Dark Specter

18

I awoke shortly after dawn to find a figure standing beside my bed. My dreams had been unusually vivid and elaborate, and for a moment I thought the intruder was another illusion, an escapee from that nocturnal melodrama. Then it moved, and I saw that it was female, and naked.

The covers were stripped back and I felt flesh touch mine at many points, chill on the surface but brimming with internal warmth. A face was buried in my neck and hands roved over my body. Firm breasts were crushed against my chest, the nipples knotted with cold. My cock, already thick with early morning tumescence, stirred and hardened as wiry pubic hair brushed against the bud.

I was still in that ambiguous state between sleep and waking, where the normal rules and standards do not apply. The woman was shivering, so I hugged her. It must be Andrea, I thought drowsily, come to bring me comfort and news of my son. Then the woman turned and raised herself slightly, looking down at me. The light was dim, seeping in through the cracks in the exterior walls and under the door, but it was enough to reveal my mistake. This was not Andrea. It took another few minutes, by which time we were almost coupled, before I realized who it was.

My erection immediately began to sag. I pulled away, giving myself space, studying the plain, feral face with its high cheekbones and stubby nose. My companion was none other than Ellie, the plump nymphet whose enthusiastic compliance Sam had so brutally vaunted the day before.

“Fuck me,” she whispered imploringly. “Please fuck me.”

It should have been a perfect wet-dream scenario. Maybe it was its very perfection which gave it away, that and the fact that her desperation was evidently not erotic. Certainly she played her part well. She sucked on my lips and her knee pushed in between my legs, and as my traitorous cock stiffened up she grasped it and squeezed so hard I gasped. In any other situation I would have been only too happy to go along and ask questions afterward, but I knew I couldn’t afford that luxury.

“What are you doing here?” I croaked.

“Just fuck me!”

She sounded impatient to get it over. The next thing I knew she was on top of me, her breasts in my face, trying to cram my flaccid cock inside her. We tussled like that for a while, but she was dry, and her clumsy and increasingly frantic attempts to force penetration removed any remaining traces of desire on my part. My prick had collapsed to a little bundle of slack flesh, as though trying to make itself invisible. I rolled her off me and pushed myself up on one elbow, looking down at her.

“You’ve got to fuck me!” she cried with a mixture of petulance and fear. “You’ve got to!”

“You don’t even want to.”

“Just do it!”

She heaved herself up with surprising energy and started wrestling with me again. I pushed her off.

“Cut it out, Ellie!”

“What’s the matter?” she cried in what sounded like real distress. “What am I doing wrong?”

I stroked her hair.

“It’s not you,” I said. “It’s the whole thing that’s wrong. I haven’t even spoken a word to you, and here you are climbing into my bed and trying to rape me. What the hell’s going on?”

She fixed me with a determined stare. Just as she had been trying too hard to be sexy, now she was trying too hard to be adult.

“Sam sent me. I’m supposed to bring you to see him. But first we’ve got to fuck.”

I ran my eyes over the chunky, pubescent body which wore its womanhood like a badly fitting prom dress.

“Why?” I asked.

“I don’t know! You’ve just got to do it! If you don’t, he’ll say it was my fault and he’ll beat me up.”

I looked her in the eyes. There was no doubt that she meant exactly what she said.

“Has he beaten you before?” I asked.

But she was already regretting her candor.

“Listen, you going to fuck me or what?”

I got out of bed.

“Consider it done.”

“But we haven’t done it!”

I started to get dressed.

“So? Who’s to know? Is he going to give you a swab test or something?”

I tossed over a light cotton bathrobe I found lying on the floor, which she must have discarded before I awoke.

“Listen, Ellie, I’ll tell him you fucked me all ends up. I’ll swear you were the best piece of ass I ever had in my life and you made me come ten times in a row. And if he lays a finger on you, you come straight here, OK?”

She pulled on her robe with a sniff of disdain.

“I don’t need nobody to look after me,” she said in a tough little voice. “I can take care of myself just fine.”

Even though she had been acting under orders, I got the distinct impression that Ellie felt resentful that her advances had been spurned. I followed her out into the open spaces of the hall, barely illuminated by the early-morning light. There was no one around. Ellie marched resolutely across the boards to Sam’s door and knocked four times, a little rhythmic figure that sounded like a code.

“Who is it?” said a voice inside.

“Me,” Ellie replied.

“Phil there?”

“Yeah.”

“Anyone else?”

“No.”

There was a loud thump. The door opened a crack and Sam’s ferrety features appeared. He inspected us for a moment with a beady eye, then threw the door open. The automatic rifle in his hands was pointing right at us.

