Demons (34 page)

Then he fell on his rump, laughing, Ira’s handheld camera shakily dipping to keep him in frame. Marcus cracked, “I needa mediscan—but not if the girls are around . . . ow damn.”

Did Melissa take a portable medical scanner with her? Yes, Ira was sure she had. He’d made sure, and he’d charged its battery, too.

As she watched Marcus on the little screen, the babushka professor laughed. Eyes stinging with tears, Ira nodded, smiling, and fast-forwarded to another scene: Marcus playing with Kenny, the little Chinese kid who lived down the street with his grandparents. The kid was eleven but was as small as Marcus, and he didn’t seem much more mature. The two boys were playing a holographic game, in which they darted in among projected images and tagged treasures from the capering 3-D figures of elves and pretty witches. But one of the figures, a troll, looked a little too demonic . . . and the boy burst into tears. The boy’s parents had been killed by a Sharkadian, Ira knew. Marcus switched off the hologame and, with an amazing lack of pretense, put an arm around the sob-wracked boy. Comforting this child who was two years older than him, he said, “I know what you mean, Kenny. I do.”

As his Russian companion leaned into the aisle to argue with the attendants—demanding coffee and apparently being told they were too close to landing—Ira went to another file, artwork he’d made on a portable digital-art pad.

He stared at the image, shook his head, baffled. He’d been trying to sketch Marcus from memory. He’d done it before, without difficulty, but this time his sketches of Marcus’s face seemed blurred, mixed with some other face, seemed too grown-up, and . . . different.

A male flight attendant signaled him to put away his palm viewer and put up his tray table. They were about to land in Turkmenistan.

The airport near Ashgabat

Customs.

He was drooping with fatigue in a Tower of Babel, voices in Greek, Turkish, Russian, Farsi, and some local dialect. He stood in a long line in a room with flaking pale-green walls and fluorescent lights on the low ceiling. He looked at his watch. Only eight minutes had passed since the last time he’d looked. He’d been sure at least half an hour had passed.

The line finally moved a step or two. He pushed his overnight bag ahead with his foot, took the step, and prepared to wait some more.

He checked his palmer for the third time since arriving. No messages from Melissa. He felt a gripping tension in his shoulders and stretched, then pushed his overnight bag ahead with his foot. He got out his passport again, thinking:
As if having it ready makes the line go faster.
He grimaced at his photo.

Someone took the passport from Ira’s hand. He snatchedat it, but one of the strangers—there were two of them—slapped his hand away.

Ira had an impression of unfamiliar uniforms, of jet-black eyes, solemn, almost bored expressions, and glossy black mustaches. But his eyes were drawn to the Uzis they cradled.

The shorter one pocketed Ira’s passport. When he started to protest, they flashed cryptic identity cards at him, gripped him firmly by the elbows, and dragged him out of the room.

Everyone in line was careful not to show too much interest as Turkmenistan state security took Ira away.

They hustled him into gray daylight, sleeting wind, and a street braying with car horns, and then quickly into a military-green Jeep. The shorter of the two men drove; the larger man sat in the back with Ira.

They drove down a service road and out into the stony desert flecked with shrubs, and past the mazy pipes and gray towers of a refinery. There was a new chain-link fence around it, topped with razor wire. They didn’t enter the refinery grounds, but Ira found himself staring, as they passed, at a sign next to the gate, its text repeated in Turkish, Cyrillic, and, at bottom, in English:

A WEST WIND INTL REFINERY
IN COOPERATION WITH THE REPUBLIC OF TURKMENISTAN

They left the refinery behind, continuing for three, maybe four miles through more of the bleak landscape. The Jeep reached the warehouses and junkyards on the outskirts of Ashgabat, which gave way to a warren of old, perhaps ancient, buildings of stone and clay and tile, tenements relying on one another to stand straight.

