafts or survivors were ever recovered.
In 1855, a whaling ship—perhaps in search of the Esperanza's Incan gold and silver trove—was consumed on the deadly reefs of the island. The ship and her crew disappeared as if they had never existed.
To this day ships and yachts and sailboats have continued to disappear or have had calamitous encounters with Palmyra and its reefs. And each account differs from other sea disasters with just that extra detail or two that turns the whole set of circumstances . . . odd. Abandoned sailboats found drifting, shipwrecked crews that no one would agree to rescue, charts of the island found washed ashore thousands of miles away . . . and survivors' tales of the overwhelmingly creepy feeling of being watched by the island's uninhabited jungles.
Even the U.S. Navy came to recognize the "Palmyra Curse." During World War II the island was used as a refueling station. Its position, smack dab in the middle of the Pacific, made it ideal for a long-range operations base—both for submarines and air operations. President Roosevelt signed an executive order identifying Kingman Reef, close by Palmyra, as a U.S. National Defense Area, declaring it off limits to foreign planes and surface craft back in 1941. The order has apparently never been rescinded.
Too bad for our fighting men—or subsequent generations of visitors—Palmyra isn't the tropical paradise that many Pacific islands tend to emulate.
The reefs that surround Palmyra are actually a triple threat. Not only do they devour unwary ships but they harbor large colonies of ciguatera algae and appear to be the Pacific nursery for the gray and black-tipped reef sharks. The problem with the former is that this particular strain of algae is very poisonous—not to the fish that feed on it, but to anyone expecting a seafood diet while visiting. And the problem with the latter is that the lagoons and beaches are off limits for swimming as well as fishing. Even wading is a deadly gamble.
And then there were the technical mishaps. Like the time a Navy patrol plane went down just off the island. It disappeared without a trace—not even flotsam or jetsam or an oil slick to mark its impact. Or the flights that would take off from the runway and inexplicably turn the wrong way and head in the opposite direction of their flight plan. More than one flight was never heard from again—somewhat understandable as World War II had commenced in the Pacific—but there were other incidents, as well. Planes that would circle the island, unable to find the runway. Or fly over Palmyra without being able to see the island at all. There was a reason sharks frequented the waters surrounding Palmyra.
After World War II the Navy abandoned the island. Over the decades that have passed since, it has been visited by yachtsmen and sailors of various stripes and several attempts to colonize the island were made. No one stayed for any length of time. Conditions always turned bizarrely difficult. Even vinyl would rot—a situation difficult to reproduce anywhere else. All accounts agreed on a similar tone that something was not quite right and that the place filled visitors with a sense of foreboding.
This was even before the double murders of Mac and Muff Graham in 1974. Muff's remains were washed up on the beach a few years later. Her body had been burned, dismembered, stuffed into a metal cargo box, weighted, and sunk offshore. Mac Graham's remains remain unfound. Prosecutor Vince Bugliosi wrote a book, And the Sea Will Tell, about prosecuting the murder case against Buck Walker for the double murders.
"So," I said, as Zotz finally began to wind down, "does this island have hatches in the ground with underground bunkers?"
He nodded. "Yeah. It was a Naval installation, remember? There are still all kinds of gear and outbuildings supposed to be there. Gun emplacements . . . runway . . . causeway . . . roads . . . ammo dumps . . ."
"Polar bears?" I asked. "Smoke monster?"
"What? Oh. I get it. Like the TV show." He snapped his fingers. As they were webbed the sound was rather unpleasant. "Maybe Palmyra was part of the inspiration for the writers."
"Well, it sure wasn't Gilligan's Island. What about the other two coordinates?"
He shook his misshapen head. "This may or may not be the weirdest part . . ."
"Oh goody."
"There was this Indiana Jones-type guy," Zotz continued, "back around the turn of the last century. Globe-trotter, archeologist-without-portfolio, obsessive whack job: had these outlandish theories about aliens and ancient archeology."
"Chariots of the Gods?"
"More like Dragsters of the Damned. This guy claimed to have discovered the ruins of giant alien civilizations—in Europe, the Middle East, Asia—even the Antarctic. He'd fire off these long, rambling dispatches to Derleth—"
"Derleth?"
"August Derleth. Editor of the The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. He was the only newspaper editor who took Lovecraft's communiqués seriously."
