What exactly was the whispering telling him to do? And why was the light going purple in here? Was he having a stroke, or what? Maybe he should ask to go to the infirmary. Fat chance. Not something they granted without his being practically dead already.
He stepped into his cell, found the plastic comb. The guards worked hard on not giving you anything you could use as a weapon on someone else, or yourself. Toothbrushes were short and soft,
there were no springs on the bed, no toilet seats, and on and on. But he'd been working on the end spine of this comb, scraping it against a rough spot on the metal frame of the door, and he had it pretty sharp. Wasn't much of a weapon. He hadn't been sure what he was going to do with it. Till now.
“Don't waste any time,
“ the whispering said. Gulcher could hear it more clearly now.
“The wave is rising. It won't continue forever. Do it. “
He sat on the bunk and took the spiky plastic end spine of the comb and bent it a little outward from the other spines, gritted his teeth—and jammed it into his wrist. It took a moment to punch through. Had to press hard. Then—he sucked air through his teeth as pain jolted through his wrist and blood squirted out, a red so dark it was almost inky. He hadn't hit anything major, just a bunch of smaller vessels, but it was more than enough blood for his purpose. He yanked out the plastic spine, then climbed in close to the wall over his cot, dipped the index finger of his other hand into the blood on his wrist and started drawing. Just letting the feeling guide him, like the whispering said. It felt good to do that. And he always did what felt good.
First he drew a rough circle, in blood, on the wall over his cot—a circle about two feet in diameter—then words within the circle, following it around its curve, inside. “The writing on the wall,” he muttered. “Read the writin' on the wall!” An expression he'd heard from that Juvenile Hall judge, old Judge Kramer. Gulcher chuckled, as he wrote, remembering that.
He didn't know what he was writing till it was there on the wall. He just let it be guided. But Gulcher remembered some of the names—Names of Power, they were called—from the books he'd read as a young man. He figured they'd been stored away in his head, somewhere. MOLOCH was one of them. He found he was writing them inside the circle.
Gulcher heard the door of his cell clang shut behind him, the lockdown triggered by the guards, but he ignored that. He knew it wouldn't matter.
“Hey, Gulcher!” Jock shouted from the next cell. “You're right, I feel weird! I'm, like, hearing shit too! Voices!”
“Listen to them, Jock!” he shouted back, as he dripped blood on his right hand, from the wound, covering the whole palm, the fingers.
“Now, apply the mark of your hand to the interior of the circle, to complete the connection,”
said the whisperer.
He pressed his bloody handprint into the circle. The words, the lines, the print, all dripped, but you could make it out anyway. It was an intact image.
“Gaze on this symbol,
” said the whisperer,
“reach out with the power you feel now, connect, take power from us.... Use it as you see fit. “
Gulcher stared...
And felt the power descend on him. He felt overcharged with it, like he might explode if he didn't release it. He backed away from the bed, turned to the door, put his hand on it. Seemed to see the mechanisms that held it shut, inside the wall. Saw snakelike figures in there, ethereal snakes with faces, writhing, waiting for his command. Told them to push here, and here...
2°
The door slid open. Followed by all the doors of all the cells in Securimax 5. An alarm started hooting, earsplittingly loud.
Gulcher stepped out and looked around—wondered why the air was so cloudy. It was like they were in a steam bath. But it wasn't steam, it was something else. Like it was the vapor of life itself.
Like it's the stuff ghosts are made of,
he thought. Like that, but spread out, choking the air. And he saw faces form in it; faces forming and falling apart...and forming again.
The siren howling...and the men howling as they writhed on the floor.
And one vaporous face seemed to dominate the others—a bigger face that kept stock-still in the air as the others rotated around it with a slippery, nauseating motion. Like one of those faces you see carved on the squatting statues stuck on the roofs of old churches. What did they call that? A gargoyle. But big, this face. Big as a basketball backboard. Big. Looking at him, its horny lips moving.
“The air serpents are yours. Formless familiars. Take territory. I will guide you to the place where I can take strength; where I can grow... and in time I will send more of myself, to your side. “
“Who are you?” Gulcher demanded.
