The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All (26 page)

    Ms. Diamond's knee brushed his own; her hands were primly folded in her lap. She smiled a glassy smile of defeat. Mr. Rawat lolled directly across the way, eyes closed. Kara's cheek rested against the breast of his jacket. The Cooks reclined a few inches over, nodding placidly with the swaying of the car. Dedrick was in front, riding shotgun, hidden by the opaque glass.

    Dr. Christou said to Mrs. Cook, "What do you mean, Francine? The land itself can possess sentience? The Great Father of the Native Americans writ in root and rock?"

    "Yes," said Mrs. Cook. "Yes, that is exactly what I mean. Vortexes, dolmens, leylines, sacred monoliths, massive deposits of crystal and other conducting minerals."

    Dr. Christou shrugged. "How do you envision these anomalies affecting the larger environment-human society?"

    "The natives amplified them with ceremonies and the construction of corresponding devices. Some acolytes yet perform the ancient rituals in the name of…various entities. Places of power become more powerful." The dome light was on. Mrs. Cook stared into the mirror of her compact. She patted her nose. "There's an ancient gridwork across this landscape. A scar. You can't feel it? How it plucks at you, siphons a tiny bit of your very life force? No, you can't. My disappointment is…Well, it's profound, Doctor. Profound indeed."

    "But
you
can feel it," Dr. Christou said. He averted his gaze, grimacing, a man who'd gotten the scent of something rancid and might vomit.

    "Yes. Yes! Why else would I let hubby-kins drag me to Kansas of all benighted places?"

    Mr. Cook sneered. "I don't give a tinker's damn for office property, only that its foundation lies upon the rim of a vast, ancient wheel. We, this speck of a vehicle, travel across it like a flea on the back of an elephant."

    "You see, my good doctor, we've done our homework. The old races made a number of heroic excavations." Mrs. Cook had applied a lot of powder. Her face was ghastly pale, except her lips, which resembled red earthworms. "Those excavations are hidden beneath the shifting stones and the sunflowers and the wheat. Yet they endure and exert significant force. A million bones ground to dust, a lake of blood leeched down, down into the earth, coagulated as amber. This good earth buzzes with a black radiation. Honey and milk to certain individuals."

    "Right on," Mr. Cook said, idly adjusting his silvery ascot. He licked his lips at Mrs. Cook as she snapped shut the compact.

    "Besides the Serpent Intaglio, I'm unaware of any geoglyphs in this region. Even if these geoglyphs of yours exist…Comanche, Arapahoe, Kickapoo, Kaw… None of them were terraformers on the scale you suggest." Dr. Christou was rubbing his skull again. A red splotch grew livid on his brow.

    "Not the new tribes," Mrs. Cook said. "Rather the civilizations that ruled here when this continent was still fused to Asia."

    "Back, back, back," Mr. Cook said. "Only two continents in those days. Plus the polar caps. A wee bit before our time, admittedly."

    Lancaster surfaced from his own disjointed thoughts and began to process the exchange. Cold bright recollection smashed through his mind, a dousing of ice water, although he only experienced the visceral epiphany in the abstract, unable to comprehend the nature of its import. He said with practiced and patently false calmness, "Mr. Rawat, how did you come to learn of the Roache property? Someone brought it to your attention. Your investors, or someone in your employ? You have a department devoted to mergers and acquisitions."

    Ms. Diamond casually dug an elbow into Lancaster's ribs. Mr. Rawat opened one eye. "Byron and Francine. They prepared a prospectus."

    "Byron and I were vacationing in Portugal," Mrs. Cook said. "The three of us happened to stay at the same hotel. One thing led to another, and another…"

    "We became fast friends," Mr. Rawat said.

    "Bosom buddies," Mr. Cook said, staring directly and unblinkingly at Lancaster. What had Ms. Diamond called him? Mr. Howell from
Gilligan's Island
. Yeah, there was an uncanny resemblance here in the shifty gloom.

    Lancaster glanced from the Cooks to Dr. Christou. "Last night, who started that conversation about monsters?" He knew even before anyone answered that his assumption Mr. Rawat or Dr. Christou chose the topic was in error. They'd merely carried it along. He remembered kissing Mrs. Cook's hand the previous evening, its repellent flavor of sweet, rotting fruit and underlying acridness. She'd been inside his mind before that, though, been inside all of their heads, that was her power. Even now her likeness floated in his waking mind, whispering to him how it was, how it would be. A river of blood, the sucking of living marrow-

    Mrs. Cook's bright smile widened. "
Monsters
fascinate me to no end." She leaned forward and grasped Dr. Christou's thigh as if propositioning a would-be lover. "We've read all of your books, Doctor."

