Book of Secrets (28 page)

CHORUS 

   Rise now, father of us all.

HESPERUS

   Rise and come with us, and we will lead you from your place of torment.

CHORUS

   We will stay on after, Prometheus FireBringer, and hold the torch high for all to see,

   Every man and beast, every god on the earth, or under the seas, or in the skies, and every passing wind.

   We shall hold it forth, with our own stained hands.

I had trouble sleeping, and when dawn came, the first light of day spearing into the room through the slits and tears in the ancient curtains, I finally gave up trying. It had been one of those nights when every bump was a killer at the door, every rattle in the vents some nefarious something out to get me. The air had been hot and close, no matter how high I'd turned up the air conditioner, and the sheets clung to my clammy flesh as I moved. My head ached, my eyes burned, and my thoughts were racing. All in all, I wasn't in very good shape.

  Peeling myself from the bed sheets, I showered as best I could again in the tepid trickle, did a sniff test on my shirts and sundries to pick out the most clean (or least dirty), and got suited up. I considered calling Amador to check the plans for the meet, but realized there was a good chance that whoever the Black Hats were they might have succeeded in tapping the motel phone lines once they learned where I was. For all I knew, I was being watched right then. I hoped not, as it might sour my plans, but in the end there wasn't much I could do about it one way or another. Packing up my gear, and ditching the Lucite case in favor of a large Sears department store sack I'd found in the bathroom trash as a less conspicuous means of transporting the book, I hefted my load and headed out into the world. It was a little after seven o'clock, and the butterflies in my stomach reminded me of first date jitters, or the trip to the doctor to get the results of my blood work.

  From the front desk of the motel, I had to rouse the desk clerk from a peaceful slumber on an army cot hidden behind the counter. What the hell, I figured. If I couldn't sleep, no one should be able to. I paid my tab with most of the cash I had left over, leaving me with a few tens and twenties huddled together for company in my wallet. I phoned a cab and rode to the airport. The cabbie dropped me off in front of the rows of car rental outlets, taking the meager tip I could manage with a kind of stoic silence. He didn't offer to help me with my bags and box, and I didn't ask.

  I hurried past the first rental outfit guiltily, somehow thinking they might recognize me as the guy who ditched one of their cars out in Arizona a couple of days before. Realistically, it was unlikely the car had been reported in yet as abandoned, sitting in the parking lot of the Greyhound station along with the cars of all the other bus travelers. Still, I was in a paranoid mood, hardly to be blamed, and my paranoia was only going to get worse.

  The second rental outfit I came to was out of anything suitable, but the third one had a mid-sized sedan with a functioning air conditioner and an AM/FM radio, and they'd take a credit card for the rental and insurance. That worked for me; I was hardly in a mood or position to be picky.

  A half-hour later I was on the road, heading east into the flat, barren wastes of West Texas, hurrying to an appointment in my own personal Samara.

A couple of hours into the trip, my bladder about to burst and the grumbling in my gut telling me I had better eat something soon, I pulled into a roadside truck stop to look for a restroom and food, in that order. I managed to meet both of my requirements, though just barely; the restroom a far cry from what I'd call restful, and the sandwiches I ate only food in the broadest sense of the word. Still, I choked it down as quickly as I could, dropped another twenty on cigarettes and sodas for the road, and headed back out to the car. There was a payphone next to the door, and I figured that if I was going to try to assuage my fears with a call to Amador, this was the time to do it. I knew he would come through for me, but at this point every bit of reassurance would help.

  My collect call to his house went unanswered, and at his office I just got voicemail. I decided against leaving a message, figuring it might cause problems. You never knew who might be listening in. At this point, I was half convinced that every phone line in the state was tapped, even those to the FBI offices where Amador was.

  Back in the car and on the road I switched on the radio, hoping a bit of music might keep my mind off of things. After an hour of Puro Tejano, the lie was put to that little theory. For the most part. I was still expecting the worst, but now I was expecting it to come accompanied by the maddening sounds of a non-stop accordion.