“Come on in,” he snapped. “Close the door after you. Ellie, put the bar on.”

The girl picked up a length of wood from the floor and slipped it into the metal brackets bolted to each side of the door frame. Only then did Sam lower his weapon.

“Hi, Phil,” he said tonelessly. “Did Ellie show you a good time?”

“She sure did! Best wake-up call I ever had.”

Sam smiled coldly. He nodded at Ellie.

“Get in the bedroom.”

She obeyed without a word. Sam laid the rifle down on the sofa and waved me to a chair.

“We’ve got a problem,” he said.

“I kind of figured we might.”

He sat facing me on the sofa.

“We’re going to have to move along a lot faster than I was planning. It’s too bad. It’s way better to let the whole thing grow on you gradually, until you’re not just ready for the truth but hungry for it!”

A look of power took possession of his face for a moment, then faded.

“In my dreams, it was all so different! You were ready, open, desperate! And then we’d have done the whole thing right, with a big hit of acid. The stuff you can get these days is twice as powerful as anything we ever had! It completely rewires your brain, lets you see the truth that’s been staring you in the face all along. But there’s no time, and anyway I need you straight.”

He leaped to his feet.

“Remember I told you Mark’d gone to Friday to find out what happened to Russ and Pat? Well, it turns out the news wasn’t good. They called late last night. They’ll be back soon, Phil, and they won’t be bringing flowers.”

I stood up.

“Look, Sam, I wish you all the best in whatever doctrinal disputes you may be having with your followers, but you’ve got to understand that none of this has a fucking thing to do with me. Just tell me where my kid is, give me the phone and let me call a boat. I’ll be out of here in an hour, and you guys can hash out your exegesis of Blake’s later epics to your hearts’ content.”

He stabbed me with his eyes.

“I gave you Ellie,” he said quietly. “She’s my woman, Phil. No one else around here has had her. I mean, I’m trying to bond here!”

I didn’t say anything. Sam shrugged.

“You want the phone? It’s next door.”

I walked through to the middle room and looked around at the exercise equipment, the pool table, the wall-bars where Andrea said that one of the women had been tortured. Then I saw the twisted mess of plastic on the floor, and the bullet holes in the boards themselves.

“I guess I kind of lost it when Mark called.”

I turned around. Sam was standing in the doorway, the gun in his hands.

“He said a lot of bad stuff about me,” he went on. “A load of insulting bullshit. After a while I’d had enough, so I picked up this baby and …”

He pointed the rifle at the remains of the cellular phone and mouthed a soft explosion.

“Well, that was really smart!” I said. “Now if they do come back and try and make trouble, there’s no way you can call for help.”

“We don’t need help, Phil.”

He went over to the far wall and opened the doors to what I had assumed was a cue rack. Inside were about twenty weapons like the one he was carrying.

“We got the firepower and we got the manpower,” he said. “I spent the whole night working on the other guys. They’re all on deck. That just leaves you, Phil. Come on, let’s get to work.”

He strode back into the other room. I followed, stopping in the doorway.

“First I want to see my son,” I told him.

Sam stretched out on the sofa and yawned massively.

“No problem. I’ll send for him. Sit down.”

I took a seat on the chair facing Sam. He leaned forward intensely.

“Have you ever heard of the Secret of the Templars?” he asked.

My heart sank. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it was certainly something more original than this. One of the guys I worked with at the community college was a conspiracy buff who used to press books on me about supposed secret societies dedicated to concealing the fact that Jesus had survived his execution, married Mary Magdalene and founded a dynasty which had controlled the destiny of the world ever since. He also believed in flying saucers and the prophecies of Nostradamus, and was an avid chess player and computer nerd.

“The Templars,” Sam continued without waiting for an answer, “were the richest and most powerful bunch of motherfuckers in the medieval world, yet they were ruthlessly wiped out to the last man in this like show trial, right? The charges against them didn’t make any sense, but they were tortured into making confessions and then burned. So what was the deal? Lots of people believe that the official charges were just a cover for something too terrible to be mentioned. The truth is that the Templars were the guardians of a secret which they had learned from the Cabalists, who were these Jewish mystics-”

“Sam,” I said, holding up my hand. “Excuse me, but could we skip the history lesson?”

He wasn’t used to being spoken to like that. For a moment he looked at me in a way I had never seen before, and which scared me. Then he shrugged.

“Maybe you’re right. I’ve never done it this way before. It’s kind of hard to know where to start.”

He looked down at the floor for a moment.

