Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 (33 page)

           
So Brother Rush is back.

           
Well, no matter. The process is
under way now; he can’t stop it. That strange quintet
will
get into Green Meadow III, I can count on Frank to make that
happen. Each will go in for a different reason, but the reasons will unite them
just long enough for my purposes.

           
Once inside the plant, the five will
make their demands, and the demands will not be met. It won’t be out of bravery
or foolhardiness that officialdom will refuse to meet their conditions, but out
of muddle and mess and ego and incompetence. Responsibility will be diluted
among various private corporations, public and semi-public regulating
authorities, even congressional committees. Those who are afraid to act will be
counterbalanced by those who are afraid they will not get credit for whatever
actions turn out to be successful. Publicity-hogging, buck-passing, all the
common discourtesies of public life, will conspire to keep Frank from getting
his money. And the usual spinelessness of the happy media will keep the various
propaganda efforts from getting out of the plant and into the world’s
consciousness.

           
Gradually, but sooner rather than
later, Frank and the others will begin to realize the enormity of what they’ve
done and the hopelessness of their position.

           
And then my task will be finished.

           
N o one knew exactly what to make of
Pami’s “friend,” Brother Rush. Clearly, he wasn’t her friend at all, but she
seemed to feel powerless to deny him. There was at all times something cold and
sly and insinuating about him, but the menace never quite broke the surface,
never entirely solidified into anything you could call him on.

           
Frank felt the frustration of this
the most, and took Pami aside to make her tell him what was going on: “What’s
with this guy? He your pimp? What do we want him around for?”

           
“I don’t
want
him around,” Pami said, “but Rush—he gets what he wants. But
he won’t bother nobody.”

           
“He bothers
me
.”

           
At which point, Rush came strolling
into the room and said, “Hey, what’s happnin,” and that was the end of that.

           
That he would be staying for dinner
was understood, somehow, though he never asked and no one invited him and in
fact no one wanted him. But a sixth place was set at the table, Rush took his
seat at the far side of Pami, and as the meal progressed he alternated between
extravagant praise of what Maria Elena had accomplished in the kitchen and
questions that confused them all.

           
He was pumping them, that was clear,
or at least he was trying to, but about what? His questions were hard to answer
because they were full of assumptions that weren’t true. He said, “You just
waitin here for somebody else gonna show up?”

           
Frank said, “Like who?”

           
“I dunno,” Rush told him, shrugging
as though it didn’t matter, trying to make that mean secret face look casual
and innocent. “Somebody to tell you what to do next, where y’all gonna go from
here.”

           
Grigor smiled at Rush with closed
lips, and said, “No one tells us where to go. We know where we are going. Some
of us do. We are absolutely free.”

           
“You know where you’re going?” Rush
looked interested. “Where’s that, Gregor?” (He couldn’t quite seem to get his
mouth to twist the name all the way around to
Grigor.)

           
This time Grigor permitted his lips
to open when he smiled.
^cc
To the grave, brother,” he said.

           
Rush looked merely interested: “You
got what Pami got?”

           
“This,” Maria Elena said firmly,
“is not a thing to talk about at dinner.”

           
“You’re right, Maria,” Rush said. “I
love this sauce. You got some special spices in here, don’tcha?”

           
But soon he was at it again, saying,
“Do you all have some special doctor you’re gonna go see?”

           
Frank put down his fork. “Rush,” he
said, letting the exasperation show, “do I look like I need a doctor?”

           
“No, you don’t,” Rush agreed. “You
truly don’t.” And he grew quiet again, if thoughtful.

           
The next time he spoke, it was
something new; neither irrelevant questions nor extravagant praise. Lifting his
head, sniffing the air, almost like a cat, he said, “You got somebody hangin
around outside. This the guy you been waitin on?”

           
“Goddammit, Rush,” Frank said, “I
don’t know what the hell is the matter with you, what Pami said to you or
what—”

           
“I didn’t say nothing to him!” Pami
cried. “This is some idea all his own!”

           
“Whatever it is,” Frank said.
“Whatever gave you this wild hair up your ass,
Brother
Rush, let me tell you once and for all. We aren’t waiting
for anybody We weren’t waiting for you—”

           
“Absolutely,” Grigor said.

           
“—and we aren’t waiting for anybody
else.”

           
Rush nodded through this, smiling
gendy, and when Frank was finished he said,
^cc
Then you won’t care if
I go out and see to this fella outside.”

           
“Be my guest,” Frank said. “If you
think there’s somebody out there.”

           
“Oh, somebody’s there all right,”
Rush said.

           
Maria Elena, looking toward the
curtained windows, said, “But who?”

           
“That’s what I’ll find out,” Rush
told her, and got to his feet. “Satisfy
all
our curiosity.” Dropping his napkin beside his plate, smiling around at them
all, he turned away and left the dining room. For a big man, he could move very
silendy.

           
They are in the air like bats, these
creatures of the night, the lesser servants of Lucifer. He was the first
schismatic, of course, Lucifer, that onetime angel and captain of angels, my
former brother. Pride was his besetting sin, and darkness his punishment. He
had been very nearly as immortal as God Himself, and remained so. It was not by
a foreshortening of his life, his sensations, his awareness, that he was
penalized, but instead by a near-eternity of darkness, a permanent exclusion
from the Light. Yes, that’s right: from the Light.