“Your god, who blesses you,
“ said the face, then it broke up, melted away. But Gulcher felt it still watching him; still just as much there, even if it was invisible.
“Call me Moloch as some did once, whose children burned in my grasp. “
“Gulcher!” Jock was yelling. “What the fuck's happening!”
The guards were running in, their faces tight with fear.
The man-faced serpents were writhing in the living steam—were made of it, and something else —and Gulcher shouted, “Kill them!” and the man-faced serpents darted at the guards and entered into them. And the guards clawed at themselves and began firing their weapons at one another.
And they fell convulsing, yowling with pain and psychosis, as Gulcher led Jock up the stairs to the now open metal door.
CHAPTER ONE
A humid New York summer day. And someone was following him.
Gabriel Bleak always knew when he was being followed. This time, he could feel the tracker about half a block back. He sensed it was a woman, blinking her eyes in the hot light searing off the windows of the high Manhattan buildings. She was hurrying through the crowd to keep him in sight. He couldn't read her mind—but, as long as her attention was fixed on him for more than a few seconds, he could see what
she
saw. Attention itself had a psychic energy, a power he could feel, could connect to.
It was hot and humid, it was July in the city, and the corner of Broadway and Thirty-third was thronged with people, all hurrying along. Bleak sometimes felt as if the people were giving off the heat on a day like this. As if the summer heat rose from the body heat of the shifting, elbowing, insistent crowd; the humidity was a by-product of their sweat, their countless exhalations, their sticky, thronging thoughts.
Bleak figured that illusion troubled him because he could
feel
their lives around him.
He didn't feel any hostility from the woman following him, and none of that telltale psychic pulse that would indicate she was part of the Shadow Community. So he would take his time evading her.
Bleak stopped to wait for a double-decker tourist bus to pass in front of him. Japanese, French, German, Iowan faces looked down at him from the roofless top deck of the bus; the Statue of Liberty's face, painted hugely on the side, slid ponderously past, and it was as if she were looking at him too.
The bus passed, and Bleak pressed on through its cloud of exhaust, holding his breath. Dodging a taxi, he made it to the farther corner. Yankee Hank's Bar was up ahead. He'd slip in there, see what move she'd make when he cut the trail short.
The fingers of his right hand balled into a half-fist as he conjured a bullet of the Hidden's force; drawn from the energy field coating the world itself, the power pulsed down through his arm as raw energy flow, coalescing into a glimmering bullet shape within the forge of his fingers. He cupped the bullet in his right hand, close against his hip, so no one could see it. Bleak could see it though, if he looked. He felt it pulsing there, hot and volatile, a mindless compaction of life itself—in this form, potentially destructive. He would throw it only if he had to. If he didn't use it against his enemy, he couldn't reabsorb it, he'd have to release it into the background field—which would draw attention to him. It was bright outside, no one would see it in his hand, but in a dark room, the energy bullet would show up, as if he had a little ball of fireflies trapped in his fingers.
Bleak was aware, suddenly, that the woman following him had an apparatus of some kind in her right hand—an electronic device. She would glance at it, then hide it in her palm, cupped against her side—echoing the way he was hiding the energy bullet. He got a glimpse of the gadget from his flickering share of her point of view. Looked like some kind of handheld EM detection meter...only, it wasn't. What was it? A weapon?
He turned, used his left hand to open the bar's door—his right still cupping the energy bullet— and went into the suddenly cool air-conditioned room, a dark space shot through with the light of beer signs and a couple of red-shaded dangling overhead lamps the color of banked embers. Baseball souvenirs on the walls. ESPN baseball was a rectangle of bright greens and whites on the flat screen over the bar. The bartender, a man with short, curly red hair, long sideburns, was one Seamus Flaherty, who nodded at Bleak when he came in. Bleak was a familiar face here. He sometimes drank himself into a safe numbness in Yankee Hank's, when his sensitivity to the Hidden became too much to bear. He spent a good deal of mental energy separating out the material world and the Hidden; trying to stay focused, not get lost.
