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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
The Kept
Chapter 1
The Keepers
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
The Cure
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
“… This Place”
Chapter 14
Praise
Copyright
DEDICATION:
For E.T.G.T. and A.M.D.G.
… Hamlet … is mad and sent into England.… ’Twill not be seen in him there. There the men are as mad as he.…
Hamlet
Act V, Scene 1
The Kept
Chapter 1
Fog misted upward from rotted leaves, hugging the mansion like a fetid shroud, squeezing with the grip of demented love until the jaws of its gargoyles gaped with terror in silent, hysterical, never-ending shriek. Soft rain splattered. Ceased. Splattered. Dawn sifted in. Thin fall sunlight groped through trees, fracturing in dapples against the gabled, turreted, grotesque Gothic mansion and a breeze-blown shutter creaked once, twice, moaning for Duncan. A crow coughed hoarsely in a meadow far away. Then stillness—dense; oppressive; waiting … waiting for the wraith-like hooded figure in black that stalked silently through the dense forestation ringing the mansion. The long trailing folds of its heavy velvet robes slid whispering and scraping over decayed shards of darnel, hemlock and oak; rosemary, iris and flowering Judas. Trees ended. The figure halted. And eyes the color of broken dreams brooded across the barren quadrant of earth fronting the mansion; lifted to the moat; to the splintered, lowered drawbridge and the grinning bust of Belial rampant above the door; then fell, like a dying hope, to the gravestone at its feet:
BELA SLOVIK
1898-1959
A withered sigh, hopeless and aching, filtered like remembrance through the figure’s black veil, trickling onto the grave in melancholy rivulets. The apparition knelt. Alabaster fingers, the fingers of a woman, reached out to the headstone holding a pure white rose; then dropped it abruptly as the stillness was shattered by a military bugling. The crackling notes of “Assembly” raged across the courtyard, ripping into the fog with hooks of brass, and an American flag, fluttering defiance, leaped up in spangled majesty atop a mansion turret.
A man garbed in crash helmet, football face guard and Air Force fatigues exploded through the mansion door, fell sprawling to the ground and bellowed: “Everyone out of the whirlpool bath!”
The apparition started, rose up and fled.
Twenty-three men in Air Force fatigues burst like shrapnel through the door, shouting:
“Hurry, children, hurry, hurry!”
“Move it!”
“Scramble!”
“May Day! May Day!”
A green swarm of meteors, they hurtled to the center of the courtyard, muttering and mumbling, crooking their elbows in dress-right-dress. One wore a sword and golden earrings. One wore a peppermint-striped beret. From the head of a third bloomed a coonskin cap.
“Where’s my bra? I forgot my bra!”
“Captain Marvel, meet my urologist.”
“Move!”
“What’s a ‘U.F.O.’?”
“Well, Liberace, for example.”
“Sink the Bismarck!”
“Up your clyde!”
“Oons!”
“Who took my Green Hornet douche bag!”
“Who the hell cares about your douche bag!”
“Morris Fairbanks, have you no heart?”
“No! It is welded to my sword!”
“Yes! Which is presently slicing my foot!”
“Beastly fog! There’s no color in the air!”
As imprecations floated up from them like steam thick with sparks, they were fronted with authority by a dark-haired ramrod. He wore dirty white sneakers and an N.Y.U. blazer over his faded green fatigue tops. “Attention!” he commanded. “It is I—Manfred Cutshaw!”
The men raised their arms in the salute of ancient Rome. “Mighty Manfred, let us serve you!” they howled into the fog. Then they dropped their arms and froze, hushed and unmoving like the damned awaiting judgment.
Cutshaw’s eyes swept over them like the blue of arctic lights, flashing and mysterious, luminous and deep. And no bird sang. At last Cutshaw spoke: “Sergeant Dorian Zook! You may take three giant steps and kiss the hem of my garment! The hem, mind you, the hem!”