           
An odd judgment, when you stop to
think of it. Lucifer was punished by being given his own kingdom, his own
minions, his own realm and rule; and all for the sin of pride. Pride. So an
angel can be proud. An angel can sin. An angel has free will.

           
We angels obey because we choose to
obey. And so do
his
creatures. They
love their louche lord, their Prince of the Powers of the Air, they love the
work they do for him, and now they swarm in the night air around me like moths,
reporting my movements to that nameless demon, their immediate master, who
struggles so hard to keep me from accomplishing the fulfillment of God’s
design. I take him, that demon, to be some minor baron in the Prince of Darkness’s
vassalage, some puffed-up satrap, arrogant beglerbeg of the middle mists,
powerful, but not,
deo volente,
so
powerful as I.

           
(I would not be able to stand up to
Lucifer himself, and I know it, but so does he, and so does He. The Prince of
Darkness, even before the Fall, was a power and a might second only to God,
which is what led him to his pride and his destruction in the first place. But
if Lucifer were to confront me, it would no longer be me he was confronting. I
would at once be retired, so that God Himself could take my place; and in
every
direct encounter between those two
Masters it is Lucifer who has lost, it is he who has retired from the battle in
shame and pain and degradation, forked tail between cloven- hoofed legs. Like
the limited wars on other people’s territories that the so-called Great Powers
have indulged themselves in over the last half-century of Earth’s little
history, it is only through proxies that my Master and His Opponent can
contend. Lucifer will surely try to cheat, will cast about for advantage, but
he will not try to overwhelm me; that would bring into play a
truly
Great Power.)

           
No, it is only that nameless
hospodar that I have to contend with, only he who has taken up arms against me.
His master believes, or at least hopes, that this deputy devil will be enough
to thwart me in doing God’s work. But it is my firm belief that, with God’s
help, and in His gleaming Light, I will be enabled to perform His work, obey
His commands, accomplish His desires, amen.

           
And for now, it is time to separate
that avatar of the demon, Brother Rush (a name rich in association), from my
quintet. Leaving Andy Harbinger seated quiedy beside Susan Carrigan in Quad
Theater #3 on
West 13th Street
, watching
Night Fall
(a film noir of current popularity), I made my way to
Stockbridge and assumed corporate form in the darkness of a church parking lot
not far from Maria Elena Auston’s house.

           
The shape I had chosen to take was
that of the man who had helped Kwan escape the police in Hong Kong, and who later
rode the plane with Pami; an early version of Andy Harbinger, really. Two of my
five people already have reason to trust me. It would be preferable to have
their confidence, while I am ridding them of Rush. As Brad Wilson of U.S. Naval
Intelligence, as the documents in my wallet testified, I would already have the
presumption of authority, so it should be possible to perform the extraction of
Rush from the group without the necessity of doing anything gaudy. Or at least
I certainly hoped so.

           
I walked the two and a half blocks
of curving suburban street—an early sign of sophistication in humans, I have
noticed, is a distaste for straight lines—and as I approached the Auston house
I saw that the drapes were open at the large dining room window, presenting my
quintet at meal as though Hogarth had done a cover for some supermarket family
magazine.

           
But where was Rush? The others sat
and ate and talked and brooded—Kwan occasionally took tiny painful sips from a
glass of pale orange liquid—and a partially eaten meal waited at a sixth place,
but Rush was not to be seen.

           
I sought him with my mind, but
couldn’t find him. He had to be present, because of that meal in front of that
empty chair. Had his rustling claque in the air above my head warned him of my
presence?

           
I didn’t want to declare myself to
the others until I had fixed the position of Rush. I partially crossed the
lawn, to its darkest segment, away from the light-spill out that dining room
window and also clear of streetlamp illumination, and there I stood and
watched, and waited.

           
Why were they so cheerful? By now,
bitterness and sorrow should have made those five
much
more silent and introspective. It must be their companionship
that was raising their spirits, but unfortunately I couldn’t give them a properly
disheartening solitude; they had to work together. Would they do the right
thing when the time came? Yes, they would, they would, there was no real
question. I would turn the screw until they
did
do what I wanted. Of their own free will, of course.

           
I was careless, I admit it. My
attention had become too fixed on my five operatives, and insufficiently on my
current metempsychosis, Brad Wilson of U.S. Naval Intelligence,
and
on the whereabouts of
Rushl
Before I knew it, the attack was
well under way.

           
Damn
him! I tried to take a step, to see another portion of the dining room, but my
feet wouldn’t move. Only then did I realize what he was up to. The Brad Wilson
toes had become roots, digging down through his shoes into the soil of the
lawn, burrowing down and down, clutching at rocks, entwining with the roots of
other trees, luxuriating in the groundwater—

           
Other
trees! Already the flesh of my ankles and shins was bark, already an
irresistible pull drew my arms upward, already my joints were stiffening. In
alarm, I tried to flee this body, but the chittering of the thousand thousand
tiny counter-cherubs all around my leafing head imprisoned me.
They
couldn’t hold me in, not by
themselves, but with the power of Rush as well I
might
be defeated.

