8.

Ah, yes, my commando costume: black seaman’s cap found in the attic, black shoes, denim shirt and jeans, charcoal-blacked face and hands. I’d have happily traded the whole outfit for my snub nose, but that wasn’t possible. It was time to check out what I was now certain was Tommy’s “Mirkwood.”

I didn’t want Janet vulnerable to a valid conspiracy charge if I were caught, so I parked her car in some tall weeds off the main highway and hiked down the dirt road leading to the building housing the Volsung Corporation. The moon was bright, but it was occasionally hidden by passing clouds.

The plastic, tape-striped card fit neatly into the notch in the steel gate. There was a soft click, and the gate popped open about two inches. I pushed on the edge of the gate; the massive steel barrier swung open easily and without a sound. The road between the two gates was hard-packed, apparently free of sensing devices. I couldn’t tell if there were silent alarms wired into the gate; since there wasn’t anything I could do about it if there were, I dismissed the problem from my mind.

After repeating the procedure with the inner gate, I was inside the compound. I ran low and fast down the remaining quarter mile of road to the building itself, pressed back hard against what seemed to be a garage door. I stayed that way for long minutes, breathing hard and listening. I could hear no alarms, no signs of activity inside; there was only the chirping of crickets, the bellowing of a horny bullfrog, the faint rustle of insects and reptiles in the grass.

Nothing happened when I put the magnetic pass card into the notch on the garage door. I wiggled the card, and still nothing happened; there was no soft click, no small jump of the door, and for a moment I feared I’d reached the end of the blue plastic and black tape road. Then I thought to push on the door. It moved in slightly, and then there was the soft whir of an electric motor. The garage door lifted. I stepped inside, leaving the door open.

I was inside Mirkwood.

There was an initial flickering when I pressed a light switch on the wall, and then soft fluorescent light flooded the spacious garage. Parked inside were a brown Toyota pickup, a red Chevrolet van, a black, late-model Cadillac.

There was a narrow stairway to my right. I went up it, pressed another glowing plate on the wall, stood and stared. The open space before me was massive, perhaps three-quarters the size of a football field, more if you counted the dozens of rooms radiating off the outer wall. The floor was all off-white tile, soothing to the eyes under the same type of fluorescent lighting installed in the garage.

It looked like some scientist’s idea of heaven. There were six separate computer banks, all still now, their black tape spools staring at me like reproving eyes out of faces of glass and stainless steel. Long, rectangular, marble-topped work tables, spaced a few yards apart, marched like silent soldiers down the center of the space; the surfaces of the tables were covered with Bunsen burners, test tube racks, pipettes, microsurgery equipment, state-of-the-art microscopes, including no less than four huge, portable electron scanners.

A number of theater-size speakers, high-fidelity Bose models, hung in pairs from the ceiling, but I could not see any television monitors or electronic eyes.

There were cages, empty now but irrevocably there just the same. Since I’d never seen a corn stalk that required a cage, it meant they were experimenting on animals—some of them large. A scientific no-no.

When five minutes passed and no welcoming committee arrived to greet me, I took an exploratory stroll around the perimeter of the space. At the far end a moving walkway—now still—disappeared into darkness down a long, narrow corridor. I assumed it led to the scientists’ sleeping and recreation quarters, and I didn’t bother going down it.

Three-quarters of the way around the circuit, on the inside wall, I found something I certainly would have gone through if I’d been able. It was a red door with a notch configuration different from that on the outer gates and the garage door. I tried the card, but it fit loosely in the slot; the door would not move, no matter how hard I pushed, pounded, and kicked. I leaned my head against the cool metal, fought against a sudden, unexpected welling of tears.

As hangar-large as this workspace was, it formed only a small part of the huge complex I’d viewed from outside. There was more, much more, on the other side of the red door.

Tommy, I was certain, had been through the red door. He and Rodney Lugmor, escorted by Obie Loge, had been into the inner sanctum; although it seemed beyond belief, the son of Volsung’s director, in order to score some points in a bizarre fantasy game, had somehow been able to bypass a few million dollars’ worth of security and show his two friends the “monsters in Mirkwood.” It had to have happened.

My fourteen-year-old nephew had been bright and sophisticated enough to recognize the grave danger in what he saw, decent enough to be profoundly disturbed by it. Fourteen years old, torn between a natural desire not to betray a “friend” who had trusted him and a need to shout that there was evil growing in the county—evil that could conceivably be let loose, or escape, into the land. The pressures on him had been enormous.

Tommy and Rodney Lugmor had not known what to do. They had spent a week together debating what course of action to take, wrestling with an awesome conflict that would have brought most adults to their knees. I was immensely proud of my nephew, and of Rodney Lugmor.

