The God Machine (39 page)

I
N SUBBASEMENT
B
OF THE
P
RAYER
P
ALACE, FAR UNDER THE
earth, the great machine twinkled and purred. Michael Rose watched as the last of the technicians in their white cleanroom uniforms made their way from the chamber. The door wheezed and clicked, creating a seal. At last, Michael thought. He and Lacey were finally alone.

Michael took a step closer. He ran a hand down the side of the portal. He could feel a faint electrical charge through the tips of his fingers. “I can't believe you talked me into constructing this… this abomination.”

“It's just an experiment,” the archbishop replied. “And it hasn't harmed any of our animal subjects.” Lacey approached him. The archbishop wore his clerical robes, which made him appear even stranger in this high-tech environment, an anachronism. His forehead glistened with sweat.

“I'm not a monkey, Your Excellency,” said Michael. “Nor an evolutionist. We could be fulfilling the worst of the prophecies.
‘Now at that time Michael,’”
he quoted,
“‘the great prince who stands guard over the sons of your people, will arise. And there will be a time of distress such as never occurred since there was a nation until that time; and at that time your people, everyone who is found written in the book, will be rescued.’ Are
you in the book, Damian?”

“Only the Almighty knows that.” Damian Lacey smiled. “I'm not one of your fifteen-year-old acolytes, Michael. Don't quote Scripture to me.” Then he waved at the purring device. “And don't pretend that you're not as excited as I am,” he added. “After two thousand years… It boggles the mind. Think, for a moment, what it will mean for your church to have this device in its arsenal. Consider what your father could do with it.”

“My father!” Rose laughed. “You mean the new Pontiff,” he countered.

“Are you ready?”

Michael nodded. He stepped toward the doorway. He looked up at Lacey, who hovered a few feet away by the console.

The archbishop pressed a button and the frame of the portal started to glow. At first it was almost imperceptible. It looked like the blue flame of an ordinary cooking range. The machine began thumping, like the pounding of drums or the sound of some great double bass being plucked over and over repeatedly. The rhythm grew faster. Then, the frequency shifted. The blue light in the portal began to slowly extend from one edge of the door to the other. The sound became shriller and shriller, until it passed out of range of his hearing. Michael paused by the opening. He looked at the archbishop. Then he turned and said, “Wish me luck.” He stuck out his hand.

Lacey twisted the dial on the console. The blue light in the doorway seemed to grow even brighter. It shimmered teal blue, then violet and aquamarine.

“Wish me luck,” Rose repeated. He still held out his hand.

The archbishop shook it. “Good luck—” he began. Then he saw Michael's other hand sweep down from the side. Lacey took a step backward, but Rose had clamped his hand onto the archbishop's forearm. He wouldn't let go.

“Release me,” shrieked Lacey, trying to pull himself free.

“‘Blessed is the man who listens to me… waiting at my doorway.’”

“We agreed, Michael! You're younger and stronger…” Lacey struggled with renewed ferocity. He yanked at the younger man's arms, like a desperate animal caught in a trap.

“And you're more pure of heart,” Michael answered. “Despite your transgressions. Believe me.” He twisted his grip. His thinning blond hair flapped on his skull as he heaved himself backward.

The archbishop teetered, off balance. “God damn you,” he cried as he leaned toward the portal. “I'll see you in hell, Michael Rose!” Then he fell.

There was a burst of white light.

Michael grinned and replied, “Get in line.”

As soon as the archbishop had passed through one side of the portal, he popped out the other. Except what returned wasn't Lacey. It was something inhuman.

There was a head and a torso, and some sort of arms, but the bottom was missing. The creature flopped onto the floor and Michael jumped back. Clots of scalding red matter flew up from the body, splattering Michael's shirtfront and face. It burned like hot lava, like acid. A moan issued up from the creature before him. Michael gaped at its face. He could see all the veins and the arteries on the crown of the skull pumping madly.

“Your Excellency?” Michael said. Bile bubbled up in his throat.

The creature raised one of its flipperlike arms, as if
motioning him forward. Michael found himself leaning a little bit closer, despite his revulsion.

The archbishop opened his mouth. It was a red toothless aperture that unhinged like a snake. His lidless black eyes stared up at the ceiling. He twisted in agony. Steam rose from his skin.

“What is it?” urged Michael. “What did you see?”

A word formed on the archbishop's lips. Michael leaned in still closer.
“What did you see?”
he demanded.

Lacey heaved himself up on one stump. “Everything,” he replied. Then he coughed and rolled over. His eyes seemed to melt in their sockets as a hot fountain of vomit shot out of his mouth.

Michael jumped back, cursing. He watched as what remained of Damian Lacey quivered and shook, as the figure collapsed, sinking into itself, the head and the torso flattening out with a hiss under a blossom of billowing steam. Michael gagged, staggered backward. It was then that he first heard the knocking.

Rose swiveled about. The pounding continued. They were trying to break in through the door! He glanced about desperately for another way out, though he knew that there was none. He was trapped—in the bowels of his own church! Without pausing to reconsider, Michael dashed toward the door. It swung open as he pressed the green button.

It was Sister Maria. And behind her, her henchmen. The technicians were huddled together at the rear of the hallway, eyes blank with terror, faces pale.

“Oh, thank heavens,” said Michael. “There's been a terrible accident.”

Sister Maria stepped forward. Michael could hear her catch her breath as she spotted the gelatinous pool of seared flesh near the portal. “Wait here,” she ordered tersely. The Knights pulled back immediately.

Michael retreated toward the rear of the room as
Sister Maria closed the steel door behind her. “I warned him,” he stammered. “But he insisted on building this thing.” He crouched, shivering, behind a small workbench as the nun neared the purring machinery. “I told him,” he said. Then the words petered out. Michael bit his thick lips. He sighed and glanced down at the floor. “A true Knight of Malta,” he added. “In the end, despite my misgivings, the archbishop insisted on going in first.”