“Sah!” bawled Zook, a pudgy little man with a glistening bald head and a proud, jutting belly. He paced three steps forward and cracked his heels together resoundingly.
Cutshaw measured him with warm reserve, then said, “Smashing form, Dorian!”
“Thank you, sir! Thank you!”
“Do not allow it to go to your head, Zook. There’s nothing more vile than hubris.”
“Yes, sah!” responded Zook.
Cutshaw looked smartly to the group. “Now, then—baby steps only!” He whirled, turning his back to them. “Ready? Green Light!”
Behind him the men shuffled forward like electrified lead soldiers, taking rapid, tiny steps. Then, “Cool it! The ‘fuzz’!” bawled the one with the sword, and the men scuttled rapidly back to formation as out from the mansion, in angry stride, marched the starched and militant figure of an Air Force captain.
“Look where it comes,” burbled Cutshaw, “in the very form and figure of my father’s pet jackass!”
Zook nudged him. “Plan ‘A’?”
“No, ‘B’—‘Madden But Do Not Craze’!”
The Air Force captain irrupted before them, angry hands balled into fists. “Cutshaw, where’s Fromme?” he demanded severely.
“Heaven knows, Captain Groper.”
“Mighty Manfred has spoken!” chorused the men en masse.
Groper blanched and Cutshaw leaned forward. “Sir, I’ve asked them not to do that.”
“Sure, you asked us,” chided Zook, “but you didn’t ask us right.”
“What is ‘right’?” demanded Cutshaw. “Don’t talk interlocking puzzles.”
“You didn’t say ‘Simon Says’!”
“Is that the rule?”
“Well, sure it’s the rule!”
“Nobody told me.”
“Nobody told you! Listen, what the hell are you, a baby? You couldn’t check? You couldn’t research? You couldn’t just ask a cop on the—?”
“Simon Says ‘TENNNNNNN-HUT!’” Groper’s interruption was a furious roar.
The men snapped to attention. Silence, total silence. And into it Groper spat words that were distinct blobs of acid quietly sizzling on porous rock. “You stinking, crawling, garbage-headed scum! Think you’re kidding me with your phony little squirrel act? Sure, you’ve broken Ryan! But we’ll have you ready to fly again or break every one of your legs!”
His speech was not a total success. The men roundl
y hissed.
“Quiet!” raged the captain.
The hissing grew louder.
“Knock it off!”
And louder.
“Simon Says ‘shut up!’”
An unqualified success.
Groper regarded the men with a savage contempt. “Hissing—that you’re good for, you slimy little snakes!”
“Bra-vo! Bra-vo!” breathed Cutshaw quietly but with feeling.
Groper acknowledged the insolence with a darting, hateful glance. “But,” he continued doggedly, “until headquarters ships you a fresh human sacrifice, I am in command! Now pull your heads out of your barracks bags and give poor Colonel Ryan just a little better send-off than you gave him a greeting! Just once try to act like airmen!”
“Banzai! Banzai!” crowed a man in the second rank.
Groper chose to ignore it. He looked to the mansion door. Two airmen were emerging, bearing a man on a stretcher. His hair was iron-gray. He whispered incessantly, incoherently and to no one: to the wind; to the fog; to his limp and crumpled spirit; to a vital mission aborted.
Groper faced the men. “Attennnnnnn-hut! Present—h’ahms!” He about-faced and saluted. The stretcher bobbed past.
“Hail, Caesar!” croaked the men. The one with the sword extended it smartly.
One of the bearers tripped on a pebble. He rebuked it with a glance, recovered, moved on. The vacant-eyed colonel on the stretcher fell silent. Then abruptly he sobbed—a single, wrenching sob. Cutshaw’s gaze never left him.
The astronaut lowered his arm. Some infinite sadness, some haunting regret fluttered its shadow across his face like the dark wings of pain but briefly remembered. Abruptly, crisply, he lifted his hand in proper salute. And murmured, “Simon Says ‘get well.’” He barely heard it himself over the slam of the ambulance door.
