“But then how . . . ?”
“I untied it
with my mind
.”
She continued to stare. “That’s impossible.”
“It is not only possible, but it happened, as you can see.”
“The meditation failed. You’re the same.”
“The meditation worked , my dear Constance. I have changed—enormously. Thanks to your insistence that we do this, I have now fully realized the power given to me by the Agozyen. The power of pure thought—of mind over matter. I’ve tapped into an immense reservoir of power, and so can you.” His eyes were glittering, passionate. “This is an extraordinary demonstration of the Agozyen mandala and its ability to transform the human mind and human thought into a tool of colossal power.”
Constance stared at him, a creeping feeling of horror in her heart.
“You wanted to bring me back,” he continued. “You wanted to restore me to my old, conflicted, foolish self. But instead, you brought me forward. You opened the door. And now, my dear Constance, it’s your turn to be freed. Remember our little agreement?”
She couldn’t speak.
“That’s right. It is now your turn to gaze upon the Agozyen.”
Still, she hesitated.
“As you wish.” He rose and grabbed the neck of the canvas sack. “I’m through looking after you.” He moved toward the door, not looking at her, hoisting the sack onto his shoulder.
With a shock, she realized he had no more regard for her than for anyone else. “Wait—” she began.
A scream from beyond the door cut her off. The door flew open and Marya came backing in. Beyond, Constance caught a glimpse of something gray and unevenly textured moving toward them.
Where did that smoke come from? Is the ship on fire?
Pendergast dropped the sack and stared, taking a step backward. Constance was surprised to see a look of shock, even fear, on his face.
It
blocked the door. Marya screamed again, the thing enveloping her, muffling her screams.
As the thing came through the door, it was backlit for a moment by a lamp in the entryway, and with a sense of growing unreality Constance saw a strange, roiling presence deep within the smoke, with two bloodshot eyes, a third one on its forehead—a demonic creature jerking and moving and heaving itself along as if crippled . . . or perhapsdancing . . .
Marya screamed a third time and fell to the floor with a crash of breaking glass, her eyes rolling and jittering in her head, convulsing. The thing was now past her, filling the salon with a damp chill and the stench of rotting fungus, backing Pendergast into a corner—and then it was on him,in him, swallowing him, and he issued a muffled cry of such raw terror, such agonizing despair, that it froze Constance to the marrow.
69
LESEUR STOOD IN THE MIDDLE OF THE CROWDED AUX BRIDGE, staring at the S-band radar image of the approaching ship. It loomed ever larger, a phosphorescent shape expanding dead ahead on the radar screen. The Doppler readout indicated a combined closing speed of thirty-seven knots.
“Two thousand five hundred yards and closing,” said the second officer. LeSeur made a quick mental calculation: two minutes to contact.
He glanced at the more sensitive X-band, but it was awash with sea return and rain scatter. Quietly and quickly, he’d briefed the rest of the officers on his plan. He knew it was at least possible Mason had heard everything he’d said to the captain of theGrenfell : there was no failsafe way to block communications on the main bridge. But either way, once theGrenfell made its move, theBritannia would be hard pressed to respond.
Chief Engineer Halsey came up to his side. “I have the estimates you asked for.” He spoke in a low voice so the others wouldn’t hear.
So it’s that bad,
thought LeSeur. He withdrew Halsey to one side.
“These figures,” said Halsey, “are based on a direct collision with the center of the shoal, which is what we anticipate.”
“Tell me quickly.” “Given the force of that impact, we estimate the death rate at thirty to fifty percent—with almost all the rest seriously injured: broken limbs, contusions, concussions.”
“Understood.”
“With its draft of thirty-three feet, the Britannia will make initial contact with a small shoal some distance from the main portion of the reef. By the time the ship is stopped by the main rocks, it will already be ripped open from stem to stern. All the watertight compartments and bulkheads will be breached. Estimated sinking time is less than three minutes.”
LeSeur swallowed. “Is there a chance it might hang up on the rocks?”
“There’s a steep dropoff. The stern of the ship will pull it off and down—fast.”
“Dear Jesus.”
“Given the extent of injury and death, and the speed with which the Britannia will sink, there won’t be time to institute any procedures for abandoning ship. That means nobody aboard at the time of collision has any chance of survival. That includes”—he hesitated, glancing around—“personnel remaining on the auxiliary bridge.”
“ Fifteen hundred yards and closing,” said the second officer, his eyes fixed on the radar. Sweat was streaming down his face. The aux bridge had gone silent, everyone staring at the looming green blob on the radar scope.
