The key turned without resistance. The air in Vera’s room was neither stuffy nor frigid. It felt cozy actually ... if a bit gloomy. Max flicked the switch and was surprised when the lights came on. Much better—an occupied generic motel room like a thousand he’d seen in his lifetime: the rug worn, tread upon by numberless travelers’ feet; a bedspread splashed with a parrot blue, orange, and yellow pattern, the bed itself neatly made; a red suitcase leaned open against a wall; and an extra pillow occupied the armchair. A standard television with a cable box angled toward the bed. He touched the power and a dot flashed on the screen, then an image of a newscaster sitting at a desk emerged. The woman’s lips moved, but she was mute. The electricity worked. Max pressed a button and sent her away. The heater under the back window purred, circulating warmth that reached him where he paused at the threshold. Traces of floral air freshener and shampoo lingered. Max’s heart pounded. Calmness descended upon him as well. He was like a sleeper having a deep but stimulating dream.
He stepped completely inside.
He engaged the deadbolt.
Attached the chain.
He placed the Ruger on the small writing desk where he could
reach it. The parka came off. He dropped it on the bed. He rubbed his hands together, feeling the blood flow into his fingers.
Where was the stone?
That was exactly what Horus Whiteside wanted to know when he showed up on Max’s doorstep years ago, when he imprisoned him in his own home, and converted it to a torture chamber. Whiteside was searching for the legendary onyx. Max, at the time, only knew the stone as a plot device. A MacGuffin. He’d borrowed it from earlier writers. An occult Holy Grail, a mere pulp contrivance to hang a short story or two on, a little voodoo to scare the kiddies at heart and turn a buck. It meant nothing to him.
Whiteside saw things differently.
He brought Max around to his point of view.
If only you could make yourself dream.
Dream on command was the way Whiteside had said it.
You’d live anything you could imagine. No limits. And do it all while you were awake. Your hand operated the controls. You were free of conventions, of man-made laws, of anything but your own set of rules.
That was one thing the stone offered.
Freedom.
I can help you do this now ; Whiteside said. He smiled.
Max flinched. He had learned in short order that the smile meant pain was coming. The black lenses glided over him . Zooming downward.
He told Max not to be afraid. He petted his head. Max lying trussed like a pig on the floor of his home. Blood caked, sticky on his face. One eye battered. His chest exposed and scorched. The stink of singed hair and skin hung in the boxy rooms and narrow hallways of the ranch house, a homemade branding tool tilting at the fireplace mouth, forgotten for the moment, reheating in embers. The Egyptian eye seared into his flesh, over and over ...
I am a doctor. A hypnotist. A magician.
Whiteside, a doctor.
I can make you relax. I can make you remember where the stone is. You will tell me. We will find it together.
“It’s imaginary. A fiction,” Max said. He spit out the words between hyperventilating breaths. He wanted to scream at the top of his lungs to his neighbors. But he knew that they probably would do nothing if they heard him. Yelling was too common here. It was that kind of L.A. neighborhood. Dropouts and fallouts. Success stories in transit. An enclave of schemers, professional and amateur cons, and Hollywood heads inducing dreams by any method possible. People who yearned to live big and instead lived loudly. With all the parties came arguments, cries of passion, lust, hatred, surprise, disappointment. He knew that Whiteside saw screams as progress. They spurred him. They made him creative.
Max was trying to use logic.
He had yet to discover how fruitless that would be.
You can look, if you choose, at my glasses.
Where else was Max going to look?
It started as simple as this—you stared at him, and that meant at the glasses. The doctor educated Max.
We are accessing your mind. I am going to link my subconscious to yours. If hypnotism is light, then what we are about to do is a laser beam.
Flat reflective surfaces worked the best for some reason, better than cavities or bulges. The energy collected on the flat surface, organizing fields the same way a magnet used its invisible power to draw iron.
Your consciousness will soften like a pat of warm butter . ..
And the doctor sighed.
People do it all the time without knowing they are doing it. Call it daydreaming. Call it sleeping at the wheel. You go away a little. Take a mind stroll. Yet something always happens to break the spell. What if you harness this trance energy and guide it?
What happens then?
Max started to answer and Whiteside covered his mouth with a glove.
Typically, before you can tap the powers, the part of the brain that’s kept our species alive for millennia, crawling on the jungle floor, kicks in. It draws us back inside our animalistic shell. For protective purposes, you see. You can’t be off trancing when something might be trying to eat you. We haven’t shed the habits of the hunted yet. Only a few of us have.
So you come back to earth in a snap.
Maybe you rub your neck, or give your head a shake. Clear the fog.
Wake yourself up.
