From Black Rooms (23 page)

Nagasaki, from napalmed vil ages in Vietnam and from Ground Zero in New York. Anywhere the human form

had been reduced to its elemental carbon and pulverized to a fine powder.

Upon this bed of crematoria compost reposed a dozen figures robed in white linen. Tattooed node points pocked the sheen of their shaved heads like craters. A few knelt, hunched and mumbling in a kind of prayer, yet heaving as if about to retch. Others lay disarrayed like reaped wheat, torsos twisted and limbs awry. Al but one squealed in anguish. Only the group's focal figure remained as silent and serene as a pyramid, his legs folded beneath him, head bowed, hands pressed together beneath his chin.

As she approached, Serena could only see the back of the man's egg-shaped head with its jutting moth-wing ears, but she would have known who it was even with her eyes closed. Only Master Simon McCord seemed

impervious to the Ash Field.

For a Violet, the strongest possible touchstone for a soul was a piece of the dead individual's body, be it blood, bone, or flesh. Traversing a common cemetery could prove fatal for an untrained conduit, for a dozen souls might start knocking at once, and their battle for dominance of the Violet's brain could easily result in a lethal seizure. To set foot on the Ash Field was akin to walking through a hundred churchyards in a single step, for it contained microscopic particles from literal y thousands of corpses--thousands of touchstones for thousands of souls, al of whom could try to inhabit a Violet simultaneously.

One of the acolytes, a pink-pale young man with barely visible Nordic-blond eyebrows who'd been grunting from the effort of maintaining control, abruptly shrieked and grabbed his head. He dropped into the dust,

wriggling as if being devoured by worms, the gray grounds of skeletons sticking to his sweat-soaked face. When a froth of spittle foamed from his mouth, the student next to him, a waifish Vietnamese girl, darted worried glances at him even as she strived, whimpering, to defend herself from the onslaught of dispossessed spirits.

"Leave him," Simon commanded when she moved to aid her convulsing classmate. "He must learn." Serena waited at the threshold of the Ash Field, partly out of deference for the lesson in progress but mostly from her own aversion to the ordeal. She watched as, one by one, the stricken students stil ed the cacophony in their minds, mastering their bodies enough to return to a kneeling position, although some stil shuddered with the struggle. After several minutes, only the pale young man remained cataleptic, yet Master McCord

showed no indication that he would end the exercise anytime soon. Serena knew that Simon considered it an affront for anyone to tread on the Ash Field in shoes, so she commenced her own protective mantra and

removed her steel-toed boots.

I've got peace like a river, she recited silently. I've got
peace like a river...I've got peace like a river in my
soul...

The instant the bare sole of her left foot imprinted the peppery dirt, the souls stampeded her, their immaterial essences clawing at and clinging to her consciousness like a horde of ravening beggars. Disjointed memories flooded her mind--visions of lost loves and searing death, happy children and sadistic soldiers, al blurring into incomprehensibility like a pack of riffled playing cards. Serena's legs deadened with a numbing paralysis, but she refused to al ow them to col apse beneath her. As Simon had taught her, she let the rhythms of the old spiritual from her childhood soothe and sustain her, matching her breaths to their cadence.

I've got love like an ocean I've got love like an ocean.
I've got love like an ocean in my soul...

The desperate dead continued to bombard her, but the shel of Serena's wil held them at a remove, as if they were hailstones glancing off a roof. With only a coltish tremble to her stride, she walked forward to stand at attention at Simon's side.

"Ah, Serena." He rose to greet her, entirely at ease, as if refreshed from a pleasant nap. "I trust you've come with news of the Violet Kil er."

"Yes, sir. But he is the least of our worries." She restrained the urge to breathe through her mouth as she spoke; Simon would no doubt view her huffing and

puffing as a sign of weakness. But she did not cease chanting her mantra in her mind, even for a second.

"I've discovered another matter that needs our immediate attention. One we should

discuss...privately."

"I see." He surveyed his prostrate disciples, stil quivering from the strain of the test they'd endured.

"Very wel --you are al dismissed. And take him with you."