LeSeur had debated whether to issue a general order warning passengers and crew to brace themselves, but he had decided against it. For one thing, using the PA would tip their hand to Mason. But more importantly, if theGrenfell did the job right, the force of the lateral impact across the bow would be mostly absorbed by the enormous mass of theBritannia . It would be a jolt that might startle the passengers, or at worst jar a few off their feet. But he had to take the risk.
“
Twelve hundred yards.
”
70
ROGER MAYLES HEARD RUNNING FOOTSTEPS AND PRESSED HIMSELF into a cul-de-sac on Deck 9. A gaggle of passengers ran by shouting, gesticulating, on God knows what senseless, hysterical mission. In one sweaty hand he clutched a magnetic key that he kneaded and rubbed incessantly, like a worry-stone. With the other, he removed a flask and took a long slug of single-malt whisky—eighteen-year-old Macallan—and slipped it back into his pocket. His eye was already beginning to swell from the blow he’d received during a tussle with a hysterical passenger back in Oscar’s: it felt like someone was pumping air into it, making it tighter and tighter. Blood flecked his white shirt and dinner jacket from a bloody nose that had yet to stop leaking. He must look an absolute fright.
He checked his watch. Thirty minutes to impact, if the information he’d received was correct: and he had every reason to believe it was. He checked again to see if the hall was still clear, then staggered out of the cul-de-sac. He had to avoid passengers at all costs. It wasLord of the Flies time on board theBritannia , every man for himself, and nobody descended into brutish behavior quicker than a bunch of rich assholes.
He made his way carefully down the Deck 9 corridor. Although there was nobody in sight, the distant screams, yells, pleas, and agonized sobbing were omnipresent. He couldn’t believe that the ship’s officers and security had virtually disappeared, leaving hospitality staff like himself at the mercy of these rampaging passengers. He had heard nothing, received no instructions. It was clear there was no plan to deal with a disaster of this scale. The ship was absolute bedlam, with no information to be had, the wildest rumors spreading like a brush fire in high wind.
Mayles slipped down the hall, the key clutched in his palm. It was his ticket out of this madhouse and he was going to spend it right now. He wasn’t going to end up being one of forty-three hundred people ground to mincemeat when the ship ripped its guts open on the Grand Banks’ worst shoal. The lucky ones who survived the impact would live another twenty minutes in the forty-five-degree water before succumbing to hypothermia.
That was one party he wasn’t going to attend, thank you very much.
He took another slug of the whisky and slipped through a door marked by a red exit sign. He ran down a metal staircase, his short legs churning, and paused two landings below to peer into the corridor leading to the half deck where the port lifeboats were housed. While the corridor was again empty, the shouts of frantic, angry passengers were louder on this deck. He couldn’t fathom why they hadn’t launched the boats. He had been part of the lifeboat drills and had ridden on a couple of freefall launches. Those boats were damn near indestructible, dropping into the water while you were safely buckled into a cushioned seat, the ride no rougher than a Disneyland roller-coaster.
As he came around the corner toward the outside half deck, the noise of the crowd increased. Wouldn’t you know it: a bunch of passengers had gathered at the locked lifeboat hatches, pounding and shouting to get in.
There was only one way to the port lifeboats and it was through the crowd. No doubt more frantic passengers had assembled around the starboard lifeboats as well. He advanced, still clutching the key. Maybe no one would recognize him.
“Hey! It’s the cruise director!”
“The cruise director! Hey, you! Mayles!”
The crowd surged toward him. A drunken man, his face afire, grabbed Mayles by the sleeve. “What the hell’s happening? Why aren’t we launching the lifeboats?” He gave his arm a jerk. “Huh? Why not?”
“I don’t know any more than you do!” Mayles cried, his voice high and tense, trying to pull his arm back. “They haven’t told me anything!”
“Bullshit! He’s going to the lifeboats—just like the others did!”
He was seized by another grasping hand and pulled sideways. He heard the cloth of his uniform tear. “Let me through!” Mayles shrilled, struggling forward. “I tell you, I don’t know anything!”
“The hell you don’t!”
“We want the lifeboats! You aren’t going to lock us out this time!” The crowd panicked around him, tugging at him like children fighting over a doll. With a loud rending noise, his sleeve came away from his shirt.
“Let go!” he pleaded.
“You bastards aren’t going to leave us to sink!”
“They already launched the lifeboats, that’s why there’s no crew to be seen!”
“Is that true, you asshole?”
“I’ll let you in,” Mayles cried, terrified, holding up the key, “if you’ll just leave me alone!”
