Minister Faust (42 page)

He fixed his furious eyes back on me, already enraged that Hnossi had insisted on my presence during his last remaining hours with her. After he refused to acknowledge my question with anything other than rage, she spoke for him.

“
Ja,
Frau Doktor,” she whispered.

By then her skin was almost entirely racked with seeping red craters and brittle white plates. Even her scalp was a tortured moonscape, with what had remained of her hair burned off during her electrical discharges.

Yet when Festus turned to look at her while she struggled to talk, there wasn’t a hint of horror or disgust in his eyes.

Only love and pain.

“Of course…I knew,” she said.

“Was there ever anything between you? Sexually?”

Festus’s back stiffened, but neither of them answered.

Finally Hnossi said, “It vuss 1961. Five munse before I vuss to marry Hector. Unt Festus unt I vere vurking longk hours, heading up ze anti-Treemason task force…unt, vell, zere hadt alvays been ziss…ziss
po
tency betveen us, betveen me unt Festus. Unt vun night after a battle, ve came back to ze Fortress, unt ve’d bose been drinking…”

She sighed so heavily I feared the onslaught of another hacking fit—possibly her final one. But then she resumed.

“I felt so guilty…I couldn’t even look at Festus, unt our friendship…vell, it never vent back to vut it hadt been. Never. Unt me…my
self
-respect…after all zose centuries uff svearing I vud never be like my own muzzer. But it vuss like a curse. I vuss no better zan zat whore.”

She gnarled her fingers together, gazed toward the ceiling with eyes almost entirely scummed white. “All my talk. About honor! Nussing but vurmvoodt.”

“And so,” I asked as delicately as I could, “you said this was five months before you married Hector. And five months
after
your wedding…”

“Ja. Inka vuss born.”

“And is she—?”

“She’s Hector’s,” said Hnossi. “Sank Odin for zat. I put ze man srough enough pain. But Festus…venever ve hadt FOOCH family picnics, I’d catch him staring at Inka ven he sought I vuzn’t lookink…”

Festus’s eyes went wide. He’d apparently never known that the watchman had been watched.

“Staring how, Hnossi?” I asked. “At what?”

“Like…he vuss tryingk to see if somehow ze test hadt been wrong…or if I’d lied to him about ze test, maybe? I don’t know. And zen after she got to a certain age, he stopped lookink at her altogezzer, I sink, because…she remindtet him.”

“Of what?”

She looked at me, twin tears glistening in the shock of her frosted eyes, apparently stunned that I could not figure it out for myself. “Of vut couldt never be!”

She beckoned in Festus’s direction. He was at her side instantly, holding her crumbling hand with the delicacy of cradling a newborn.

“Festus…I vant to tell you sum sings…”

“What, Hnossi?” he croaked, his throat a tuba of mud.

“I’m sorry…zat I made you suffer srough all of my, my—”

“This isn’t the time for
sorry
s, Hnossi—”

“Let me finish!” she snapped, then instantly softened. “I’m sorry for hurtink you, rejectink you…for all my…vut does Frau Doktor call it? Ze ‘crazy-makink’ behavior,
ja.
”

“It’s okay, Hnossi,” he said, clearing his throat and swallowing heavily, twice. “It’s okay.”

“Nein,”
she whispered. “It vuss never okay. But at least now, at ze ent, I can say to you vut I shudt haff said back zen, back in 1962…”

He waited, stooping, clutching her hand to his cheek. When she said nothing, he begged, “Yes, Hnossi?”

He looked down into her eyes.

They were pale gray, motionless.

Her chest fell as softly as snow.

Red, rust-scented smoke was drifting from her mouth.

The medical monitors screamed as one.

“Hnossi!” shouted Festus. “Dr. Singh! Nurse! DR. SINGH—”

The door swung open, and a suited and caped Omnipotent Man strode in.

“Wally, you idiot! What the hell are you doing here? Get Dr. Singh!”

“Step aside, Festus,” he said. He clutched Festus’s shoulder and plucked him out of the way like a mother dog retrieving a puppy by the neck.

Wally reached into the bed, sifted out Hnossi, and clutched the red-ravaged body in his arms.

And then he kissed her.

