So what! He was out, free, armed, with money in his pocket, and in civilian clothes. Sure he was making a deal with something like...the devil. But hadn't he already done that, years ago, in a way? Hadn't he crossed the line anyway, when he killed that dealer and took his weight, back on the block? What difference did it make if he got in deeper?
And it felt
good
when he hooked into that power. Good watching those pigs die, walking out those doors.
They'd found a cab waiting in the parking lot of an all-night restaurant on the interstate, a quarter mile from the prison. They'd walked right up to the cab, and the driver, one of those Paki types with a turban, he'd seen their prison clothes and tried to drive away, but murky faces swirled around the hood of his yellow cab...and it just stopped running. Engine just froze up. Somehow seemed like the most natural thing in the world, to Gulcher, when that happened.
The guy had jumped out and run like a scared rabbit. They'd got in the cab, ignoring the sounds of sirens whooping from the direction of the prison. People starting to figure out there'd been a jailbreak and a lot of correctional officers gone crazy, back there. And dead people... quite a few dead.
Jock had taken the wheel and they'd driven in the cab to a little curtained, frame house a few miles from the prison, where there were a couple of guys who'd snitched on Gulcher.
The two dudes and their girlfriends had been up tweaking on their glass pipes when Gulcher and Jock walked in, Jock grinning, with the service .45 taken from the prison in his hand, firing one two three four five shots, only one extra needed when that black chick tried to crawl away.
They'd searched the place, taking some money and finding clothes they could wear. Hawaiian shirts, jeans, Gulcher picking up a nice pair of wraparound shades. “Wonder where they stole these shades,” he'd said. “Look at that, says 'Dior' on the side.”
“Might be counterfeit.”
“See there, you fucking rain on my parade, Jock.”
Gulcher put the shades on now because the glaring overhead lights of the casino, meant to keep people awake and gambling, were irritating his eyes.
He was feeling some tiredness—normally in stir he'd be snoring about now—but he was still high, still feeling stony good.
He hadn't been tempted by any of the dope in that frame house. That was new, not being tempted by drugs. Anytime before, since he'd first got high at thirteen, he'd have jumped right into that shit.
But it seemed paltry now, compared to this.
“The suffering here is part of your power, “
came the whisperer, then, as they paused by the roulette table.
“Look around you, and know it. “
Gulcher had never had an interest in whether people suffered, unless he hated them—then he was
real
interested. People he didn't know—who cared? But if the whisperer said it was important...
There, a row of people at the slot machines. Three stumpy, little old ladies with fat ankles and cigarette-yellowed hands and droopy-sad faces: a white lady, a Filipina, a Cuban lady. Then a chunky black woman in a nurse's uniform; then a middle-aged, maybe Italian guy with buck teeth, receding hair, fake-looking gold chain. Then a big black guy in a New York Jets jersey; then a white guy so fat he was in a wheelchair from it, barely fitting in there between rows of slots; then a tall, skinny white woman in a pale pink pants suit with a crotch stain that made him wonder if she'd peed her pants because she wouldn't leave her slot machine; then a scared-looking pimply young guy, maybe nineteen; then...
And they were all pumping the slots, one way or another pumping at them, though the new machines, most of them, didn't have the metal arms you pulled; these weren't the old one-armed bandits, these were touch-screen and push-button, and they were all shiny with colors and panels glowing with pop icons, and they had themes, some of them, pictures of characters from TV shows on them—a
CSI: Denver slot
machine, a
Magic Girl
one, a
Disney Planet
one—and they had little lights on top that revolved when they paid, and they all went
yippety-yippety-yippety-tweet-tweet-tootle
all the fucking time.
As he watched them, a kind of ripple was in the air around each slot player, a membrane of heightened perception provided by the whisperer—and it revealed
a second face
on each person. As if each slot player had two faces at once, the second one floating behind and a little above the one you normally see. The second face was blue-white, almost like a mask, but you could see through it—a ghostly visage, with a different expression from the face the slot player showed the world, and it was looking around.
“That is the face of their souls,
“ said the whisperer.
These soul faces were frightened and angry. They had the look of trapped people, Gulcher decided. Like they were really stuck somewhere and not sure how or why they got stuck there and they just wanted to get
out.