"Lovecraft," I said.
Zotz nodded. "Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Died young. Official story was cancer."
I grunted. "Brain tumor?"
"Naw. Intestinal cancer. Though one rumor was he was insane when he died. Another that, whatever he was hunting, it found him first."
"So, what was he hunting?"
"An ancient city. A big, bad-ass alien city built a million years ago."
"More ruins?"
"That's just it. Some of his dispatches talk of this city like it's an ancient tomb. Yet others suggest that it's still inhabited. He got the backing of Derleth and the paper to take a tramp steamer down to the South Pacific to look for it."
"Sounds like a nice vacation," I observed.
"No, I mean the southern South Pacific. Down closer to the Antarctic. Bit nippy. Anyways, no islands at the first set of coordinates, 47°9' S 126°43' W, so Derleth radioed a second set to explore while he was in the area: 49°51' S 128°34' W. They're fairly close together—in the global sense—and way off the regular shipping lanes."
"And?" I prompted.
"Nada. Nothing. Empty ocean. Even today's satellite maps show nothing's there. On the surface anyways. But underneath? These two locations linked to the first set of coordinates for your fictional Lincoln Island form a triangle that covers a good portion of the Eltanin Fracture Zone of the South Pacific. A strange series of seismic events involving intense T waves was recorded back in the early nineties and again earlier this year."
I looked at him.
"And that's it. That's all I've got. Four global chart coordinates and only one correlation to an actual land mass. It's not like I had a lot of time to do the research but it's not like there's a lot of info available on the base data. Four sets of coordinates; one tiny, pretty much deserted island. You want more? You gotta give me wider search parameters. And an internet connection. And more time."
"Okay, Lincoln Island," I mused, "was part of a dormant volcano—fictional, of course—but if Lovecraft and Derleth had any actual intel on their two locations, undersea volcanoes would certainly account for the rapid appearance and or disappearance of a land mass at sea."
"And Palmyra," Zotz added, "is actually an atoll, rather than an island by classification."
"So, it's the remains of an extinct, collapsed volcano?"
He nodded. "A crescent-shaped remainder of the original cone and several islets."
"Okay," I said. "We've got four sets of coordinates located in the Pacific Ocean. One is for a real island—or atoll. With a spooky history. One is for a fictional island that never existed outside of the pages of a science fiction novel . . ."
"As far as we know," Zotz interjected.
"What?"
"Well, just because there's nothing there now, doesn't mean there wasn't at one time. You just pointed out that undersea volcanoes—"
"It was a sci-fi novel! A pretty good sci-fi novel but fiction, just the same. Verne wrote about fictional people on a fictional island! The submarine didn't even exist, yet!"
Zotz shook his head. "Not true. Dutch inventor Cornelius Drebbel built the first navigable submarine in 1620 based on Englishman William Bourne's designs from the 1570s. You Americans were experimenting with submersible vessels well before Verne's fictional Nautilus. Bushnell's Turtle was invented in 1775 and employed in the Revolutionary War. And the Civil War saw the development of two Confederate subs, the David and the Hunley, and one Union submersible, the Intelligent Whale."
"The Hunley was the only submersible to ever successfully sink a target," I interrupted, "if you can call an unintentionally kamikaze mission 'successful.' I see you really have been doing research and not just spending all of your online time smut surfing. But the bottom line is there wasn't anything like the Nautilus until the last century."
Zotz shook his head again. "The fact that there isn't an island there now doesn't prove that there wasn't an island there then . . . anymore than the fact that there wasn't a submarine like the Nautilus then proves that Verne was writing of fictional events."
"Wow," I said. "I know I'm tired and distracted and my brain is probably co-opted by all my nanos giving me a hive five . . . but I'm just not up to debating your impeccable logic on that one."
He shrugged. "Thought you'd learned by now to keep an open mind."
"Okay. One known 'island,' three patches of empty ocean—at present—for the other sets of coordinates. The only common threads are that all are placed in the mid to southern expanse of the Pacific Ocean with the possible criteria of volcanoes, past or present. And one scary lady's voodoo altar." I looked at Zotz. "What does it mean?"
Zotz's inhuman features tightened into an implacable knot. "It means we run down to the Big Easy and make a certain close-mouthed fortune-teller tell us what it's all about."
