“Oh, Jesus!” Howie cried.
“Take it easy, man. We’re here now.”
Supporting the smaller man, Earl helped him to the cottage door. An old Charlie Daniels LP was playing at full blast, so Earl didn’t bother knocking. Keeping one hand close to the weapon stuck in his belt, he opened the door, then half-carried Howie inside.
The cottage was almost all one room with a couple of doors leading off on the far side to smaller bedrooms and the can. Sitting on floor pillows and a beat-up couch were two men and three women. They all looked up when the door opened. The cottage was warm with a good-sized fire in the hearth. The smell of marijuana was strong in the air. One of the men reached over to the stereo and took the needle off the record, dragging it across the grooves.
“Who the fuck are you?” he demanded, coming to his feet.
Earl left Howie propped up against the door. “Steve,” he said. “How’s it hanging?”
The man who was standing peered closer, then a broad grin cut across his features. “Hey, hey, hey! Fercrissakes, Earl. What’re you doing up here?”
“Looking for a party—what do you think, Steve?”
Steve Hill nodded in appreciation—there wasn’t a better reason to be doing anything. He was a tall thin man, wearing a faded Grateful Dead T-shirt and cut-off jeans. He didn’t bother introducing his friends.
The other man looked like a biker—long black hair pulled back in a ponytail, a silver swastika hanging from one earlobe. He was wearing cowboy boots, greasy jeans, and a plain white T-shirt with the arms torn off. The three women seemed all of a kind—one blond, two brunettes, but all three were sleepy-eyed and stoned. One of the brunettes was only wearing a pair of bikini briefs. The other two women wore shorts and halters.
“You want a toke?” Steve asked, offering Earl a joint.
“Thanks.” Earl took a long drag, then held the joint up to Howie’s lips. “We had us a little…hunting accident,” he said as he handed the joint back. “You got a first-aid kit, man?”
“Hey, we got a fucking nurse here tonight.” He nodded to the women and the topless brunette looked up. “See what you can do for the man, Sherry.”
Unselfconsciously, Sherry stood up and approached Howie. She took in the amount of blood that his shirt had soaked up, then crooked her finger at him. “Let’s go to the can,” she said. “What’s your name, tiger?”
Even through his pain, Howie had trouble keeping his gaze from her breasts. He glanced at Earl.
“Go on,” Earl said. He waited until Sherry led Howie away, then looked back at Steve. “You got a phone in yet?”
Steve shook his head. “I come here to get away, man. What’s up?”
“I got some serious business that can’t wait.”
Steve glanced at the butt of the gun sticking up from the belt and thought for a long stoned moment about Howie’s shoulder. “You need reinforcements or something?” he asked finally.
“No. But I got to make a call to a certain man—the sooner the better, if you catch my drift.”
“Where’s the call going?”
“I’ll make it collect.”
“Hey, Lisa,” Earl said. The blonde looked up. “You want to take my friend here up to your place so he can use your phone?”
Lisa’s gaze ranged up from Earl’s shoes to his face. “Sure.”
“Wait a minute,” the other man said. “You’re with me toni—”
“Cool it, Max—okay?” Steve grinned at the bigger man and tossed him a small glass vial. “This is strictly a phone call, nothing else. Right, Earl?”
“You got it.”
Steve nodded. “So check out the nose-candy, Max. Talk to Pam here and Lisa’ll be back quicker ’n she can shake her ass.”
Lisa sauntered over to the door where she put on a jacket and a pair of leather sandals. “Have you got wheels?” she asked when Earl and Steve joined her outside.
“Not so’s you’d notice. We drove up in the Toyota—it’s on its last legs and it’s hot.”
“Steve?” Lisa asked.
Steve tossed her a set of car keys. “Take the Honda.” Then to Earl: “You bringing anything down on us?”
Earl shook his head.
“Anything in it for me? Can you use a couple more bodies?”
“I’ll know more after I make this call.”
Steve grinned. “All right. I owe you one anyway.”
