June 17, 1972
My memories of the night of June 17 will never be complete, and the various wild and hallucinatory accounts of what happened cannot be reconciled. The only certainty is that some went into the eighth floor of the Watergate Hotel, and some fewer walked out.
The Democratic National Committee had fatally overreached. Gregor had contacted that fool McGovern and sold him on a plan for electoral victory, sold him as only a Kremlin-trained operative could. The Politics of Spirituality or some such hippie line, tailor-made for the New Left.
As it was, they were almost too late. When Arkady tore the door off the room on the sixth floor, the air inside felt frigid, felt like dawn over Russian permafrost. Several DNC staffers were found frozen to death, still standing in the postures in which they had completed the ritual, victims of their own naive understanding of power politics. The suite was soaked in blood, caked in feathers, and strewn with candles, paper, the debris of the summoning.
American magic is haphazard, a thing of genius loci and wild talents. The Russians had set their most inventive minds to the problem of travel through frozen, starry places beyond their gates. When they came, the eight military shamans who stepped out onto American hotel carpeting were hardened from service in Afghanistan and stranger places, and ready to die to establish their beachhead.
While six shamans dug in behind desks and chairs, the final two prepared the way and its cold breath pervaded the room. Pat glimpsed it but would say little, a dark shape rising from the Russian steppe, spilling millennia-old snow from wings that could shroud a city. It needed only to empower a proxy in the land of its enemy and it could bring its will to bear. And then, its host in power, it could at last shake off its bonds and take flight over the pole to the New World, its form a gargantuan blot on American radar before it descended to breed in its new satellite nation. A McGovern presidency would end the Cold War and unite the rival powers in one savage, blasphemous coalition.
I wish I could have seen the fight. Tatiana unrestrained, a blur to the eye, at last free of the pretense and control of civilian life.
I’d begged Pat not to go but she wouldn’t hear of it. As I heard it later she was capable of far more than she ever confessed to me. I believe she had spent time in the subterranean White House without me, reading the Democratic disciplines that had belonged to that party long since, battle magics perfected in the War of 1812 and on the fields of the Revolution itself. Pat reportedly shone so brightly it was impossible to look at her; it was as if the world had been torn open to show the light behind it, a fracture in the shape of my wife.
Henry loomed in the fray, the dark beast of the Bavarian forest at last unleashed. His origins will never be understood and whether he was profoundly good or evil, human or not, it was his legalistic sorcery that turned the tide and closed the gate, though the effort nearly killed him. He did his duty that night; his only mistake was to miss that crucial last card I would deal from the very bottom of the deck.
A numbed and semiconscious George McGovern was apparently central to what they’d hoped to accomplish. We also recovered several spheroid objects, each two feet across, whose composition was later found to be an inexplicable match with lunar rock formations. But Gregor was nowhere to be found.
I, of course, was nowhere to be found either. In fact, I was in the lobby, disguised and safe from harm, only waiting for the outcome. Eventually, I went to the restroom, walked to a stall, and sat down to wait in privacy. Just for a minute, face in hands, trying not to wonder how much time it would take. After a few seconds, I heard the restroom door.
I thought maybe Gary had come to tell me the world was ending after all. I opened the stall door just a crack. A little old man in the red-and-gold uniform of a Watergate Hotel valet lingered in the restroom doorway.
It was a shock to see how much Gregor had changed. The sleek young man of 1948 had withered and puckered; his skin had a deep permanent tan and age spots. He still wore his thinning hair combed straight back, but there was now a circular scar on his left temple, the skin roughened, the surface visibly cratered. It appeared he’d once been shot in the head and it hadn’t worked.
“Richard?” he said. I didn’t say anything. There were no other exits. It wasn’t going to be hard to find me, but I couldn’t bring myself to step out of the stall. I was only seconds away from a very unpleasant thing happening. I wanted those seconds. I wished with all my heart I could fight him. Eisenhower would be gathering thunderclouds by now, preparing to strike the man dead.
“Richard, I don’t have much time. I wanted to do this properly and have a good talk but Kissinger’s made it hard. I was going to run for office against you. If you think Kissinger played it rough, well…you should see how we do it back home.” True, the restroom had only one exit, but the space was palatial in scope. A line of stalls ran down each wall, with a marble island of sinks, soaps, and mirrors in the center. I was in a middle stall and watched while Gregor strolled along the stalls opposite me, stopping and nudging each one open, taking deliberate care, one and then the next. I waited breathlessly for him to pass the midpoint.
“But you’ve come on your own, and it’s too much to pass up. I truly can’t wait till he sees me wearing your face. What a time we’ll have then. East and West united. Down comes the Berlin Wall. We’ll go to the moon. All comrades together.” Now Gregor had reached the middle, and then he passed it. I was closer to the door than he was.
Behind him, I eased the stall open and took my first step along the tile. Gregor was making headway. He could turn at any moment. I took another step, as silent as I could be in stiff presidential shoes. I tried to calculate my odds. The moment I began to run, he would hear my footsteps clattering. He still walked like a young man, and I had never been fast. A desperate scramble across the tiles with the devil himself at my heels. For some reason that was the thing I couldn’t stand. What if I slipped? What if he caught me?
Two more gingerly placed steps. In ten seconds he was going to turn around and see me standing there. The thirty-seventh president would die creeping through a public restroom. Where were my fucking powers? The real ones? I’d thought I was going to be able to fly.
Five seconds. Just up to the mirror with the light switch. I should probably have started running by now. Eisenhower would have backed Gregor down and laughed him out of the room. I was nowhere near the door. Could I get back to a stall? No. It was a joke. It was over. Three seconds. The awful thing was going to happen and I didn’t know what to do.
I turned the lights off. I heard a soft “Oh” from across the room. Had Gregor noticed where the light switch was on his way in? If he had, then I’d just told him where I was. I stood frozen and waiting for it but it didn’t come. I watched as Gregor felt his way along the row of sinks to the door.
“All right, comrade. I’ll wait. I’m at the door now. You may come to me when you’re ready.”
I felt my way forward to the sink and turned one of the taps on, and the water hissed out, the white noise masking every other sound in the room. I slipped my shoes off for good measure.
“What are you doing, Mr. Nixon?” Gregor said. I looked for something I could pick up, anything at all. It didn’t seem like anything in the room was going to kill Gregor. I lifted the heavy ceramic lid off one of the cisterns, hefted it; the man who controlled North America’s nuclear codes was going into battle armed with a toilet-tank lid.
I remembered being dragged, long ago, toward that hole in the wall and the frightful thing beyond, and I remembered begging them to stop, and I watched now as the shadows around Gregor darkened further. He was becoming less human as I watched, features contracting and lengthening into that hideous beak.
And there was nowhere to hide now. I was going to die alone with the darkness inside me that had always been there, inescapable. The night in Yorba Linda, the train whistle, dark shapes in the depths of the reservoir. I had written once of the black thing in a tree, and the dark swarm that came out of it, and the good dog Richard who ran from it, ran all the way home.
I saw now that Gregor stood in the darkness too, blind and deaf and very far from his home. Gregor, the monster I made. He didn’t see me as I hefted the cistern lid and swung, hard, but it was only to get his attention. I let it drop and shatter on the tile. I’d lived in that darkness for so long and I knew it now. I was the blackness of a particularly cold winter night in 1620, and although Gregor was a frightening man, there were worse things in the world. There were in particular four women still out there in the dark forest under the snow who had never quite died after all, had they? And they knew what to do with Gregor.