    "We've come a long way for this," Mr. Cook said. "There are some friends we'd like to introduce to you."

    Dr. Christou's face slackened. He made an inarticulate sound from the back of his throat. Finally, he mastered himself and said to Lancaster, "Do you understand what's happening? My god, Lancaster. Tell me you understand."

    Lancaster hesitated and Mrs. Cook cackled, head thrown back, throat muscles bunching.

    Mr. Cook glanced out the window, then at his watch. "Oh, my. They're waiting. I almost dared not hope…On with the show." He loosened his tie.

    The limo slowed and halted at a lonely four-way crossroads overseen by a traffic light dangling from a wire. The light burned red. A sedan was parked at an odd angle in the approaching right-hand lane, hazards flashing. A man and a woman dressed in evening clothes stood nearby, blank and stolid, awaiting rescue, perhaps. Lancaster squinted; the couple seemed familiar. As the limo began to roll forward through the intersection, Ms. Diamond said, "My god." She pressed the intercom button and ordered Ms. Valens to pull over.

    "Wait, don't do it," Dr. Christou said with the affect of a man heavily medicated; a man who'd chosen to give warning in afterthought when it was far too late.

    "It's them." Ms. Diamond was already on her way out of the car and briskly walking toward the other motorists. Her heels clacked on the asphalt.

    "What's going on?" Mr. Rawat said, annoyed.

    "Who are those people?" Kara said. Her face was sleepy and swollen.

    Mr. Cook reached up and killed the dome light. From the shadows he said, "Victoria's parents. They burned alive in a car crash. 1985. She has lived alone for so long."

    "Uh-uh," Kara said. "That's Casey Jean Laufenburg and her brother Lloyd. I went to high school with those guys."

    "Did they burn in a car accident too?" Dr. Christou said.

    "Worse. Casey Jean's in retail. It's awful." She gazed at Mr. Rawat imploringly. "Can we please keep going? Why do we have to stop?" She sounded fully awake and afraid.

    "Don't you want to say hello to your chums?" Mr. Cook said. "And you, doctor. Aren't you just positively consumed with fascination? This is how it happens. A lonely road at night. You come across someone familiar…an old friend, a brother, a sister, the priest from the neighborhood."

    Mrs. Cook said, "It could be anyone, whomever is flitting around your brain. Here's the darkness, the haunted byway. Here in your twilight, you get to be part of the legend."

    "That's enough booze for you, Ma'am," Lancaster said with forced cheer. Mrs. Cook released Dr. Christou and grasped Lancaster's forearm in a soft, almost effortless fashion that nonetheless reduced his resistance to that of a bug with a leg stuck on a fly strip. She opened herself and let him see. He was bodiless, weightless, sucked like smoke through a pipe stem toward a massive New England style house. He was drawn inside the house-marble tiles, sweeping staircases, bookcases, paintings-and into the master bedroom, the wardrobe, so cavernous and dim. An older couple were bound together in barbed wire. They dangled from a ceiling hook, their corpses liver-gray and bloodless, unspun hair dragging against the carpet. Eyes glazed, jaws slack. The real Cooks had never even made it out of their home.

    The image collapsed and disintegrated and Lancaster reconstituted in the present, Mrs. Cook's, fingers clamped on his arm. He wrenched free and flopped back into his seat, strength drained. He said to Dr. Christou, "I think we've been poisoned." Someone had spiked the liquor, dosed the food with hallucinogens to soften the group, to break them down. Lancaster had read about this, the government experiments on Vietnam soldiers, the spritzing of subways with LSD in the 1970s. Mind control was the name of the game. "Doctor, this may be…" Lancaster shook his head to clear it, trying to decide exactly
why
an oppositional force would want to drug them. "It's a kidnapping." The motive seemed shockingly obvious-ransom. This carload of rich people tooling along the countryside could represent a payday for a suitably prepared criminal. He pressed the intercom and said, "There's a situation. Something's happening."

    The glass whisked down and Dedrick swiveled in his seat. "Yes?"

    "I believe we're under attack. Please get Ms. Diamond. Drag her if necessary. Ms. Valens, the minute they're in the vehicle get us the hell out of here."

