He sank as her weight became monstrous, as if she were made of concrete instead of rotten flesh and bone. She bore him deep. He opened his mouth; bubbles rushed from him, rising to the churning surface. They turned over and over, locked together as if in some hideous underwater ballet.
The light darkened. His cheek scraped against the bottom of the pool.
And then he was being pulled upward, wrenched to the surface, and dragged out onto the Astroturf. Someone turned him over on his stomach, and pressure squeezed the small of his back. Water streamed from his mouth and nose, and then he was throwing up his dinner and the three Zingers he’d eaten. He moaned, curled up on his side, and began sobbing.
“He’ll be all right,” Dorn said, stepping away from the body. His suit was soaked, and he glanced at Niles, who stood a few feet away with Felix. “What’d he try to do, drown himself?”
“I don’t know.” If Felix hadn’t heard Wayne scream, Niles knew, the boy would be dead by now. When Dorn had leaped in, Wayne had been down in the deep water, struggling weakly as if trying to escape from something. “Bring me a canister of oxygen,” he told Felix. “Fast.” The boy’s body was almost blue, and he was shivering violently. “And bring a blanket, too. Move it!”
They covered Wayne with the blanket and cupped an oxygen mask to his mouth and nostrils.
The boy shuddered and moaned, and then finally drew a rattling breath. His eyes came open, bulging with terror. Tears slid down his cheeks. He gripped Niles’s hands, his fingers digging into the man’s flesh.
Niles said quietly to the others, “Mr. Krepsin doesn’t have to know about this. It was an accident. Wayne went swimming, and he got water in his lungs.” He looked up at them, his eyes darkening. “Mr. Krepsin would be very upset if he thought we almost let Wayne…hurt himself. Do you both understand? Okay, he’s breathing fine now. Shit, what a mess! Felix, I want you to go to the kitchen and pour Wayne a large glass of orange juice. Bring it up to his room.”
Wayne pushed the oxygen mask away from his face. “She was here in the pool and she grabbed me and wanted me to die she’s waiting for me she said she wanted me to know what death was like…” His voice cracked, and he clung to Niles like a little boy.
“Help me with him,” he told Dora. “He’s got to be ready to leave in the morning.”
“No don’t make me go back,” Wayne moaned. “Please don’t make me go back she’s waiting for me in the lake she wants me to come back…”
“He’s flipped his fucking lid!” Dora picked up the pajamas, his wet shoes squeaking.
“So what else is new? Come on, let’s get him upstairs.”
“Don’t make me go back!” Wayne blubbered. “I want to stay with Mr. Krepsin, I want to stay and I’ll be a good boy, I’ll be good I swear I swear it…”
As they reached the glass partition, Niles looked over his shoulder at the pool and thought he saw a shadow—a huge shadow, maybe seven feet tall, that might have been some kind of animal standing on its hind legs—in the corner where there should have been no shadows. He blinked; the shadow was gone.
“What is it?” Dorn asked.
“Nothing. Damn it, this door should’ve been locked!”
“I thought it was.”
“Forever,” Wayne said, the tears dripping down his face. “I want to stay here forever. Don’t make me leave…please don’t…”
Niles turned off the pool’s light. For an instant the rippling of disturbed water sounded like a high, inhuman giggle.
TWELVE
Inferno
59
LIZARDS SCAMPERED OVER ROCKS baking in the sun. A distant line of sharp-edged mountains shimmered in the midday Mexican heat. As Niles came out of the air-conditioned interior of Krepsin’s concrete bunker twenty-five miles north of Torreon, he slipped on his sunglasses to keep from being blinded by a world of burning white.
Niles, immaculate in a khaki suit, walked past Thomas Alvarado’s copper Lincoln Continental toward the concrete garage where a few electric carts were kept. Under a brightly striped canvas awning, Wayne Falconer was hitting golf balls out into the desert, where pipe-organ cactus and palmetto grew like a natural barbed-wire fence. Wayne had been urged to find something to do while Krepsin went over business matters with Alvarado, Ten High’s Mexican connection.
Wayne hit a ball and shielded his eyes from the glare, watching it bounce across the rocky terrain. It came to rest about twenty yards from one of the observation towers, where a bored Mexican security man dreamt of a cold margarita.
