you know what I’m saying?”
“Actually, Wellsboro’s the teeming metropolis nearest Carlo’s hut.” Orlando had visited once, briefly, until Carlo made it clear how unwelcome he was. “His shack’s completely in the boons.”
“Looking forward to talking with the dude. I want him to tell me how he produced those drum fills on ‘Pursue the Stink.’”
He probably doesn’t remember, Orlando thought.
At the five and a half hour mark, Orlando got bored of the CD selection and scanned the radio dial for a talk station. Kacie was sprawled out in the back seat and softly snoring. Orlando dialed past a couple of evangelists and a sports call-in, finally settling in on an NPR discussion of something that had been steaming him, ever since he’d heard of it, months back. The Ochykyk Project. The morons had even approached him to have Puppy Mill play their brain-dead inaugural concert in Brussels.
“Have you heard of this, Sphinc?”
“Sure, it’s only on CNN about once every twelve minutes.”
This Russian aerospace company had shot this series of giant reflectors up into space, and on New Year’s Eve they were going to activate them, shining light ten times as bright as the full moon down on Seattle, Brussels, Kiev, and... Orlando had forgotten where else, but the radio story soon supplied the rest of the details: London and Hamburg. All to show that, with even more reflectors, they could light up the winter Arctic as bright as daytime in Miami Beach.
“Supposedly, that is,” Orlando ranted at Sphinc, drowning out the radio debate. “It’s all a big marketing group-grope. The perfect freaking venue for corporate sponsorship: a big flashy event that means exactly zero. A recursive celebration of itself. One hundred per cent content-free.”
Orlando came up for air, allowing the astronomy professor speaking on the radio to be heard. He and his colleagues were apoplectic that nothing could be done to stop the project. The reflectors would be so bright, they’d make proper observation of the night sky impossible.
“And you should see the freaking line-up for their concert: the lamest assemblage of interchangeable, focus-grouped, payola-fueled, plastic-teated crapola ever paraded before an international audience.”
“How many people going to be watching this?”
“Millions, they claim. Zillions.”
“And we had a shot to play this gig, and you turned it down? How much did they offer?”
Orlando cut him off with the dirtiest look he could muster. “Hey, we all agreed that Puppy Mill was about integrity, every minute of every day.” Seeing Sphinc’s hurt look, he moderated his tone. “Hey, man, I know you didn’t go through The Dogs era, so you don’t know the gnawing feeling you get inside when you realize you’ve totally whored yourself out. Believe me, I know. And we all agreed—”
“Sure, Orl, sure. I was just kidding with you, man.”
“Okay.”
They drove a bit.
“And anyway,” Sphinc said, “getting all worked up over Ricky Martin and Britney Spears, I mean, isn’t stuff like that always going to be with us? Isn’t it, like, getting pissed off at nitrogen?”
Orlando threw himself around in the seat. “It’s freaking soul pollution, that’s what it is.”
Fresh tire tracks had been cut in the thick layer of snow covering the driveway leading up to Carlo’s clapboard garage. The golden light of the fading sun made the fresh top layer of flakes sparkle like on a Hallmark card.
Sphinc shivered pro-actively as Orlando reached over to open the passenger side door. “Way rustic. Does Carlo drive?”
“Of course he drives,” said Kacie, stretching and arcing her back. Orlando tried to look anywhere but her compact yet perfect chest. “This is the middle of nowhere. Everybody drives.”
“Sphinc, you wait here, just in case,” Orlando said. “We’ll go see that everything’s okay.”
“This will have been a long trip if it all just turns out he forgot to pay his phone bill.”
“That’d be the answer that would make me happiest in the world, my man.”
Orlando and Kacie crunched through the deep drift leading up to the cottage. Orlando didn’t own winter boots, and his red Converse sneakers soon filled up with snow. He ran up to Carlo’s front stoop and banged on the door.
“Carlo! Hey Carlo, it’s me and Kace! We just dropped by to see if you’re doing okay!”
A voice came from deep inside the house.
Orlando turned to Kacie. “Did he say come in, it’s unlocked?”
“I think that’s what he said.”
Orlando tested the aluminum screen door and yep, it was unlocked, as was the pine door behind it. A skiff of snow followed him in as he shoved it open. He stamped his feet on the mat and walked into what he remembered as the living room. Behind him he heard Kacie stomping the snow off her boots. The room seemed oddly dark and indistinct for the time of day. From outside, he hadn’t noticed that the drapes were drawn, but they clearly had to be.