Electricity crackled from Wally’s mouth into Hnossi’s, streamers of it whipping frenetically around the room and overloading the machines and exploding the lightbulbs, plunging the room into flare-strobing darkness. Festus screamed at Wally to stop while Hnossi’s limbs danced and jerked and her chest sucked closed and inflated outward violently again and again, and still Wally welded his kiss onto her, and when the scorching blue luminescence brightened to the point of blindingness, Festus and I scrambled from the room in fear for our lives.

“HNOSSI!”
screamed Festus from the hall, while light seared our eyes even from around the rim of the door for what seemed like forever.

And then there was silence.

The door swung open.

Standing beside the steely, confident Omnipotent Man was Hnossi Icegaard.

Reborn.

Her skin was gleaming copper, her hair was returned miraculously to its full thick blackness and luster, and her eyes were shining like halogen amethysts. Wrapped only in a white bedsheet, she looked more Greek goddess than Norse, glowing before us and smiling with secret, joyful knowledge, as if listening to celestial music only she and the divine could hear.

“Wally,” gasped Festus, relief and horror fighting for control of his face, “what did you—”

“All th’little gal needed, Festy, was a little galvanizin. Course,” smirked Wally, “not every man knows how t’perform that.”

Back in therapy after the excursion to Asteroid Zed, after Hnossi had already developed rust poisoning, Wally had fallen to pieces and electro-welded his own fingers and limbs back on. But none of us—not I, not Festus (whom Wally’d electro-blasted across the room), and not Wally himself—had realized how that power might be applied to transforming others.

I complimented Wally on his apparently successful transformation of Hnossi and, of course, of himself. He turned a sunrise smile on me, saying, “I couldna done it without ya, ma’am-doctor.”

“And your alters? Ricky R. Bustow, Reverend Crocket, Musk Ox Miller? Are they—”

He tapped the side of his skull, eliciting a soft bell tone. “Wellsir, they’s still all up here—but now, they’s together.
Un
i-mah-fied.” Even Wally’s voice had been transmuted, expanded, as if the multiple “voices” inside him had harmonized sonically into a melodious choir, powerful and hypnotic.

“I did like you told me, ma’am,” said Omnipotent Man. “I cogitated suh’m fierce upon who I
wannid
t’be, steada all the thangs I weren’t an that I was a failure at. I put all m’shortcomins in th’closet an put on m’best Sunday-go-t’meetin suit, an fixed m’self to bein like m’mentor. An th’more I did, the more I realized the truth.” His eyes shifted toward the ceiling, as if gazing past drywall and plaster and up into the majesty of the revolving, evolving galaxy.

“And what truth is that, Wally?”

“That I have a personal rel
a
tionship with the Ka of Hawk King,” he said, his voice riding a rhythm. “That I have ac
cep
ted the Ka of Hawk King as my own personal superhero. That the Ka of Hawk King has
saved
me—”

“
Ka
-ka,” mumbled Festus.

Wally’s eyes flashed tiny electrical arcs, twin bolts of lightning, but he did not stop.

“—and that in his celestial crusade for justice, he has made me his knight. His
Hawk Knight.
”

Draping herself from his shoulder, Hnossi stared up at Wally, her eyes sparkling as if his dynamic current were still surging inside her. Her flesh renewed, her muscles taut and defined, I’d never seen her look more powerfully beautiful or beautifully powerful.

And I had never imagined I would see the dark matter of disdain so disintegrated from her demeanor that she would shimmer like a nebula from the light of a hyper-masculine supernova. Wally’s omni-belief in himself, and the resulting growth in his own superstrength, had proved an old maxim: for many women, even goddesses, power is the greatest aphrodisiac of all.

And then Mr. Savant returned with Syndi, who was agog at the sight of her radiant mother. Mother and daughter embraced in a death-averted hug with more warmth than they’d likely ever shared before.

Festus Piltdown, on the other hand, slumped against the wall, looking as if he’d just been punched in his soul.

Graffiti from the Ghetto of the Mad

G
athered with us back inside the crime lab, Syndi, flush with relief at her mother’s recovery, divulged all the information she’d received from her rendezvous with Kareem, even revealing the location, since it no longer mattered: the now-abandoned Hermes Theater in Stun-Glas.

