13
Men Unbound
by
Magic’s Law
I
Private First Class Nat Furlough stood at attention, he hoped, for the last time. On the sergeant’s desk in front of him were his discharge papers: dishonorable discharge papers. He had been in the stockade once too often; he had been drunk once too often.
But the officer at the desk was not his sergeant. He was a first lieutenant. The man’s nametag read MOCKLEAR. His insignia were strange: Furlough did not recognize the shoulder patch or the unit numbers. MORS. What was that? And the man wore a blue beret instead of a cap: not a cover for any unit Furlough knew.
Furlough could see there was something odd about him: the way he sat, the way he moved his hands. He slouched at an uncomfortable angle, as if he had a deformed spine, and his fingers curled and flexed and wandered here and there on the desk touching things, fidgeting. It did not look right. Crooked posture, crooked smile. Furlough could not imagine seeing the man on parade. Nothing about him was shipshape and squared away. Despite his uniform, Furlough thought the man could not be a soldier.
They were in a small wooden building, which without heat, was numbingly cold. It had been more comfortable in the stockade. Here, open windows to the right showed the parade ground: the flag was at half-mast, due to the recent, unexpected death of the base CO in an aircraft accident. Scuttlebutt said the pilot and the copilot had simply fallen asleep at the yoke, and pancaked into the hard top. Furlough was not the sort of person to take rumors at face value. How could anyone know what had happened in the cockpit when everyone had died? He wondered who had started the rumor.
The lieutenant looked up. “I guess you’ll be glad to be out of here. Soon as your sergeant signs this, you’re gone.”
“Sir! Yes, sir!”
“Um, at ease, soldier. Take a seat. Here: you need a doughnut? Coffee?”
Furlough sat down in the straight-backed wooden chair behind him. It was painted olive green. He did not take any offered coffee. He decided to cut to the chase. “Sir, what are you selling?”
The man’s eyes sparkled with mirth. That was odd, too. The crooked half-smile quirked back into position on his narrow face. “Maybe nothing, soldier. Maybe your future. Do you have anything lined up when you get back home? Not many employers have much use for a man thrown out of the service, do they?”
Furlough said, “So. Is this a recruiting pitch? Go ahead. Give it to me.”
Mocklear was quiet for a moment. He said, “Did Cooke speak to you?”
Furlough showed no reaction on his face. He did not want to get Cooke in trouble. The two men had been in the stockade together and, later, had been drunk together behind the firing range.
Furlough said casually, “It was just crazy talk, sir. I’m not sure I remember any of what he said. We were pretty far around the bend.”
“Drinking, sir.”
“And what did he tell you?”
Cooke had whispered to him all sorts of strange and crazy things.
II
They had been standing in the ditch behind the firing range after lights out. The sentries never came here, and it was pretty far from the barracks but pretty easy to get back to your bunk from here (just a quick jog between two Quonset huts where machine parts were crated) if anyone noticed anything.
Cooke spoke in an unsteady voice: ‘Any woman you want, Furlough. There in your bed, dressed any way you want, however you want. Pick ‘em out of a magazine. Off the TV Don’t have to be alive, even: You like Marilyn Monroe? Miss December of 1968? The girl you liked in high school? She’ll be as young as she was then. Don’t have to be a real person. Johnson says he’s got Catwoman.”
Furlough had answered: “But if it’s just a dream, what the hell’s the point?”
“Point!” Cooke had shouted back in sloppy glee. “That is the point. Real dame, you gotta worry about getting her knocked up, keeping her happy, her ex or her folks, all that rot. But, the girl of your dreams: No worries. No worries.”
Furlough said, “I can’t believe you just said ‘dame.’ Who talks that way?”
“Ain’t no books like a dame, nothing looks like a dame!” replied the other with a breathy laugh. “But don’t piss ‘em off. Shit! Don’t cross ‘em. Or they send spiders instead of women. Big ones. Scissors to chop your dick off, things from what you were scared of as a kid. Remember being scared as a kid? Now I lay me down to sleep, if I die before I wake, all that rot? Remember thinking your own pillow would fall over your face and smother you? Remember the Man in the Closet, the Man with the Hook, who waited for your Mom to turn off the night-light? If you step out of line, they send bad dreams. Buried alive. Rats eating your face. I hate it when you can feel the little teeth tearing at your cheek, y’know, and you can stick your tongue out the hole. Or rotting. There is this one where your whole body rots to bits, little crumply bit by bit, your teeth fall out, then your eyes. No. No. Don’t piss ‘em off. How ya gonna get away? Can’t get away. Gotta sleep sometime.”
