Coils

Chapter 6

...And came down, as the man said.

The sea-green Ouroboros serpent which had wrapped itself around the plane faded as we entered the landing pattern. We swept in, touched down perfectly and taxied to our gate with no delays.

As I emerged from the tunnel, this one uncluttered with horrors, an airline agent—a short, dark-haired stock character in a crisp uniform—approached me.

“Mr. BelPatri?”

“Yes.”

“Donald BelPatri?”

“Right.”

“Would you come this way, please?”

I took a couple of steps with him, out of the traffic. Then, “Where are you taking me?” I asked.

“The VIP lounge, sir.”

“Now why would you want to do that?”

“There is a gentleman there, waiting to see you.”

“And who might that be?”

“I don’t know his name, sir.”

“Well…” I said. “Let’s go and find out.”

I walked with him for a time. We finally turned up a short corridor. He opened the door and showed me in.

There were four people in the lounge, three men and a woman. Two of the men were flunkies, I could see that right away—large, young and athletic-looking, with open-necked shirts under light jackets; clean-cut; bodyguard types. They were standing behind the older, jovial-seeming, white-haired man who sat at a table, facing me. He wore a dark, well-tailored jacket, white shirt, somber necktie. There was a bottle of mineral water on the table, and the three of them held glasses of clear, sparkling liquid. Not so the woman. She held a big, wicked-looking drink in an old-fashioned glass. She was seated at the man’s right. Arresting features and complexion—quadroon, I’d say—with very bleached hair. Somewhere around forty. Had on a pretty yellow blouse with ruffles, a strand of dark beads about her neck. Stouter now than I remembered her, I saw, as she rose along with the man, to greet me. Her name was Marie—Marie Melstrand—I knew, as suddenly as I could recall having known her before. I couldn’t remember much else about her, though. Both of them smiled at me.

“Don, how is everything?” The Boss inquired.

The Boss… We almost always called him just that. His name, however, was Creighton Barbeau, chairman of the board of Angra Energy.

We…? I wasn’t certain exactly who all the pronoun covered, as I possessed only a partial memory here. But there were images of myself as a member of some sort of group of special people who worked for him. And Marie, Marie was one of us.

“Everything is very interesting lately,” I said. “How’d you know I was on that plane?”

He squinted his left eye and smiled, which I knew meant that he considered that a foolish question. Of course, I ought to know that he knew everything…

“I’m concerned about you, Don,” he said, moving around the table, coming up to me, squeezing my shoulder. “You don’t look real well. I thought we were taking better care of you. Getting tired of Florida?”

“I’m getting tired of a lot of things,” I said.

“Surely,” he agreed, taking my arm. “Completely understandable. Not everybody likes an early retirement.” Automatically, I let him guide me to the table. “Care for a drink?”

“Not now, thanks.”

“…But you know how it was,” he went on, raising his glass for a sip. “A lot of trouble there, getting you out of the way in time.”

He set it down and gave me a full, direct, open-seeming gaze.

“Not that you weren’t worth it, of course, God knows. But things were a bit ticklish for a while. Couldn’t take any chances. Always worth going out of your way for a good man, though.”

“Donald,” Marie said, in her precise way, before I could get off a reply. She extended her hand and I took it, again automatically.

“Marie,” I said. “How’ve you been?”

“Not hurting,” she answered, “and getting better at what I do. What more can a person ask?”

“Indeed,” I said, feeling something a trifle hostile behind her smiling mask.

“I’ve thought of you a lot, Don,” The Boss was going on. “You’ve been missed, you know. Considerably.”

“Where’s Cora?” I said, turning toward him.

“Cora?” He furrowed his brows. “Oh, Cora. Of course. Someone did mention her to me—a lady you’ve been seeing recently. You know—you know, Don—I’d be willing to bet that she never left the state at all. I’ll bet she’s still down in the Keys, looking for you right now. Had a little pout and left, changed her mind. You should really have left her a message.”

I felt slightly uncomfortable at that, because of the bare possibility that there might be some truth in it. He pressed on then, before I could voice any doubts:

“You know, I don’t think you really came here looking for her,” he said, conspiratorially. “Maybe that’s what you told yourself, but I think it was something different. I think maybe you’re feeling better now than you were a few years ago. I think you came up here, whether you realize it or not, looking for some action. I think you really want your old job back.”

He studied my features at this last—almost hopefully, I’d say.

“I don’t remember my old job all that well,” I answered him. “Is Cora here?”

