Relentless (32 page)

I told Penny about Henry Casas, his mother, Arabella, and the painfully tedious method by which he now painted.

She was as astonished as I had been that the impressionistic portrait of one of his tormentors should at once be recognizable as the deformed man in the Maserati. Most disturbing, however, was Henry’s
contention that he had been imprisoned and mutilated not by a lone psychopath or even two, but by an organization of many.

His hands and tongue were removed with clinical precision, under anesthesia, and he received competent postoperative care while being held against his will. Consequently, the organization, whatever its nature, included at least one good surgeon and others with medical knowledge.

I could not believe that a large group, including highly skilled health-care professionals, could come together to assist one another in their secret lives as serial killers. This was something else—and worse—than we had thought.

The more that we learned, the more the odds of our survival seemed poor.

Researching the artists whom Waxx had savaged under his pen name, Russell Bertrand, Penny had found another who seemed to have been a victim of more than the critic’s words.

“Cleveland Pryor, a painter. He was found dead in a Dumpster in Chicago, where he lived.”

His body was so tightly wound in so much barbed wire that he appeared almost mummified. According to the coroner’s report, the wire had been cinched to Pryor while he had been alive.

“Cleveland never knew his father,” Penny said. “His mother died when he was nineteen. Never married, no children, so at least he didn’t have to see everyone he loved destroyed before Waxx murdered him.”

In her research, she also discovered that some writers and artists of a new philosophical movement were relocating to Smokeville or were considering doing so. They hoped to establish a creative community.

Like Henry Casas and Tom Landulf, these people rejected both the nihilism and utopianism of our time and of the previous 150 years. They sought a future based not on the theories of one man or on one
narrow ideology, but on the centuries of tradition and wisdom from which their civilization had grown.

“Which explains,” I said, “why Waxx might have had two targets in the same small town.”

“He probably has more,” Penny said. “And … here
we
are.”

Having gone to bed at nine o’clock, exhausted, I woke at 11:10 P.M. Before retiring, we switched off only one of the two nightstand lamps. Penny remained asleep beside me.

The cottage bedroom offered two double beds with mattresses that were no doubt provided free by a chiropractor in need of business. The second bed was empty.

Remembering John Clitherow’s vanished daughters, I hurried out to the living room. Milo remained at work on the floor. He sat at the center of what seemed to be a much larger array of gadgets, gizmos, thingamajigs, and thingamadoodles than had been there previously.

My laptop rested on a footstool, and Milo gazed at the screen, on which streamed a mystifying video of complex but unidentifiable constructs.

“When are you coming to bed, kiddo?”

“Not yet.”

“You need your sleep.”

“Not really.”

Lassie sat under a straightback chair. The legs and stretcher bars formed a cage around her. She barely fit in the cramped space, but she was grinning, her tail wagging.

As surely as Costello knew what Abbott would reply when asked “Who’s on first?” I knew the answer when I asked, “Did you put the dog under the chair?”

“No,” Milo said. “She did it to herself.”

“That can’t be comfortable.”

I lifted the chair straight up, off the dog, and set it aside.

Lassie stood, shook herself, and cocked her head at me as if to say that I remained, in her view, by far the most curious part of this family.

Looking at the video on the laptop, I said, “What is that?”

“Structure,” Milo said.

“Is there any point in my asking what structure?”

“No.”

The image enlarged as the camera appeared to descend into it, much like a microscope probing a tissue sample at an ever-increasing power of magnification—and then a new pattern arose where the previous one had been.

“What’s that?”

“Deeper structure.”

“That’s what I thought. Come to bed soon.”

“Okay.”

“Is that a sincere okay?”

“Okay.”

At the doorway between the living room and bedroom, I glanced back. Milo raised one hand to the computer screen, as if he wanted to reach into the image of the deeper structure and feel it. The dog was caged under the chair again, and grinning.

When I woke at 1:22, Penny was asleep beside me, and Milo’s bed remained empty.

I was at once aware of the whorls and pulses and radiating fingers of blue and red light that shimmered beyond the open door, as if someone had parked a police cruiser in the cottage.

When I entered the front room, I found that the entire ceiling had
become a projection screen on which were displayed patterns more complex and dimensional than those that had been on the computer during my previous visit.

Two-dimensional versions of the images appeared as streaming video on the laptop screen. A cord led from the computer to a jerry-built device that projected them in 3-D onto the ceiling.

Milo lay on the floor, in a debris field of high-tech thingums and doohickeys and flumadiddles, staring at the spectacle overhead.

