Impatient and alone, Horus Whiteside paced inside his trailer. He owned a half dozen of these no-frills, single-wide, mobile homes. They were scattered on private semiremote lands across the Upper Midwest. Though the units varied somewhat in their exteriors, all appeared shabby and seemingly uninhabited. Dented, weatherbeaten siding was standard. A bit of rust never hurt, either. They lacked outward decoration. No flags or flowerpots. No chimes or garden gnomes peeping from the weeds. Not a single piece of visible evidence indicated homeowner pride or a neighborly invitation.
The message was crystal.
If you should be in the vicinity, you’d find no welcome here. The location of the trailers discouraged chance encounters, being situated as they were, on narrow hidden plots amid the thickest overgrowth available. Debris often lay strewn around their perimeters, but never enough to draw undue attention. Yet it was important that each trailer remain accessible by road throughout the year.
The ambulance needed to make it up to the door.
Inside they were virtually identical. A cubicle curtain, the kind used for privacy in hospitals, ran on a U-shaped track and partitioned off the entryway from the rest of the interior. Viewed from outside the opened door, curious eyes would discover aqua fabric hanging ceiling to floor.
Steel grilles secured the windows. Roller blinds and interior plastic sheeting kept out the sunlight and dust. Potential burglars would encounter a painful, though nonlethal shock if they attempted to breach any window or the door. Whiteside didn’t want to kill anyone accidentally. Bodies drew questions and worse— cops. If someone wanted to steal from the trailers badly enough to defeat the security, then he’d let them. And if any burglar ever did get inside, the shock of what he saw might very well send him away empty-handed.
The trailers were freestanding ICU patient rooms.
They wouldn’t have lived up to the minimum requirements of any hospital in the United States. But they didn’t have to. Many doctors elsewhere on the globe would have marveled at the array of monitors, pumps, intravenous lines, tubing, and catheters. A laptop-sized electrocardiograph sat on a shelf. A red crash cart with its defibrillator and drawers of life-resurrecting drugs stood in the corner. Chief among the expensive equipment was a refurbished Bird Products medical ventilator. Everything ran off batteries or a generator secreted in a concrete bunker underneath the mobile home.
The room contained two standard hospital beds.
Horus paced between them.
His acolyte was late. Late again. Late, late, late. Horus checked his pocket watch. His energies started to disperse. It was so exhausting being an innovator. But what really aggravated him was Time. Time spent. Time wasted. Horus didn’t have much time left to work the kinks out of his plan. He needed to make some real progress. He desperately needed to find the girl and the artifact.
The stone.
He tried not to perseverate on its loss.
If only he had more help. But good help was always hard to find. His pool of potential recruits was infinitesimally small compared to what most executives of similar caliber and ambition had at their disposal. He reflected for a moment. Really, he could not think of anyone alive he regarded as his equal.
Life’s loneiy at the top, he told himself. Lonely at the beginning.
And at the end, too.
Time.
The stone.
Missing for so long. Then a magnificent reemergence. His hard work and talents were paying off after all these years. The Tartarus Stone. Gaspar Romero’s legendary discovery: a doublepyramid onyx, unearthed near the mythical site of the Garden of Eden. Romero the Blasphemer, a heroic man who rebelled ferociously against God and His Church—he burned at the stake, martyred in the fight to restore the dark gods. The stone, in the keep of his murderers, was lost. But now it was found. Verified. And carefully the Pitch had watched those who guarded it. They chose a strategy. They commissioned the theft. They executed their adversaries. Only to be undermined by a young woman acting out of spite in a lover’s quarrel. To imagine the artifact in her illegitimate, ignorant, reckless care ...
They’d been so close. He could almost feel the impossibly brilliant weight of its ancient geometry in his hands.
Now it vanished again.
Perhaps forever ... but, no, he would have the Stone.
Not someday, but soon.
The curtain shrieked as he ripped it aside. He flung open the door and peered into a bracing wind. Trees surrounding the trailer scratched against its sides. Their empty limbs clacked and shivered.
Where was Pinroth?
Horus didn’t own a cell phone. Not in his own name. He’d never carry around a bit of machinery like that in his pocket. He worried it would be used to track him down. The government had ways. The public thought the government, although bureaucratic, was at its core about realism. Oh sure, there were crooks holding office, they’d freely admit. Maybe most of them were dirty. But they were businessmen and businesswomen. Goddamn
lawyers, every last one. They understood how things worked at the deepest levels. They cut corners and read bottom lines. Yet certainly those who were smart enough or crafty enough to land the choicest jobs in Washington believed in rationality, scientific methods, and order. Perhaps their only difference was they began life privileged, or they had been schooled to be more ruthless than plain folks busy eking out existences in the suburbs. That wasn’t the worst thing in the world. Was it? Having the big shots running the show—savvy operators who utilized computer logic and the latest information, who had at their fingertips the best cutting- edge technology money could buy, eager to serve their selfish purposes, yes, but also, indirectly, to protect ordinary citizens from harm and keep them happy enough not to care?
Horus knew better.
