By now he was beginning to realize that this was neither hallucination nor dream—and that he could hear three distinct voices. Although spirituality had never been his strong suit, his brief service to the shards had left him fertile for any seed of possibility. Right now forgiveness and salvation sounded real good.
“Who are you?”
“The beloved of heaven,” came the answer. “Those who dance on high.”
Again. Martin laughed wildly at the thought that angels, if that’s what they were, would actually suffer to speak in King James grandiloquence. “How do I know that you’re real?” he asked through his laughter. “Will you make my palms bleed? Will you make my plastic Jesus weep?”
But the alleged heavenly hosts were not amused, and simply proceeded with their agenda.
“Who do you despise most on this earth?” they asked Martin. “Who is the enemy of your soul?”
There was no hesitation on that one. “Dillon Cole.”
The hosts were pleased. “Dillon Cole,” they repeated. “He has taken away your family, and brought your life to turmoil. And still he lives.”
The thought that Dillon could still be alive was a thought he never wanted to entertain—but now that it was put into his mind, it awakened a fury that couldn’t be quelled by any amount of swings from the Slugger.
He thrust his hand forward, reaching into the light to get a hold on these beings that lingered there, but he could not reach them. It was as if some membrane stood between their world and his. “You want me to find him?” Martin asked.
“We want you to defeat him,” they answered. “Defeat him, and prepare our way.”
“What do I have to do?”
“You cannot kill him . . . but death will be your tool for his defeat.”
“I don’t understand.”
And so the hosts explained. “Michael Lipranski and Tory Smythe are dead . . .” they began. Martin gave up any reservations now, and listened to their orders, letting them plant in him a mission and give a purpose to his ruined life.
FIVE MINUTES LATER, EUREKA police arrived to find a bruised, bewildered security officer and a dental office in shambles. There was no sign of the culprit, because Martin Briscoe was already speeding south on the freeway, his hate now focused toward a single goal. He played the final orders the hosts had given him over and over in his mind like a mantra. The words calmed him, giving peace and direction to his troubled soul.
“Michael Lipranski and Tory Smythe are dead,” they had told him. “Now you must seek out their bodies . . . and once you have found them, you will scatter their flesh to the ends of the Earth.”
Part II
Fall Back
8. ABYSS
* * *
TWO THOUSAND MILES EAST OF EUREKA, AND EIGHT HOURS after the offices of Eureka Dental were vandalized, Dillon Cole awoke to the shrill chirp of a clock radio. The device was crippled by an inability to pick up any radio stations, the cell being so completely insulated. All it could do was chirp its alarm, and hum like a theremin whenever Dillon got too near it. He had time for little more than a shower before the chair began sounding its own alarm, far more caustic than the chirping of the clock. It would continue to blare until its sensors registered Dillon’s body weight in the seat, and it clamped down around him like a fly trap.
Once he was secured in his chair, the outer door swung open, and his personal zeroid came in to wheel him out, with Bussard right behind.
It was as he crossed the threshold of his cell that the oppression began to fill him. He had been neither claustrophobic nor agoraphobic before arriving here, but each day of his imprisonment brought anxiety swimming up from some inaccessible trench in his mind. It was always the same, and it only hit him when he was outside of his cell, when he could pick up the hidden vibrations in the frequencies of life around him. He was prepared for another onslaught of the mental malaise that funneled down the open mouth of the cooling tower. But he was not prepared for this.
It hit all of his senses at once as he was wheeled into the open cylinder of the cooling tower, like a sound so loud it painted a flash of texture on the retina. His head jerked within his mask as if he had taken a deep whiff of smelling salts, and with no space to turn, his neck took the force of the action—straining against itself. He gasped in staccato, halting breaths, his chest muscles suddenly too tense to take in the air he needed. He was floating in space, and there was not enough oxygen in the world to fuel his brain to process the wave of sensation that flowed through him.
The sensation that something had been triggered. Whatever chain of dominoes he had set in motion, the last one had tipped and was beginning a long, lonely fall.