The fax I'd got from Michelle the night before hadn't cleared up much for me, and I was hardly surprised. If anything, I was even more at sea than I had been before. As I drove, I ran through what I knew over and over, and was more confused every time I did.

  There was the book, which contained on at least one page of writing about some secret cult, with ties to the mythological figure of Prometheus. The notes Michelle had scribbled in the margins of her translation indicated that Aeschylus, the writer of the play, had been censured at least, and possibly even killed, because he had exposed secrets of this Cult of the Light Bringer in the action and dialogue of his play. There was some mention made of the stained hands of the cult members, which set off in Michelle a cascade of associations, leading to the article clippings and Xeroxes of encyclopedia articles she'd sent along. A whole laundry list of "light bringer" deities throughout world mythology, and references to secret organizations reported to be known by the symbol of the stained hand. Or by black hands.

  This is where my train of thought started to derail, and everything stopped making sense all together. A number of the articles Michelle had sent along concerned secret organizations from various nations whose names, when translated into English, meant more or less "The Black Hands." Thinking about the odd history my grandfather and his family had with that term, and all of the crazy legends and stories boxed up in my inheritance, I found it pretty hard to swallow that this was all some giant coincidence. Still, I was completely unable to come up with anything resembling a rational explanation, or any sort of causal relationship between them. What were the chances that the weird shit my grandfather had collected during his declining years of senility had anything to do with the story I was working on and the mysteries I found myself drowning in, much less that I would stumble across them all at around the same time? Slim and fucking none. Still, the fact remained that I had found the term in places and situations so far apart that they couldn't possibly be connected, so coincidence seemed the only possible answer.

  In the interests of saving what little sanity I had left, I decided that the only acceptable answer was that my grandfather's family had a generationslong lunatic obsession with dressing up and playing masked hero, which may or may not have included my grandfather himself, and that it was just a weird bit of synchronicity that they chose a name sometimes associated with this Greek cult. A nagging voice at the back of my mind kept asking about that "Cult of the Black Hand" mentioned in that Middle English ballad, but I hadn't made it this far in life not being able to ignore the voices in my head, so that voice went unanswered. The simplest answer was best, and that was all there was to it.

I arrived in San Antonio ahead of schedule, hours before the scheduled meet. Parking in a pay lot a half-dozen blocks from the Alamo, I collected my things, putting a pack of cigarettes into each pocket, and hefted the Sears shopping bag with the book. I suppose I could have passed for a tourist in a pinch. Seedy tourist, with a fear-of-God look on his face, but tourist nonetheless.

  I made my way to the Alamo in a hurry, not that I had any reason to rush. I had hours to wait, and it was only force of habit that led me to arrange a meeting in an open place where I could while the hours ahead of time scouting the area, watching for possible traps and potential backdoor exits. I knew a spot at the edge of the Alamo Plaza where I could squirrel myself away on a bench in a corner, keep an eye on the whole scene, and not be spotted. It didn't hurt that the spot was a coffee shop that served the best pastries I'd had outside of Paris and San Francisco, and where their coffee was served black and bottomless. I was jittery and nervous enough as it was; the coffee was bound to be no help at all.

  An hour and a half-dozen cups of coffee later, I was proved right. My paranoia had kicked into overdrive and my thoughts just couldn't stay still. I was having no problem keeping to my seat, though; I'd poured enough coffee into me that if I stood up, I'd be having to empty my bladder every fifteen minutes. At least sitting down I could keep my mind off of it.

  Paranoia was getting the better of me. I had to fight to resist the temptation to try Amador on the phone again, to call Cachelle to see how Tan was doing, or to run screaming for fear of what might happen for that matter. My thoughts ran in tight circles around the mysteries I couldn't seem to solve, the questions which bred like rabbits, one after the other.