“If we could swing by the American embassy,” Ira said, “I think all this can be straightened out, whatever the misunderstanding is.” They ignored him. “Could you at least tell me—”—

The big man beside Ira took his Uzi in his left hand and backhandedly smacked its muzzle against Ira’s lips—not hard but sharply. It stung, and Ira got the message.

They passed a mosque, and down a side street Ira saw the distinctive cross of the Russian Orthodox church. He felt an urge to shout out the window for help, and shook his head at the foolishness of the impulse.

Next came a zone of more spacious streets, of high glassy buildings, skybridges, squat state edifices of beveled concrete. Here solo copters buzzed by overhead, natural-gas scooters crowded the street, and now and then a limo drove by. Cops in elaborate uniforms waved them through checkpoints.

Within thirty minutes of leaving the airport, they pulled up in front of a tall building of tinted glass and pitted concrete. They hustled him around the corner and through a back door, past two checkpoints, and down four flights to a sparsely lit level of what appeared to be detention cells. Down to whimpers and hoarse, despairing laughter.

They pushed him into a nearly barren, cold little room with brown-stained cement walls, a hole in the floor, and a cot. He tried once more to demand to speak to an ambassador, a lawyer, a supervisor. One of them, before locking him in alone, said, “Soon begin interrogation, sit quiet.”

He never saw those two again. The ones who came later wore no uniforms.

Turkmenistan, the Fallen Shrine

“Mom—come on, wake up! You gotta see this three-eyed guy out here! He might embarrass you but he’s pretty cool. Mom, you have to check it out.”

Melissa sat up, blinking around at the little room where she’d been sleeping beside Marcus on a pallet. She hadn’t been able to see it much when they’d gone to sleep—but there wasn’t much to see: a lamp in one corner and no decorations, daylight coming brightly through the open door. She shook her head at Marcus, starting to laugh at his excitement. Then she remembered all they’d been through, and the laughter died on her lips. “Marcus! Sit down. You’re sick, and we’ve got to have you looked at before you go running around. You couldn’t be recovered already; you’d need food and—”—

“I’m
fine
! Shaikh Araha told me I could do what I wanted now.”

“Shaikh who?” But then she remembered who it was. “Oh.”

“The old guy with the long white mustache! Shaikh Araha, Mom. He already checked me, he said I was good, I was okay. I ate some curds and honey and stuff. Come on, I want to show you the statue and the caves!”

She hastily dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt, and let him lead her out into the pale winter sunlight. The air was crisp; she could smell coffee somewhere. “Where’s Nyerza?” she asked as they went.

“He’s up in one of the caves, praying,” Marcus saiddistractedly. “I’m gonna find him. Look at the idol in daytime—check it out. Is that thing cool or what?” Marcus gazed up at it, amused and awestruck, just standing there staring—then he ran to a crevice at one side of the idol and began climbing toward a shadowy overhang.

She had an impulse to forbid him to climb. He must still be weak and sick—mustn’t he?—and she didn’t want to let him out of her sight for a while. But she couldn’t quite say it.

Just let him go. . . . He’ll be all right. . . . We’ll watch over him. . . .

“You be careful, Marcus,” was all she was able to say as she gazed up at the statue.

Its sandstone cracked, blotched white by bird droppings, the idol—almost Egyptian in style but not quite—stood half-emerged from the beetling sandstone cliffs. It was as if it had been hidden away in the stuff of the Earth and then had tried to force its way out, freezing partway. Shielding her eyes against the morning sun, Melissa understood immediately what Marcus had meant by something embarrassing her. Just two yards above eye level, the idol was clasping an enormous erect phallus with its lower right hand—lower right because it had three arms, two on the right side, one on the left. The upper right hand was touching its forehead, with surprising delicacy, just to one side of its third eye. Its left hand was touching a shape made enigmatic by time and decay, close above its navel. Perhaps, she thought, it was a lotus, or a sunflower. Or what was left of a carving of the sun.

“It once had nine points on its corona, that sun,” Araha said, strolling up beside her. He scratched a shaggy white eyebrow, gazing up at the idol. “We’ve been meaning to clean him off. This bloody awful bird mess. To clean him not out of any sense of worship, you understand, but out of respect for the monks who carved him.”