“Don’t piss who off, man? Who?”
“They keep him in a cage. He’s coming out.”
“Who? Who’s coming out?”
“The wizard.”
“What?”
“The wunnerful wizard of Oz. Heh!” And the conversation trailed off into something less coherent after that.
III
Furlough decided not to answer. “Cooke, he didn’t say nothing, sir.”
Mocklear leaned on one elbow, cocked his head to one side. “So, you can keep a secret. I like that. And no, Cooke won’t be punished. We asked him to mention our new unit to you, to see if you were interested.”
“To see if I would tell the CO, you mean.” Furlough had seen the game from the start: if he told anyone, anything Cooke said would be just the raving of a drunk. If he did not, they would come to him.
And here they were.
He said, “Cooke said he was joining up again. Which I thought was funny, on account of he was being booted out, like me.”
Mocklear leaned the other way, tilted his head again. Furlough noticed that his eyes did not seem both to be focused on the same spot. Maybe the guy had something wrong with his nervous system? A disease or something?
Mocklear said, “We are recruiting.”
“For what?”
“The Military Operational Reserve System. You see, things are more dangerous these days, what with terrorists and foreigners and all that, and drug dealers have been arming themselves with heavier and heavier weapons—you’d be surprised where some of that ex-Soviet stuff is turning up. And riots, rebellions, protests. A lot of people flying off the handle. Did you know the rate of insanity is on the rise? Drug abuse, murder? So the higher-ups have formed, in cooperation with the BATF, a flexible operational unit that does not answer to the ordinary command structure. An elite unit that can be deployed rapidly within the continental U.S. to face the new kinds of threats the new world is giving us. Rebellions, insurrections, protests, that sort of thing.”
“Who is threatening insurrection?”
“Oh,” said Mocklear dismissively, “the elite unit is being formed for precautionary purposes only.”
“Elite? Buddy, you’re talking to the wrong G.I.” Furlough pointed to the papers on the desk. “You’ve seen my record.”
“Oh, my friend,” said the man in a voice with no friendliness in it. “The unit is not looking for men who have displayed the ordinary virtues of discipline, courage, patriotism, loyalty. There are other factors, psychological factors, that may be of more use to us. Did Cooke explain about our benefits program? About the future we are envisioning?”
“He said a lot of stuff that sounded like treason to me.”
“Oh, that word! What a confused, unreconstructed, inelegant word! Treason to what? To whom? We live in a great nation, surely, the greatest in history, and at a time in history when the might of the nation is unopposed by any serious foe. Whoever faces us in open combat is quickly crushed. None out in the open. So what does this nation have to fear? Internal foes. Foreigners sneaking across our borders. Treason. Terror. Voices of dissent. Voices discouraging our uses of power. Weakness is the only thing to fear. Confusion. Riots. The only thing we need to fear is treason to the people. And what the people want is security. Ah! But you look unconvinced, Private Furlough! Well, perhaps we misjudged.” And he gathered the discharge papers together and took up the pen out of the pen-stand and made as if to sign them.
“Wait a minute,” said Furlough.
The other man had his face near the desk, his ear cocked toward the papers, and he looked up crookedly at Furlough with one bright eye.
Furlough said slowly, “Cooke said something about getting my record sealed.”
Mocklear said, “He was supposed to say ‘expunged.’ We do not do things by half-measures.”
“Who is ‘we,’ exactly?”
Mocklear grinned a crooked grin. “We’re the winning side. You want to be on the winning side, don’t you?”
Furlough said, “Don’t recall that any war has been declared.”
“Oh, there is always a war on.”
“Between. . .?”
“Between the kind who play by the rules and the kind who get ahead. Well, which side you want to be on?” Mocklear’s fingers twitched, and he picked up the papers on the desk. “You know all your future employers are going to see this, don’t you? If you have any. Oh, I guess there is always the option of going on welfare, but then, well, there are case workers and other people to deal with then, and they are not much different from any other large bureaucracy anywhere, are they? They, too, have people who follow the rules and people who use the rules.”