Movement drew my attention to the sofa. Lassie was lying there, on her back, also staring at the ceiling, all four legs kicking as if she were running through a meadow. She did not appear to be in distress, but perhaps in a state of rapture.

I sat on the floor beside Milo and said, “Structure?”

“Yeah. Even deeper than before.”

“Structure of what?”

“Everything.”

“Do you understand what you’re looking at?”

“Yes.”

I tried another tack: “Where is this coming from, Spooky?”

“Somewhere.”

“From some Internet site?”

“No.”

“From some government computer you hacked into?”

“No.”

I pushed aside a few dofunnys and half a dozen something-or-others, and stretched out on my back beside my son. The visuals on the ceiling were awesome from this perspective.

“Did this turn out to be an interstellar communications device, after all?” I asked.

“No.”

“Come on, is this stuff from an alien world?”

“No.”

“Is it from the far future, a time transmission or something?”

“No.”

“Can you say anything besides
no
?”

“Yes.”

“I’m just doing what your T-shirt says. It says
persist
.”

“You should go to bed, Dad. This is gonna be too much for you.”

“Are you kidding? I do this stuff all the time. So now … what is this stuff we’re doing?”

“I’m learning,” Milo said.

“Am I learning, too?”

“I don’t think so. You really should go to bed, Dad. If you keep watching this, it’s going to get too scary for you.”

“Oh, no. I’m enjoying it. Are you enjoying it, Milo?”

“It’s amazing.”

“It’s like fireworks,” I said, “without the risk of burning off your eyebrows.”

On the sofa, the upside-down running dog issued what sounded like a whimper of delight.

“This is beautiful,” I said. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

“It’s elegant,” Milo said, “in seventy-seven ways.”

“It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Isn’t it the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen, Milo?”

“It’s very beautiful, Dad.”

“Isn’t it? Isn’t it beautiful, Milo?”

“Yes.”

“It’s so beautiful that it’s getting a little ominous.”

“Close your eyes, Dad. It’s a good ominous, but you’re not ready for it.”

“Just a little ominous, Milo. And now … more than a little.”

“I warned you it might get too scary for you.”

“I don’t scare easily, son. I was once trapped in an elevator for three hours with Hud Jacklight.”

“Scary.”

“I was so afraid your mother would rip his throat out. I didn’t want your mother to end up in prison. I love your mother, Milo.”

“I know, Dad.”

“It’s more beautiful by the second, but it’s also more ominous. I feel like … when I’m looking into this, whatever it is, at the same time it’s looking into me.”

“Close your eyes, Dad, or you’ll get very dizzy.”

“Oh, no, I’m not dizzy at all. It’s so strange and complex and ominously beautiful. Milo, do you feel like your skull is going to collapse?”

“No. I don’t.”

“I feel all this pressure, like the hull of a submarine at forty thousand feet, as if my skull might collapse like a popped balloon and squirt my brain out my ears.”

Milo didn’t say anything. On the sofa the dog whimpered with pleasure again, and farted.

I said, “This thing on the ceiling … it’s getting alarmingly, dreadfully beautiful, Milo. Horribly, terrifyingly beautiful, and the whole room is spinning.”

“I warned you about dizziness, Dad. If you don’t close your eyes, nausea is next.”

“Oh, no, I don’t feel the least bit ill. Just anxious, you know, and alarmed, maybe even aghast. And humbled. This is very humbling, Milo. This is too beautiful for me.”

“Close your eyes, Dad.”

“This structure, whatever it is, it’s too deep for me, Milo. It’s like a thousand times too deep for me. Here comes the nausea.”

I passed out before I could throw up.

Compared to me, Mozart’s father had it
so
easy.

I woke on the living-room floor shortly after four o’clock in the morning, and my skull had not collapsed. Almost as good: I felt fresh and buoyant, with a sense of having experienced something transcendent, though I could not put into words what it had been.

In the light of a single lamp, the ceiling was blank, mere plaster and paint.

When I sat up, I discovered that Milo had packed away all his gear. Not a single item littered the cottage floor.

In the bedroom, Penny lay sleeping in one bed, Milo and Lassie in the other.

I stood watching them sleep.

In spite of where we were, how we had gotten here, and why we had come, I felt that at this moment of our lives, this place was exactly where we belonged. We were not drifting but rising, rising toward something right and of significance.

Everything that rises must converge. The ultimate convergence of man and maker requires the navigation of that final passage, death. At that moment, however, watching my family sleep, I was in the thrall of a quiet elation and was not thinking of death, though as it turned out, Death was thinking of me.