    "Excuse me" Mr. Rawat said, his reserve cracked, a raw nerve of terror exposed in his rapid blinking. Doubtless he'd seen his share of violence back in the homeland and was acutely aware of his vulnerability. "Mr. Lancaster, what do you mean we're under attack? Dedrick?"

    Dedrick's stony countenance didn't alter. "Sir, please wait." He made no further comment while exiting the limo and striding toward Ms. Diamond and friends. His right hand was thrust inside his jacket. Mr. Rawat appeared shocked and Kara retrieved a baggie from her purse. She dry-swallowed a handful of parti-colored pills. Surprisingly, in the face of fear she kept quiet.

    Lancaster squirmed around until he managed to get a view from the rear window of what was happening outside. He simultaneously opened his cell phone and dialed the Roache security department and requested a detail be dispatched to the location at once. He considered alerting his handler Clack of the situation, except in his experience communication with the NSA office was routed through multiple filters and ultimately reached an answering machine instead of a human being ninety percent of the time. It seemed a bad sign that the Cooks were unconcerned that he'd summoned the cavalry. Something great and terrible was descending upon this merry company of travelers. He said, "Who are you working for?"

    "The Russians," Mr. Cook said.

    "The Bulgarians," Mrs. Cook said. "The Scythians, the Picts, the Ostrogoths, the wicker-crowned God Kings of Ultima Thule. The Martians."

    "Mrs. Cook and I serve the whims of marvelous entities, foolish man," Mr. Cook said. "The ones inhabiting the cracks in the earth, as the doctor is so fond of opining."

    That sounded like some kind of terrorist group to Lancaster. "Why here? Why not at the office where there'd be privacy?"

    The Cooks exchanged blandly malevolent glances.

    Dr. Christou mumbled, "Because we are near a place of power. A blood sacrifice requires a sacred foundation."

    "Or a profane foundation," Mrs. Cook said.

    "Like sex magic, the journey is half the fun." Mr. Cook's grin shone in the gloom.

    "Really, you don't want to know the who, how, and why," Mrs. Cook said. "Alas, you will, and soon. We procure and thus persist."

    "Yes, we persist. Until the heat death of the universe."

    "Procure," Dr. Christou said in a monotone. His flesh seemed to be in the process of deliquescing. Blood beaded on his forehead, squeezed in fattening droplets from the pores and rolled down his cheeks. Blood leaked from the corners of his eyes. Blood trickled from his sleeve cuffs and dripped in his lap. "Procure, what do you procure?"

    Lancaster recoiled from the doctor. He had visions of anthrax, a vial of the Ebola virus, or one of a million other plagues synthesized in military labs the world over, and one of those plagues secreted in a handbag, a golf bag, wherever, now dosed into the food, the water, the wine, this virulent nastiness eating Dr. Christou alive. On a more fundamental level, he understood Christou's affliction wasn't any plague, manmade or otherwise, but the manifestation of something far worse.

    "My goodness, doctor, they
are
eager for your humor to draw it at this distance," Mr. Cook said, gleeful as a child who'd won a prize. He pretended to pout. "I was promised a taste. Gluttons!"

    "Go on, sweetie," Mrs. Cook said. "There is more than enough to spare."

    Mr. Rawat said, "My friend, my friend, you're hurt!" He extended his hand, hesitated upon thinking better of the gesture.

    The Cooks laughed, synchronized. A quantity of Dr. Christou's blood was drawn in gravity-defying rivulets from where it pooled on the seat, first to the floorboard, then vertically against the window where it formed globules and rotated as if suspended in zero gravity. Mr. Cook craned his neck and sucked the globules into the corner of his mouth. "If ambrosia tastes so sweet upon a mortal tongue, how our patrons must crave it as that which sustains them!"

    There was a thunderclap outside and a flash of fire. Ms. Diamond ran toward them. Her left high heel sheared and she did a swan dive onto the road. Dedrick also sprinted for the limo, moving with the grace and agility of a linebacker. He hurdled the fallen woman and blasted another round by twisting and aiming from under his armpit. Lancaster couldn't see the gun, but it had an impressive muzzle flash.

    The mystery couple pursued on hands and knees, clothes shredded to reveal slick, cancerous flesh illuminated in the red glare of the traffic light. Their true forms unfolded and extended. The pair approached in a segmented, wormlike motion, and the reason why was due to their joining at hip and shoulder. Their faces had collapsed into seething pits; blowtorch nozzles seen front on, except spouting jets of pure black flame. In that moment Lancaster realized what had been leeching Dr. Christou from afar and he became nauseated.