It was the man in the leather chair.
It was the three figures on the diving platform.
The sensation of falling was unbearable, throbbing in his nerve endings. Dillon couldn’t be here anymore!
“I have to get out!” he wailed. “I’m meant to be out! OUT OUT OUT OUT!” But he knew his ranting sounded as deranged as the brimstone ravings of a street-corner prophet.
He could barely hear his own wails, but he could feel the pain as he convulsed within the unyielding bonds of his chair, his saliva bubbling into a rabid foam spewing through the mouth hole of his face plate, until one of the Coats mercifully jabbed a hypodermic into his arm, plunging his consciousness into a sea of white noise.
9. CURVED SPACE
* * *
NEWPORT HARBOR HIGH SCHOOL SAT ON PRIME REAL estate, and for years local developers had fought and lost many battles to relocate the school and build high-end tract homes in its place.
Even though the Colorado River Backwash was three hundred miles away, and had no connection to Newport Beach, security at the school still had to be beefed up. This was primarily because of all the in-depth news reports that had tracked down the roots of Michael Lipranski—as if the source of Michael’s transformations of nature could somehow be found in the classrooms of Newport Harbor High. For months there had been waves of curiosity-seekers making pilgrimages to the school and other points of new-divinity interest, hoping perhaps to absorb some residue of the shards’ passing. But it was Dillon whom most people were interested in, not Michael, so the tide of visitors to Michael’s stomping grounds soon ebbed, leaving only the occasional zealot wandering onto the school grounds.
And then there was the man by the fence.
At 4:30 on a Thursday afternoon, Drew Camden did a few warm-down laps with the rest of the track team, setting the pace. He had noticed the man just on the other side of the north fence about ten minutes before. He walked a rankled Chihuahua back and forth, weaving through the eucalyptus breakwind. It was by no means an odd occurrence—this was a dog-happy neighborhood, and the residents had no reservations about letting their dogs crap in the eucalyptus grove by the school. This man, however, was different. Perhaps it was the way he tugged on the yapping dog with little care or sensitivity. Or perhaps it was the way he made brief eye contact with Drew each time he came around for another lap. His gaze made Drew pick up the pace.
“Hey, Drew, it’s a warmdown,” one of his teammates reminded him. “Ease up!” But Drew didn’t slow down until the track curved away from the north fence.
There were several explanations for the man with the dog, and none of them were pleasant, but as team captain, he felt a responsibility to dispatch him. So when they reached the stands and the coach sent them off to the showers, Drew chose to take another lap alone.
Back in September, the Orange County Register had printed a nice-sized article on Drew, featuring a picture of him breaking through a finish line. When he had met the reporter for the interview, he was naive enough to think it was going to be an article highlighting his stand-out track performance. But the reporter was not from the sports desk. That should have been Drew’s first clue. The article turned out to be a feature entitled “ ‘Out’ in Front,” and was a coming-out manifesto likening Drew to Greg Louganis, as a local
emblem of gay athletic pride. People were either appalled, or impressed. Some people would stare at him, their equilibrium thrown off by Drew’s complete lack of effeminate affectations. Some of his friendships were lost, while others grew stronger, and now the fact that he was captain of the track team—which hadn’t meant much to anyone before—was a political statement. Hell, if he went to take a piss now it was a political statement. But worse than any of that were the advances from strangers. Some were boys his own age, some were men much older—teens and trolls who idolized him for what they thought he represented. Honesty . . . bravery—which was ridiculous to Drew, because his coming out wasn’t about being brave at all. In the wake of the Backwash, and Michael’s death, he simply found himself uninterested in maintaining his old facade.
And now there was this man with his yapping Chihuahua.
At about the time Drew began to smell the dog crap, the man called out to him from the other side of the fence. “Hey! You’re Drew Camden, aren’t you?”