He indicated the pal id young man, whose face had darkened to a grotesque shade of magenta as he gasped for air and coughed up spit. Simon clucked his tongue as a couple of the man's fel ow students draped his limp arms around their shoulders and dragged him from the Ash Field. "You know, if he weren't Wil iam Wilkes's son, I wouldn't even bother," Master McCord

remarked, loud enough for everyone present to hear.

"Now, then, what is this new crisis?"

Serena withheld her answer until the last of the students departed for the pueblo. Some of them could only

marshal the energy to crawl from the Ash Field on al fours. Serena herself wished she could have this

conversation in a more relaxed location, but Simon didn't move. "It's the Corps," she said at last. "They're trying to make us obsolete."

Master McCord gave a chuckle of disdain. "Wishful thinking on their part!"

"They could succeed. They've isolated the gene responsible for conduit ability and they're implanting it in ordinary people. And Evan Markham's helping

them."

Simon's amusement evaporated as quickly as a water droplet on a hot griddle. Although he was legendary for his incandescent temper, Serena had never seen him so furious.

"Tel me." Choked with rage, his voice barely rose above a whisper. "Tel me everything."

Serena related what little she knew about Carl Pancrit and Project Persephone, praying that Master McCord would not vent his wrath on the bearer of bad news.

"B
lasphemy." Simon's eyes flared with violet fire.

"You were quite right to come to me about this matter, Serena. Tel no one else."

"No one," Serena agreed, but did not mention that Natalie Lindstrom and her family were already

involved.

Her obedience mol ified him. "You understand, don't you, Serena? Only God's chosen ones may serve as the emissaries of the Next World. For anyone else to usurp our ordained power is a sin."

"Yes, sir. What do want me to do?"

"Destroy the project. Obliterate it so that it can never be resurrected."

Serena's frown lines calcified as she thought of Calvin Criswel and of Natalie's attraction to him. "What about the...test subjects? What do I do about them?" Simon McCord bent to scoop a fistful of the Ash Field from the ground at his feet. "It is your duty to eliminate the unworthy."

He took hold of her left hand and let the dust of multitudes sift into her open palm.

19

Airport Insecurity

BESIDE HER IN THE morning, Natalie chose to slip

out of bed without waking him. He needed the rest, and she had a to-do list that would have daunted even Hercules.

Cal ie did not make the travel preparations any easier. More sul en and snappish than usual, she griped about how early it was and refused to get out of bed. For his part, Wade merely seemed flustered and tongue-tied, as if unsure whether to acknowledge his daughter's

dal iance or pretend that it hadn't happened. By the time Natalie helped both of them finish packing and returned to the living room, only a shal ow depression remained in the sofa bed.

"He's in the bathroom," Cal ie grumbled as she descended the stairs, behind her mother. "And he takes for-ev-er."

"Cal ie!"

Her daughter trudged on into the kitchen and helped herself to a glass of orange juice. Natalie vowed that she would give that girl a good, long lecture about respect just as soon as they didn't have serial kil ers and evil doctors to worry about.

Although Natalie had removed the latex gloves after she got up that morning, she put them back on before

climbing the stairs to check on Calvin. She had barely tapped on the bathroom door when he yanked it open and spread his arms wide with the flair of a gymnast landing his dismount.

"T
a-da!" His right hand still held one of the twin-blade
razors Natalie used to shave her legs, and a dol op of shaving cream stil foamed on his upper lip, but his chin was smooth and fuzzless. He rubbed it with his free hand for emphasis. "Wel ?"

Natalie laughed and clapped her gloved hands. "Told you you'd look cute without the facial fur. Cuter, I should say."

For the first time, she studied his features with the care of a portraitist. The slight upturn to the nose and the pointiness of the chin gave his face its whimsy, along with the endearing tendency of his broad, ful cheeks to dimple when he grinned. But the corners of his large eyes had a downward slant, and bags had begun to puff beneath them, giving them a mournful cast. If the masks of Comedy and Tragedy ever mated, Natalie thought, Calvin would be their offspring. She could hardly wait to draw him.