"Good luck," I said, remembering her reticence on the entire subject matter.
"You mean on getting her to talk? Or taking a shallow-draft houseboat down the Ouachita, Red, and Mississippi rivers, all the way down to the Gulf and finding her in the middle of a monster tropical storm—if she isn't already blown up in a hundred different directions and into a hundred different dimensions?"
"There is that," I said.
Dawn was still hours away when, one by one, the stars began to go out.
There wasn't a visible cloud in the sky so the effect was a little end-of-the-worldish.
The Marine-band radio was busy with reports of a category one hurricane forming out in the Gulf of Mexico but spared time for a mention of volcanic eruptions along the Pacific Rim of Fire. Apparently Mother Earth was convulsing big time, blasting billions of tons of ash into the Earth's upper stratosphere and mesosphere. A nice, scientific explanation but it did little to dispel the eldritch effect of the rest of the universe disappearing into endless darkness.
When sunrise finally came it was nothing more than a red smear on the horizon. Continental shelves of cumulous clouds rolled up from the south like airborne glaciers. The sky turned the color of an ancient tin roof. Down in the Gulf, Hurricane Eibon had ramped up to a category two.
The Ouachita was still running relatively smooth and the New Moon was making headway at twelve knots. When I had purchased my home upon the water she'd come equipped with a pair of Mercruiser 180 hp engines that gave her a cruising speed of seven knots on one motor or a full running speed of eight knots using both. One rarely races houseboats and since running both engines doubles the fuel consumption while only yielding an additional one-point-one-mile-per-hour increase in speed, I could have done the sensible thing and left the whole package alone.
I am not a sailor. I am a guy who values a quick getaway and the ability to outrun things that the local law enforcement types—police, fire department, coast guard—are typically unprepared to protect you against.
So I had the original engines replaced. Had bigger, badder, more powerful props and motors squeezed into the chassis. As expensive as the new engines were, the dry-dock charges and rehabbing cost me even more.
As I said, I'm not a sailor: they saw me coming. After all was said and done I discovered that my new engines were theoretically capable of pushing the New Moon's equivalent weight and mass at better than 20 knots. But the houseboat's draft and overall displacement would only tolerate eleven—and only under ideal conditions, thirteen to fourteen—knots before becoming "unmanageable." I could say "unstable" but that's more descriptive of what would happen if I pushed it to sixteen. Forget the Proud Mary; the New Moon would redefine the phrase "rollin' on the river!"
At this speed it would take me better than three days to thread the river traffic, switchbacks, locks, and obstacle-laden watercourses between the Ouachita and the lower Mississippi. Not taking into account fueling stops, mechanical cool-downs, or the mitigating effects of bad weather.
And God help us if we encountered any more boarding parties along the way.
No, I needed an alternate means of locomotion. Going ashore seemed to be our only option, even if the return trip was guaranteed to be a nightmare due to the choked evacuation routes.
But first we had to lose our furry "tails."
Every attempt to swing in close to either side of the river during the night had been met by a series of howls and a gathering wolf pack along the shore. Any hope of daylight providing a solution was dispelled as a trio of pickup trucks was revealed off our starboard side, pacing us on the levee road. I almost didn't need the binoculars to see that the "human" occupants had a decidedly unshaven, lupine look. And the "hunting dogs" grinning from the back beds left no doubt as to their true pedigree. We kept to the center channel, mindful of cab-mounted gun racks and overhead bridges.
"Go below and get some sleep," Zotz said as I took another quarter turn around the upper helm. He was nearly human-looking now in deference to the growing odds of daylight traffic on the river.
"We should take turns," I said.
"I don't sleep. I'm a magical construct. You, however, are starting to look like a cross between Death warmed over and something stuck under those infrared lamps on the back counter at a third-rate burger joint."
I shook my head. "I thought we would have shaken them by now. We need a better plan than putt-putting down the meandering waterways of Louisiana's scenic vistas."
"You have something against traveling by water?" Liban's voice asked from my feet. Her head appeared as she climbed the steps from the lower deck.
"We're moving too slow," I explained as she stepped up to join us. "We need to go ashore."
"Your enemies are ashore," she said. "You're safer on the water."