“OK, let’s try something more recent. You remember that night at the Commercial Hotel? You remember that baby we were talking about, the one got cooked by its junkie mother? Have you seen what’s been happening in Africa? Sometimes they just cut the kids’ arms and legs off with machetes and let them bleed to death. Sometimes they-”

“I don’t need a catalog of horrors, Sam. Sure, bad stuff happens. So what?”

He seemed to make a deliberate effort to fix me with his eyes.

“So what about God?” he breathed.

I sighed.

“That’s not a problem for me, Sam. I don’t believe in God.”

Sam smiled unpleasantly.

“So what do you believe in? A universe controlled by the laws of the jungle, where species come and go and the individual counts for nothing, and in the end the whole shebang collapses into a black hole? Is that the kind of world you want to live in?”

“I don’t have a choice. But if I did, I’d rather live there than in a world ruled by an omnipotent Deity who lets all these horrors happen.”

Sam leaped to his feet and slapped his hands together.

“You’ve put your finger on it, Phil! How can He permit such things to happen? That’s the whole point.”

“What about David?” I said.

Sam waved impatiently.

“Let’s look at it the other way. Supposing God did use His power to prevent evil, what would happen?”

“We’d all be a hell of a sight better off.”

“Materially, sure! But what about spiritually? If the innocent never suffered and the guilty never prospered, faith would be meaningless. We would be forced to acknowledge God’s existence. It’d be like trying to deny the law of gravity.”

I nodded.

“So you’re saying that baby got boiled alive as exhibit A in an ongoing theological demonstration?”

Sam smiled.

“God is both just and loving, Phil. He’s not into playing sadistic games. Never for a single moment does he permit one of his creatures to suffer.”

I stood up.

“What about when you beat up Ellie?” I demanded. “Are you saying her pain doesn’t really exist? That she’s just pretending to be hurt because she knows it turns you on?”

Sam searched me with his eyes.

“Ellie!”

The far door opened and Ellie walked toward us in her cotton robe.

“What?”

“Did you tell Phil here anything about our bedroom secrets?”

The look of betrayal she shot me was answer enough. Sam grabbed the rifle and jabbed the barrel into her stomach with a swift bayonet-like thrust. Ellie grunted and fell to the floor.

“Stop it!” I shouted.

Sam turned the rifle on me. He smiled lazily …

“I didn’t do that to punish her, Phil. I did it to enlighten you.”

Ellie lay at his feet, clutching her abdomen.

“Initiation usually takes us over a year,” Sam went on. “Sometimes longer. We don’t have that kind of time, so I’m having to come up with some new methods.”

He pointed to the injured girl.

“Tell me what she’s feeling, Phil.”

The rifle was still pointing at me.

“Is she in pain?” Sam asked.

“Of course.”

“How do you know?”

I fought to remain calm, to play this appalling game by the rules Sam had imposed.

“Because I know that if you get hit like that, it hurts.”

“That’s not what I asked, Phil. Sure, you’ve taken hits and they hurt. But how do you know this one hurt her?”

I stared at him blankly.

“You don’t!” he exclaimed. “You can’t! There’s simply no way we can ever know what another person is feeling, or whether they’re feeling anything at all!”

“‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’” I murmured. “‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’”

Sam stepped over Ellie’s prone form, gesturing rhetorically with his free hand.

“Yeah, I remember that class. The professor, what was his name? That old guy in the tweed jacket. Remember how he set fire to his pocket one time, putting his pipe back when it was still lit?”

There was a low moan from the floor behind him. Sam turned and prodded Ellie with his boot.

“Get the kid,” he said. “Bring him back here.”

The girl got to her feet, bent over, still holding her stomach. Sam waved toward the bedroom.

“Come on, Phil.”

I followed. Sam evidently had a point to make, and since he was holding both my son and the gun it seemed best to let him make it. He threw the rifle down on the bed, picked up the binoculars and scanned the scene outside.

“Where were we?” he asked without looking round.

“You were saying that we can never be sure another person really feels pain,” I replied. “But by the same token, we can never be sure they don’t.”

“Wrong!” Sam retorted, whirling round. “That’s the whole basis of the Secret! All the top theologians and philosophers have wrestled with this for thousands of years, but they’ve never come up with the solution! That’s because you can’t get there using mere rational thought. God has fixed it that way, because if the truth ever got out, His plan for the world would be destroyed. But He reveals the Secret to a few people in every age so that it won’t be lost forever. It’s kind of like a covenant.”

I found myself nodding thoughtfully, as though we were discussing steelhead fishing techniques.

“And you’re one of those people?” I prompted.

Sam nodded.