“He told me to save myself. Because he said that you, Eva…that you’re either Sarah Bellum, or Menton, or both.”

Grimacing as if swallowing a pill the size and shape of a horseshoe, Syndi was clearly pained to be revealing her intelligence—whether from a wish to protect me or Kareem, I wasn’t sure. The luminous Hnossi and Wally stood flanking her, each with a comforting hand on one of her shoulders.

Festus stared anywhere in the room but at that trinity.

There was a sudden whining buzz about my ears. I batted away the distraction.

André asked, “Why do that nutjob think she Menton or Bellum?”

Syndi shook her head. “Oh…it’s…it’s so sad. It’s crazy. Paranoid. He was all over the place—because Eva’d written all those books on Menton, like she was the Earl of Oxford to Menton’s Shakespeare.”

I found myself startled by Syndi’s reference, still integrating my comprehension that nineteen-year-old celebrity puffhead Syndi was actually thirty-two-year-old intellectual Inga. “Why else, Syndi?”

She carefully laid bare the layers of Kareem’s paranoia, as if opening a set of nested Ukrainian dolls. Apparently, Kareem was accusing me of being Sarah Bellum; he said also that I was originally the minor heroine Right-Brain Girl, rejected for F*O*O*J membership in the early 1970s; that he’d seen photographs of the “real” me standing in front of bookshelves full of Ayn Rand texts; that in the late 1970s I’d “assumed” the identity of Dr. Brain, and as therapist for Tran Chi Hanh had driven a wedge between the Flying Squirrel and Chip Monk, destroying their partnership; that I either had caused Dr. Napoleon Orator to become Menton so I could have the perfect mate, or had “doubled” my mind, placing half of it in Dr. Orator as the first fiefdom of my geopsychic empire; that, imprisoned on Asteroid Zed, I had evolved my
phagopsychosis
to absorb psinergy from the planetary unconscious itself, eventually enough to wreak murderous revenge on Hawk King; that I had used deceptive, destructive therapeutic techniques to initiate Omnipotent Man’s breakdown; that I had manipulated my F*O*O*J patients into going up to Asteroid Zed where they could be mass-murdered, and, barring that, where a Plan B could initiate the death at least of Iron Lass, which in turn would weaken Syndi and Festus; that I had accessed secret, comprehensive files on X-Man and Syndi, leaking the information to the press to destroy him in a scandal; that by establishing myself as the F*O*O*J’s chief confidant, I had placed myself in the perfect position to gather supreme intelligence on them, exploit their weaknesses, and destroy them one by one—or to manipulate them to my further end of taking over the planet for a never-ending
phagopsychotic
feeding frenzy on the collective minds of the human race.

When Syndi was done, a cold silence clutched the crime lab like the metallic fingers of Count Speculum.

“It’s tragic,” I said, “that a young man so bright, with so much promise…Ah, well. Now. Given the threat to public safety that Kareem’s psychosis clearly poses, we need to focus on what all of you are going to do.”

“Oh, and there’s one more thing, Eva,” said Syndi, taking out and handing me an ordinary paper note addressed to me. I swatted at the insects whining in my ears before taking the note.

“What’s it say?” demanded Festus and André in unison, rushing me.

I scanned it, and then read aloud:

First, “Doctor Brain,” or whoever you truly are, my final ten-word answer to your recurring question about what I’d do if I could never equal the glory of my predecessors is as follows:

“Pursuing glory is what created this mess. I’ll take justice.”

Second, contrary to your psychobabbling parable intended to “heal” me, I want you to understand that I don’t have two wolves inside me and never did. Just a single black dog with four paws: one of fear, one of hope, one of rage, and one of love.

And he’s a good dog.

Festus snapped, “What kind of Congo-jumbo is that sambo sociopath dithering on about?” André shushed him violently, and remarkably Festus obeyed.

And finally, before the end of this day, I intend to expose the real assassin of Hawk King and explode an even more diabolical conspiracy that would otherwise leave thousands of American citizens dead, thus subjecting the country, if not the planet, to a never-ending war on freedom. And I swear by the
Udjat,
I will do so by any means necessary.

 

Dã-f xu, us em maãxeru!

The X-Man