I snorted. "Until the Fabulous Finny Freak Brothers show up again. Or Carpet'o'Slime. Or Mysterious Underwater Light. The point is I can travel more quickly by car than by boat. Here, we have no maneuvering room. Silas's crew doesn't have to keep us in sight at all times; they only need to follow the river, monitor the forks, and wait for us to make landfall. But the bottom line is speed. The river doesn't travel in a straight line and we're not geared for speed."
Her eyes swept the river's course to the horizon. "What if you were?"
"What?"
"Geared for speed?"
I frowned. "I don't follow you."
"But if you do follow me, I can open a way that may solve some of our problems."
"Uh," I said. Somewhere behind the question of just what she was getting at was the issue of how "my" problems had become "our" problems.
"I am a sea goddess," Liban continued. "Unlike my sister, I still have power over water. If we were sailing upon the ocean I could open a path through the sea that would turn months into weeks, weeks into days, days into hours. Although the ocean is my elemental demesne, a tributary is not so alien as it is confining."
I stared at her. "Can you open a path to New Orleans?"
"I can but try."
"Great! Let's get started!"
She shook her head. "I must rest, first. Rest and prepare."
"Now there's a smart idea," Zotz rasped. "She rests. You rest. Everybody's fresh when we hit the Big Sleazy."
"Why don't you give it a rest?" I growled.
"I'm a magical construct," he beamed, "I don't need to rest. But you're overdue, Mr. Grumpypants. Go down below, get reacquainted with your bunk, and make sure you're not running on empty the next time you have to exert yourself. I've got it all covered up here but I promise to call if the scenery changes."
I gazed out to the south where the land was cloaked in distant darkness. A yellowed thread of lightning winked at the edge of the horizon. "I don't know if I can sleep . . ."
A hand fumbled for mine: Liban's.
"Come, rest with me."
I looked back at her face and saw what it cost her to swallow her pride and offer herself for a second round of rejection. To a mortal. With a demon as witness.
Damned pheromones!
I opened my mouth but no words would come out.
You think it's easy saying no to a faerie queen? An elven sea goddess? A woman whose beauty made the concept of "no" practically unthinkable?
Practically, but—even though Lupé had pretty much cut me loose this past year and even though our future was uncertain given the incompatibility of our body chemistries—I wasn't an emotional free agent, here. I was on my way to rescue the mother of my unborn son. And Deirdre was somewhere in the mix. And it wouldn't be fair—to anyone but especially her—to complicate things emotionally, now.
No matter how unthinkable "no" might seem to our super-amped, hormone-drenched response systems.
Still, given the fact that her mental/emotional/biochemical gestalt was being seriously destabilized by yours truly, I owed her better than another smack to her self-esteem.
And, from the purely practical, almost clinical point of view, rejecting a powerful ally whose contributions might make all the difference between saving my friends and family and arriving too late—well, bit of a horned and horny dilemma here.
All that aside, it wasn't the uncertainty over what to say that was preventing words from coming out of my mouth.
Something seemed to have severed the synapses connecting my brain to my vocal chords!
Maybe I was having a stroke! The top of my head felt funny. Numb . . . tingly . . . squirmy . . . ?
"Holy cow, Uncle Martin!" Zotz exclaimed.
I reached up and felt twin rods emerging from the top of my skull. I turned on wobbly legs and caught sight of my reflection in the portside mirror for the helm. Silver stems that were dead ringers for an old set of rabbit-ears antenna had telescoped out of my scalp and now crowned me like a silver V.
I had just enough time to reflect on two things.
One, that Ray Walston looked just like this on My Favorite Martian every time he invoked his extraterrestrial powers. And two, right after his antennae came up, he turned invisible.
And that's when I turned invisible.
Well, to be more accurate, everything turned invisible.
.
.
.
Here's the thing . . .
I never really was much of a clubber. And once you settle down, get married, have a kid—well, staying out till two or three in the morning just drops off the options list.
Now a lot of undead are drawn to the late-night club "life." It gives them a sense of community, something to do together to fight off that creeping ennui that won't go away as the decades and then the centuries mount up. And open clubs provide open hunting grounds for those too lazy to stalk their prey far afield.
