The Terminals Page 7

  He shifted to the desk, putting it between us. Strewn across its surface amongst the case files and photos and Styrofoam takeout were pills for pain, blood thinning, hypertension, enough to give anyone the ability to reverse diagnose the man with heart disease. As he sat in the chair, his silver cross swung forward, knocked off the cherry veneer and then settled at his sternum. Right where I’d like to punch him.

  “You bastard.” I glared, knowing that he tested me, knowing that I wasn’t passing.

  “Ironic, eh? Killing this monk will save eleven kids, when killing that kid in the sands would have saved eleven men. You catch that?”

  What I hated most was my creeping belief that this decrepit man was right. That he was my font of redemption … my savior, however undesired and undesirable. I strode around the desk, my jaw clenched too tight for speech. I pressed closer to him than I wanted, gripping his shoulder with one hand and cocking my other arm back. He tilted his grizzled jaw out in offering and swallowed hard. I wondered if the general cared even less about life than I did. I hesitated.

  “Fine. I’ll do it.” What did it matter if it was Deeth at the plunger, or me?

  Before I turned away, I tapped him on the cheek with my hand and he expelled a long breath.

  I marched through the door, out of the stink of the general’s disease, and into a pungent cloud of paraffin, incense, and coffee grounds.

  Attila’s sharp nose pointed at me. Above its slant, his eyes were as dark as his espresso. Gold hoops winked out from beneath the black wave of his hair.

  I greeted him with a nod, but he simply cracked his neck.

  “Christine!” Charlie held out a hand to me, and I let him have mine. He clasped it warmly. Then he sucked in a deep breath, released, and yawned.

  Deeth removed the last of the sensors, took Charlie’s arm and strapped his wrist in the leather.

  “Scared?” I asked, delivering a final squeeze before I figured it was okay to let go. The contact felt awkward, embarrassing, like I was a surrogate spiritual guide. But I could never be a real one and was woefully under-qualified to plan this sort of attack.

  “Nope, and I sure feel better off the chemo.” And Charlie looked better, too. In only six hours, color had returned to his face.

  “Not even a little scared?”

  “Would that make it easier for you?” he asked. “When did death become so sacred and scary?” He seemed to think about his own question. “Do you know why death is feared?” I produced the bottom of my lip in response—I didn’t see death as sacred or scary. In my experience, it was the dying part people feared. “It’s because the afterlife is not guaranteed. That it’s an ending rather than a new beginning.”

  But it’s still an ending, I wanted to say, but I decided to give the soon-to-be-dead the last word.

  “Hold still.” Deeth gripped his arm tight and slid a large needle into the forearm. Connected to the needle was a saline lock that would allow me to inject the drugs.

  Charlie frowned, but it wasn’t due to the needle. “My only worry is that we’re too late.”

  “By most estimates, the children will still be alive,” I replied. I wished I could be so sure.

  “No, don’t you remember what I said, why Valentinus bound his spirit to Seth’s in the first place?”

  I nodded my head slowly, but couldn’t find the connection.

  “The first dose is sodium thiopental,” Deeth explained. “It’ll put you into a coma.”

  “Borborites believe in reincarnation. If Hillar has found gnosis, he won’t be in the afterlife long.”

  Cold slipped down my spine, and I looked back to the mirrored window. “So it’s a race. How much time do we have?”

  “The second injection is pancuronium bromide; it’ll stop your heart and respiration.” Deeth held up a bottle with another syringe poked into it.

  Charlie just nodded at it, like he was approving a wine selection. “That requires a bit more knowledge.”

  “That’s the sort of info that helps me track you down,” Attila said, moving close enough that I could smell the earth beneath the coffee aroma, as if his clothing was just unpacked from a trunk after many years.

  “Illuminate us.” I thought I could hear the tick of a wall clock, but there wasn’t any clock in the room.

  Charlie glanced again at the needle in his vein, drew another deep breath, and then cleared his throat.