“I know,” Earl said.
The smile faded on Steve’s face, but Earl didn’t notice. He’d already turned to follow Lisa to the car. Steve waited until the Honda’s taillights were out of sight before going back inside. Maybe he could get some information from the guy Earl had left behind. Sherry was coming out of the washroom as he stepped inside.
“How is he?” Steve asked.
“He’ll live. The bullet went through muscle tissue—missed the bone. He should go to the hospital for stitches, though.”
“I’ve got a needle and thread.”
“Gimme a break. That’s not the kind of—”
“No hospital, Sherry. Too many questions—understand?”
“Yeah. Sure.” She didn’t look happy about it.
“So you gonna sew him up?”
“Here, Sherry!” Max called and tossed her the glass vial of cocaine. “Maybe this’ll steady your nerves.” He and Pam laughed.
Steve took her arm and steered her back to the washroom. “I’ll give you a hand,” he said.
* * *
After leaving Mally by the stone, Lewis made his way home where he sat in the dark for a long while before finally lighting a lamp. He went to the bookshelves and walked slowly around, reading the titles. Yeats’ Trembling of the Veil stood alongside theosophist classics like Annie Besant’s The Ancient Wisdom and Mundy’s I See Sunrise. There were books by Madame Blavatsky, Raymond Buckland, Israel Regardie, Robert Graves, T.C. Lethbridge, Eliphas Levi, W.B. Crow and Charles Williams. There were some contemporary writers represented as well, such as Colin Wilson and E.S. Howes.
The subjects ranged from Fiji firewalkers to the Order of the Golden Dawn, Freemasonry to the Rosicrucians, Jung to spiritualism. All of the mysteries were represented, but it was up to the reader to discover which out of those thousands of volumes held a kernel of truth, and which were out-and-out quackeries.
Lewis stopped in front of the shelf that held Aleister Crowley’s books. He thought of the stag and its mystery and tried to compare its wonder with Crowley’s poor showing. “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” That was the fundamental assertion of the self-confessed Beast. He had borrowed it by way of Rabelais and William Blake, but given it a new resonance, a Nietzschean morality. Only the strong should survive. Wasn’t this nature’s way? The natural way?
Lewis sighed. He took down a volume by Ackerly Perkin and brought it over to the table where he sat down, the book lying unopened before him.
Perkin had been a contemporary of Crowley’s—the original owner, in fact, of much of this library. It was he who had first caused a shadow to fall on the stag, on the piping, on the rites that bound the two to New Wolding.
“Man needs illusion,” this particular volume of Perkin’s journals opened with, “for without his illusions, man is nothing. The strength of your illusions is dependent upon the strength of your will. The stronger your will, the more you will rule, for other men will always flock to him whose illusions are the most potent.”
It was a circumspect approach to Crowley’s assertions, but where the Beast had gone on to the magical uses of sex and the use of drugs like mescaline, Perkin withdrew from the world, seeking his illusions in microcosm, rather than the world at large. What he found merely intensified his belief in the need for illusion.
When he became aware of the piping and the stone, of the rites and the dancing and what they were calling to, he used what influence he had to evoke his own illusions to counteract the one he believed the villagers upheld. For while he would allow all men their ill
usions, he would not allow those illusions to manifest themselves in this world. Such a thing should not be possible. If, however, such a thing was somehow possible, then he was determined that the only illusions that would be manifested would be his own.
When Lewis tried to find out why Perkin would have done this, the only reason the journals gave him was that Perkin did what he did simply because he could. Because he believed it all to be illusion.
“Which is more illusory?” he asked in one entry. “Illusions built upon belief, or those built with reasoned disbelief?” Around this point the journals ended and Perkin returned to the wandering life he’d known before moving to Lanark County, leaving the library in his old house.
Mally had first appeared around this time and it was she who had helped a younger Lewis transfer all those books to his cabin in New Wolding. “The dark man won’t be back for them,” she told Lewis. “He’s found his god in war now. He thinks it to be a reasoned exercise, or the greatest of all illusions, but whichever he decides on, he won’t be back.”