Of course, that cuts both ways: I'd briefly reacquainted myself with the club scene on a few occasions when I'd gone hunting the hunters after Jenny and Kirsten died. Vampires hunt humans at certain clubs so vampire hunters hunt the vampires there, as well. Seriously, at least one bouncer per club should be trained as a game warden.
All that aside, I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out why I was standing in line outside of a Hindi nightclub with the soundtrack from some Bollywood musical pumping up the volume through the open doors. merrick's flashed on and off in tubular neon over an arched doorway that tapered upwards to a point. Electric sitars and tanpura twanged and danced, violins and sarangi sang and wailed, tablas and pakhawajs thumped and boomed: the music was ancient, primal, the beat was vaguely disco. Somewhere in the back of my mind was this nagging impression that I had more important things to do at the moment.
Anything else to do at the moment . . .
The line moved and I found myself confronted by the doorman. He was a big gorilla and looked me over to decide whether or not I passed the entrance exam. I looked back.
It's sort of a stereotype to refer to club bouncers and door men as "gorillas" as they tend to be big, no-neck, missing-link types who will shake your tree if you give them half an excuse. But this guy was really an ape! Half monkey, half man, he wore a Hugo Boss three-button, red-black pinstripe suite. Gold cuff links with the letter "H" encrusted in diamonds flashed at his hairy wrists. I got a good look as his inhumanly long arm came down like a railroad crossing gate.
"Invitation?"
I looked up at the peculiar scar on his chin. Invitation? To what? Where was I? What was I doing here?
Just beyond his unfamiliar monkey mug a more familiar, less anthropomorphic profile appeared. The giant barrel-monster for the seafood lover in you appeared in the doorway, waving tentacles and eyestalks and flexing its centrally spaced, leathery wings.
"Let it in, Hanuman," said the not-quite-Winky voice. "It is summoned."
The gorillalike arm was removed from my path with a sigh. "Very well. I have nothing against ecumenicalism, you understand, but with the fate of the world hanging in the balance . . ."
"We are all Outsiders here, godling. Only those who inhabit the Prime Plane can contest for it when the Devourers come. Either they will prove themselves cattle and seal their fates," starfish head said, backing into the darkened interior. "Or contend for their place among the stars as have those of us which have come before."
I wasn't keen on going forward. As I said before, what the hell was I doing in line at a raga rock nightclub? And, not real invested on following Tubby Tentacles into a strange, dark building. Monkeyman's parting shot was no confidence booster, either. "If all of our hopes reside in the demon shade of one of our lost supplicants and a clueless unbeliever," he said, "then I fear all is lost before it is well begun . . ."
Unfortunately, dream states come with their own sets of internal rules and compulsions: I was into the building and out of earshot before he was finished.
The entryway was a long, dark corridor that turned this way and that, becoming a pipeline of sound with thrashing electric neo-Hindi music pounding out a beat while occasional bursts of light indicated a destination of sorts, ahead.
I came out into an immense, black room whose walls and ceiling were tricked out in vast patterns of stars. It was the best disco-ball effect I had ever seen: it was as if I was standing out in the midst of the cosmos, surrounded by the endless depths of the universe. As the stars slowly revolved, the occasional comet and momentary meteor stuttered by. Such was the nature of the illusion that a room that could barely accommodate a hundred clubbers appeared as if it could contain tens of thousands with room to spare.
Surprisingly, the other clubgoers had wandered off into other rooms: only one other dancer was out on the floor at the moment. And, rather than be intimidated by the cavernous room, he owned the dance floor. Spinning and stomping and gliding and shaking, he threw himself into the music with a passion and intensity that was positively breathtaking.
And then I noticed the tentacle growing out of his misshapen face!
Crap! One thing on top of another and now this: apparently Dead Can Dance!
And now tentacle-puss was dancing my way.
I looked around: vast black room, lit by hundreds of thousands of pinpricks of light. No obvious exits. I didn't have a clue as to which way to run. Maybe I could sucker-punch him while he was still doing the Monster Mash. . . .
But as he shimmied closer I got a better look at his serpentine schnoz. It wasn't a tentacle. It was a trunk. An elephant's trunk. Dancing boy looked human from the shoulders down but, from the neck up, he was sporting an elephant's head.
I checked the ears: Indian, not African, elephant's head. And missing a tusk.
Okay, not Gnarly-ho-tep or squidhead.
