The Plant (30 page)

is a smell Carlos has detected emanating from his own armpits when he has been being strenuously psykik.

He closes his eyes and murmurs, “
Talla. Demeter. Abbalah. Great Opoponax
.”

He breathes deep and the smell intensifies, filling his head, making it swim with visions that are dark and full of gusty-cold flying. They are visions of the land to which he will soon be going, the place where he will make his transition from earthy mortal to
tulpa
, a creature of the invisible world fully capable of returning to this one and possessing the bodies of the still-living. Perhaps he will use this power; perhaps he will not. Right now, such things do not matter.

He opens his eyes again and yes, there is the
kadath
. It is growing all over the walls and the carpet, thinning as it advances toward the reception area, thick and luxuriant further down the corridor. Somewhere down there, Carlos knows, is the place where the original pot still resides, buried in billowing drifts of green which would be invisible to all those who don’t believe in the plant’s power. The far end of the corridor looks as impenetrable as a rainforest jungle, buried in growth right up to the fluorescents, but Carlos knows people could walk blithely up and down that corridor with absolutely no idea of what they were walking through…unless, of course, Zenith
wanted
them to know. In which case it would be the last thing they’d
ever
know. Basically, Zenith House is now a large green bear trap, spring-loaded.

Carlos walks down the corridor, Sakred Sakrifice Case held at chest level. He steps over the first trailing strand of Zenith, then an entire clot of entwined branches and rhizomes. One stirs and touches his ankle. Carlos stands patiently, and after a moment the strand drops away. Here, on the left, is the office of WADE EDITOR IN CHIEF. Carlos glances in without much interest, then passes on to the next door. Here the ivy-growth is much thicker, the strands covering the lower part of the door in zigzag patterns and twining around the knob in a loose lover’s knot. One strand clings to the upper panel, which is glass, and streaks across the name like a stroke of green lightning.

“Kenton,” Carlos says in a low voice. “You mocker.”

224

10:44 A.M.

In Herb Porter’s office, General Anthony Hecksler opens his eyes. The thought that he may have dreamed the voice never so much as crosses his mind. What he has heard is this:
Kenton, you mockie
.

Someone else is in the Zenith House offices.

Someone else on a Saturday morning.

Iron-Guts has a pretty good idea who the someone else must be.

“Tick-tick,” he whispers, his lips barely moving. “Designated spic.”

In his doze, Hecksler has slid down a bit in Porter’s chair. Now he slides even farther, wanting to make absolutely sure that the top of his head won’t show if the D.S. should wander a few yards farther down the hall. It’s okay for “Carlos” to see the
mess
in here as long as he doesn’t see the
man
in here.

Silent as a sigh, Hecksler eases his hand into the pocket of his pants and pulls out another of his Army-Navy store purchases: a bone-handled hunting knife with a seven-inch tungsten blade.

There is the faintest click as the General unfolds the blade and locks it into position. He holds it against his chest, the tip nearly touching the undershelf of his stringently shaved chin, and waits for whatever comes next.

Central Park

Skies fair, winds light, temperature 60 F.

10:50 A.M.

Bill Gelb is so excited about his planned excursion to Paramus that he hardly slept at all last night, and still he feels energized this Saturday morning, totally jazzed. He couldn’t stay in the goddam apartment, just
couldn’t
. The question was, where to go? Ordinarily he’d think movie, Bill loves the movies, but he couldn’t sit still in one today. And then, in the shower, the answer came.

On a Saturday morning in Central Park, especially on a pretty spring 225

morning like this one, there’ll be a veritable Olympic games going on, everything from skateboarding and pick-up softball to chess and checkers.

There will also be a crap game going on at the edge of the Sheep Meadow; of this Bill is almost sure. It may have been closed down, but he can’t imagine why the cops would bust such an innocuous game: low stakes, young white guys pretending to be cool dudes rolling the bones. Seven come eleven, baby needs a new pair of Adidas sneakers. A bottle or two of cheap wine will make the rounds, allowing the players to feel totally raffish, not to say decadent, shooting craps and drinking Night Train at eleven o’clock in the morning.