The Keepers
Chapter 2
Has madness a color? A particular tone of voice? What is its uniform? What is its rank?
They strode along squabbling, the Senator and the General, their accents turning heads along the Pentagon corridor. A messenger on a bicycle nearly bumped into them, smiled apologetically, then pedaled on past them deeper into the labyrinth, squeaking to infinite out-baskets.
“The Moon, General Lastrade! I want to talk about the Moon!”
Lieutenant General George M. Lastrade, large-boned and hulking Chief of the Strategic Air Command, shifted a shortened, soggy cigar stub to the drier corner of his mouth. His jowled face was wrinkled with the care of boundless skies, and beneath the jagged lightning of his black-billed cap gleamed the two intense and probing pearls of gray that were his eyes. Unreadable as a basilisk’s, they struggled to communicate a look of ageless wisdom. Yet they were better equipped by nature to communicate with sharks. Their owner’s sleep was dreamless. But he was willing to endure the insufferable in order to get his way.
“But, Senator!” pleaded Lastrade in what he devoutly hoped was a whine.
Senator Nolan D. Hesburgh, longtime Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Appropriations Committee, wheeled on Lastrade and whipped a flaky, freckled hand out of the right-hand pocket of his new vicuna coat. Then he waggled a preachy finger under the General’s broad nose.
“You’re the one who started this! Wasn’t this supposed to be a sightseeing tour?” He spoke in a flat, expressionless drawl, laced with gravel and nasal twang.
“Yes, but—!”
“So far all I’ve seen is the Field Officers’ Men’s Room and your thickly coated wild blue tongue wig-wagging pleas for money!”
“Good image!” sparkled the General.
“Good grief!” muttered the Senator. His hand stabbed into his pocket again and he trudged ahead down the corridor on stubby, muscular legs, eyes glaring balefully out of a deadpan face. He adored baiting the brass. The Army, the Navy, the Marines and the Coast Guard had rejected him for service in World War II.
“Too short!” said the Marines. “Bad eyes!” said the Army. “Try the Coast Guard!” said the Navy. The Coast Guard said nothing, which proved most disturbing of all. Hesburgh had never forgotten it; would never let them forget it.
But Lastrade he found exasperating, impervious to insult. Nothing could dent his hide. Is it an act? wondered Hesburgh. Is the man putting me on? Earlier that day he had taunted Lastrade by relating in sober detail how he had once seen a flying saucer “swooping low” over the CIA building. “It lowered a ladder,” he’d lied to him brazenly, looking him straight in the eye, “and someone on the roof climbed up into the ship.” Then he had waited. “Yes, my wife saw something similar,” the General had replied. “I think there’s something out there.” Lastrade’s expression, at the time, had been one of unalloyed sagacity. The Senator was baffled. He scratched a wart on his neck. “Too short,” he muttered bleakly.
“About the money!” puffed Lastrade, catching up to him quickly.
“The Moon!” snapped Hesburgh. “June, spoon, Moon!”
“The Moon is highly classified!”
“Everyone knows it’s Roquefort!”
Lastrade abruptly halted them by an unmarked door flanked by two air policemen. His head was bent low at a menacing angle. Hesburgh watched him slyly—waiting—hoping—as he saw the General’s hands clench spasmodically into fists. But Lastrade said nothing more than, “Let’s discuss it in private!” He pushed in on the door and held it open for the Senator. And smiled.
Hesburgh’s shoulders sagged. He stared dully into the room. “And what are you hiding in here? The fourteen corporals who do all the work?”
“Electronic computers!” snapped Lastrade with a hint of pride.