It made her happy to see him in a joking mood again, but she could tel from the way his eyelids and mouth quivered that the souls were knocking louder than ever. The tattered remains of a doubled sheet of aluminum foil stil covered his head, but it didn't fit wel over the springy curls of his sandy hair. He would never make it through airport security that way.

"Losing the beard was a good start," Natalie said, strol ing to the bathroom sink, "but we need to go a bit further." She opened a drawer and took out the electric clippers she used to shave her own head.

When she plugged in the shears and came at him,

Calvin shied away. "Whoa there, Delilah! Leave me some hair."

She peeled off her wig to reveal her own bare scalp, striped with the white bands of double-sided tape stil stuck to it. "You won't find any sympathy here, pal. Now, kneel."

She pointed imperiously to the floor at her feet. Whispering the Alphabet Mantra, Calvin got to his knees and removed the foil from his head. He seemed more afraid to lose its protection than his hair. It only took a couple of minutes for Natalie to plow the locks from Calvin's head, leaving him a prickly lawn of stubble through which one could see the shiny skin of his scalp. When he stood and looked at their twin reflections in the mirror, she stroked his denuded crown with her gloved hand. "There! Now you look like a real Violet."

"Yeah," he said tonelessly. His grin did not return, and he immediately resumed muttering the alphabet.

He cheered up a bit when she plastered an even thicker layer of foil over his cranium, then covered the crinkly sheets with bandages and surgical tape from her firstaid kit to insulate and disguise the metal.

"Glad you survived that tumor operation," Natalie remarked as they examined the result, and Calvin

laughed in spite of his anxiety.

To keep Sanjay Prashad from guessing their travel plans, Natalie sent Wade and Cal ie on ahead in her dad's car without any luggage, as if they were simply going to spend another day at the library. She and Calvin planned to meet them in the parking lot of Downtown Disney, the shopping center near

Disneyland in Anaheim, once they'd had a chance to ditch the Corps Security agent. They waited about a quarter hour after her father drove off, then loaded the bags into her Volvo and prepared to leave, with Calvin hiding his bandaged head under the Padres cap.

When the garage door opened, though, they saw that Prashad wasn't the only person they needed to worry about.

A woman with wooden beads threaded into her long

blond hair paced the gutter in front of the condo, hugging a fringed gypsy shawl around her shoulders to ward the early-morning chil off the bare arms and decol etage exposed by her low-cut corset top. As the Volvo emerged, the woman clopped up the driveway in her spike-heeled sandals to block the car.

Calvin let his head droop into his open palms. "Good God. Tranquil ity...

Only after Natalie saw his mortification did she make the connection: the topless model dressed like a Greek muse that she'd seen in the painting on the easel in his apartment. He'd done a good likeness. Indeed, the way the woman's heavy mascara had trickled streaks of black across the dark rose blush of her cheeks made her look like a portrait whose paint had started to run.

"C
al!" The Volvo's rolled-up windows dampened but
could not seal out her screech. "Don't think I don't know it's you! That stupid disguise doesn't fool me for a second."

He heaved a sigh and lowered his window. "Trank, what're you doing here?"

She put her hands to her chest as if the shock would give her a heart attack. "Oh, puh-leeease! What am I doing here? You leave me at your place half-naked, without any explanation, without ever cal ing to let me know you're okay. Then I find out you've spent three whole nights with this...this...this skank, and you dare to ask me what I'm doing here?"

Calvin glanced at Natalie for her reaction, his face as red as the ace of hearts. "Trank, you don't understand-"

"No, I don't! If you want to go whoring around, at least have the courtesy to break up with me first." Natalie's mouth fel open in amazement at the woman's sheer temerity. "Now, wait just a minute--" Calvin cut her off by removing his basebal cap and indicating his bandages. "I have a brain tumor, Tranquil ity. Natalie's taking me out of town for a few days to see a specialist."

Tranquil ity coughed up a laugh. "Oh-ho-ho! That's the best one I've heard yet! Like she's some kind of brain surgeon. I know exactly what you're up to, Cal, and I am so going to get you for it. You hear me? You are so going to get it."

She sneered this prediction through teeth clenched in a bul dog underbite, turned with a sweep of her shawl, and stalked off.