           
Defeated! This corporeal form was
merely a temporary shape, but it was the permanent
me,
made up of my own atoms. (We do not inhabit and possess Earthly
creatures, as the fiends do, as Rush was doing now, but make our shapes from
ourselves.) If the demon and its million squeaking parasites could hold me, the
essence of
me,
inside this
terrestrial vessel until they completed the transformation, until they turned
me into a vegetable, with a
vegetable’s
brain,
I would never break free, never be Ananayel again, never have power
to be anything but what they would have made me: an inexplicable tree on a
suburban lawn.

           
Failure was possible. And if I
failed, what? There was no doubt, not the slightest doubt, that I would be
abandoned to the effects of my failure. I would be encased here, lost here,
shut up mindless inside this woody crypt for as long as it took Him to send
another effectuator, a worthier deputy, to succeed where I had faltered, and at
last to end this world.

           
And then? I would end with it, of
course.

           
But now,
now,
what of now? Soon, in that theater in
New York City
,
Night
Fall
would come to its expected end—the girl is innocent, it’s obvious—and
Susan would rise, but what would happen to Andy Harbinger? There isn’t enough
animation in him to get him on his feet and out of the theater, much less to
take him through the complications of the rest of the evening. There would be
confusion, then shock, then an ambulance. To the hospital Andy Harbinger’s
apparently living corpus would be taken, and I had not bothered to be
meticulous about that corpus. It doesn’t contain everything a human body would
be expected to contain. Here and there, I did short circuits, took the easy way
out. And now? Expose that body to emergency room staff? Confine myself to a
severely abbreviated life span as a
tree
? Fail my God?

           
I still had teeth. I ground them as
I forced this head to turn on its stiffening neck. Where was Rush? Where was
Rush?

           
At the curb was parked Frank’s
Toyota
. Its exterior left-side mirror was angled
so that I could just get a glimpse into it. Among other things reflected in
that mirror was not Rush but a Buick parked on a driveway down the block, on
the other side of the street. Narrowing my focus, peering through the
Toyota
’s exterior mirror into that Buick, into the
interior rearview mirror of the Buick, my view included the plate-glass living
room window of the house next door to the Auston house. The room behind that
window was dark; the window was not a perfect mirror, but it would do, and in
it was reflected the
Toyota
again. And from that angle, in the driver’s window of the Toyota, very
dimly, very darkly, hunched low in shrubbery around the side of the Auston
house,
there
was Rush! Gibbering with
glee.

           
My arms were almost vertical. My
legs had been joined into one trunk, encased in bark. My sight was dimming, but
I focused it, I focused it, and then I
opened
my eyes.
The
Toyota
and Buick mirrors, the plate-glass window, the driver’s window of the
Toyota
, all cracked with sounds like pistol shots.
But as they went, the beam of my fury reached Rush where he hid, sliced into
him like a harpoon, yanked him into the air, and flung him to the ground at my
feet.

           
How they howled, that skyful of
gnats! How their faint cries rose into the night, crackling like static
electricity across the surface of high thin cloud layers. How they fled, fading
into wisps of gas. And how their master squirmed inside his borrowed husk,
trying to escape the agonized body of Rush.

           
Oh, no, not
this
time. I couldn’t kill him, I knew that, not unless I was fast
enough or lucky enough to convert
all
his matter to energy at once, which would be just about impossible, but I could
give him a memory so searing he would never
dare
to confront me again. Pain so violent that the very thought of me, eons from
now, would make him curl up like a shrimp.

           
He was Rush now, he would feel what
Rush felt, and he would
stay
Rush
until I had taught him his lesson.

           
I boiled the blood within his veins.
I turned his eyebrows to needles and embedded them in his eyes. I knotted his
intestines, placed a living ferret in his stomach, turned his tongue into a
piranha with its tail still attached to his pharynx.

           
He squirmed, that devil, he snarled,
he shrieked in a range inaudible to any ear on Earth. He tried everything,
tried to counterattack, to resist, to fight off the plagues I put upon him,
strangling the ferret with his own guts, burning the piranha as it ate his
mouth, but always and ever distracted by the pain I kept on inflicting and by
the new horrors I thrust into his mouth and his nose and his ass and his eyes.
Humans escape such torment by fainting or dying, but neither avenue was
available to him. And he knew better than to beg for mercy. Mercy? To a foul
fiend?

           
He first tried to escape as a worm,
out Rush’s ear, but I charred that worm to ash and less than ash, and he barely
got back inside before I did for him completely.
Feel
my punishment, demon!

           
Then he tried, frantically,
repeatedly, to kill Rush, to end the onslaught by robbing me of the field of
play, but I resuscitated the body every time, and every time I blessed it with
more plagues, more stabs, more clenchings, twistings, rippings, rendings.

           
Then I stopped. It cowered, still in
the burning center of all the anguish of the Brother Rush persona, afraid to
make another run for it, while I undid the damage it had done, severing the
roots beyond my feet, reverting back to flesh, sap to blood, fiber to sinew.