   I also couldn't stop checking on the book, leaving it first on the ground against my left foot, then holding it on the ground between my feet, and finally ending up with it on my lap. Every few minutes I gripped the edges of the book through the paper of the Sears shopping bag, as though it might have disappeared. I tried to do it unobtrusively so as not to draw attention to myself, or to it. But I couldn't help myself.

  Finally, I took to opening the bag and peeking inside. The disk on the front of the thing intrigued me. It looked like silver, mirror bright, but seemed to shift as the light hit it. There seemed to be a spiral motif engraved on it, or it might have been the grain of the metal. Either way, as I moved my head from side to side slightly it looked something like a spinning pinwheel of metal, or silvery water running down a drain.

  I wondered what sort of metal it was, to be untarnished after so many years. The clasps that held the book closed were of iron, it seemed, and looked every century of however many hundreds or thousands of years old the thing was. The metal disk, though, looked newly minted, like a silver dollar fresh off the presses. It couldn't be any newer than the rest of the book, though, because it looked as though the leather of the cover was cut around it, like it had been built up around the thing.

  I started to wonder if I could even smudge or mar the thing if I wanted to. If I touched it, would it leave a print, or would it impervious even to that? And just what did the symbol mean – if it was a symbol – the curving spiral vortex? And why was it on the book in the first place?

  My head buzzing with questions, I reached into the bag, my palm grazing the silver disk. As I watched, the illusion of movement increased, and it looked as though the disk was a living, moving whirlpool of metal.

  And the world opened up, and the spiral swallowed me whole.

And the spiral swallowed me whole…

And the world opened…

And the spiral swallowed…

And the world…

And the spiral…

And…

I was standing on a featureless white plain, unable to distinguish any features, unable to see horizon or sky, walls or ceiling. San Antonio, the Alamo, the coffee and the pastries, the whole world… all of it was gone. Silence roared in my ears, and to my surprise the fear in my gut was gone, my hands firm and still. I looked down at myself, the only thing visible on which I could focus, and saw that my clothes were neat and clean, my boots shiny and new. I was polished and immaculate, free of sickness or fear.

  I tried to take a step forward, but even though I could see my feet move below me, I didn't experience any sensation of motion. No feeling of kinesis. Without any landmarks, only featureless white in every direction, I had no point of reference. I crouched down and tried to touch the ground, but felt nothing. Patting my legs and chest and slapping my hands together, I could still feel the fabric of my pants and jacket, could feel the stinging of the slap, but the ground of whatever it was couldn't be felt any more than it could be seen. It was a blank to all of my senses.

  "Well," I said aloud, my voice sounding small and distant in my ears, "this is either the afterlife, an experiment in sensory deprivation, or the last stages of madness. I'm not sure which I'd prefer."

  I tried to take a few more steps forward, jumped to the side, and hopped up and down in place; anything to feel some sort of difference. Nothing.

  "Okay," I said as loud as I could, "I'll bite. What the hell is going on here?"

  A voice answered, loud enough to rattle my teeth, coming from everywhere and nowhere.

  "A QUESTION," it said.

  This was the voice that scared the crap out of Chuck Heston in
The Ten Commandments
, this was the voice that every super alien in
Star Trek
shared. This was loud, deep, and resonant, and sounded like the bells of final judgment. This was the voice of thunder.

  "Right," I said, more than a little uneasy, looking up as though it would do any good. I wondered if this was how all the other lunatics felt, when the voices in their heads finally started answering back. "So where's my answer?"

  The voice didn't speak, but suddenly directly in front of me hovered an enormous disk, liquid silver and churning in a rotating spiral. Without any frame of reference, it was impossible to tell how big; it could either have been ten feet tall and ten feet away, or a hundred yards tall a hundred yards away. Either way, it looked big. Stretching my arms tentatively forward, I couldn't reach it. Like a giant pool of mercury running down a drain, though I couldn't remember which way it went in which hemisphere. This one ran counterclockwise, whichever hemisphere that meant. And it was familiar.