Lewis often wished that he had never read any of Perkin’s books, especially those that Perkin had written himself. Before, Lewis had been a simple man, content with what he had. But when Vera died and Edmond fled, the books were all he had left to sustain him. They filled the emptiness inside him with questions until sometimes he no longer wanted the answers.
He longed then to return to the simple belief that he’d once shared with the other villagers, but it was far too late for that. Just as it was too late for the village to survive. There were only four of them under the age of twenty now. The old folk had died; the younger ones gone out into the outside world seeking…illusions, he supposed.
When he had asked his own son why he was leaving, Edmond had replied, “There’s nothing for me here.” Lewis hadn’t had an answer for that then. He didn’t have one now.
Lewis flipped through the pages of the book, then let it close with a thump. If the hounds that chased the stag were Perkin’s creations, if they were his illusions, then why were they still here, fifty years after Perkin had left?
Lewis was afraid of the answer to that question. He was afraid that by taking Perkin’s books, by following the hundreds of threads that ran through them, the wisdoms along with the foolishness, that it was he himself who was now sustaining the hounds. That they crept out of the darkness of his own soul to chase the stag. For was that not what all the writers of these books sought? Not the mystery itself, but some method to hold it, to control and measure it, to dissect it to see what made it tick. He’d asked Mally about it once, knowing that his own search made him no better than those writers.
“You’re not alone in what you do,” she’d replied, as though confirming his worst fear.
“Then I am responsible?”
“How should I know, Lewis?”
“Did I make you? Are you one of my illusions? Or should I say delusions?”
“Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters!” he’d cried. “What are you?”
“I’m a secret, Lewis,” she said. “That’s all.”
And that was no comfort at all.
* * *
“This is a nice place,” Earl said as Lisa led him into the cottage and flicked on a light. “You had it long?”
“It belongs to my parents.”
“Are they around?” His hand drifted toward the butt of his .38.
“No. They’re in Europe.”
Earl nodded. “So where’s the phone?”
“In the bedroom—through there.” She indicated a door, then drifted into the room after him. “So are you one of these tough guys that Steve uses on his jobs?”
Earl turned to her and laughed. “Steve’s told you he pulls jobs?”
Lisa nodded. “Sure. Where do you think he gets all his bread?”
“I’ll tell you where. Steve’s got himself a dead-end job in the government and the only way he makes do is by selling dope to the people he works with.”
“That’s not what he told me.”
Earl shrugged. “I don’t care what he told you. He’s an asshole, plain and simple.”
“Well, then how’d you get to know him?”
“Even assholes come in handy sometimes. You ever try to take a shit through your nose?”
Lisa pulled a face.
“This is a private call,” Earl told her.
For a moment it looked like she was going to say something, but then her gaze met his and a weak smile touched her lips. “Sure,” she said. “No problem. I’ll wait out there on the couch.”
Earl waited until the door closed behind her, then picked up the receiver and placed his call. Collect.
“I’ll take it,” the voice on the other end said when the operator gave the caller’s name. Then to Earl, “This better be good. You know what time it is? You got a clean line?”
“Yeah. This won’t take long, Joe. Think of it as me doing you a favor.”
“I’m listening,” Broadway Joe said.
“Tony Valenti.”
“What about him?”
“Are you still looking for him?”
“What kinda game you playing, Shaw?”
Earl leaned back, stretching his legs out on the bed. “No game. I can give you Valenti, but you’ve got to move fast.”
“Gimme me your number,” Broadway Joe said. “I’ll call you back in twenty or so.”
Earl read off the number from the phone and smiled as he hung up. “Hey, Lisa!” he called. When she opened the door, he patted the bed. “We’ve got twenty minutes to kill before I get a return on my call. You want to get it on?”
Lisa stared at him for a long moment. “You’ve got some nerve, you know that?”