Bill has played in this game maybe half a dozen times over the last two years, always in warm weather. He likes to gamble, but shooting craps in Central Park when the temperature is below forty? No way. But today WINS radio says the mercury may shoot all the way up to an unseasonable seventy degrees, and besides…what better way to see if the force is still with him?

Which is why—as Riddley’s train approaches Manhattan, as Sandra and her niece continue their whirlwind tour of Cony Island’s early-season amusements, as Carlos Detweiller begins inspecting “Poop-Shit” Kenton’s files, and General Hecksler sits slouched in Herb Porter’s office chair, knife gleaming in the sunlight—we find Bill Gelb down on his knees in a circle of yelling, laughing white guys who are happy to fade his heat. Lucky son of a bitch got in the game, bet two guys to crap out (and won), then took the dice himself. Since then he’s rolled five straight sevens. Now he’s promising them a sixth, and
further
promising them it’ll be sixty-one. Dude is crazy, so of course they’re happy to fade him. And Bill is happy, as well. As happy as he’s ever been in his life, it seems to him. He showed up here on the Meadow with just fifteen dollars in his pocket, deliberately leaving the rest of his cash at home; he’s already tripled that. And this, by God, is just the warmup!

Tonight, in Paramus, he will sit down to the main course.

“God bless that crazy houseplant,” he murmurs, and rolls the dice onto the painted hopscotch grid that serves as the pit. They bounce, they roll, they tumble—

226

—and the Saturday morning yuppie crap-artists groan in mingled dis-belief, despair, and amazement.

It’s six and one.

Bill snatches up the wad of currency lying on the HOME slot of the hopscotch grid, smacks it, and holds it up to the bright blue sky, laughing.

“You want to pass the dice, Mr. Lucky?” one of the other players asks.

“When I’m on a roll like this?” Bill Gelb leans forward and snatches the dice. “No fuckin way.” The bones feel warm in his hand. Someone hands him a bottle of Boone’s Farm and he takes a hit. “No fuckin way am I passing,” he repeats. “Gents, I’m going to roll these bones until the spots fall off.”

11:05 A.M.

The
kadath
has infiltrated Kenton’s office right through the cracks at the edges of the door, growing exuberantly up the walls, but Carlos barely notices. The ivy is nothing to him, one way or the other. Not now. It might have been fun to sit back and watch it work if not for Tina Barfield, but the bitch stole his owl’s beak and time has grown short. Let Zenith take care of the rest if it wants to; Kenton is his.

“You mocker,” he says again. “You thief.”

As in Herb’s office, there are pictures on the walls of Kenton with various authors. Carlos cares nothing for the authors (they look like wankers to him, too), but he looks fixedly at the repetitions of Kenton himself, memo-rizing the lean face with its shock of too-long black hair.
What does he think he
is?
Carlos asks himself indignantly.
A damned old rock star? A Beatle? A Rolling
Stone
? The name of a rock and roll group Kenton
could
belong to occurs to him: Johnny and the Poop-Shits.

As always, Carlos is startled by his own wit. He is serious so much of the time that he’s always shocked at what a good sense of humor he has.

Now he barks laughter.

Still chuckling, he tries Kenton’s desk drawers, but, unlike Herb’s, they are locked. There is an IN/OUT box on top of the desk, but, also unlike 227

Herb’s, it is almost completely empty. The one sheet of paper has several lines jotted on it that Carlos doesn’t understand in the slightest:
Leper hockey game: face off in the corner

7: 6 to carry the coffin, 1 to carry the boombox
Never mind the jam on your mouth, what’s that peanut butter doing on your forehead?

“Fuck the mailman, give him a dollar and a sweet roll.”

Orange manhole cover in France=Howard Johnson’s.

What in the name of Demeter is all
that
crap about? Carlos doesn’t know and decides he doesn’t care, either.

He goes to Kenton’s file cabinets, expecting them to be locked as well, but he has a long weekend ahead of him, and if he gets bored, he can open both the desk and the files. He has plenty of tools in the Sakrifice Case that will do the job. But the drawers of the file cabinets turn out to be unlocked—go figure.