“Carlo? Hey man, where are you?”
“Down here, Orlando.” The voice maybe emanated from the cellar, behind a closed door. Orlando ventured down and saw Carlo, appearing shrunk since the last time he laid eyes on him. Sunk into an overstuffed, old-style chair as if it were wired for electricity and he was sitting in the death house, waiting for the throwing of the switch.
“Hey, Carlo, what’s up? If my mom were here, she’d say, put on some lights, you’ll ruin your eyes.”
A dim shaft of light from a low window fell across Carlo’s body, directing Orlando’s eye towards an end-table.
“I’m sorry, man.” Carlo’s eyes were pleading up at him. A set of works lay on the table: syringe, rubber tube, spoon, lighter, clumps of white powder on a square of foil.
Orlando heard Kacie cry out and turned in time to see her topple, felled by a blow delivered by a massive form concealed by the cellar’s clinging gloom. He reeled as something caught him hard on the temple. Turning, he saw a second towering figure bearing down on him. Which meant he’d given his back to the other one. Orlando’s neck swiveled to and fro as he tried to keep both of them in his field of vision. Even though his eyes had otherwise adjusted to the low light, the two attackers remained blurry around the edges. They seemed to wear dark clothing; he got the impression that there were just big empty holes where their eyes should have been. He felt Carlo’s legs bump the back of his knees as he backed into the chair.
“Carlo!” he said, gaze still fixed ahead of him. “Carlo!” He turned for just a moment, and saw that Carlo had completely nodded out. He wondered how much of the stuff they’d shot him full of. Whether it was meant to kill, or just to sedate. Orlando wasn’t even sure these guys were human, but something told him they weren’t primed to carefully measure out the difference between dose and overdose.
One of the big guys grabbed a floor lamp and yanked on it to pull its cord from the socket. The glass fixture on top tottered off and onto the shag carpet below. Orlando backed past Carlo’s chair. The thing, guy, whatever: it was obvious he was planning to swing that heavy lamp like a freaking cudgel.
He hadn’t tried talking to them yet. “Look, I don’t know who you dudes are or what you want, but we don’t have to play it this way, do we? Come on, what’s the deal? Maybe I’d rather go along with you than get hit by that thing.”
The sound of his talking seemed to stop them up, at least momentarily. They exchanged eyeless glances; then the one armed with the lamp again advanced. Orlando took another few steps back, felt warmth radiating behind him. He allowed himself another quick backwards turn of the head and saw a big-bellied old cast iron wood stove.
“So if I were to surmise that you two collectively have as much brains as a Bon Jovi lyric, I wouldn’t be too far off the mark, would I?”
This time his words didn’t faze them; the forward one continued its plodding advance. A final beam of sunset light struck the lamp-pole, sending a glinting reflection playing across the room’s roof beams. Orlando made as if distracted,
following the light. On cue, the thing took advantage of his wayward gaze and charged all-out. Like Bugs Bunny in the cartoon where he whips the matador’s cape aside to reveal an anvil, Orlando side-stepped out of the way, allowing his attacker to plow directly into the hot furnace. He expected the guy to rear back, groaning with the pain of his burns, but instead the thug stayed stuck to the furnace door, his head and arms bubbling and falling away. The air filled with the smell of burning tallow. Wispy gray smoke rose from the figure’s shitty suit.
Orlando tried to remember the correct term. He’d been schooled in all this stuff from an early age, but he’d been more interested in listening to old Velvet Underground records than in Mother’s boring details of the family business. Homunculi! That was it: homunculi. Sorcerous constructs in the form of men. In this case, fashioned from a member of the wax family. Heavy-duty hocus-pokery. If this was all Tom—and it had to be Tom—he’d definitely been boning up during his hiatus.
The remaining homunc cocked its head, like it was trying to sniff the air only to remember it had no nose. It plodded over, too, but then stopped short. Maybe these things had enough rudimentary smarts not to follow each other, lemming-like, into the same trap. Or perhaps Tom had some kind of limited remote control over them. Whichever it was, Orlando was screwed for an idea of how to get the remaining one to ram the stove, too. He’d have to take the thing down some other way.