“Nice shot,” Niles observed.
Wayne looked up. His eyes were drugged from the extra Valium in his system, his movements slow and heavy. Since the incident at the swimming pool several days before, Wayne had needed careful watching. He fawned over Mr. Krepsin at every opportunity, and Niles was sick of him. Wayne’s face was puffy with sunburn.
“I’m almost through with this bucket of balls,” he told Niles, his speech slurring.
“Get another one.”
“Mr. Krepsin says my church is going to be the biggest one in the world.”
“That’s fine.” Niles walked past him, in a hurry.
“Are you going out there again?” Wayne asked, motioning with his golf club toward the little white concrete structure about a mile away from the main house. “I saw Lucinda go out there with some food this morning. I saw her come back. Who’s out there, Mr. Niles?”
The man paid no attention to him. Suddenly there was the whoosh of the golf club, and a ball cracked off the garage wall and ricocheted dangerously close to Niles. He tensed and turned toward Wayne.
Wayne was smiling, but his face was slack and Niles sensed his belligerence. Niles had realized in the last few days that Wayne was jealous of his closeness to Mr. Krepsin. “You thought you could fool me, didn’t you?” Wayne asked. “You thought you could put him right under my nose and I wouldn’t know.”
“No one’s trying to fool you.”
“Oh yes you are. I know who’s over there. I’ve known all along!”
“Who, Wayne?”
“Henry Bragg.” Wayne’s smile stretched wider. “He’s resting, isn’t he? And that’s why I’m not supposed to go over there.”
“That’s right.”
“When can I see him? I want to tell him I’m sorry he got hurt.”
“You’ll see him soon.”
“Good.” Wayne nodded. He wanted to see Henry very much, to let him know what he was doing for Mr. Krepsin. Last night Krepsin had asked him to feel a lump in his neck because he was afraid it might be a cancer. Wayne hadn’t been able to feel any lump at all, but said he did anyway, and that Mr. Krepsin would be just fine. “I’ve been having that nightmare again, Mr. Niles.”
“Which one?”
“The one I have all the time. I thought I wouldn’t have nightmares anymore, after she was dead. The snake and the eagle are trying to kill each other, and last night the snake bit the eagle in the neck and pulled it to the ground.” He blinked, staring out at the horizon. “The snake’s winning. I don’t want it to win. But I can’t stop it.”
“It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a dream.”
“No sir. It’s more. I know it is. Because…when the eagle dies, I’m scared something inside me—something important—is going to die too.”
“Let’s see you hit another ball,” Niles said. “Go ahead, tee it up.”
Wayne moved like an obedient machine. The ball sailed out toward another observation tower.
Niles continued to the garage, got in one of the electric carts, and drove out toward the white structure. A fly buzzed around his head in the heat, and the air smelled like scorched metal.
Niles rapped on the door. Lucinda, a short squat Mexican woman with gray hair and a seamed, kindly face, opened it at once. He stepped into a sparsely furnished living room where a fan blew the heavy air around. “How is he?” be asked in Spanish.
She shrugged. “Still sleeps. I gave him an
other shot about an hour ago.”
“Was he coming out of it?”
“Enough to be talking. He spoke a girl’s name: Bonnie. After this morning when he threw his breakfast all over the wall, I wanted to take no chances.”
“Good. Mr. Krepsin wants to see him tonight. Until then, we’ll just keep him under.” Niles unlocked a slatted door across the room and stepped into a darkened, windowless bedroom with cinder-block walls. The boy was lying on the bed with a strap across his chest, though the precaution was hardly necessary; he was deeply asleep from the drug Lucinda had injected. The boy had been kept drugged since he’d been brought in on the private airstrip behind Krepsin’s bunker several days before. Niles stood over him, felt the boy’s pulse, hooked up an eyelid and then let it fall. This was the boy Wayne feared so much? Niles wondered. Why? What hold did this boy and his mother have on Wayne?
Niles said, “I’ll call before I come to get him tonight. You might want to give him some sodium pentothal around nine o’clock. Just enough to keep him settled down for Mr. Krepsin. Okay?”