But you never actually fell asleep. Did you f
Key to the process is: You had to have the right intention. The doctor insisted on that point. Said it was crucial. To demonstrate he brought the pincers down into Max’s belly and pried a rubbery chunk of him loose. Blood drooled down Max’s side and he felt it pooling under him. Max gritted his teeth.
Chewed his lips. Moaned. Flung beyond speech.
If you were able to trance at will, physical pain would be meaningless. You aren’t going to tap the wellspring of this human power by accident. No, no.
A chuckle.
Focus was necessary. And discipline.
Stooping over Max like a bird of prey, Whiteside had the instant ability to terrify. The pincers in his hands had something to do with it. He exuded blunt arrogance, bone-deep narcissism on display with each stroke of knuckles against his smooth chin. Max guessed he’d recently shaved off a beard and was still getting used to the missing hairs. One hand rested against his shirt, the other fondled an absence. His skin was lustrous, pink as a birthday candle. He seemed to communicate approval with his gloved fingertips. He ceased touching himself. Now it was Max’s turn. Max the whimperer, the dying.
There, there, my friend.
There, there.
Off came the glasses.
His eyes were holes. Max half expected something to crawl out at him.
He tried to shut down. He closed his eyes. But it didn’t matter. Didn’t matter because all he saw was the ragged holes. Open grave pits. Caves. Places where shadows crossed each other. Black ribbons tangled in the wind.
He wasn’t certain what was real or not anymore.
He thought he might die there and then.
He wanted to die.
Instead there was a voice talking. Whiteside’s. But the doctor’s voice wasn’t a harsh beast. It was as soft as a motherly squeeze. Except for one thing—mother had an awfully cold hand.
Be receptive.
Make yourself a vessel for whatever floats by.
Then it was simply a matter of patience.
Pick your spots, Max. Let’s get started, shall we?
Max didn’t remember anything after that.
Blackout.
Until the police arrived.
Whiteside and his bag of tricks were gone.
The stone wasn’t in the suitcase. Or under the bed. Max found it though. In the armchair, behind the pillow Vera must have thrown to hide the thing, or to hide from it. A sharp-edged hunk of rock that would fit inside a bowling bag.
The Tartarus Stone.
So it existed.
Max lifted it.
It was heavy.
Max sat on the edge of the bed and straddled the octahedron
with its Byzantine markings, its hieroglyphs, and its odd spirals. He traced his finger along six columns of carvings, an alphabet of daggers. What did Vera make of these?
He didn’t know what they were.
Amazing.
Romero’s onyx, alive and well.
He wanted to be sure he was awake. Pinch yourself, pal. When Max did, the pain registered in the back of his hand. He winced. Okay ... okay.
He had chased it for all these years because he had to know. Was Whiteside right? Was it possible?
To occupy two worlds at once, waking and dreaming. To have them both be real. To tap the power. To master the stone.
To live as you dream.
Now imagine dilation. The mad doctor’s voice again, that snake charm rhythm notched up to full ooze. Max swore Whiteside was inside the motel room with him, talking. The words were too right. The sound of him. Max realized what was happening. He had blocked it out. Yet here it was again. Posttraumatic flashback, he guessed. Only this part must have come from the missing time. The blackout. Max was remembering the final pieces now ...
Dilation.
Whiteside drew the last word out.
Diii-laaa-tion.
Max actually heard him despite the decades past. He was back in L.A., hog-tied and blinded by fear.
He glanced around Vera’s room.
He was alone.
His forehead was damp. Trembling in his legs. Pulse racing in his neck and chest. But no pain erupting from his guts. No cancer. He needed to find out if the stone could save him. From what lay beyond the now. He was giddy with thoughts of deliverance. He needed to know if this goddamned thing was real.
The mind muscle, for years rigidly contracted into a knot, expands.
Okay, mad doc, whatever you say. Just be gentle. It’s my first time.
See it.
Damn if he didn’t see it. His mind for eighty-odd years screwed tight like a middleweight’s fist. It opened up. Just a little.
Then wider.
And wider still, in one quick burst, like a plant on the ocean floor, the kind that gulps fish as they swim by.
Infinity.
To grasp at infinity ...
He’d done it. He had connected the world of reality to the world of dreams.
He might literally bring his dreams to life.
Be free of fear, save himself from death.
Now imagine the same scenario, only you’ve made a grave error.
What if... ?
You’re not the one in control.
Dilation.
Connection.
You occupy two worlds at once.
You’re awake and dreaming.
“Wait a minute. Wait a damn minute,” Max said.
He scrambled away from the stone, onto the bed.
His hands were gripping the sheets and blankets, tearing them loose from the mattress and flinging them at the stone, trying to cover it because ...
Something was coming through.