Hesburgh, with a sigh, stepped into a whirring world of whispers, sibilance and clicks, subtle chattering of tape. Instantly it chilled him. It sounded—no, felt—like some ominous discussion between alien intelligences, dim and half-remembered (imagined? dreamed?) from those nights when he lay warm and half asleep in bed as a boy, the house still and dark and his parents not yet home from a party on Cape Cod. (The rustling of leaves? Sea foam bubbling over moss-covered rock?) The Senator looked at his hands, now, noticed they were sweating. He wiped them with a handkerchief as his gaze slithered upward, up the shining, hulking column of a memory bank.
It was tall and superior and he hated it intensely. His heart beat slightly faster. Had computers been automobiles and he a mongrel dog, he would have run amok amongst them, fanging their tires with foaming mouth. The door clicked shut behind him. He heard Lastrade’s footsteps.
“Show me the one that picks the wrong President on television. I’ve got an inspirational message for it,” he growled in his arid monotone.
Lastrade unwrapped a cigar. “Not the same type.”
“Let’s hope,” muttered the Senator. He glanced around the room, locked his gaze on one of the units. It was flashing a burst of signals—sparks of yellow light in unvarying spurts. Hesburgh, a former Boy Scout (they had never told him “Too short!”), identified them immediately as the International Morse Code for “SOS.” He glided in closer.
“No, sir!” continued Lastrade as he searched for his lighter. “This whole damn room is just one giant brain—the Lefkowitz IX! Latest, biggest and smartest of ’em all!”
“I think it’s in trouble,” said Hesburgh quietly.
Lastrade found the lighter. “Could I have that again, sir?”
“What does it do?”
“What?”
“Lefkowitz.”
“Prepares the National War Plan.”
“I think we’re all in trouble.”
Lastrade came up beside him, took a deep and troubled puff on his freshly lit cigar. “Have you seen the latest Plan?”
“Um.”
“Isn’t it a masterpiece?”
“Oh, I think it’s beautiful! But who wins the war?”
“Oh, we do, Senator Hesburgh!”
Hesburgh turned slowly, staring with the incredulity of one watching planets collide. Lastrade was
smiling grotesquely. His teeth were bared wide and his stare was fixed and vacuous; but deep behind the luster of his eyes, on some mountaintop, Hesburgh detected movement: a snarling, maddened bobcat edging along a tree branch—patiently, delicately, tail twitching electrically. Hesburgh, waited, hoping. But nothing. Nothing at all. Lastrade remained immobile in frozen grin.
“I’m greatly relieved,” said Hesburgh at last.
“Premature!” pounced the General, pressing in tight to the Senator so that their noses almost touched. “We win the war only when my proposed new bomber group is programmed into the Plan! Every other time we feed it in, we lose—dismally!”
“Don’t we take any villages?”
“I love your ready wit, sir! A very funny quip!”
The remark was Hesburgh’s limit. He decided to strike where it hurt. “Well, if that one strikes you funny,” he snorted, “here’s a gag you’ll love! Seems there’s this astronaut named Cutshaw, see—supposed to go to the Moon! Yeah! Makes two hundred orbits; also gets three and a half years of training costing a billion in taxpayer dollars! And he can’t be replaced! He’s all we’ve got left! One of his understudies decided that he wanted to run for Governor and the other one got clobbered when he tripped over a skateboard! But a funny thing happens on the way to the launching pad: Cutshaw goes berserk! Says he refuses to go to the Moon! And why? Why? Because it ‘might be bad for his skin!’ Understand me? His skin! Pretty funny, eh, General? But wait! There’s more! Because unless a certain general gets his jockey back in orbit, even Ecuador will beat us to the Moon!” “Oh, wait, now, hold it!” Lastrade drew erect. “No, sir, no! There you’re out of your depth! I happen to know that, Moonwise, Ecuador can’t hack it!”
It hit the Senator like a flounder: an undeniable confirmation that Lastrade was putting him on. The realization spurred him to fury, and he abandoned all finesse, growling, “Incredible shrinking General, you are a strange and wondrous study in spectacularly limited genius.”
“Was that intended as an insult?” asked Lastrade with childlike simpleness. It was clearly his finest hour.