The crowd paused, digesting this. Then: “He said he’d let us in!”
“You heard him!
Let us in!”
The crowd pushed him forward, suddenly expectant, calmer. With a trembling hand Mayles stuck the key in the lock, threw the door open, jumped though, then spun and tried to quickly shut it behind him. It was a futile effort. The crowd poured through, knocking him aside.
He scrambled to his feet. The roar of the sea and the bellowing of the wind hit him full in the face. Great patches of intermittent fog scudded over the waves, but in the gaps Mayles could see black, angry, foaming ocean. Masses of spray swept across the inside deck, immediately soaking him to the skin. He spied Liu and Crowley standing by the launch control panel, along with a man he recognized as a banking executive, staring at the crowd in disbelief. Emily Dahlberg, the meatpacking heiress, was beside them. The knot of passengers rushed toward the first available boat, and Liu and Crowley quickly moved to stop them, along with the banker. The air grew thick with shouting and screaming, and the horrifying sound of fists impacting flesh. Crowley’s radio went skipping and spinning across the deck and out of sight.
Mayles hung back. He knew the drill. He knew how to use these lifeboats, he knew the onboard launch sequence, and he would be damned if he was going to share one with a bunch of crazy passengers. Fighting between the mob and Liu’s group was intensifying, and the passengers seemed to have forgotten about him in their eagerness to get into the nearest boat. He could get away before they even knew what was happening.
Liu’s face was bleeding freely from half a dozen cuts. “Get word to the auxiliary bridge!” he cried to Dahlberg before the angry mob overwhelmed him.
Mayles walked past the violence, toward the far end. As he did so, he casually pressed a couple of buttons on the launch control panel. He’d get in a boat, launch it, and be safe and away. The GPIRB would go off and he’d be picked up by nightfall.
He reached the farthest boat, keyed open the control panel with a trembling hand, and began activating the settings. He watched the crowd at the other end, fighting with the banker and stamping on the now motionless forms of Liu and Crowley. A head turned toward him. Another.
“Hey! He’s going to launch one! The son of a bitch!”
“Wait!” He saw a group of passengers coming toward him.
Mayles jabbed in the rest of the settings and the stern boarding hatch swung open on hydraulic hinges. He rushed for it but the crowd was there before him. He was seized, dragged back.
“Scumbag!”
“There’s enough room for all of us!” he shrilled. “Let go, you morons! One at a time!”
“You last!” An old, wiry geezer with superhuman strength belted him aside and disappeared into the boat, followed by a surging, screaming, bloody mob. Mayles tried to follow but was seized and dragged back.
“Bastard!”
He slipped on the wet deck, fell, and was kicked into the deck rail. Grasping it for support, he pulled himself to his feet. They were not going to keep him out. They were not going to take his boat. He grabbed a man crowding in front of him, slung him down, slipped again; the man rose and charged him, and they struggled in a tight embrace, staggering against the rail. Mayles braced himself with his foot, stepping on the rail to gain leverage, while the crowd surged and fought to get through the narrow hatch.
“You need me!” Mayles cried, struggling. “I know how to operate it!”
He pushed his assailant back and made another lunge for the hatch, but those inside the boat were now fighting to close the door.
“
I know how to operate it!
” he screamed, clawing over the backs of those trying to keep the door open.
And then it happened—with the spastic, abominable acceleration of a nightmare. To his horror he saw the wheel turn, sealing shut the hatch. He grabbed at the wheel, trying to turn it back; there was aclunk as the release hooks opened—and then the lifeboat shot down the ramp, jerking Mayles and half a dozen others forward. He tumbled down the greased metal rails with them, out of control, unable to stop, and—very abruptly—suddenly found himself in a free fall toward the roiling black ocean, somersaulting in slow motion, head over heels.
The last thing he saw before he struck the water was another ship, blowing out of the sea-mist dead ahead of the
Britannia
, coming at them on a collision course.
71
LESEUR STARED OUT THE FORWARD WINDOWS OF THE AUXILIARY bridge. As the wind had increased the rain had lessened, and now the fog was breaking up, allowing occasional views ahead across the storm-tossed seas. He stared so hard he wondered if he was seeing things.
But suddenly there it was: the
Grenfell
, emerging from a pocket of mist, bulbous bows pounding the seas. It was coming straight at them.
As the
Grenfell
appeared, there was a collective intake of breath from the aux bridge.
“
Eight hundred yards.
”
The Grenfell made her move. A sudden boiling of white water along her starboard aft hull marked the reversal of the starboard screw; simultaneously, a jet of white water near the port bow signaled the engagement of the bow thrusters. The red snout of theGrenfell began to swing to starboard as the two ships closed in on each other, the giantBritannia moving much faster than the Canadian vessel.
