The man with the secret eyes hoisted an old-fashioned doctor’s bag onto the empty bed. Flap of leather sliding though brass buckles. He began removing instruments, holding them up for a brief examination before dropping them noisily into a metal pan.
Scalpel.
Scissors.
Clamps. Miniature steel hammer. A hacksaw.
“This invalid is my father.” He aimed the saw. “We share a name and a mission. I take it Max explained the significance of the artifact to you?”
The saw clattered into the pan.
Opal blinked. “He said it was a kind of compass.”
Other less recognizable tools: clacking mineral orbs resembling eggs; a cruciform latticework of peeled sticks; a gold wire star; and a wicker doll bound together with what looked like three colors of human hair.
Horus shook his head.
He placed the cruciform, inverted, on his father’s pillow; secured the golden star to his forehead of soiled bandages.
Primitive knives badly corroded with age; tongs with fanglike arms; a long polished bone grooved along each side and barbed like a harpoon; an iron twisted at one end into a pupil-less eye.
Horus unpacked a pair of thick liver-brown rubber gloves.
He put them on.
“The Tartarus Stone, also known as Romero’s Onyx or the Damnation Stone, is not a compass. It is the seat of Hell. Prophecy dictates our present options. We cannot take the stone but it must be given to us freely by an innocent who does not believe in its powers. This we accept to be true. So, I must ask you. Do you believe you hold Hell in your lap?”
Opal considered the question carefully before answering.
“I don’t know,” she said finally.
“Doubt is all I need from you. Let’s proceed. My father is going to die before sunrise. Will you give the stone to him?”
The body on the bed did not smell clean. Opal thought she heard the rustle of cloth. Then a sound like paper catching fire. The sheets remained still. She didn’t know where the sounds were coming from.
Horus repeated the question.
“Will you give the stone to him?”
“I want something in return.”
“You aren’t entitled to any requests.”
Opal removed the stone from the satchel. Like two pyramids glued bottom to bottom, an octahedron, Max had called it.
“Let my son go free, and I’ll give you the stone.”
Horus nodded, smiled.
“Pinroth, bring me the boy.”
Opal could feel the heat of their sweating bodies as they neared; their breathing was like one beast, filling and emptying itself of air. The four men were bearing a hooded, hog-tied, and horizontal Adam. They brought him in headfirst, as if they might, at their whim, ram him into a wall just to see what was inside his skull.
They stood him up. Sat him forcibly down in a chair.
One of his captors cut the cinched cord around his throat. They tore the bag off. The lights were such a harsh change Adam was temporarily blinded.
His eyelids fluttered.
Horus sorted through a metal pan. He turned around. Opal was shocked to see the long-handled tongs in his enormous gloves. She felt a scream building in her lungs, but before it could escape, a hand covered her mouth.
Adam couldn’t see his mother because the men held him.
He pleaded, “No, wait, wait...”
But Horus did not wait.
Expressionless and determined, he ripped aside Adam’s jacket then his shirt, exposing his bare chest. Without hesitation he closed the pincers on Adam’s left nipple. Blood spurted like flames. Adam was the one screaming now; no one quieted him. Opal saw the pincers rock side to side, stripping away pink meat in their claws. She was sick. Acid dribbled down her chin. The world shrunk to a fuzzy gray tube. Through the tube she watched Horus drop the tongs heavily on the bed. She felt her heart beating in time with the blood leaking from her son’s cut flesh.
She cried out as the smothering hand came away.
“Stop it!”
“Give my father the stone,” Horus said.
She was sobbing.
Horus picked up the tongs again.