  “Buddhists conceptualize this in between place as the Bardo, and its manifestation depends on the karma of the particular soul. The Gnostic realm is more fixed. We believe that the Earth is just one of the deeps that we need to pass through to reach the Pleroma, what Christians call heaven. Different sects have different beliefs. Before most Gnostics can enter the Pleroma they need knowledge, or gnosis, of all seven gates. Archons—somewhere between an angel and a demon—guard these gates. To pass, you need to know their names. The Demiurge, whom you’d call the Devil, doesn’t want any of the divine sparks—souls, let’s say—to reach the Pleroma. He’s going to use these gatekeepers and their deeps to try to stop you. Stop me, I guess.”

  “So if the Pleroma is the Christian equivalent to heaven, then these deeps are …” I was surprised by the excitement that surged in me with his explanation. This was an ancient religion’s most sacred knowledge. Knowledge that once required years of indoctrination and study before it was bequeathed.

  “The deeps would be equivalent to hells,” he said.

  “You know the passwords?” I asked.

  “Tough to know for sure, isn’t it?” He checked the needle in his arm and bobbed his head in readiness. It reminded me of the scenes in movies where the actor gives a sharp nod, eyes looking distant, before the helmet is fitted to the astronaut’s suit.

  “And Hillar the Killer?” I asked. “Does he know the passwords?”

  Charlie shrugged. “Hilllar’s one old, twisted spark. Theudas had once been the Keeper of Secrets, but that was a long time ago. And we don’t remember anything from one lifetime to the next. I’d guess that the only thing keeping Hillar from the Pleroma is true gnosis. Passwords are one thing, but gnosis is more than that. Without gnosis, he can’t reincarnate again. But that’s what the deeps are for. They’re a training ground of a sort. If I can somehow stop him from entering the Pleroma …” his eyes lit and his hand clenched, “I may yet end the cycle of his rebirth.”

  “And if he does make it through to the Pleroma?”

  My hand rested on the bed near his, and he had just enough mobility to reach out and clutch it. “It’ll be the next generation here on Earth who’s going to have to deal with him. Valentinus’s and Pius’s sixtieth or so lifetimes.”

  “How long have we got?” I stared at the small curl of tube sticking out from his hand.

  “Only one way to find out,” he said. Without the use of his arms, Charlie indicated Attila with his lips.

  Now I fully understood why Charlie lay on the bed. He wasn’t just looking for my soul to save, or the lives of kids, this was bigger. This was stopping Attila the Hun before he was born again. This was about freeing himself from an eternal cycle of hell on Earth.

  “All set for execution, then.”

  The coldness of Attila’s words made me look up from Charlie.

  “Hey, the general only pays me to communicate with the dead.” He pointed at the syringes. “Call it what you like, but that’s the same shit they use for capital punishment, and that makes you an executioner.”

  “Yeah, just do your job then,” I replied, suddenly feeling protective of Charlie. “And no more.”

  He sniffed, tossed the doorknob in the air once, and caught it. It gave a little smack as it landed in his palm. “Here we go.” He wrenched his mouth left and right like he needed to stretch it out and began. “Remember my face, it is your trace.”

  “Do you always speak in verse?
” Charlie interrupted.

  “Of course not, just helps clients remember.” Attila’s accent had a touch of Brooklyn, despite his Hungarian Rom heritage. “Now listen well.”

  He leaned in. “Know my smell as you traipse through hell.” He breathed his heavy coffee breath over Charlie who blinked. “The hell you know is the hell you’ll see. What you feel is what you’ll be.”

  Charlie’s eyes narrowed, and his jaw set. His demeanor shifted from one of vague annoyance to extreme focus. Feet in the blocks and ready to start the race. In his lap was a photo of Hillar the Killer. Hillar stared up at him with a malicious smile and washed out blue eyes that seemed to look at me, too.

  “The one you seek, you will know. Listen to the spirit ebb and flow.”

  “I’ll feel him,” Charlie whispered.

  My heart pounded.

  “In a moment, Brother Harkman, you will fall asleep,” Deeth said. “There will be no pain.”

  I looked at Charlie, trying to stop my eyes from tearing. The tears weren’t for the kids. Or for Charlie. It was this nagging sense that all I’d done in digging Charlie’s grave was to shovel another mound of guilt on my already large pile of wrong. I was buried so deep.