“Monks? I’d have thought . . . I mean, I don’t know much about the history of the place. I thought it was an old pagan temple of some kind taken over by, I don’t know, some Christian sect. But you’d have thought they’d tear down this—this fellow.”

“So our friend Yanan did not tell you? Yanan was my student, you know, once. The monks who were here for several centuries were the ones who carved this idol about six hundred years ago. They knew it would be mistaken for a far more ancient pagan god. They wanted this confusion. They wished it to be mistaken for something other than what it was. Various archaeologists have assumed it to be Baal or perhaps a variant of Vishnu from some lost Hindu sect. But this one has no name at all. The idol is a
legominism
, only: a message from the past—a teaching in a code of visual symbols.”

“The three minds of man,” she said, looking at the statue, the three places on it controlled by the figure’s three hands.

“Yes. The heart mind, the mental mind, the carnal mind—this last not only sexual but also—what would you say?—all bodily nature. Instinct and so on. His hands, you see, stand ready to guide the mind, to open the soul to the energy of creation, and to control the instincts, the sex center, redirect its power. You see, if you look at the hand, he is not caressing. He is protecting, sheltering that part of himself. He keeps the energy but does not release it in the carnal way.”

She nodded. The hand, she saw now, was in front of the carved phallus, but not quite touching it. She stepped back and gazed up and down the idol. She nodded. “His arms are symmetrical, with relation to each other, to symbolize these things in balance. And his third eye is the biggest, open widest—for a consciousness that is, so to speak, open wide.”

“You are right.” He nodded solemnly. “So—is that you speaking of this figure’s meaning, young lady, or . . . ?”

She looked at him, puzzled—and then she understood. “Or
them
? They have not . . . spoken through me for a long time. I’m not sure they’re still there.”

He nodded gravely. “Perhaps not as before but ‘Lift the stone and find me; split the wood and there I am. . . .’ ”

“I’ve been trying to place your accent—if you don’t mind my asking. Your English is very good, and you seem to have a bit of a British accent. But it doesn’t seem to be your native language.”

He made an eloquent gesture of acknowledgment and self-deprecation. “I was educated at Eton and Oxford, but I am in fact Iranian. I lived in England, and after graduation I traveled a bit—then went back to Iran. After the Shah fell, I fled to . . . shall we say, a certain monastery in Egypt. And they sent me here. I have been here for perhaps eighteen years, a sort of caretaker and . . . like a telephone operator for this place. It is a powerful place.”

“After the Shah . . .” She looked at him more closely. This man was far older than he looked. Then she remembered what he’d done for Marcus. “Oh! I am so sorry—I’m still a bit sleepy, overwhelmed. I haven’t thanked you! You saved my son’s life!”

“I could do not less. And I’m not certain he would have died. I suspect that he was attacked, you know. They bend the laws of probability, sometimes, the servants of That Certain One. They may have directed the tainted water to him.”

Her breath caught in her throat. “You think they . . . really? They’re targeting him?” She looked up the cliff side and couldn’t see Marcus. If there were malign influences against him, could they make him miss his footing up there?

“Perhaps. I understand they have a
tepaphon
.”

She blinked at him, waiting for an explanation. Wondering more, each second, where Marcus was.

“I see you don’t know—but of course you don’t. The FOGC Lodge—one of the precursors of those who brought the demons about—have an instrument. It was used by the Teutonic lodges to destroy enemies at a distance. They use it to transmit what they call ‘odic’ force—we call it something else, of course. Or they can draw away one’s odic energies, inducing sickness and death from afar. It was made out of lenses and copper coils and copper plates. An image of the victim is placed in it, electricity is then passed through it, and one uses psychic force in guiding it. It can be used for projecting souls to other realms for various purposes. A truly arcane device. I understand that some modern devices can be adapted to become
tepaphons
. . . .”