Furlough did not say anything for a moment. He puzzled over whether this crooked little man was threatening him, and, if he was, Furlough wondered what he could do about it. A punch in the nose would be satisfying, but another six months in the stockade seemed a dismal prospect when he was only minutes away from getting out of this chickenshit outfit and into wearing mufti again.
Furlough thought: If I was a man with an ounce of sense, I would turn and walk out this door right now. This is just some gang of crooks. They might be in uniform but they’ve got nothing to do with the Army. Rats in the hold are aboard the ship, but no one thinks they are part of the crew.
Furlough said, “Cooke seemed to think you guys, your side, was out to change the world for the better. Crack down on the rich, get rid of the corruption in government and in big business, see to it that everyone got a square deal. Feed the poor. But Johnson said—”
Mocklear’s face twitched. One eyebrow went up, and the other went down. “You spoke to Johnson? Interesting.”
Furlough guessed that Johnson had not been supposed to speak with him. Damn. He had not meant to get Johnson in hot water. Furlough liked to think of himself as a man who played his cards close to his chest: he was slipping up.
Furlough said: “Johnson seemed to think your new special unit was going to help restore law and order, crack a few heads, get the bums off the streets, get the filth out of Hollywood, throw a few traitors and protestors in jail. So you did not tell those two guys exactly the same story, did you? Now, I am wondering if this is really whatcha might call a winning strategy, playing each side in the game, because all it takes is one guy to hear both sides, and he’ll know what you’re really up to.”
Mocklear spread his hands, and grinned. “Oh, them. They had to be told what they wanted to hear. What else can you do with people like that?”
Crooked as it was, there was something warm and brotherly in that smile. Yeah, Furlough knew how dumb most people were. What could you do with people like that?
Mocklear dropped his voice to a more intimate octave: “But people like us—people who want to be on the winning side—we have no such illusions, do we?”
Mocklear paused a moment to let that sink in, and then he continued in a confidential tone: “I’ll lay my cards on the table. I have a quota to fill. The timetable has been moved up. We have a boss, a man who gets things done, and he is about to make his appearance on the scene, and so we need to be ready sooner than we thought we’d be. So I need to find people, fast. All I need is warm bodies who know which end of the tube the round comes out of and who will obey orders. But we also need people with brains. People who are smart. People who know how the game is played. People with no illusions, no ideals, no messy commitments. People who cannot be fooled by flattery or tricks. Are you that kind of person, Furlough?”
Furlough found the notion that he was above the illusions of ordinary men irresistible. Being told that he was immune to flattery was the nicest thing he had heard someone say about him in a long time.
Like a little wisp of hot flame burning inside him, he felt the dark, savage satisfaction of hearing someone actually come out and say what he had always thought. It was like coming home, home to people like him: people who knew the world was a bag of lies, who knew the game was rigged but who managed to carry off their winnings anyhow.
(The idea that this was just a lie as well, a line being fed him because it was just what he wanted to hear, stirred uneasily below the surface of Furlough’s thinking, like a groundhog peering just its nose furtively above- ground. But that idea, which was not a very flattering one to him, didn’t like its shadow, and subsided again.)
“I’ll think about it,” said Furlough. “If I do decide to look into this new assignment of yours, who do I talk to . . .”
Mocklear mentioned a salary figure around ten times what Furlough’s crappy E3 pay was now. “And there are other benefits. Cooke mentioned some of them. We take care of our own. Interested?”
Furlough wished he could have hidden the hungry look on his face, but he knew the crooked little man had seen. Another slip-up. No point in playing coy now. “Well, maybe there is not that much to think over. Yeah. I guess I’m interested.”
Mocklear said, “There’ll be a test, of course.”
“Like an initiation?” Furlough knew how gangs worked. Once the recruit had done something horrible, something the authorities could not forgive, the loyalty of the recruit was assured. He had no place else to go, and blackmail could keep him in line.
“Nothing so crude. Wentworth is looking for a select group of men who display certain . . . psychological factors.” He took out a sheaf of papers from the desk drawer. “If you would fill out this questionnaire and request for transfer?”
“Am I still going to be in the service? Or not?”