Lucinda nodded in agreement. She was as familiar with drugs as she was with fried tortillas.
Satisfied with Billy’s condition, Niles left the white house and drove back to the bunker. Wayne had started on a new bucket of balls, chopping them in all directions.
The bunker’s front door was metal covered with oak, and it fit into the concrete wall like the entrance to a bank vault. Niles pressed a little beeper clipped to his belt, and electronic locks disengaged. Disinfectant filled the entrance foyer, which led to a honeycomb of rooms and corridors, most of which were underground. As Niles closed the door behind him, he failed to notice the fly that circled quickly above his head and flew off through a faint swirl of air-cleansing chemicals.
He found Mr. Krepsin in his study, talking to Thomas Alvarado, a gaunt dark-skinned man with a diamond in his right earlobe.
“Twenty-six?” Krepsin, wearing a white caftan and surgical gloves, was saying as he ate from a plate of Oreo cookies. “Ready to come across by when?”
“Next week. Thursday at the latest. We’re bringing them in a truckload of uncured iguana hides. They’ll have to bear the stink, but at least the federales won’t poke their noses in.”
Krepsin grunted and nodded. The cheap Mexican labor that Alvarado provided was used by Ten High in a number of ways, from the orange groves to the Sundown Ranch in Nevada. On the floor beside Krepsin’s chair was a can of film, another gift from Alvarado, who owned a motion-picture studio that cranked out cheap westerns, horror films, and martial-arts gore-fests. “How is he, Mr. Niles?”
“Sleeping. He’ll be ready.”
“A secret project?” Alvarado asked.
“In a manner of speaking,” Krepsin said. Behind his desk was a stack of newspapers, all carefully sprayed with disinfectant, carrying articles on Chicago’s vanished “Mystery Medium” and photographs from a video tape that had been made in a burned-out vagrants’ hotel. The boy’s sudden disappearance from the hospital had fueled a controversy over the authenticity of that tape, and emotions were running high. Krepsin was intrigued, and wanted to know more about Billy Creekmore.
Krepsin had been explaining to Alvarado how the Falconer Crusade’s assets were being transferred to Mexican banks, and how Wayne was fully in favor of the idea.
“But what about his own people? Won’t they cause trouble?”
“It’s not to their advantage to rock the boat, and that’s what Mr. Russo is telling them right now. They’ll still run part of the show and draw their salaries. Every penny donated to the Crusade will first go to Alabama. In time, we’ll build a television center outside Palm Springs so Wayne can continue his network ministry.”
Alvarado smiled slyly. “It’s a bit late for you to become a man of God, isn’t it, Señor Krepsin?”
“I’ve always been a man of God,” he replied, chewing another cookie. “God’s green, and he folds. Now let’s go on to the next item of business, shall we?”
60
WHEN AN AMBER OVAL moon had risen over the stark mountain peaks and Wayne Falconer was asleep in his room, Niles and Dorn came for Billy.
Floating in the darkness, unaware of where he was or how he’d gotten here, Billy heard the lock click and thought it was the woman again. He was startled when the overhead light came on, blazing into his eyes. There were two men in suits standing over him. A strap cut across his stomach as he weakly tried to lift his head. He remembered a tray of food, and the way it had splattered against the wall. The woman with the needle had said some very nasty things to him.
“Mr. Krepsin wants him scrubbed,” one of the men said.
The woman started on Billy with a soapy, rough sponge, and scrubbed him until blood was almost drawn. Billy had come to like the woman in a way, to depend on her. She helped him find the bedpan when he needed to go to the bathroom, and she fed him when he was hungry.
The strap was loosened.
The man who’d spoken put a finger against Billy’s throat to check his pulse.
“Is Bonnie here?” Billy asked. “Where’s Dr. Hillburn?”
The man ignored his questions. “We want you to stand up now. We’ve brought you some clothes.” He motioned toward a chair across the room, and Billy made out a pair of yellow pants and a pale blue short-sleeved shirt. Something about the yellow pants jarred him—the color was familiar. From where? he wondered.
“Stand up, now.”
Billy did, and his legs collapsed. The two men waited until he could stand up by himself. “Need to call my mom,” Billy said.