Drew found himself particularly disgusted by this man’s approach, and was actually looking forward to telling him where he could go. Drew slowed his pace to a walk, and stopped a few feet away from the fence. “You could be arrested for what you’re doing,” Drew said to him.
“Walking my dog?”
“Soliciting a minor.”
For a moment the man appeared flustered. The dog just barked.
“That is why you’re here, isn’t it? Or are you just here to look?”
The man adjusted the Angels cap he wore, and glanced down at his dog, giving a sharp tug on the leash which did not quiet the animal. Then he recovered his composure. “I’m sorry if it looks that way. Actually I just wanted to talk to you. I’m an old friend of the Lipranskis’—I understand you knew Michael.”
A breeze tore a flurry of eucalyptus leaves from the trees. Drew could feel his sweat chilling on his shirt, which clung uncomfortably to his back. He took a good look at the man, trying to see how much sincerity he could parse from the man’s face. Neither Michael nor his father had ever mentioned any old family friends—but then they never spoke much about their lives before moving to California.
“So, you’re a friend from when they lived in Vermont?” Drew asked.
“No—Long Island. I didn’t know they lived in Vermont.”
Drew grinned. “They didn’t.”
The man chuckled, acknowledging the test, and the fact that he had passed it. “The name’s Martin,” he said. “Martin Briscoe.”
Drew took a step closer, then realized the fence negated any need for a handshake. The dog growled at Drew, then growled at Briscoe, then went back to its yapping fit.
“So if you wanted to talk to me, Mr. Briscoe, why didn’t you just call?”
“Didn’t know where to find you—but the people I’m staying with gave me this.” He held up a copy of Drew’s fifteen minutes of fame, the newspaper already turning yellow at the edges. “I figured the best place to look would be the Newport Harbor track.”
“Why was it so important to find me?”
Briscoe didn’t answer. Instead he studied Drew for a moment—and in that moment, Drew thought he recognized something in his face. A sensation that bordered on déjà vu.
“You were close to Michael, weren’t you? Like brothers, I mean. I always felt Michael needed a brother. He was always such a loner.”
“Not the Michael I knew.”
“I always felt that Michael was profoundly special. I just never realized how special. I wish I could have been there to see him part the skies.”
“So you believe all those stories?” said Drew.
“Why shouldn’t I believe them? They’re true, aren’t they?”
Drew chose to neither confirm nor deny the things that Michael and the rest of the shards were capable of. The less he spoke of Michael, the less painful the memory of his last moments with him, and the more distant that image of Michael and Tory looking back at him from the dying dam. Even with all their power, they had been powerless to save themselves.
The wind blew again, drawing gooseflesh beneath Drew’s sweaty shirt, and he longed for the relaxing release of a shower. Again a vague sense of this man’s familiarity set him on edge. Perhaps he had been in one of the pictures in Michael’s house. Regardless, it dragged him back to the reality that he was talking to a man he did not know through a chain link fence. Whether or not Briscoe found that awkward, Drew and the dog certainly did.
“Is there something I can do for you, Mr. Briscoe?”
“Jimmy moved,” Martin answered. “I showed up at his door, and the place was empty.”
“Jimmy?”
“Michael’s father. No one seems to know where he went.”
Drew had never heard anyone call James Lipranski “Jimmy.” But then, two years in Newport Beach was just a small fraction of the man’s life. “He’s renting a townhouse in Costa Mesa,” Drew told him. “215 Placentia. You need directions?”
“Thanks, but I think I can find it.”
“I’m sure he’ll be glad to see you. No one came to the funeral from back east. Not even Michael’s mother.”
“I doubt Jimmy even called her.” Briscoe lifted his baseball cap to reveal a thinning head of hair on a scaly scalp that was irritated and red. Briscoe dug his nails in and scratched vigorously, dislodging flakes, and making the irritation worse. “Funny thing,” he said. “I stopped by the cemetery to pay my respects, but I couldn’t find Michael’s grave.”
“Ask his father,” Drew suggested. “Maybe he’ll take you there.”