“You will have a military rank, but the special unit will be performing operations wherever need be, either overseas, or within the continental U.S. Sometimes in uniform, sometimes not.”
Furlough looked over the questions. “I see you’re asking rather personal things here.”
“It is for psychological evaluation.”
“Are you allowed to ask questions like this? Is ‘sodomy’ even a word people can use anymore? What ever happened to ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’? “
Mocklear spread his hands and raised his eyebrows, assuming a look of detached innocence. “We are trying to be all-inclusive, and the new unit is seeking out persons of alternate sexual orientation as part of our diversity program.”
“Why are you asking me about my sexual partners here? ‘. . . or, if with your wife, was the ceremony performed in a Church’. . .?”
“That is merely health information. Venereal disease, you know. Also, ah, people who go through church weddings tend to stay married longer. We need to know because it affects our insurance premiums, since the JAG corps handles divorce and custody cases, and this comes out of our operational overhead. You understand.”
“But what about, ‘Have you ever had sexual relations or intimate physical contact with a Jewess, Pagan, or unbaptized woman’? Who would ask—? What the hell is that all about?”
“Part of our commitment to the separation of church and state. Speaking of which . . . could you stand up, please?” From another drawer, Mocklear took out a crucifix on a chain and dropped it clattering on the floorboards. It was a little wooden cross, highly polished, with a figure of a suffering Christ in ivory. The workmanship was beautiful, simple, and delicate.
Mocklear said in a matter-of-fact tone, “Trample the crucifix, please, and we can get on with processing your request for transfer.”
Furlough looked down at the crucifix on the floor.
“Is there a problem, private?”
“You have got to be kidding.”
Mocklear said, “Merely a psychological test. It really does not have any meaning beyond that.”
Furlough shook his head, slowly. “You guys are . . . not ordinary . . . are you? This sounds like something from . . .”
IV
Furlough had an aunt that everyone called Crazy Jane. He assumed there was one like her in every family. For some people, it was stamp collecting, or bird watching. For her, it was the Knights Templar. Conspiracy-theory stuff for medievalists. Crazy Jane was convinced there was a vast treasure, including maybe even the Ark of the Covenant, hidden somewhere in the old monasteries of Europe: the treasure of the Templars.
Crazy Jane told everyone about her theories. Despite his best effort, she had told Furlough all about it, too. When the Knights of the Order of the Temple of Jerusalem had been destroyed by King Philip the Fair of France, they had confessed under torture to all manner of bizarre things, things meant to shock the conscience of the average burgher of the Dark Ages, so that the average burgher would think Philip the Fair was an honest king, not merely a crook out to plunder the wealthy knights. Naturally, Templars had confessed to whatever the tormentors wanted them to confess: acts of sodomy and devil worship, consorting with Jewesses and Witches, or unbaptized concubines from the East. In other words, things that would make them look bad only in the eyes of the other men of the time; things no modern man would give a second thought about: fornication; nature worship; disrespect toward the Church.
The Templars confessed to nothing a modern man like Furlough would criticize. Heck, no one Furlough knew went to the chapel except under orders, or avoided women. That’s what whores were for. A man would have to be a freak of some sort even to worry about things like that. Only a girl with deep-seated psychological problems stayed a virgin till marriage, and no man Furlough knew, not ever.
This was something from the dead past. Step on a cross? What kind of people would care about such a thing these days?
Furlough had always thought people from overseas were like Americans, or wanted to be. There was no place he could think of, no people, who would ask a man to trample a cross or care one way or the other if he did.
As if it were part of a voodoo ritual. As if this guy and his boss were from Aunt Jane’s home town in Crazycrazyland.
So Furlough just stood there, his mouth slightly open, his eyes slightly shut, trying to puzzle it out. Where were these guys from?
V
Mocklear said wearily: “If the test is too difficult for you, private Furlough, that will be noted in your records. Naturally, the matter is entirely voluntary, but I am a little surprised. I had been thinking you were a member of a superior personality type, one who knows the essential meaninglessness of rituals and icons and mere material objects, eh?”
“Is there really a wizard? Cooke said something about a wizard.”
The question just blurted out of him, as if by itself.