Like bugs in a Roach Motel.
The faces of their souls...
“You see it too?” Jock asked, sounding scared and sick himself.
“Yeah,” Gulcher said. Wondering what the expression on the face of his own soul looked like. These people looked like they were suffering, all right. That was funny, because the regular faces on their bodies looked like they were kind of bored, or just vaguely interested, or slightly excited. But these soul faces were like something you'd see in a mental ward. Gulcher himself had once been in a mental ward, playing crazy to stay out of prison, and he had fessed up pretty quick. Because that place
was too damned depressing. He figured people's body faces in mental wards looked like their soul faces, no different.
“Those you see before you have folded their winds into the games of chance, “
said the whisperer.
“Their minds are trapped in the game, round and round. They have surrendered themselves; they have left an opening to anything that wishes to enter and take them. They are like puppets waiting for a hand.
Your
hands. Stretch out your hands. Two hands will do for many. “
“Two hands for many,” Gulcher repeated. Not knowing why.
“What'd you say, Troy?” Jock asked.
“Shut up, I gotta concentrate and shit,” Gulcher told him curtly. Jock had some ability to hear the whisperer, to glimpse the hidden things, but he didn't have anything like Gulcher's gift.
“Now reach out,
“ said the whisperer.
“Speak the names you were taught and reach out—feel your hands beyond your hands. “
He remembered. The whisperer had guided him, as he'd destroyed the guards, opened the doors at the prison.
“It is something you were born to do,”
it told him.
“It is a gift.”
Gulcher closed his eyes, said the names, and had a sensation that was alien to him and natural both, when he used the gift. A feeling in his hands. As if they were rubbery, extending impossibly from within. His astral hands, reaching out beyond his physical boundaries, stretching out toward the people at the slots. And swirling around them were the steam-shapes, the man-faced serpents, going where he directed them. Unseen by anyone but him.
“Hey, you two,” said the security bull, walking up to them. Gulcher opened his eyes a moment, glanced at the guy. Short, almost freakishly broad-shouldered, froggishly wide-mouthed. He closed his eyes again as the guy went on, “What's this, standing around waving your arms at people with your eyes closed? All this grinning and laughing? We don't want drugged-up people in here, this ain't no place to be tripping on meth.”
“Ha, he thinks we're on drugs there, uh, bro,” Jock said. A criminal's instinct keeping him from saying Gulcher's name out loud. “Tripping, he says!”
Gulcher was stretching his unseen astral hands out to the nearest ten people, reaching into a head, through a head; stretching on to the next head, into the head, through the head; on to the next one, his reach stretching through three heads, and on to the fourth, opening them up, to stream astral familiars, the man-faced serpents into them.
Someone put their hand on Gulcher's arm—and Gulcher ignored it.
“Hey, keep away from him!” Jock warned the security bull.
“Okay, we got one with a gun here—!”
Bang of a gunshot, and the touch on his arm went away. Gulcher didn't open his eyes. He felt a body hit the floor. He knew it was the stocky, broad-shouldered one, falling, a bullet in his head. Didn't need to see it to know.
“More enemies are coming... reach out to more puppets. “
Running feet, another gunshot, but he was ready. He opened his eyes and looked around, saw one clumsily sprawled dead man, another man crawling away, blood spreading across that funky paisley carpeting.
Men were running toward him, two of them with guns in their hands. Jock beside him saying, “Hey, man—you going to—”
Then it came together—and came rushing out. All those people, his puppets, rushing from between the slot machines at the men in the suits, the security bulls going down under a scrimmage of gamblers before they could fire a shot; a tumble of bodies, many of them old and fat and infirm, but young ones too, so many of them the casino guards were overwhelmed. And what they did then...
It wasn't Gulcher who made them do those things to the security bulls. He never told them to pluck out their eyes and squeeze their necks till the blood came out their mouths.
“You have tapped into their anger,
“ came the whisper.
“Their hidden anger flows free and drives them. “
Its voice oozed primal satisfaction.
Gulcher felt sick and had to look away. He didn't really care what happened to private pigs—but watching people get their faces pulled apart like that, naturally it's going to make you sick.
“What we do now?” Jock asked.