  “Now, Colonel,” Deeth said.

  And if the Doctor hadn’t called me Colonel, I’m not sure I could have completed the order.

  I heard the door open behind me and knew the general loomed in the doorframe. While Deeth loaded the second syringe with fluid, I depressed the first plunger.

  “Godspeed,” I told Charlie.

  I chased the medication with saline to push the drugs into Charlie’s veins.

  Immediately the pulse on the heart rate monitor arced lower, and Charlie’s breathing grew shallow as he tumbled into a coma, into the deep.

  Deeth stepped back from where he’d slid the second needle into Charlie’s saline lock, and I gulped. It was already too late. Still, my hand trembled as I completed the second injection, killing a man who wasn’t an enemy, wasn’t a soldier. Somehow not believing in God didn’t help me play Him. My hands formed fists, and I turned to the door, but instead of a gloating general, the doorway was empty. I felt jilted. I needed to direct my anger at something. The only face I saw was my own reflected in the glass, tears streaking my cheeks. Deeth packed up his equipment. I jerked around when Attila’s hand fell on my shoulder.

  I looked at him.

  “He’s gone, right?” He waited, but I had nothing to say. “Let’s make it worth his while.”

  I let him take my hand, realizing that his earlier anger wasn’t directed at me, it was the same bitterness I now felt due to the job, and together we moved slowly over to the white side of room. Charlie flat-lined.

  “Time of death, 3:32 A.M,” Deeth said to the mirrored glass, and walked out.

  Chapter 10

  Life did not flash before Charlie’s eyes, but memories scrolled by. Even in the confusion of death, he knew the difference—that this was a past he had chosen to remember, like the conqueror having the ability to write the history of their conquests. No ghost of Christmas past held his hand as he faced hard truths. The vision was glazed by his selection and manipulation, but Charlie was his own harshest critic.

  Charlie had been living in San Francisco and watching a newscast when he first began to realize how he was different. The symbol on every TV screen was a circle with a cross through it, the signature of the Zodiac Killer, and it sent a bolt of electricity through him. He saw the rune in his sleep and his dreams and eventually it led him to research other Gnostic symbols used by the Zodiac Killer.

  His answer was Josephine Wentworth, Jo, a Gnostic priestess who helped the police with the case. Jo could feel the Zodiac Killer, sense places he had been and things he had touched. Charlie’s parents were strict Baptists. They thought Jo was a New Age hippy and tried to keep them apart, but by then Charlie was nineteen and he left home, learned Latin, demotic writing, and steeped himself in religious knowledge. Although they spent their time in search of a killer, this period had been an oasis of love, trust, and mutual respect. In retrospect, Charlie mistook his divine connection to Jo for carnal love.

  One night, Charlie tried to kiss Jo, and the priestess had looked upon him with tenderness and pity. Pity was all Charlie had seen and he’d fled their apartment. Jo followed after, searching for her protégé student. Charlie, rejected and forlorn, had found solace in the bottom of a beer can. It hadn’t taken many, but rather than finding the drowsy sleep of the drunk, he became enraged. He returned to Jo’s apartment, ready to confront her, but she was gone. Searching deep within himself he unearthed his bond to her and followed it. Alcohol divided his memory into hazy flashes. Through the middle class neighborhoods and into the seedier dives he trekked, until finally into the dark fingers of a city park. There, using a bench as an altar, the Zodiac Killer prepared to kill his next victim.

  Jo.

  At the time Charlie wasn’t certain it was her, not until the next morning, when the police crashed through into his room, but if he was being true to himself, he had known.

  Seeing the blade hovering above her chest and the mad glee of the murderer as he prepared for the kill stroke, Charlie had not screamed. He had not rushed the killer. He had run.

  In the absence of an arrest, the cops had investigated the spurned young man. Charlie admitted his flight, told them all he recalled, much to the dismay of his parents. But Charlie knew the killer was already dead. Three days after Jo’s murder, the connection disappeared. Snuffed out. And Charlie plunged into depression. Nothing mattered. The truth was, Charlie was guilty of her murder. When given the chance, he had fled. As she had searched for Charlie, the Zodiac Killer had found her. And Charlie had let her die.