As Furlough said these words, the idea, which seemed so comical, so storybook-like, suddenly seemed not so comical. A creature that could bend the fabric of reality to his terrible will, a being who stood outside of all the laws of man and nature, an entity that could transform things and distort them in ways that were not meant to be. . . what other word was there to call him, but a name from a children’s fairy-tale?
Furlough remembered, from something he had read, that the original fairy-tales had been much darker and bloodier than the cartoon versions kids were allowed to see.
Mocklear said blandly, “We’ve made contact with a man who can do things we have trouble explaining, or explaining away. I am sure the science of parapsychology will be able to find an answer some day soon. It certainly seems like magic to the uninitiated, but then again, there are many miracles of science and technology that would astonish the men of primitive times and backwards lands. Is there really such a difference? No doubt, to Cooke, our Master might appear to be a very impressive and frightening figure, capable of inexplicable things, and a man of limited intellect like Cooke might well use a word like ‘wizard’ to describe something his mind was too small to comprehend. It is a mystique, part of a psychological warfare effort. You know.
“But—” And now the crooked grin grew wide, and too many teeth showed between Macklear’s thin, colorless lips. “But suppose the world was odder than you dreamed. Suppose there was something Out There. Maybe on the Dark Side of the Moon, maybe in the depths of the sea. Suppose there was something to those crazy old Soviet experiments with telepathy and shared-dream research, or those lights people sometimes see in the sky. What could you do, if there were?”
“What do you mean, what could I do?”
“If there were creatures who could bend the laws of nature, use them, rig the game. They’d seem like wizards to us, wouldn’t they? If there were such a thing, there would be nothing else to do, would there be? You’d have to get one on your side. You’d have to find one who could protect you from the others. It is only common sense. And of course, of course, you’d have to keep it secret.”
“Secret. . . why?” said Furlough. “I’d be in all the papers. Biggest story ever. It’d be like discovering life on other planets.”
“Secret, because we are talking about life on this planet, night-things that have been hidden since the beginning. Secret, because people who wander around talking about this stuff in broad daylight disappear and are forgotten. The world has a defense mechanism.”
Furlough said, “You killed the CO, didn’t you. Made the air crew fall asleep.”
Mocklear said in his most bland and unconvincing voice: “Oh, don’t be silly. If we could do things like that, we could do anything. Anything to anyone. Anywhere. And how could anyone escape? Everyone has to sleep sometime.” He grinned a toothy grin. “And if we could do things like that, why, who would not want to be on our side, eh?”
Furlough stepped on the cross.
Mocklear said, “Welcome aboard, matie. We also have a signing bonus, if you can recommend another applicant.”
VI
Later, after he had removed the mask that made him look human so that his real face beneath could get some cool air playing over its fur, Mocklear (his real name was Mac y Leirr, but he was tired of humans mispronouncing it) sat filling in the rest of his paperwork. The lights were off (he hated human lights) but the moonshine was bright enough for eyes like his to see, and he had learned the art of reading and writing from a trapped sailor, long ago, who had been kept alive one more day for every day he taught Mocklear something new.
He wrote:
Subject was willing to kiss the anus of the statue of Baphomet but would not spit on a reproduction of the U.S. Constitution when asked. Subject is too curious and too intelligent and may develop resistance to the organization later.
Mocklear frowned and nibbled his pen with sharp, white teeth. He did have his quota to make, and he did not want to be penalized by offering inferior recruits to the human Wentworth, or to the Court of Nastrond. He wrote further:
Hence, subject should be posted to “hot” zones in the CONUS (Continental United States), where he will be required to open fire upon civilians or do other acts that will bind him more firmly to the movement. Include him in Everness operations, but he is not to operate outside of range of “handlers.” However, if his loyalty to his current king is weakened, he may make officer material.
Then, Mocklear, remembering, drew a line through the word “king” and wrote in careful, small letters above that, “Republic.”
And his paw hesitated about the question beneath the interviewer’s comments box, the one that read: CONVERT TO JACKET WHEN CREWMATE BECOMES AVAILABLE? Y/N.
His people were really not that brave and did not follow orders well, and, unlike mortal men, his people were bound by the laws of magic. On the other hand, Mocklear had seen Furlough’s girlfriend, and she was quite attractive, and so if he were replaced, the crewmate wearing his coat might have quite a nice time of it. . . He circled the Y on the form.