But it had been too late to do anything. Whether alerted by a nervous Obie Loge who had begun to have doubts, or whether the breach had been independently discovered, the darker—obviously more efficient—arm of Volsung’s security operation had gone into action. The price of the tour through Mirkwood had been death.

Somebody had cold-bloodedly blown up two gentle teenagers with a shotgun; there could be nothing more twisted or monstrous beyond the red door.

For a few seconds I considered the pleasant, simple expedient of trashing the place, but realized that such as exercise would accomplish nothing except to get me very sweaty and very dead. The equipment was only money, and the Volsung Corporation obviously had all of that they needed, and more. I kept moving.

The first room I entered looked like an office-lab that was being renovated or repaired. Part of the wall had been torn out, and the steel, cast-iron, and zinc components of a slop sink were sitting in an open case by the hole, waiting to be assembled.

The second room was a spacious office, well-furnished and elegant. There was a large desk and file cabinet against one wall, a small computer terminal on a hardwood stand. There were more file cabinets against another wall, as well as an enormous, thousand-gallon aquarium, empty now of fish, attached to complex compression and filtration equipment. A six-foot-high working model of the DNA double helix stood against another wall, looming over me like some knobby, multicolored skeleton creature unearthed on some very distant planet; in fact, the construct represented the fundamental basis of life on our own.

Although the files seemed to be arranged in the normal alphabetical indexing system, there was but a single label at the top of each file cabinet.

THE VALHALLA PROJECT

It had a logo—four thick, interconnecting rings forming a larger ring. It didn’t surprise me.

Starting with the file cabinet next to the desk, I slid open the top drawer, stuck my hand in—and froze. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled, stood up. I hadn’t heard anything, but suddenly I felt another presence in the room with me. I turned and found myself face to face with a gorilla.

He was a big mountain gorilla, three hundred to three hundred and fifty pounds, a male silverback. He was sitting on his ample haunches, filling the doorway, staring at me with beady bloodshot eyes under a jutting black brow that ran across his low, sloping forehead like a cliff edge. He wore what looked like an upside-down electronic typewriter with display screen strapped to his chest. The expression on his face was almost human; at the moment he seemed bemused, perhaps by my size, more likely because he wasn’t quite sure what to do with me.

Normally, mountain gorillas are the gentlest beasts imaginable, dangerous only if provoked or cornered. However, I had a strong suspicion that this fellow was an exception; he was a “watch-gorilla,” and he had me cornered.

“Uh, down boy?” I flashed a great smile and made little kissing noises.

The gorilla looked down at the machine on his chest, then slowly and deliberately punched a few color-coded buttons. When he’d finished he glanced up at me and—I was absolutely certain—arched what would pass for gorilla eyebrows while I read the message on the display screen.

?

THE WHO FUCK YOU SMALL SONBITCH

Cute as a button, I thought, the creation of an animal behaviorist with immense patience, a lot of time, a few tons of bananas, and a bent sense of humor. He’d been trained to respond to a password—or the lack of it.

“Valhalla,” I said quickly, taking pains to clearly enunciate each syllable. “Wotan? Götterdämmerung? Rheingold?”

He just wasn’t into opera. I was still rummaging around in my very limited Wagnerian vocabulary when he came for me. As big as he was, he was quick. I managed to sidestep his rush a couple of times, but he cut me off at the pass each time, blocking my route to the door while he lurched after me like some great hairy express train.

After five minutes of this, he decided to take a rest break. He sat in the doorway, pointing and glowering at me. I stood against the opposite wall, panting and glowering back at him.

“Valkyrie? Fafner?”

A message.

LITTLE SONBITCH QUICK QUICK

“Volsung? Siegfried? Bayreuth?”

FUCK ALL OUT TIRE

A conversationalist, smarter than the average gorilla. “Me, too. Let’s you and I go find a nice quiet bar, have a few drinks, and talk this over.”

?

STOP RUN

“Polly want a banana?”

BIG NOW PISSOFF

he flashed, signaling that halftime was over.

Finally he got hold of an ankle and reeled me in with what I could have sworn was a rumbling grunt of satisfaction. I flailed at him, but I knew I had as much chance of hurting him as of unhinging a heavy punching bag. I expected him to start picking me apart like a fried chicken, but he wasn’t going to do anything that gross or messy. Instead he casually lifted me off the floor by the seat of my pants, grabbed the back of my neck, and plunged my head under the water in the aquarium. And he held me there.

Real panic, I discovered, was colored silver, despair brown; those were the colors of the dots that swirled in front of my eyes as I held my breath. My lungs felt ready to explode as I used up still more oxygen futilely struggling against the black leather fingers that held me in a grip as tight and final as death.