Bang! Bang! Bang! It was the screen door being whacked on, up above. Sphinc, presumably. And about damn time.
“Orl! Orl! Everything all right in there?”
The homunculus reared back, distracted by the noise Sphinc was making.
Orlando cupped his hands over his mouth and yelled. “Sphinc! Go back to the van and get a freakin’ tire iron!” As soon as he started, the homunculus turned back towards him.
“What?”
This time the homunculus ignored the distraction, kept its non-stare fixed on Orlando.
“On second thought, if you got one in there, bring an acetylene torch!”
It recommenced towards Orlando again. Its balled-up fist looked about the size of a ham. Orlando tried to reassure himself that getting punched by wax could not possibly hurt that much.
He heard the upstairs door bang open. The homunculus turned its back on him and motored with surprising speed towards the cellar door. Orlando tailed it, pausing at the end-table by Carlo’s chair to grab the syringe. He leapt up and jabbed it down into the thing’s neck. The homunculus’ back was slippery as hell, and Orlando slid down it even before it turned to shake him off. Orlando could still see the syringe poking out of the back of its neck. He hadn’t expected to be able to tranquilize this glorified aromatherapy accessory, but, hey, all he had to work with were the materials at hand.
The cellar door swung wide, and there stood Sphinc, jaw agape. The homonculus turned and linebackered towards him. Again Orlando jumped up, wrapping his hands around its massive neck. It bucked to throw him off, but with terrier tenacity Orlando hung on for the ride. Sphinc recovered from his disbelief episode and wound up to sock the thing in the chest. His fist went through the dark suit jacket, which seemed also to be made of wax, burying itself in the thing’s chest up to the wrist. The homunculus wrenched itself around, yanking Sphinc’s two hundred and forty pound, steroid-enhanced frame along with it. Sphinc’s wrist snapped, and he hollered in pain. Orlando watched the color drain from Sphinc’s face. He kept digging with his fingernails into the thing’s head and neck. Greasy yellow shavings peeled from the thing’s featureless mug, impeding it not at all. It raised its fist, ready to hammer down on Sphinc’s shaved skull. Orlando reached out to try to pull back on the arm, but managed only to slap it on its way down. Stray wax chunks splapped onto Carlo’s paneling and window blinds as the homunculus’ fist smacked Sphinc in the temple. Sphinc went limp.
Orlando chose to get off the thing’s back. He looked around for a useful found weapon. The homunculus wrapped its now-misshapen fingers around Sphinc’s wrist, and, with a discernible pop, freed the drummer’s hand from its chest. Orlando ran back towards the stove. Stepping gingerly past the homunculus he’d already downed, he reached over for a lifter sticking out from the stove top and pulled on it, freeing what felt like about ten pounds of thick iron lid. He was worried the lifter might be too hot to hold, but the handle turned out to be insulated. The lid was not. He turned and swung wide with the lifter, sending the lid sailing like a discus towards the wax figure. It hit the thing in the neck, slicing the head clean off, hot-knife-through-butter. The waxy orb plopped into a metal wastebasket, hitting it on the edge and knocking it over. Orlando gaped at the utter perfection of his fluky shot.
Then the thing resumed its forward motion, unperturbed by the loss of its head. Orlando felt pressure around his right ankle, looked down, and saw the severed hand of the stove-melted homunculus clamped around his sports sock. The other one loomed over him, pulling back both of its arms and then clapping them together, with Orlando’s head their obvious and imminent point of intersection.
“Oh, crap,” Orlando thought.
Orlando’s brain swam its way back up to muzzy consciousness, and with the effort came the parallel realization that he was somewhere he’d been before. A slight feeling of motion, with a soothing hint of rocking cradle. The soft seats: black leather. Enclosed space: little more than eight feet across. Rows of seating. Alongside and back, four to a row, aisle in the middle.
Holy crap, he was on the Concorde. He blinked and stretched his facial muscles. Yes, it was definitely the Concorde. Orlando hadn’t been on one of these babies since his major label days. Before he fully understood how all the extravagance was being charged back against his future royalties. He craned to see who was seated beside him, and, as he did so, understood that he was somehow contained, that he couldn’t move his arms or legs more than an inch or so in any direction. He looked down and saw no chains, no fetters. He was caught in a hold spell.