“I got more ’n that if you look in the right place, babe.”
“I’ll bet you do.” She studied him for another moment, then reached up behind her back to undo the clasp of her halter, freeing her breasts. “I must be crazy,” she said as she stepped out of her shorts and got onto the bed beside him. “I don’t even know you.”
“I bet you say that to all the guys,” Earl said as he grabbed her and pulled her in close.
Lisa just laughed.
* * *
Broadway Joe Fucceri hung up and looked across his desk to where his boss was lying stretched out on a leather couch. Ricca Magaddino had one hand behind his head, a cigarette in the other. He was a lean, dark-haired man, handsome with a Mediterranean cast to his complexion. He took a drag on his cigarette, blew a wreath of blue smoke up to the ceiling, then looked at Broadway Joe.
“So who was that?”
“That little punk Earl Shaw—the one with the coke deal.”
“Oh, yeah. What’s he want?”
Broadway Joe leaned back in his chair to put his feet up. He was in his late fifties now, ten years older than Ricca. His hair was silver at the temples.
“Shaw says he can finger Valenti for us.”
Ricca sat up and put his feet on the floor. “Do we still want him?”
“You, me, and Louie—that’s all who know what really went down,” Broadway Joe said. “Tony’s not gonna talk. Shit, who’s he gonna talk to? First cousin that sees him’s gonna blow him away.”
“You still got some feeling for him, hey, Joe?”
Broadway Joe shrugged. “You’re the boss, Ricca. You know that. The old padrone, he wasn’t changing with the times. But Tony—Christ, he was always so fucking loyal, you know what I’m saying? It’s hard to get dedication like that now. I mean, so far’s Tony saw it, the family was his career.”
Ricca nodded. “Yeah. I know all that. But I think maybe we should send Louie out to see what Shaw’s got. I never did like loose ends, capito?”
“Too bad we can’t just use Shaw,” Broadway Joe said.
Ricca regarded his consigliere. “Why not?” he asked. “I like that—keeps us right out of it.”
“He’s crazy,” Broadway Joe said. “We used him once in th
at Miami deal your old man was running through Tony, and we’re using him now for the coke thing, but I don’t want us involved with his kind of killing. He does it for fun, Ricca. And he does it messy. If we were to get fingered, just saying he got busted—”
“Nothing can hold up in court,” Ricca protested. “I mean, he’s not even one of our own people.”
“But say the story gets loose how the padrone really died? Say Tony says something and Shaw repeats it? The families wouldn’t like that. If we still want Tony, we’ll send my boy. That way we’ll know what’s going down. Besides, Louie’s still hurting from that Malta deal, you know?”
Ricca grinned. “Hey, there’s a reason you’re still consigliere, Joe. You handle this shit, okay? Any way you think is best.”
“I’ll set up a meet between Shaw and Louie,” Broadway Joe said. He pulled the phone closer and direct-dialed the number he’d gotten from Earl.
* * *
He was running, the hounds so close now he could hear the click of their claws on the asphalt. He turned to look back at them, wanting to stand and fight, antlers sweeping down, hooves flashing, but he knew there were too many of them. He could run, and that was all he could do. Run, with his heart pounding in his chest. Run, until his leg muscles ached too much to take him any farther. Run, with the burning in his tissues and the sound of the dogs’ cries ringing in his ears until he fell.
His flanks were streaked with sweat. Froth foamed around his mouth. The highway snaked on, deeper into the countryside. Then suddenly he stumbled. The asphalt tore at his skin. The dogs were on him in a flash, teeth ripping at his skin as he flailed his hooves. But it was too late. One dog, bigger than the others, sank its teeth into his throat and he—
—woke screaming.
He sat bolt upright in his bed. Brenda fumbled with the light switch beside her.
“Lance, are you—”
“Fine,” he said, swinging his feet to the floor. His pajamas clung damply to his back and chest. “I’m fine. No problem.” Except those fucking dogs had gotten him this time.