“We could use you, if you’re up to it again,” he continued quickly. “Of course you could expect a sizable raise. Hate to see my people suffering from inflation. The competition’s getting pretty fierce, you know? That big lead we had in solar energy’s just been melting away. Too damn much government interference—and the other guys have been spying on us like something out of James Bond. Got to hand it to them, though. They’ve come up with some clever tricks for that sort of thing—and it’s costing plenty just to keep them at arms’ distance. Not that they could ever hold a candle to one of my top people, if you catch my meaning. Bet you could really throw them the shaft.”

“Look,” I said. “Maybe so and maybe not But it’s Cora I want to hear about right now. Do you know where she is?”

“Don, Don, Don…” he sighed. “You don’t seem to understand what I’m saying. We really can use you again. I’m offering you your old job back on even better terms. We want you to rejoin the family. People look at me sometimes when I talk that way, but I really do think of all my personal aides as a family. I can’t think of anything I wouldn’t do for them to make their lives a little brighter.”

“Cora,” I said through clenched teeth.

“Might even help you look for your lady friend,” he said then.

“You’re saying you don’t know where she is?”

“Don’t know,” he said. “We’ll help you, though, if you’ll help us.”

“I think you’re lying.”

“Now that hurts, Don,” he answered. “I try to be square with my people.”

“Okay,” I said. “I know you keep records on everything—clandestine as well as above-board. Let me look, if that’s the case. Let me check the Double Z files on current quiet stuff.”

“And you said your memory was bad. But that’s right, you did work in Double Z a lot. Guess that would be hard to forget. All right. It grieves me that you don’t trust my word, but if you want to check the records, you can. Anything you want. We can go and look at them right now.”

Was that a mocking light in Marie’s eyes as she raised her glass and drained it?

The Boss made a motion to his Muscle. They crossed the room. One of them opened a door—not the one I had come in by.

He held it open. The other passed outside. Marie picked up her purse from the floor and got to her feet. She and Barbeau began moving toward the doorway. I followed them.

We exited, to come upon a small, private parking lot. The bodyguard who had preceded us was already climbing into a limousine. There was something more than a little suspicious to me about the ease with which The Boss had agreed to give me a ride over to the shop for an inspection of secret records.

The limousine came to life. It moved.

“This is very cooperative of you,” I said, “but I’m not really prepared to inspect them immediately. I want my lawyer on hand when I do.”

I didn’t really have a lawyer in the area, but if I called Ralph Button I’d a feeling he could put me in touch with someone competent.

“A lawyer?” he said, turning toward me as the car swung around. “Come on, Don! This is just between us. I don’t want some legal eagle sniffing around while you’re pulling out sensitive stuff.”

“I’ll come by in the morning, to the front door,” I said, “with counsel. I want to have lots of explanations then—like what I was supposed to have done that got me sent out to pasture with my brains washed. I’ll want to talk about that, too.”

The car pulled up before us, halted.

The big man at his side moved forward and opened doors. I took a step backward and let my hands hang loose. I adjusted my balance. I’d a feeling that the bodyguard was going to try forcing me into the car. If so—

“Well, if that’s the way you feel about it,” Barbeau said, “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry that we can’t just work this out between us, like in the old days.” He turned one palm upward. “But, if that’s the way it has to be, okay. Bring your man around in the morning and we’ll do it your way.”

He and Marie climbed into the back seat

“Good-bye, Donald.”

The bodyguard shut them in, got into the front passenger seat and closed the door. I watched them drive off.

Hell of an anticlimax. It was absolutely too easy. Unless—

Could it be possible that I had really misread the situation? I had had amnesia. Supposing everything I’d seen on the way up had been bona fide BelPatri hallucinations? Could I really rely on my own judgment? What if Cora had simply gotten tired of putting up with me and left? Maybe—

I turned away. That way lies… I chuckled. More madness? Come on, feet, take me away. I looked around the area. The only pedestrian exit from the parking lot was a nearby platform—a station on the automated monorail system used to move people around the airport. I crossed over and climbed its steps.

I saw the button on the post, and there was an instruction plate beneath it. This was a special station. Cars would not stop here unless someone coming out of the VIP lot signalled for one. The idea apparently was that curious or wandering members of the general public would not be able to get off at this place. I pushed the button.

A few seconds later, a single car came along. There was one man in it. He was sitting with his back to me. I entered.

For a moment, I stared. There was something familiar about that seated figure. I moved around, nearer to him, and I looked him in the face.