The man beside him greeted him with a mild eyebrow raise as Orlando sized him up. It wasn’t Tom. Neatly-arranged hair the color of straw; a small mustache to match; powder blue eyes. Decked out in about eight thousand bucks worth of Armani business wear. Idly stroking the manicured surfaces of his nails with his thumb. His lips were moving. He was speaking to Orlando in a low, enveloping tone that made him feel everything was going to be all right. The timbre was Barry White with the merest whiff of Slavic. An incongruous sound for this body, nearly as skinny as Orlando’s, to be making.
“What?” said Orlando. He was hearing the sound but not the words.
“I am happy that you are with us again. I have been hoping for some conversation. I am never able to read on an aeroplane. My attention wanders.” A hardcover copy of Only the Paranoid Survive: How To Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company sat on his lap like a Pekinese. According to the dust jacket, its author was head of Intel.
Orlando refocused on the man. He knew this guy. But he would have remembered meeting him. Seen him on television? And in some kind of annoying context, he was increasingly sure. He’d sworn at this bland visage on some interview show —
“I will introduce myself. I am Maxim Zhakharenko.”
Jeez! The guy from the Ochykyk Project! With the scam to stick the sky full of mirrors for the delectation of Nike and Kodak. Orlando knew he recognized his presence as noxious.
“Maybe you can tell me what the hell I’m doing here.” Orlando expected it to come out as an outraged cry, but something had control of his vocal cords, adjusting him to a laid back coo. He managed a swivel: behind him were Kacie and Carlo. Kacie seemed peacefully asleep, a largish gauze-and-tape bandage fixed to her temple. Carlo was out, too, slack-jawed and drooling.
“Do not worry. They are not harmed.”
“Not harmed? You’ve doped Carlo up again. He’d kicked, you son of a bitch. Now he’ll probably bottom out all over again.”
Zhakharenko shrugged slightly.
“Y
ou don’t even care, do you? What about Sphinc?”
“Who?”
“The fourth guy at Carlo’s place. Last I saw, one of your homunculi creamed him with a giant haymaker. You didn’t kill him, did you?”
“I am unaware of this person. My people were a fair distance away. Homunculi do not reason abstractly, and cannot extrapolate from their specific orders. Doubtless the surviving homunculus carried the three specified targets to the rendezvous point, leaving the stray party behind.”
Chances were, then, that Sphinc had probably come to in Carlo’s cellar. It had been a juggernaut of a KO, but the resilience of Sphinc’s cranium was pre-established. What would he be able to do, though? This was the first time Orlando had gotten him dragged into outright occult crap. He might or might not know he’d be wasting his time going to the cops. Possibly he could follow homunculus tracks to the rendezvous point, but if Zhakharenko’s people were any good, the trail would end there. The important thing was that Sphinc was in all likelihood okay. But there’d be no rescue coming from that quarter.
“If you seek consolation, know that I have never before had a target so thoroughly destroy one of my constructs. You should be proud to have held out so effectively.”
Zhakharenko’s attempt at a benign expression roiled Orlando. He actually wanted him to feel good about the situation. Typical stalker mindset. Like he was supposed to take forcible confinement as testament to a fan’s devotion.
“Jeez. People have gone to some lengths to get The Dogs to play a reunion gig, but I gotta tell you, buddy, you’re taking it a little far. Maybe you should just go download old live tracks from Napster like everybody else, huh?”
“Do not take this as an insult, but the music of your band does not interest me. I am partial to Shostakovich.”
“Yeah well I dig the chamber music but I’m not totally sold on his symphonies.”
Zhakharenko’s expression brightened. “Ah, then, we shall have an interesting conversation.”
“So if you don’t give a flying burrito for The Dogs... And we were big, but not enough for your corporate sponsors to care—you are working for Tom!”
The Russian maintained his pleasant demeanor. “Rather, Mr. Lockhart is employed by myself.”
“And this kidnap was his price.”
Zhakharenko nodded.
“You do realize he’s probably going to try and use your event to summon malign entities from the planes beyond? You know, bringing about the destruction of the world?” Throughout his question, Orlando heard the volume of his voice drop like a board fade. No one else on the plane could possibly overhear them. “The Apocalypse, or Ragnarok, or whatever he’s calling it these days?”
“Such is the nature of our arrangement.”
Orlando wanted to