Sister Maria knelt near the portal. The machine still rumbled beside her but the blue sheen no longer blazed in the doorway. It was spent. The nun made the sign of the cross. Then she rose, turned and looked over at Michael. She had the face of a corpse.

“He was a brave man, a true hero,” said Michael. “But this device,” he continued. “This is no God machine. I tell you, Sister Maria, it's a doorway to Hell. Who was Judas who passed down his knowledge to Abraham? Unless you subscribe to the heresies, he was the vilest, the most insidious villain in the history of Man. Where would he go then? Where would he be now, but in Hell?”

As Sister Maria drew closer, Michael found it almost impossible to tear his eyes away from the rosary beads round her neck. “We are at the beginning of the Great Tribulation. And this,” he continued, pointing at the portal behind her, “this could be the very door through which Satan will enter the earth. As prophesied. We've been betrayed by the traitor. It must be destroyed. Every trace of this infernal device. All who know of its very existence. Especially Joseph Koster and Savita Sajan.”

The nun came to a stop only inches from him. She looked up at Michael with those flat, doll-like eyes. “He was like a father to me,” she said quietly.

Framed by her wimple and veil, her face seemed to glow in the harsh light of the lab. Then she slowly reached out for him.

Michael jerked back reflexively, but there was no where to go. He was trapped, his back literally to the wall. He stiffened as her hand came to rest on his shoulder. Those eyes, and that little round nose. Those blood-engorged lips. She was so carnal, so naturally sexual, and yet those features were framed by a veil! He felt like a web-bound black widow's mate: He had no overriding desire to retreat or shrink back from his fate. He welcomed it, even. He was tired of lingering.

Sister Maria pulled him in close. She drew his head down to her, her hands clamped to the sides of his face, and she kissed him—full on the lips. She seemed to suck him inside of her. Her lips softened. She suckled his lip. She stood there, quite motionless, her impassive face pressed to his face. Then she released him.

“What hasn't been found,” she said breathlessly, “can't be destroyed. All traces, you said. Koster and Sajan may still have their uses. Let them come back to us, Michael.”

For the first time, he noticed the curl in her lips. The nun's sharklike eyes, her impassive demeanor, the frost which followed her gaze; none of these things filled him with a greater sense of foreboding than the chilling curve of her grin. He reached down and kissed her, just to cover her lips. He thrust his tongue deep in her mouth.

She bit him and said, “We'll be waiting for them.”

I
T HAD BEEN A LONG AND TIRESOME MORNING, HUMID AND
overbearingly hot, and Koster was out of sorts by the time they arrived at Edison's Glenmont estate. They had landed at JFK the previous afternoon without incident, and spent the night at Koster's loft in the Village. Then, after a quick breakfast, they had borrowed a car from a friend and headed west through the Lincoln Tunnel toward West Orange, New Jersey.

Neither of them had said much on the ride out to Glenmont. They had taken special care to ensure that no one was following them. For a time, Sajan had talked about Edison, his rise to prominence as inventor and industrialist, but Koster had barely responded, and after a while she had simply fallen silent. Koster didn't know what to say. He could still picture that locket on the floor of their apartment in Paris, and he harbored a hope that, somehow or other, Sajan would confess to her membership in the GLF on her own, unprompted. But though he had probed her with all manner of questions,
many peppered with openings, she never picked up the bait. She skirted each subject without revealing a thing.

The Glenmont estate was located within Llewellyn Park, America's first private landscaped residential area, and at first they failed to notice the cutoff. In the end, they were forced to stop at a gas station and ask for directions. By the time they crawled through the gated entrance to the Park, and made inquiries at the greenhouse near the visitor parking lot, they were late, and a ranger informed them that Mrs. Bettendorf, archive director at the Edison National Historic Site, and her assistant, Maggie, had been obliged to honor another engagement. But they could still rendezvous at noon, if that time was okay, the ranger told them, at the Edison laboratories on Main Street, down the hill. So Koster and Sajan had opted for a tour of the house.

It was a massive red structure, built of wood, brick and stone in the Queen Anne tradition, so popular back in the late nineteenth century. Edison had purchased the house and thirteen acres for $125,000 in 1886 as a present to his new bride, Mina Miller. His first wife, Mary Stillwell, had died two years earlier. Already known as the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” Edison was thirty-nine when he moved into Glenmont. Mina was twenty. Un for tunately for the young bride, once Edison had completed his Main Street laboratories, she saw little of him; the inventor spent most of his days at his workbench.

Sajan and Koster strolled down the driveway toward the house. The woods were filled with great oaks, weeping hemlock, Cornelia cherry and copper beech. The sun pounded down through the foliage. Minutes later, they climbed the front steps of the house, under a covered stone archway—a later addition to the home, thought Koster. A National Park Service guide, a short round black woman in her mid-twenties, waited for them at
the door. Her name was Chavon. The tour, she said flatly, would last half an hour.

As soon as they entered the house, Koster noticed a series of small stained-glass windows in the paneled reception room. “What are those?” he inquired.

Chavon didn't even look up. “The four elements,” she replied. “Earth, water, fire and air.” Then she was off to the music room.

All in all, Koster found the house strangely comfortable, despite the period furniture, the animal skins and the dark paneling. Apparently, Mina Edison had authorized several changes to the residence over the years. Certain rooms were simply repainted and refurbished, while others were greatly expanded, such as the second-floor living room and the sunroom, which they entered next. It bulged from the side of the house like the prow of a ship, providing Mina with a clear view of the great copper birdhouses outside on the lawn. A series of light-bulbs jutted from the ceiling at regular intervals around the entire perimeter of the room.