Martin nodded a polite thank-you, and Drew left to hit the showers.
He put Martin Briscoe out of his mind until much later that night, when the news chanced to report on a stolen Chihuahua found hanging by its leash in a eucalyptus grove.
THE BIBLE IN THE stolen Taurus said it was placed there by the Gideons. This was, of course, untrue. Not the fault of the bible, which had neither motive nor capacity to lie, but the fault of Martin Briscoe, whose scriptural void had been easily filled upon checking out of the Sheraton.
Somewhere in his Gideon bible, toward the middle of Exodus, it said, “Thou shalt not steal.” But such moral ballast had no place in the ship he now sailed. He sailed higher waters now, and was, by divine appointment, above the law.
Still there was a vestige of ambivalence within him. A conflict that kept bringing his hand to his head to scratch his flaking scalp, giving himself over to the compulsion—as if his fingertips could reach right through his skull, and into the convolutions of his cortex, digging out all the brain-jam he imagined had collected in there; a gelatinous waste product of too much thinking, and feeling.
He wondered how the three Heavenly Hosts that had visited him felt about the mental bilge that clogged his brain, seeping into his every action. They certainly did have a window into his mind—he could feel that, too. There was a membrane in the midst of his thoughts, stretched thin as parchment and clear as glass, through which the hosts observed from a telescopic distance. He had spoken to them occasionally, after the grand satori of purpose they bestowed on him in the ruins of his dental office. He would call on them now and again, asking them for advice on how to proceed, but they never answered. They stayed at the other end of their tunnel. “We must not deliver ourselves into your world,” they had told him. “Not until you have completed your task.” So for now they sat as silent voyeurs of his mind, and he could feel both their intimate presence, as well as their distance. It made him want to scratch his head all the more.
The oldies station he had tuned in played a queue of feel-good sixties standards. Marty sang along with the derivative voices of the Association, getting only about half the words of “Windy” right.
He continued unhurriedly down Pacific Coast Highway, relishing the clean-air innocence of the song. It was ten o’clock at night—still a bit too early to begin his evening’s work, so he drove back and forth through Corona del Mar—a Laguna Beach w
annabe at the heel of Newport. On either side of him, the storefronts showed a string of coffee houses close together, uniformly bohemian. The only dim spot on the street was the Port movie theater, a dinosaur with boarded doors that had given up the ghost. Its unlit marquee read “Rosebud,” in mis-matching letters.
After cruising back through Newport, and Corona one more time, he turned left, heading down narrow residential streets toward Corona Del Mar Memorial Park.
All considered, the day had gone well to this point. With the unwitting help of Drew Camden, he had located James Lipranski, and had gained access to his home with little difficulty. Long before actually finding him, Marty had decided it best to kill the man—and when he put the suggestion forth to the Heavenly Hosts, they predictably offered neither resistance, nor encouragement. Surely if “Thou shalt not kill” were a commandment they expected him to follow, they would have spoken up to prevent him from the act.
But when Lipranski opened the door, Marty found the man scarcely worthy of execution. The stench of bad scotch permeated the air around him, and he held a stance Marty himself had grown familiar with; a hand high on the door jam to keep one’s feet in place, and stop the world from spinning. Not at all what Marty had expected from a man who spawned Michael Lipranski, Perverter of Nature.
“Yeah, what do you want?” he had said to Marty, who could only gawk. He had worked out an elaborate scheme for getting in—something involving the neighborhood newcomers club, and a new key to the association pool, but his words left him. So instead, he picked up a stone the good lord had provided in the flowerbed beside the door, and smashed Lipranski over the head with it. It was inelegant, and in full view of the neighborhood, but no one was watching, and Lipranski’s reflexes were far too slow to fend off the unexpected blow. He fell backward into the house and ceased to be an inconvenience. Once the door was closed, Marty once more tried to impel himself to kill the man, but shied away at the last moment. He consoled himself by realizing that homicide was an acquired taste, and his palate was not quite ready for it.