Carlos begins searching the files with a high degree of interest that quickly fades. Poop-Shit’s files are alphabetized, but after CURRAN, JAMES (author of four paperback originals in 1978 and ’79, with titles like
Love’s Strange Delight
and
Love’s Strange Obsession
), comes DORCHESTER, ELLEN (six brief manuscript reports, each signed by Kenton and each attached to a rejection letter). There’s no file marked DETWEILLER, CARLOS.*

The one item of interest Carlos discovers is in the bottom drawer, lying behind the few hanging files marked W-Z. It’s a framed photograph which undoubtedly graced Kenton’s desk until recently. In it, Kenton and a pretty young Oriental woman are standing on the rink at Rockefeller Plaza with their arms around each other, laughing into the camera.

A smile of surpassing nastiness dawns on Carlos’s face. The woman is in California, but for a genuine Psykik Savant, a few thousand miles presents

* Such a file by then existed, of course, and it contained material that might well have caused Detweiller to explode with rage, but it was in the publishing house safe, behind a picture in Roger Wade’s office. Neither Hecksler nor Detweiller so much as entered that office. That file also contained material concerning the General and the company’s new mascot.

228

absolutely no problem. Miss Ruth Tanaka is already discovering that she has backed the wrong horse in the Romance Sweepstakes. Carlos knows she’ll be back in New York before long, and thinks that she may stop by Zenith House shortly after she arrives. Kenton will be dead by then, but she will have questions, won’t she? Yes. The ladies always have questions.

And when she comes…

“Innocent blood,” Carlos murmurs. He tosses the framed photo back into the drawer and the glass front shatters. In the quiet office, the sound is satisfyingly loud. Across the hall, General Hecksler jumps slightly in Herb’s chair, almost pricking himself with his own knife.

Carlos kicks the file-drawer shut, goes across to Kenton’s desk, and sits down in Kenton’s chair. He feels like Goldilocks, only with a pretty decent stiffy. He sits there for a little while, drumming the fingers of one hand on the Sakrifice Case and idly boinking his hardon with the fingers of the other. Later, he thinks, he’ll probably masturbate—it is something he does often and well. Not knowing, of course, that his days of self-abuse are now gone.

In the office across the corridor, Iron-Guts has taken up a position against the wall to the left of Herb Porter’s door. He can see a reflection of the office across the way in Herb’s window—faint, but good enough. When

“Carlos” comes out to further recon the area, as sooner or later he will, the General will be ready.

11:15 A.M.

It occurs to Carlos that he’s hungry. It further occurs to him that he has forgotten to bring any food. There might be candy bars or something in Kenton’s desk—gum, at least, everyone has a few sticks of gum lying around—but the jeezly bastardly thing is locked. Prying open the drawers in search of something that might not be there seems like too much work.

What about the other offices, though? Maybe there’s even a canteen, with sodas and everything. Carlos decides to check. He has nothing but time, after all.

229

He gets up, goes to the door, and steps out. Once again the ivy in the hall touches his shoes; one strand curls around his ankle. Once again Carlos stands patiently until the strand lets go. The words
pass, friend
whisper in his head.

Carlos goes to the next door down the hall, the one marked JACKSON.

He doesn’t hear Herb Porter’s door as it opens squeaklessly behind him; doesn’t sense the tall old man with the knife in his hand who’s measuring distances with cold blue eyes and finding them acceptable.

As Carlos opens the door to Sandra’s office, Iron-Guts springs. One forearm—old, scrawny, hideously strong—hooks around Carlos’s throat and shuts off his air. Carlos has a moment to feel a new emotion: utter terror. Then a lightning-bright line of heat prints itself across his lower midsection. He thinks he has been burned with something, perhaps even brand-ed, and would have screamed if not for his closed windpipe. He hasn’t the slightest idea that he’s been partially disemboweled, and has only avoided the total deal by staggering to his left, bumping the General against the edge of Sandra Jackson’s door, and causing him to slash a little high and nowhere near as deeply as he intended.

“You’re one dead SOB.” Hecksler whispers these words in Carlos’s ear as tenderly as a lover. Carlos smells Rolaids and madness. He throws himself to the right, against the other side of the door, but the General is ready for this trick and rides him as easily as a cowpoke on an old nag. He raises the knife again, meaning to open Carlos’s throat for him. Then he hesitates.