A gray man, in some indeterminate region of middle age. He had grown bushy sideburns and acquired a network of broken veins across his wide nose since last I had seen him. He was a bit fleshier now, with the pouches under his bright blue eyes more pronounced.

“Willy Boy,” I said.

No, the face on the houseboat in Florida had not been his. It was as if my memory and imagination had somehow combined to warn me about something even then.

“Well, bless me! If it isn’t Mr. Don Bell-Patri!” he said, in that magical voice, clear and almost musical.

That voice had once been nationally famous. The words were always clearly enunciated; the accent varied, seeming at different times to come from all parts of the South. He’d shouted the Gospel at tent audiences and then auditorium audiences and finally at millions watching him on television. There were healings and hollerings, and then there had been the story of the teen-age girl in Mississippi—her abortion, her attempted suicide… Willy Boy’s stock had plummeted. In the end, there had been no legal charges, but for the past several years the faithful had been denied his version of the Lord. Willy Boy’s profile had flattened on the graph of public awareness. But there was still something special about him. It involved the healings. They had been real.

“Matthews,” I acknowledged, and I dropped into a seat facing him, fascinated by his presence, new memories surfacing from moment to moment.

I was fascinated, too, by the change that I saw in him—a change for the worse. He seemed to exhale evil now, along with a faint aroma of bourbon. And in a way, I was glad of this, because it meant that I had not been wrong, that I was not crazy, and that what was happening was not yet over.

The monorail car was not moving. Its door still stood wide open. But for the moment I thought nothing of this.

“How’s the energy business these days?” I asked him—because he was part of the group, I felt sure of that much, though what the group was was still hazy to me. I wondered what Matthews did-

And then I remembered what he did, even as he began to do it to me. I felt a sudden shortness of breath, and then a pain in my chest and one that radiated down my left arm.

There had been a night, long ago, when I had gone with Willy Boy to his apartment and spent an evening lowering the level in a jug of very smooth white lightning. Incongruously, for what he did in those days, there was still an opened Bible in plain sight, on a small table by the window. Curious, when he was out of the room, I had gone over. It was opened to Psalm 109, which was almost entirely underlined. Later, when we were both several sheets to the wind, I had asked him about his preaching days:

“How much of it was hype? Did you really believe any of the things you said?”

He lowered his glass and raised his eyes. He fixed me with that acetylene blueness which had come over so well on the tube.

“I believed,” he said simply. “So help me, when I started I was full of the fire of the Lord. I wanted their souls for Him. I believed. I hollered and gave ’em Scripture and waved the Good Book. I was as good as Billy Graham, Rex Humbard—any of ’em! Better, even! When I prayed for healing and saw ’em throw down their crutches and walk, or see again, or stop hurting, I knew that the grace of the Lord was on me, and I believed and there was no hype.” His eyes drifted away from me. “Then one day I got mad at a newsman,” he went on, slowly. “I kept telling him to move back, he was getting in my way. He wouldn’t do it ‘Damn you, then!’ I thought. ‘Drop dead, you miserable bastard!’” He paused again. “And he did,” he finally said, “just keeled over and lay there. The doctor said it was a heart attack. But he was young and healthy-looking, and I knew what I’d said in my heart. And then I thought about it. Thought about it a lot. Now the Lord wouldn’t go in for His servant pulling that sort of thing, would He? The healing, yeah—if it was helping to get a bunch of ’em saved. But killing ’em? I started thinking, maybe the power didn’t come from the Lord, maybe it was just something I could do by myself, either way. Maybe He didn’t care one way or the other whether I was preaching or not preaching. It wasn’t the Holy Spirit moving through me, healing. It was just something about me that could cure ’em or kill ’em. I started drinking around then, and fornicating and all the rest. That’s when it got to be hype and makeup and TV cameras and people planted in the audience with fake testimonies… I didn’t believe anymore. There’s just us and animals and plants and rocks. There ain’t no more. The best thing a man can do is get hold of all the good things in a hurry, ’cause time’s passing fast. There’s no God. Or if there is, He don’t like me anymore.”

He took a big swallow then, refilled his glass and changed the subject. It was a part of the longest conversation I’d ever had with Willy Boy on anything other than business.

… And his business was killing people. Heart attack, cerebral hemorrhage—it always looked like natural causes. He had the power. He was a reverse faith healer with no faith. I think he hated himself and he took it out on other people, for money, for Angra. And now he was squeezing my heart, and I would be dead in a matter of seconds.

I started to get up. I fell back. He was not finishing me as quickly as he might have. This was something new—overt sadism. He wanted to watch me struggle and die slowly.