Hope, on the other hand, smelled like a dentist’s office. That was the faint odor I’d detected just before the gorilla had dunked me in the “aquarium”; the “water” I was under wasn’t water.

With absolutely nothing to lose, I released the pressure from my lungs. The breath exploded from my mouth and nose in great silver bubbles. Then I played gerbil, sucking in the fluid just as if it were nothing more than good old only-slightly-polluted New York City air.

Air it wasn’t. In connection with my coven of witches, I’d undergone a series of rabies shots. They’d been exquisitely painful, given directly in the belly. The sensation I’d experienced then was a feeling of swelling in my stomach and chest, of being pumped full of some viscous liquid, like silicone. The feeling of swelling now was essentially the same, without the searing pain. There was a bubbling, tickling sensation in my sinuses, as if I’d drunk warm soda too quickly, a bitter licorice taste; then the taste and sensation were gone and I was—breathing.

There was an unexpected side effect of immersion that could explain why the gerbil I had seen paddling around in Bill Jackson’s jar of Fluosol-DA had seemed so content with his lot; I was getting high.

It occurred to me that this particular gorilla was going to be looking for something a bit more dramatic than a submerged, giggling dwarf. I sucked in a huge lungful of the solution, held my breath for a few seconds, then executed what I hoped was a very convincing performance of twitches, shudders, and kicks. Then I went limp and waited.

And waited.

It looked as if I were going to have to start “breathing” again, but just as I was about to exhale my hairy attacker pulled me up out of the tank. I opened my eyes to slits and watched as the gorilla dangled me in the air by the back of my shirt and peered quizzically up into my face. I hated to hurt him, would have much preferred a long session with his trainer, but I didn’t have too many options. I despised cruelty to dwarfs even more than cruelty to animals, so I poked him in the right eye with my index finger. The force of the stab wasn’t hard enough to puncture his eyeball, just sufficient to produce an unpleasant diversion.

The gorilla bellowed in pain and dropped me to the floor as he reflexively let go of my shirt in order to alternately swipe at his eye and thump his chest. I jumped to my feet—and immediately ran into a problem. The gerbil had obviously had lots of practice clearing fluid out of its lungs; I wasn’t so fortunate, and the transition from breathing Fluosol-DA to breathing air wasn’t a problem I’d given a lot of thought to. Consequently, I began coughing and choking as the fluid spurted out of my lungs through my mouth and nose. By the time I recovered, my companion was in full, lumbering gait, heading in my direction, trailing multicolored wires from the smashed machine on his chest.

At the last moment I tumbled out of his way, and he smashed into a file cabinet. By the time he turned, I was out the door and running; I could hear the rhythmic padding of him on all fours right behind me. I didn’t know whether he could catch me over a short course, but I didn’t want to risk a foot race I might lose. I sprinted fifteen yards, cut sharply to my left into the unfinished office-laboratory. I felt a leathery paw slap against my shoulder, slip off as the gorilla’s momentum carried him past the entrance. He recovered, came scampering through the door.

“Me the fuck Mongo, you sonbitch,” I said as I bounced a length of stainless-steel pipe off his forehead.

It was an immense relief to find that it was possible to knock a gorilla unconscious. Every instinct urged me to get out of Volsung as quickly as possible, rush home and do something sensible—like crawl under the bed. But if I left empty-handed, the evening’s expedition would have been for nothing. Worse than nothing; unless I somehow managed to cover my tracks, Jake Bolesh and his masters in Volsung would know there had been a break-in. Bolesh would have no problem knowing who to come looking for.

What, I asked myself, do you do with an unconscious gorilla? The answer came: frame him, try to make it look as though he’d been playing house with the equipment and had hurt himself.

I went out of the office, hurried to the far end, and peered down the darkened corridor leading to the scientists’ quarters. Either the scientists were very sound sleepers or their quarters were soundproofed, because the lights remained out and the walkway remained still.

The huge electron microscopes were on rollers, obviously designed to be moved about the complex. I pushed one into the office-laboratory and used a pipe as a lever to topple it over on the floor next to the gorilla; the half-million-dollar piece of equipment smashed to the tile with a resounding crash, which spelled the beginning of the end to my evening of fun and games.

I’d hoped to be able to sort through the files at my leisure, try to understand some part of what was in them, make some copies on the Xerox machine in another office, replace the files and steal safely away into the night. I should have done it before tipping over the electron microscope, but the reassuring silence that had returned after the cacophonous bellowing of the gorilla had made me feel secure. Cocky.

Stupid.

Just as I was digging into the first open filing cabinet, I heard a distant clicking sound, then a whir. The walkway. I grabbed three files that were thin enough so that I hoped they wouldn’t be missed right away. I closed the file cabinet, then raced like hell to the stairway leading to the garage, slapping light switches on the way.