The shadow people in the government paid to see the occult at work. Firsthand experience taught him that eggheads in the intelligence community and square jaws at the Pentagon liked nothing better than a little old-fashioned hocus-pocus. They turned over a roomful of personnel for a demonstration of the Whiteside method; over the course of a long weekend, a conference table of men bore witness to unprecedented feats of mind control: mass mesmerism, rapid inductions, and confusion techniques. After a few odd-sounding conversations, soldiers would emerge as fearless automatons, capable of anything the doctor ordered. He wea- ponized brains! The subconscious was clay in the hands of the dark gods and their servants. At the end, the generals clapped. Whether it was remote viewing or brainwashing, MK-ULTRA or UFOs—it was all the same.
If you invented a secret weapon, a new toy, their wallet opened.
The government was a child.
And like children, they grew tired of their toys. They said they were broken or claimed they were never very good. They called them garbage.
So Horus took his toys and went away.
It was essential to keep moving. Sharks had the right idea.
Horus stomped his feet. The space heater radiated warmth at his back, but with the door open he needed to stay in motion. Being stationary got those witches killed in Chicago. It wouldn’t get Horus. That’s why he bought the trailers. No one, except for Pin- roth, knew all their locations.
Horus tucked his chin deep inside his overcoat.
He scanned the white void. The lane before him had no light poles, no signage. A soft bend dropped off to the right into invisibility. Five miles beyond came the turnoff from the county highway, a frontage road. In good weather, it was easy to miss. Blink and the brief interruption in the landscape melted away. He made a visor of his hand and gazed at what served as the yard—a level strip of snow-covered gravel bordered by stumps of varying diameters; a burn barrel and the carcass of a John Deere tractor emerged in chalky monochromatic relief.
Remorseless day lurked above.
A sandstorm of gritty snow ate at the periphery of his vision. White sky devouring white ground until nothing was left but a dull milky blindness.
His shoulders sagged in disappointment.
He closed the door.
He was growing weak. He hadn’t slept at all through the night. His muscles stiffened. Blood beat in his temples. Against the door, he slid to his haunches and then sat on the floor massaging his sore legs.
From a nightstand between the beds, a Tiffany desk lamp cast a fan of honeyed light into the trailer. The stained glass harkened back to a more mysterious age. Earlier, Horus had turned on the lifesaving equipment; testing it to be sure he was prepared for anything that might happen. Fishy gray monitor screens and LEDs glowed in the shadows. Nocturnal gem eyes. Over the years, Horus learned to find comfort in them.
Built into the nightstand was a bookshelf.
Hardcover volumes lined it.
From his seat on the trailer floor, Horus could decipher the
titles embossed on their spines. It wasn’t necessary, because he knew them by heart. He’d read them over and over again. He’d committed entire passages of their contents to memory. They were great books. The best he’d ever read.
He loved them.
In his mind he turned pages. He stopped.
A curious Conner sat on the edge of his motel bed. His newly acquired stone box lay propped on one of its sides. The nature of the shape made it appear a sharp and crooked thing, offending to the eye—a double pyramid. The surface gleamed evilly. He straddled the foreign relic dug up years ago from the desert and carted out on camelback. He wetted his lips. Beneath its surface, figures were trapped in strata resembling translucent black ice. He detected Byzantine markings, hieroglyphs, and odd spirals. Layers floated under layers. So much depth it made him dizzy. He traced his finger along six columns of carvings, an alphabet of daggers. What was it Belzoni had said?
“The mind muscle, for years contracted into a knot, expands . .."
The lines came from a story written by Maxwell Caul. The story, “A Chunk of Hell,” was published in a short-lived pulp magazine, Inter dimensional, in the winter of 1950, and had been reprinted a dozen times. Horus thought Caul’s best work came before he started writing scripts for television, certainly before the late ’60s when he got his hands, and mind, on psychedelic drugs. It wasn’t only the drugs. Caul lacked courage. He’d seen what few men had. Seen and understood it, too. Yet fear kept him from exploring further. Fear turned him into a shade. And a liar. Max, oh Max, where did you go wrong?
The good news was the finders had spotted Caul in American Rapids as expected.
The bad news? They hadn’t found the girl or the stone.
Not yet.
As with many instances concerning the whereabouts of the stone, Horus found his visions were useless. The stone threw off high quantities of residual energy. He couldn’t cut through the static. But it would only fit if the girl and the stone ended up with Caul, who spent every Christmas writing in that motel in American Rapids. That much was guaranteed. The rest was a hunch. So Horus had sent his finders to see if the girl would find Caul.
Or vice versa.
Then the Pitch would have them both.
Knock, knock .
“Doctor? It’s me.”
“Yes, I’m coming.” How quickly situations changed. Minutes ago he’d been consumed by worry. Now he felt relief. He stood and the headrush broke over him like an ocean wave. He leaned against the door until the spinning subsided. All would be well soon. Pinroth was here. The ambulance had arrived. They would get to work. Tonight was a new opportunity. It almost made him cheerful.
“What kept you, Pinroth?”
“The storm, Doctor ... these country roads are bad. And the patient wasn’t at ease. I stopped and administered more sedatives.”
“You don’t decide such things!”
“He was asking ...”
“I don’t care. Your job is to do what I tell you.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
Horus removed his overcoat and rolled up his shirtsleeves. He was late for his transfusion. Pinroth, blank-faced, watched him from the open door.
“Shall we begin then?”
“As you say, I’ll start unloading.”
“Wonderful.”