“Right. Come on, get dressed. Mr. Krepsin’s waiting.”
Dazed and weak, Billy put on the clothes. He couldn’t understand why they hadn’t brought him any shoes. He almost cried because he had no shoes, and the pants were so loose they bagged around the thighs and hips. The shirt had a monogram: a scrolled W.
“These aren’t my clothes,” he said. The two men were blurred shapes in his fogged vision. “I went up to play the piano.”
“Let’s go.”
The night was chilly. During a ride in a little car, Billy felt the cold wind in his face. Its chill helped to clear his senses a bit. He could see lights on towers that stood high off the ground. “Where is this place?” he asked the two men, but neither of them answered.
They approached what looked to Billy like a huge square of concrete. He almost fell twice on the flagstone walkway, and the man in the gray suit had to help him walk. Billy felt a coldness coming off the man, like a bitter frost.
And then he remembered the shape changer saying his mother was dead.
The memories came back in a rush: the hospital, the chapel, the man behind him pressing a strong-smelling cloth to his face. A distant memory of engines whining. The sun beating down on a runway, and on the horizon nothing but white desert. He tried to pull free from the gray-suited man, but he was held in a viselike grip.
Inside the concrete structure, Billy was made to put on a pair of cotton slippers. The air smelled like the hospital room. The two men led him along a hallway to a closed door, and one of them knocked on it. A voice said, “Come in.”
They took him in and left him, and the door closed behind him.
Billy weaved on his feet, his vision blurring in and out. The largest man he’d ever seen was waiting in a chair before him, next to a table that held a lamp and a cassette recorder. The man wore a long white caftan trimmed in gold, was bald, and had small black eyes.
“Hello, Billy,” Krepsin said, and put aside the file folder of newspaper clippings he’d been going through. “Please sit down.” He motioned toward one of the two chairs that faced him.
Think! Billy told himself. He knew he’d been drugged, knew he was a long way from home. And knew also that he was in danger. “Where am I?”
“In a safe place. Don’t you want to sit down?”
“No.”
“My name is Augustus Krepsin. I’m a friend of Wayne
Falconer’s.”
“Wayne Falconer? What’s he got to do with this?”
“Oh, everything! Wayne asked that you be brought here. He wants very much to see you. Look here at what Wayne’s been doing.” He showed Billy the folder, full of clippings about the Alcott Hotel video tape. “He’s been cutting these out. You’re a famous young man, did you know that?”
“Then… Wayne’s here?”
“Of course. He even loaned you his clothes. Come on, sit down! I’m not going to bite you!”
“What do you want with me? I was playing the piano. Somebody came up behind me and—”
“Just to talk,” Krepsin said. “Just a few minutes of your time, and then we’ll take you wherever you’d like to go.” He offered a plateful of Oreos, Lorna Doones, and vanilla wafers. “Have one.”
Billy shook his head. Everything was mixed up in his mind, nothing was clear. Wayne wanted to see him? Why? “The woman with the needles,” he said, pressing a hand to his forehead. “Why’d she keep sticking me?”
“What woman, Billy? Oh, I imagine you’ve been under a lot of strain. With what you did at that hotel, I mean. You’re in newspapers all across the country. Wayne’s very interested in you, Billy. He wants to be your friend.”
“No. I don’t believe you.” Exhausted, he sank down into one of the chairs. “I want to call Dr. Hillburn, tell her where I am.”
“Of course you do. And you will. Tomorrow morning. It’s late, and the telephone system here isn’t very reliable. Wayne wanted you brought here—to Mexico—as his guest. I’m sorry if you’ve been under a strain, but—”
“Why didn’t Wayne just ask me to come?”
“He did. Well, he asked Dr. Hillburn. Several times. But evidently that woman was resistant to your leaving Chicago. Perhaps some of the staff misinterpreted Wayne’s request. Wayne’s told me so much about you, I feel I know you already. You and Wayne…you’re alike in many ways. You’re both well on your way in making a mark for yourselves—and you’re both special, aren’t you? He’s a healer, and you’re…blessed with a sight few other men ever know. To see beyond this world, and into the next. The pictures in those clippings aren’t faked, are they?”