Bleak had learned to compartmentalize.
This is me, in the world that ordinary people share; this is me taking part in the Hidden.
That didn't always work. Then he turned to beer—and a few shots to go with it.
Seamus didn't know about any of that—couldn't see the bullet of energy glowing in Bleak's hand; it was below the level of the bar as Bleak walked by the three men on the middle stools. They were arguing about a game.
To Seamus, rinsing a beer glass, Bleak was just a medium-height, lanky, relatively young man with sandy hair who always seemed two weeks overdue for a haircut; brittle blue eyes; a man not quite thirty, in an old Army Rangers jacket, jeans, big black boots. Pretty much the same outfit most anytime, though Bleak changed the tees under the jacket. Bleak had a collection of fading rock-band T-shirts. Today he wore the Dictators.
The drinkers in the bar didn't take much notice. Yankee Hank's was decorated with New York Yankees paraphernalia—dusty jerseys, fading autographed balls, curling baseball cards—and if you were a Yankees fan, these days, you pretty much stayed drunk, either because they were doing great or doing badly, depending on what week it was. The drinkers were slurring drunk, not sodden drunk, but they didn't notice much except the little drama on the sports channel.
As Bleak walked by, Seamus called out, “Thinking of starting up our softball team, this summer, Gabe, you in?”
“Sure, man, if I can pitch!”
Seamus gave him an affirming wink and Bleak strode on to the back room, empty except for Yankees posters and neon beer signs, two large red-felt pool tables, and restroom entrances in the farther wall. He toyed with the idea of going into the men's restroom, waiting his tracker out. But if she was really hunting him, she wouldn't let the men's room sign stop her.
He walked over to the other side of a pool table, turned toward the door, hesitated there, trying to think it through. If she wasn't Shadow Community, who was she? She could be a fed. Maybe Central Containment.
Bleak decided he wanted to know whom she was working for. And what the instrument in her hand was.
He couldn't see her, now, because she'd lost sight of him. He only had sight of her, psychically, when she had him in sight. He waited.
The energy bullet had lost some of its power through the attrition of time, but it was still hot in his hand. Holding it there for that long, he might get a slight burn on his skin. Still, he pulsed a little more power into it, building it up to full strength.
Over the noise from a television ad for a men's perfume
absolutely guaranteed to
attract women, he heard Seamus ask someone what he could get for them. It was her. Bleak thought she said a glass of chardonnay, but he couldn't hear it clearly, then she asked a muffled question, and Seamus said, “The
ladies'
is back there, miss.”
She was still tracking him. But whoever she was, she was staying undercover about it.
His grip tightened around the energy bullet, compressing its charge a little more. But he kept it out of sight below the edge of a pool table.
She walked in, then, a pale woman with bobbed raven hair; she wore a conservative dove-gray dress with a matching jacket, red pumps, matching red-leather purse over her left shoulder, nails the same color. An expression you'd expect on a prosecuting attorney added hardness to an otherwise appealing, heart-shaped face; pursed full lips. Her paleness wasn't unhealthy, it was like something he'd seen in Renaissance paintings. She was a head shorter than Bleak—but there was no sense that she was intimidated. She stopped just inside the billiard room, standing there with her feet well apart. He noticed she had her purse open. He could just make out the top of a gun butt in there. In her right hand was what looked like one of those devices carpenters use to find metal studs hidden in the walls. Only it was more complicated looking, sleeker. And as she came closer, she held it low enough so that he could see its little LCD screen. Where a tiny red arrow was pointing right at Bleak.
The gun butt convinced Bleak there was no use in playing it cute. “It'd be better if you left that gun in your purse, miss,” he warned, keeping his voice gentle but raising his hand, opening his fingers enough so she could see the energy bullet shifting through orange, red, purple, violet, incandescent blue, yellow; back to orange, red, purple. “And that other thing you have pointed at me—mind telling me what it is? I mean, it's only fair.” He smiled. Hoped it was a disarming smile. “If I had a creepy little device pointed at you, I'd tell you why.”