  For a time, Charlie had felt hollow without his evil twinned soul in the world. He ignored the knowledge that the killer would eventually reincarnate; it could be months, years or decades. He denied his duty to track him. Charlie entered the Benedictine Order, which wrapped him in the comfort of ritual, silence, and faith.

  The memory reel ended with splintering pain, and Charlie remembered that he was dead. He was on a mission. And in hell.

  Talons cocooned Charlie. He screamed a breathless, silent scream that split his jaw in its effort to be heard. Agony rendered him mindless and yet exquisitely sensate.

  The intense light shining between bony enameled claws cooked his flesh. The aroma of a pork belly’s crackling mingled with stringent, burned hair. The talons slowly tightened. Within the cup of claws, he stewed, drippings popping, tears spitting as they hit his grease. Splatter fell on his lips, and he tasted sweet and musky. Folded half over, Charlie’s spine snapped. Eye-bugging agony ripped through his nerves into his skull like a tsunami with nowhere to break.

  His calls were lost to a sea of shrieking, a world of pain beyond his own, beyond the talons. He slipped his arm out between hooked claws, and his flesh charred, fingers receding like a cigarette’s ash as if the deep drew too heavily on his soul.

  Suddenly, the claws bloomed open, and a thousand tiny suns baked his nakedness; the pain multiplying. On Charlie’s left, above and below, ran a wall of roasting flesh from which more claws protruded and yawning mouths gaped lipless and toothless to swallow limp bodies.

  This was the Gnostic deep. Charlie was but one of a thousand souls clamped to the wall, burning beneath the broiler of stars. He could not stop screaming. A hooked talon impaled a nearby woman’s chest, excavating it like a backhoe tears up pavement.

  Beneath the wreckage of her ribs shone a gem, and while Charlie watched it being plucked from her cavity, for a moment, he forgot his agony. The jewel was flicked up and away, lost to one of the balls of light.

  Pain redoubled, and the talon pressed down on Charlie’s blackened chest.

  With torture returned more memory, as if physical torment alone was not hellish enough. The tal
on dipped into his throat, dull tip crushing before it pierced. Charlie gurgled under its weight, eyes rolling into the back of his skull. It carved slowly downward, popping each rib free, catching lungs, heart, and entrails. And Charlie remembered being in a hospital bed after having his stomach pumped, nineteen, disheveled and beaten, his father hanging over him, with such power over Charlie’s future in what next he might say or decide.

  His mother had sobbed. His father only grew increasingly angry with his son’s protests. His son left a woman to die? It didn’t matter that Charlie had learned his cowardice from his dad. Charlie knew what they wondered. He’d wondered it too. The night was a blur. What were the chances of him stumbling across the killer and Jo? Did he really run? Or did he do it?

  A killer? his father said. Telling the police to take Charlie. To throw him in a hole and leave him to rot. Waterboard him and see what he really did. This isn’t the first time, no siree. Not the first time for this boy. Killers should burn in hell.

  And, for a time, Charlie had. Rejection seeped like a potent poison through his innards.

  The pain was gone. Limp within the talons’ bony grip, his eviscerated body lay like a gutted fish. Charlie mourned its passing, but the stars crackled with greedy energy. Their glare neither blinded nor burned him now, and within their nimbus formed faces, coaxing, laughing, and sly. Charlie recognized each one, a bully, a father, a beater, a hater, and he tried to turn around and to look back, but the wall was so distant, his corpse amongst the hundred-thousand arms and legs that hooked and entwined each other to form a bivouac of the dead. But he yearned to return, even to the pain; already knowing that the stars would hold no chance of redemption. As he spun further away, the distant wall of flesh flexed and relaxed, the bicep of an enormous arm that collected the inner fires, hoarding them.

  The face of a coming star—Hillar—eyes globes of blue energy, mouth yawning in thunderous laughter, drew him in, catching him in its orbit as Charlie tried to escape. Something told Charlie that should he form part of this star he would remain here until it went supernova, an eternity.