But dangerous?
It was hard to think evil of a creature who seemed to be having so much damned fun dancing! The only way I could feel threatened was if I'd brought my girlfriend along and was trying to impress her with my own moves.
Elephant head danced up and bowed to me without missing a step of the beat.
"Bloodbender, I greet you and ask you to join me in the Celestial Dance."
Okaaayyyy. "And you are . . . ?"
He—it—smiled and shrugged. "I forget that you are technically an infidel. I have many names. You may call me Ganesh."
"I like it better when you go by Kankiten," said a new voice.
An Asian gentleman strode into the nearest spotlight and stood, considering the two of us. Unlike dancing boy, who favored saffron robes and what looked like platform-soled Guccis, the new arrival looked more of a sartorial match with the simian bouncer. The lighting made it hard to distinguish details so I was guessing the suit was most likely Louis Vuitton or Giorgio Armani. A short sword threw off the tailored lines of his suitcoat: the scabbard on his belt pushed back the left flap of his jacket to show a doubled-edged, straight-bladed Bronze Age short sword rather than the curved katana one might typically associate with his genetic antecedents.
"Susanowo-no-mikoto!" the elephant man trilled. "How auspicious of you to join us! Come, dance, and we shall speak of that which must be done before the music ends."
"Bah! Your one piece is in play on the board," Susanowo answered gruffly. "I still have hundreds more to bring into play! I have volcanoes to unplug!" He turned on his heel and strode off into the darkness.
"Give my regards to your lovely sister," disco boy called after him. He turned to me. "Too bad we couldn't get Amaterasu Omikami more intimately involved."
"Yeah," I said. "Too bad about that."
"Oh, my dear boy," he chuckled, "you're attempting to have me on a bit." He shook his head. "Won't work, you know. I'm a god."
"Yeah. Well. I hate to be rude and all, but not really into the gods thing. Never was a polytheist and starting to question the monotheist proposal these days."
"Well, we won't quibble over semantics, dear boy. Just think of me as a higher power. One of a number who are invested in the good of the world."
"Judging by the evening news, there can't be that many of you—or you're just not that powerful."
He chuckled, still keeping the beat as he danced and conversed at the same time. "You and Dakkar—so much anger and cynicism. Yet the two of you may be our best hope. Yin and yang. Again, like a dance. Come," he extended a hand to me. "In the dance are the greater truths revealed."
Like I said, not much for clubbing these days. And I was never one for being dragged out on the dance floor by strange men. Not a homophobe, I have gay friends but, come on: a guy with the head of an elephant? I stood there with my arms folded across my chest and waited, figuring someone owed me some answers before I took another step.
But, dammit, I was tapping my foot along with the rhythm and dancing boy's joie de vivre was so freaking infectious!
"Dance, Bloodbender!" Ganesh or Kankiten or John Merrick cried. "Dance and live! Life is dancing! Dancing is life. Even the very atoms dance so that worlds might be. The soul must dance or the soul dies. The universe must dance or creation dies. Entropy. Heat death. The final, empty, cold blackness of nothing—that is the end of the dance. For you or for a thousand billion souls. So dance and hold back the cold and the darkness!"
"What? Are we talking sympathetic magic, here?" I growled. But I was already twitching along to the beat as I spoke.
Ganesh grabbed my hand and jerked me toward him. I had to sidestep to avoid a collision and he turned my hand at the wrist, pulling my arm up, and I found myself executing a pirouette as he released on the follow-through. I had to step very deliberately to keep from stumbling and, the next thing I knew, we were dancing side by side. That's when I noticed he had four arms instead of just two.
"I don't have time for this," I muttered.
"Look," elephant guy gestured. Across the stars-spangled dance floor "stood" the double-starfish-barrel-stacked rutabaga. "They don't dance. That is why they could not ultimately prevail."
"Oh. Well, then," I puffed. "I think we're screwed, then. You need John Travolta or Patrick Swayze or Michael Jackson, even."
"It is not you, alone, but the gestalt. The unification of those lives and talents that you and only you can unite in this moment in time. They are drawn to you in ways that higher powers such as ourselves could not hope to emulate. Only to harness. And lend what poor assistance that we can. You must overcome your own entropy in the face of doubt. Act intuitively! Trust your impulses!"