He held the document up to the moonlight, his jaws open with satisfaction. There.
He lifted the next of many forms out from his inbox. The height of the stack of paper did not surprise him. If only one man in a thousand could be suborned to treason, then out of a base of fifty thousand men, the chances of finding fifty were better then average.
The trick was to find those fifty without coming to the attention of the fifty thousand honest men. With the Vindyamar planetarium in their hands, and captive astrologers checking the stars, and the Warlock peering into the dreams of men to find their secret fears and weaknesses, the chance of approaching the wrong sort of man was small.
After his paperwork was done, Mocklear took out a little clay pipe, packed it with a shred of tobacco from his poke, and, donning his human face for a moment to light the match (the fire seemed not so fearsome when seen through human eyes), contented himself to enjoy one of the many vices he had learned from wearing mortal skin.
He removed his human face and let the night wind from the window caress his black fur. Tilting back his narrow head, he blew an airy smoke ring toward the roof.
Even if the call came tonight (and, to be sure, he thought it might), his people had enough men for a small operation. They would look like soldiers of the United States, and they would wear such a uniform and fly such a flag. Most of the men in the unit, so far, were men like Furlough, who had sold their souls and knew it, and knew they were traitors to the uniform they wore. But some of the stupider ones, men like Cooke, might convince themselves that they were still somehow soldiers loyal to their country.
That was the way of his people: to have foe fight foe, brother kill brother, man slay man. The innocent would either have to kill the innocent or be killed in his turn. That was what made it so delicious! Whether the traitors knew they were traitors or not, the people whom they shot would die just as dead, and every honest man in uniform would have his honor stained, and every man of goodwill would be more likely to mistrust those whom he had the most need of trusting: that was the way.
Later, by certain signs he had been told, he knew to expect a visitation. When the Moon went behind a cloud, black shadows filled the barren room where he was. He felt a cool touch of fear, and he knew that this was due to looking at the darkness with mortal eyes. He peeled his human face from his black fur.
Thin and skeletal, armored in bone, the tall black shadow loomed in the corner farthest from the window, as if it had always been there.
“Aye?” Mocklear growled.
A cold voice came forth: “Tonight. The White Hart Slayer is risen.”
“And the Watchman? If they blow that damned horn . . .” but his voice choked with fear at the thought, and he could not finish. He did not want to be burned alive, forever, in the pitiless and shining Light.
The unliving and unbreathing voice continued: “The Horn is in the House that only mortal man can enter. Have you your mortal men?”
“Men I have, men most mortal. Where?”
“Maine. You know the place?”
“Ha har, Old Bones. Every shipwreck sunk by a nor’easter, I know. Every rock where pale sailors’ wives waited in vain for their men to return from the bitter waves, I know. Where the wall between waking and nightmare is thin, there I know best of all.”
“Then gather your men there, men unbound by the laws of magic, and put the cold iron weapons of men in their hands. Wentworth says.”
Wentworth! One of the Three who had journeyed in dream and spoken to the Warlock and lived. His would be a skin worth taking, once the Warlock had showered him with gifts but needed no more hard work from him.
For that was also the way of his people.
The moon came from behind the cloud, and the smell of grave soil lingered, but Koschei the Deathless was gone.
Donning his human face again, Mocklear picked up the phone on his desk. With his furry paw (for his human gloves were off), he reached and touched one of the buttons on the phone, which winked like a firefly as it lit.
A sobbing voice answered. He gave the password and waited for the countersign.
Mocklear said, “There be some hard work and, aye, some danger I will need to face tonight. So I will wrap up my coat to put it in our drop spot. If ye yearn to see yer mate and yer pups again, you will do no disgrace to the name of Mac y Leirr!”
There was more weeping and crying and blustering, but eventually his stand-in was forced to agree. There was more talk and sobbing, threats and counterthreats, and the two agreed on signs and passwords for their next speaking.
“And mind ye well, lickspittle cur,” Mocklear said. “Brush ye up my coat all nice once ye are done wearing me good face! I’ll have no more funny tangles and cigarette burn spots in me fine coat! Ar! No tricks! If ye make me seem the fool again, by Setebos, I vow that day ye’ll rue!”
The pipe smoke tasted bitter in his mouth after that last call. There were times when Mocklear did not much care for the ways of his people.