“It all happened that night I dropped that shit on the way back from the bar. Right there in that crummy house in Minneapolis, with you guys snoring your heads off all around. Divine revelation can happen anywhere, I guess, like Jesus being born in a stable. But it wasn’t till I got back from the war that I really saw the significance of the whole thing. Even then I found it hard. I thought I was alone, you see. I thought I was the only person who had ever been granted this terrible vision of the truth. It seemed like a curse which I had to bear on behalf of all mankind.”

He sighed heavily.

“That was before I realized there was a tradition of the Secret stretching back to the beginning of recorded history. It has taken many different forms, but the one which inspired me to start this thing here was the Templars. They had this inner group of twelve Professed Knights who had all been initiated into the Secret. The great task I’ve been entrusted with is to re-create that holy community. I always wanted you to be part of it, Phil, from the very beginning. And now you will.”

He looked out of the window again.

“Let’s go back to the baby that got scalded to death,” he said. “How could God permit such a thing? That’s the question, right? OK, here’s the answer. He didn’t.”

I frowned.

“You mean it never happened?”

Sam leaned forward and fixed me with his intense stare.

“There was never any baby in the first place,” he whispered.

We confronted each other in silence. Sam kept staring at me fixedly, as though trying to will me into acquiescence.

“So what was there?” I asked.

“There was something that looked like a baby and sounded like a baby,” he went on in the same hushed undertone. “Only it wasn’t.”

He relaxed now, pulling back and breaking eye contact, as though the critical moment had passed.

“Think of it as a doll,” he said in his normal voice. “The most advanced doll in the world, a million times more realistic than anything you can buy in the shops. It mimics a baby perfectly, but inside it’s empty. It has no thoughts, no feelings, no capacity for joy or suffering. In a word, no soul.”

I tried to look as if all this made perfect sense, but that there were one or two details I hadn’t quite got straightened out.

“But if we have no way of knowing whether other people have feelings or not, then it’s impossible to distinguish the imitation baby from a real one. So the distinction is meaningless.”

Sam sighed and shook his head.

“You’re still thinking logically, Phil! It’s not just that baby we’re talking about here. It’s also the baby’s junkie mother and the abused wife in the apartment next door and the kid knocked down by a hit-and-run in the street outside and the guy dying of cancer in the hospital across town and the family of ten crushed in an earthquake who called for help for five days before dying. It’s every single victim of evil and injustice and catastrophe in the whole world ever since the beginning of time!”

I wondered if Ellie had brought David yet. Perhaps he was even now just a few yards away from me. But Sam had the gun, and I was increasingly convinced that he might be capable of using it. I had to keep him in play, at least for now. On the other hand, I knew he wouldn’t buy it if I just pretended to go along with everything he said. He had to believe he had convinced me intellectually.

“OK, let’s see if I’ve got this,” I said. “Bad stuff appears to happen, but it may not really, because we have no way of knowing whether the people it happens to are real.”

Sam shook his head vigorously.

“We do know. That’s the whole point!”

“But how? You just got through saying there was no way of telling the difference!”

He made an impatient gesture.

“Listen! If God is love, He won’t let anything bad happen to someone real.”

I shrugged.

“So?”

“So if it does happen to them, it means they can’t be real!”

He stamped his foot on the floor in delight.

“Get it? It’s so simple, so elegant, as only the truth can be!”

His expression suddenly became deadly serious.

“That’s why the Secret can only be revealed to a few chosen individuals. You understand what it means? It means you can do what the fuck you want! You can beat people, shoot them, burn them, torture them, anything at all! Because if God allows you to do it, the victim was never really there in the first place. He was what Blake calls a specter. An emanation, a mere shadow. ‘Why wilt thou give to her a body whose life is but a shade?’ Jerusalem, chapter twelve, verse one.”

He broke off, listening. Then he moved back to the window and reached for the binoculars.

“’Course, this is just the bare theory I’m giving you here,” he said. “To become a full initiate, you have to prove your faith in practice. And I have the feeling you might get the chance real soon.”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

He adjusted the focus of the binoculars.

“Jesus!”

“What is it?”

He handed me the binoculars without a word. I raised them to my eyes. Over the tops of the trees, a wide swath of the ocean inlet was visible, a choppy sullen gray. Then I spotted the boat bouncing through the waves toward the island. It was painted blue with some kind of white marking on the side, and was smaller and trimmer than the one on which I had arrived. The man at the wheel seemed to be wearing some kind of a uniform. As the boat slowed and turned, making for the pier, I was able to distinguish the marks on the hull, large white letters reading POLICE.