Oh yeah. Sure. Now there's a good idea: acting on all of my impulses. Let's see where that would lead. One, probably ripping out a fair number of throats on a weekly basis. Two, more than likely fathering the student enrollment for half the Montessori schools in the city. Three, expressing my political sentiments by affixing a hangman's noose to every streetlamp within a three-block radius of the Washington Capitol building . . .
Impulse control is, by and large, an underappreciated virtue.
"No, Sweet Infidel, you must trust in something greater than Fear, greater than Anger or Despair. Trust in Joy! Come and dance!"
"I have things to do," I growled. "Family to rescue . . ."
"Oh, far more than that, dear mouse. You have a world to save!"
"I don't care about the world. I care about my family. In spite of the changes to my preternatural biology I still feel something for them, at least. For a while longer. And, as long as it matters to me, I'll be investing in that, thank you. Not a bunch of strangers who don't know me. And would probably pick up a stake or a torch if they did."
"Nevertheless," Ganesh/Kankiten countered, "Fate has anointed you our Champion. If you would save your family, you must save the world."
"Find somebody else," I growled.
"It has been tried. My colleagues have reactivated history's greatest souls, hoping one or more might echo the Mahabharata's promise of a Deliverer. One of them travels with you even now."
"Who? Cuchulainn? Whoa, if you're profiling badass brawlers you've got to know I'm not it!"
Four-armed elephant guy shook his oversized head. "Not my choice. But significant that he found his way to your side."
"Oh yeah, the Army could take recruiting lessons from me."
"And then there is your affiliation with the Peri."
"What? The elves?"
"And the legions of dead who follow you from below."
"Sorry, totally not getting the fishfolk tie-in."
"Which is why I am sending you the one who was once Dakkar. He will be Kevat to your Rama and ferry you to your destiny."
"Rama?" I arched an eyebrow.
"It is a metaphor," he said mildly. "I doubt he will want to wash your feet."
"Rama-lama-ding-dong," I muttered.
"You mock what you do not understand."
I nodded. "That's right. I'd keep the hero job search open awhile longer if I were you." I kept nodding along to the beat. Damn. "Now if it's all the same to you, I've got a boat to catch."
"Yes. Yes, you do. Just remember, most heroes don't seek the quest, the quest seeks them. And sometimes it is the single word rather than the grand gesture that tips the balance of the world. Even now, Dakkar tries too hard. He is still a man of Science, even is his latest incarnation. What is needed is a man of Faith."
"Yeah, well," I said, "good luck with that."
"You are that man."
"Help me, Obi-Wan; you're our only hope."
Elephant guy blinked. "I do not understand."
"At last, something we agree on! Look, Horton, I'm sure you meant what you said and you said what you meant, but I'm totally interested like zero percent. You and the elves and the big barrel of monster parts are all babbling about sacrifices and transformations and saving the world like it's some kind of special privilege to go toe to toe with some giant Nightmare from the Phantom Zone. Well, I've got my own problems. If I was totally invested in the monster-killing business, I'd have to start with me. Then there's the fact that most of my closest friends are now nightmares in their own right. I don't know if I can even get to and rescue the people who mean the most to me in time. Every time I turn around, my own body seems to be booby-trapped and turning me into Inspector Gadget. So, from a practical perspective, I really don't see what I can do for you or for the rest of the world, right now."
"You can dance," he said.
"What good will that do me?"
"Close your eyes and see where the celestial music takes you."
Well, like I said, dream states have their own internal sets of rules and compulsions: I closed my eyes and abandoned myself to the beat. It beat talking nonsense to Ali Babar. The music swept me up and disoriented me. I felt as though I were tipping over, yet never falling. Dancing sideways and on my back. Twisting, hips thrusting to the beat. Sinuous and swaying, stepping on air and surrendering to a tidal wave of pleasure, rolling me over and over in my head . . .
.
. . . in my bed.
I sat up feeling the top of my head. The silver antennae were gone. I looked down: so was my clothing. The sheets were rumpled and half off the bed. The pillow was halfway across the cabin on the floor.
The shower was running on the other side of the door to the head.
I looked down and touched myself where the swelling had started to subside. I was sticky.
"Oh crap," I whispered. "I think I've been had!"