“We lock this place down, for a while, and get this mess taken care of.” “Sure to be people calling nine-one-one. Some is just watchin'. Not everyone's part of it.” “That's okay. You'll see. It's in the whole building, now. I can feel it.” Gulcher turned to Jock, grinning. “This casino is ours.”
***
BLEAK HAD ANCHORED THE cabin cruiser upriver; had come down here in the smaller boat. More prudent.
It was almost dawn. But here, in the shadow of a civilization, it was still dark. The sky was dark blue, showing aluminum gray of predawn; darkness draped the buildings.
As Bleak approached the rotting dock pilings, he smelled treated sewage, dead fish, decaying wood, tar, mildew. The reflection of a thin scythe of setting moon rippled with his passage, green-yellow on black. He looked back, once, to take in the baleful glower of the Manhattan skyline on the other side of the river.
His aluminum prow kissed the old, guano-frosted wooden ladder and he shipped the oars, clambered carefully forward, swearing when he nearly pitched into the drink. He grabbed the ladder, steadied himself, then tied up the boat with the painter. He could hear Shoella's ShadowComm contingent, fourteen of them up there, whispering on what remained of the old dock. He hoped no one would insist on using a familiar to probe his mind. He hated the feeling of a probe.
Bleak climbed the ladder, feeling them more clearly, up there, with every rung, their presences altering the ambient field of mind like fourteen iron spikes driven into the ground near an electromagnet. Only it wasn't a magnetic field; it was the
apeiron
field, as the Greek philosopher Anaximander had called it: the field of boundless essence that subtly took part in the other energy fields and gave birth to them; the pattern of undifferentiated consciousness from which all consciousness sprang. The apeiron was subtle yet endlessly powerful. It was the Hidden, the field traversed by planetary ghosts and other spirit beings; the energy which natural conjurers such as Bleak and the other members of the ShadowComm used as their medium of expression, each practitioner expressing himself in some personal, unique way.
Bleak climbed up onto the crumbling dock, put his hands in his coat pockets, facing New Jersey and the fourteen members of Shoella's La'hood. He was glad to be up here, where the breeze seemed fresher, pleasantly briny, coming in from the Verrazano Narrows way off to his left. But nervous, facing off with Shoella's bunch. He wasn't much liked by them.
Yorena flew at Bleak, first, just to make sure of him; to see if anyone was coming up the ladder behind him. The familiar flapped ponderously around him, leaving an acrid smell behind, and dropping a few pinfeathers; then flew back to Shoella. The creature settled on a craggy, tar-spackled post beside her: Yorena looked in profile like a big gull, except for the falconlike beak. The pattern of speckles on her chest seemed to change configuration as he looked at them.
“Was it really necessary that we all come?” asked Oliver, stepping forward. Like most of them, Giant and Pigeon Lady aside, Oliver was quite ordinary looking. A young man with heavy-lidded eyes, he wore a Mets baseball jacket and hat; someone you'd see on the subway and not give a second thought. Even the ferret on his shoulder, a familiar of sorts, didn't seem so very exotic. “I hate coming to this part of New Jersey.”
“Shoella thought it was necessary,” Bleak said, shrugging. “I'm not arguing with her. The CCA is making its move on us. They tried to get me today. They've got a new way to find us. Meaning we have to keep this meeting short.”
Oliver scowled. “Meaning we shouldn't have had it at all, you ask me. If they're after you, and you're here...” His right hand curled up as if gripping an unseen weapon—and it might just do that, since Oliver could throw energy bullets too. Only, he threw them in the manner of a hardball pitcher.
“Sounds like a risky meeting to me,” someone else in the group muttered. Giant, the little person.
The others, standing in a semicircle behind Shoella, were mostly a harmless-looking mix of men and women, only one over sixty—the Pigeon Lady. A bland appearance was camouflage, but not everyone bothered: young, pale Glory was dramatically Goth in her style, while Giant, a Hispanic near-dwarf, went out of his way to bristle with piercings, and studs in black leather. To Bleak he looked like an anthropomorphic hedgehog. He'd annoyed Giant, once, by calling him Sonic. But Giant's conspicuousness could end in the blink of an eye—he had the gift of calling up camouflage sprites and could vanish against the background if he chose.