I rolled out of my seat to the floor. A sense of the train’s computerized guidance system was in my brain like an alarm. Without knowing how I was doing it, I was trying to get the car to move, to take me to where I could get help. I reached the door, which had closed a few moments before, and I couldn’t get it open again. I pushed and pulled at it with my right hand, my left arm now feeling as if it were afire. Through the glass, I now became aware of a vague shape outside—a large man—a third bodyguard, perhaps. He just stood there watching while I struggled.

Matthews’ whiskered face loomed over me as he leaned forward in his seat, showing his long yellowed teeth, engulfing me in an atmosphere of alcohol fumes. I tried to reach out with all of my strength. Something—

The car suddenly lurched under me, back and forth, back and forth, a rapid, violent shaking. Willy Boy was jostled out of his seat.

The pressure in my chest eased. Abruptly, the door opened.

I half-crawled, half-rolled out of the car onto the platform and began to scramble away. The only safety from Matthews’ attacks, I remembered, lay in distance. If I could get more than a stone’s throw away from Willy Boy, he couldn’t kill me, not with his mind alone.

I practically threw myself to my feet. I swayed, recovered and took a step, halted again, as a wave of dizziness came and went. The man who had been waiting on the platform still had a look of surprise on his face. Old Willy Boy wasn’t supposed to let them get away. Behind me, I could still hear the car lurching back and forth, as the man recovered and came at me.

He aimed a kick, and my body responded before my memory did. I had some skill here that I had not recalled.

My arm, fist clenched, moved in a scooping block that caught his leg and broke his balance, sending him toppling backward, rolling to the side and right off the edge of the platform. He fell onto the track, where a single large rail stood up from a narrow roadbed.

Turning, I saw Matthews being shaken from his feet within the lurching car. Booze and age had slowed his reflexes. As he struggled to rise once more he was toppled again, but this time nearer to the doors. Now he tried crawling. He was almost to them. He was partway through…

With a vicious crash the doors slammed shut on him. Their edges were padded, but they had closed hard and they remained closed, clamping him in place.

Immediately then, the car ceased its shaking. It accelerated rapidly and I heard a scream from below, where the other man had fallen. I did not look down. It had been a very final thing—the unmistakable crunching sound of the car’s impact upon a body, the abrupt termination of the scream, a certain smell…

And back, back off to my left now as I turned, I could still see Matthews’ head protruding from between the doors of the receding car, his face dark and contorted, his mouth working but no words coming out.

A moment of nausea came and went. I looked all around me. The monorail’s roadbed seemed the handiest route for flight. I jumped down upon it, far past the thing that lay unmoving beside the track, my eyes averted. Then I turned and began running in the direction opposite that which the car had taken.

Something had helped me, I knew that. What or how, though, I had no time to speculate. I wanted to put as much distance as I could between myself and that platform in the shortest time possible. I ran, my breath coming hard into my lungs, my heart pounding.

This went on for what could have been several minutes. I don’t know. Then I felt the ground vibrating beneath my feet. My first thought was that a big plane was taking off or landing somewhere nearby, masked by the surrounding structures. But it grew stronger and acquired an above-ground accompaniment that I couldn’t mistake. Another monorail car was coming toward me.

A moment later it came into view, rounding a corner up ahead. Inside, I could see the passengers, pulling emergency switches or cords to which the vehicle was not apparently responding. None of them were yet looking in my direction.

I was about to leap from the track to get out of the way when the car suddenly began braking. There was no platform in sight, but it came to a halt and the door opened. I ran forward and climbed in.

The doors snapped shut behind me and the car jerked into motion again, this time heading back in the direction from which it had come.

I grabbed hold of one of the hanging loops and stood panting. Everyone in the car turned to stare at me. I felt a crazy, lightheaded desire to laugh.

“Just a test run,” I muttered. “Getting ready for the Pope’s visit.”

They continued to stare, but shortly a platform came into sight, thronged with people. The car halted there in good order and the doors opened.

I stepped out and passed among the others, running a hand through my hair, adjusting my apparel, brushing away dust, before I gave way to tremblings. I had a strong desire then to fling myself onto a nearby bench. But a death-trap had just been sprung, wheel turning upon wheel, rods dancing, delicate balances shifting, all to crush me; and someone or something had reached out and realigned a gear-setting, jogged a balance, reset the final closure in my favor, burying all discomfort beneath the triumph of survival. It would be discourteous to ruin all that by collapsing now. I kept going.