How long had Horus Whiteside toiled? A lifetime and more, poring over his books and manuscripts, volumes so boring, so tedious he teetered on the precipice of madness. He’d slipped into the gray hallways of insanity himself. Years ago. The institutions resembled decayed boarding schools. He’d suffered. Attempted various ends to his life. The rope of sheets, the hand-fashioned blade, an inspired jump from a tower window that broke his legs ... until his father came to the rescue, the father he’d never known, had never seen until the day of his discharge. A nondescript man, except for his dark circular glasses. His voice oozed like honey, the words embedded in it like deadly Africanized bees. He’d been a loyal servant to the father. His slave, actually. But his was a happy enslavement. His father taught him a new world, with a new language. Then his father revealed the work of Max Caul. Horus knew his efforts were not in vain.
There was hope.
Horus unbuckled Max from the bed. He helped him sit up and stumble to a chair. The old man kept his eyelids clamped. Hands out like feelers. Horus pulled along his IV stand, the wheels spinning silently on the Totem Lodge’s deep carpet.
“Have a seat,” he said.
“I’m good and loaded,” Max said, sputtering, weaving.
He swayed toward the floor. Horus pushed him gently backward against the wall.
The old man’s eyes snapped open.
“You’re so young,” Max said, grabbing for his arm.
Horus shrugged loose.
A bib of blood stiffened Max’s shirtfront. He was difficult to understand, slurring from the drugs. Black holes glared in his gums. Teeth were missing, but not far away; they were in a jar on the nightstand.
“How can I be so old and you’re not?”
Horus had no time to explain.
The old man had proven to be a harder nut to crack than he’d anticipated.
The trance only took them so far.
Max hadn’t told him anything he didn’t already suspect.
Horus resorted to the pliers and started removing his teeth. But the ethanol muddied the pain. Max writhed. Max moaned. But he told him nothing more than the girl was inside the motel with the family who owned the place. They had the Tartarus Stone. They knew what it was because he’d told them and they recognized the threat against them. They had better or they’d wind up ...
The old man stopped himself.
Good. So be it. The Pitch were out in the streets, putting on a show for the family. The threat was real. Horus needed the family to bear witness. Put the fear into them. They had to give him the stone. Do it freely.
Horus stopped when it looked like the old man might slip into shock. Throwing the pliers into a metal pan, mopping the sweat from his cheeks, and Max barely breathing under him, turning the color of candle wax—Horus shot adrenaline into him.
Placed ice, stuffed in a glove, on his forehead.
He tranced him again. Took away the pain.
Now here they were.
The old man asking him questions.
And wasn’t that the way with old men? So much nagging ... helpless one moment and prodding the next. Horus gave Max a cup of water.
“Drink this,” he said.
Max drank.
Horus, standing, tore away his doctor’s gown. Underneath he wore a white shirt, blotted with sweat, and a thin black leather tie. Black pants, black boots. He unbuttoned his cuffs. The buttons were mother-of-pearl. He rolled back his sleeves to reveal forearms as hairless as if they’d been shaved.
“Pinroth!”
The motel room door opened.
“Sir.”
“Prepare the patient.”
“A transfusion?”
Horus nodded.
Max sat stupefied. “You were my age ... back in L.A. Forty years.” He shook his head, as a dog would, as if to clear it. Blinking, he rubbed his face. “How can you look the same? Not a day older?”
“I’ve never met you before. Now shut up.”
Max slumped back into the chair. His legs were like a corpse’s legs sewn to his body. He pounded his thighs. Tried to bring the feeling back. He had to get out of there.
Horus walked over to the second hospital bed.
The occupied bed.
Around it was an Oriental screen of red lacquered wood. It was heavily, intricately carved. Dragons lived there. And people’s faces. Disfigured faces—each missing some vital sense organ— nose, ears, eyes, tongue. The dragons feasted on them.
Horus collapsed the screen. He moved over the patient. The ventilator changed its sound. Horus stepped to the side and held the hose in his hand. Air blew from it.
In the bed, a swaddling of bandages shifted, crackling like paper in a fire.
The sticklike man, if it was a man, lying on the bed, lifted his head and turned to Max. It couldn’t look at him because it had no eyes.
The bandages—the Stick Man was unraveling them.
More bandages than flesh.
“Don’t do that,” Horus said. But he made no attempt to halt the man’s actions. Instead, he stripped the bloody sheets from the bed where Max had been tortured, and climbed in. Pinroth was there with a fresh wet needle, a roost of bags hanging on poles like transparent bats. He put the needle into Horus’s arm. Then he went to the Stick Man’s bed. He took hold of the Stick Man’s limb. Another needle splintered light, before it vanished into the bandages. The Stick Man had no reaction. His focus was Max. The breath coming out of his mouth slit was like no thing Max had ever smelled. As it pointed its snout at Max, spidery streams of grit sifted from the bandage creases.
The thing—he decided it must be a thing, not a man—croaked dusty words.
It sounded like “Ax, Ax.”
“Oood to theeeee youuu, Ax.”
Good to see you, Max.
Max rose from the chair and fell crashing to the floor.