“Brace yourselves!” LeSeur cried, grabbing the edge of the navigational table.
The maneuver of the Grenfell was almost immediately answered by a roar deep in the belly of the Britannia . Mason had taken the ship off autopilot and was reacting—alarmingly fast. The ship began to vibrate with the rumble of an earthquake, and the deck began to tilt.
“She’s retracting the stabilizers!” LeSeur cried, staring at the control board in disbelief. “And—Jesus—she’s rotated the aft pods ninety degrees to starboard!”
“She can’t do that!” the chief engineer yelled. “She’ll rip the pods right off the hull!”
LeSeur scanned the engine readouts, desperate to understand what Mason was trying to do. “She’s turning theBritannia broadside . . . deliberately . . . so theGrenfell will T-bone us,” he said. A horrifying, vivid split-second image formed in his mind: theBritannia coming about, offering her vulnerable midsection to the ice-hardenedGrenfell . But it wouldn’t be a straight T-bone; theBritannia would not have time to come around that far. It would be even worse than that. TheGrenfell would strike her at a forty-five-degree angle, cutting diagonally through the main block of staterooms and public spaces. It would be a massacre, a slaughter, a butchery.
It was instantly clear to him that Mason had thought through this countermove with great care. It would be as effective as crashing the ship into the Carrion Rocks. Opportunist that she was, the staff captain had seized her chance when she saw it.
“
Grenfell!
” LeSeur cried, breaking radio silence, “back your second screw! Reverse the bow thrusters! She’s turning into you!”
“Roger that,” came the extraordinarily calm voice of the captain.
The
Grenfell
responded immediately, water churning up all around its hull. The ship seemed to hesitate as its bows slowed their ponderous swing and her forward motion decreased.
Underneath them, the screaming, grinding shudder grew as Mason goosed the rotating aft screws to full, 43,000 kilowatts of power deployed at a ninety-degree angle to the ship’s forward motion. An insane maneuver. Without the stabilizers, and aided by a beam sea, theBritannia yawed as it heeled over even farther: five degrees, ten degrees, fifteen degrees from the vertical, far beyond anything envisioned by her engineers in their worst nightmares. The navigational instruments, coffee mugs, and other loose objects on the aux bridge went sliding and crashing to the floor, the men gripping whatever they could get their hands on to keep from following.
“The crazy bitch is putting the deck underwater!” Halsey cried, his feet slipping out from under him.
The vibration increased to a roar as the port side of the liner pressed down into the ocean, the lower main deck pushing below the waterline. The seas mounted, battering the superstructure, rising to the lowest port staterooms and balconies. Faintly, LeSeur could hear sounds of popping glass, the rumble of water rushing into the passenger decks, the dull noises of things crashing and tumbling about. He could only imagine the terror and chaos among the passengers as they and the contents of their staterooms and everything else on the ship tumbled to port.
The entire bridge shook with the violent strain on the engines, the windows rattling, the very frame of the ship groaning in protest. Beyond the forecastle theGrenfell loomed, rapidly approaching; she continued yawing heavily to port, but LeSeur could see that it was too late. TheBritannia , with its astonishing maneuverability, had turned quartering to her,and the patrol ship was going to strike them amidships—2,500 tons meeting 165,000 tons at a combined speed of forty-five miles per hour. She would cut theBritannia diagonally like a pike through a marlin.
He began to pray.
72
EMILY DAHLBERG PAUSED IN THE CORRIDOR LEADING FROM THE port lifeboat deck, catching her breath. Behind her, she could hear the cries and screams of the mob—for a mob it was, and of the most primitive, homicidal kind—mingling with the roar of wind and water through the open hatches. Many other people had had the idea to head for the lifeboat stations, and a steady stream of passengers raced past her in a panic, heedless of her presence.
Dahlberg had seen enough to know that any attempt to use the lifeboats at this speed was sheer suicide. She’d seen it for herself. Now she had been tasked with getting this critical information to the auxiliary bridge. Gavin Bruce and Niles Welch had sacrificed their lives—along with another boat full of passengers—in getting that information, and she was determined to convey it.
She began moving again, trying to orient herself, when a burly man came barreling along the corridor, red-faced and goggle-eyed, crying out, “To the lifeboats!” She tried to dodge but wasn’t fast enough; he clipped her and sent her sprawling to the carpet. By the time she had risen to her feet again, he had vanished from sight.
She leaned against the wall, recovering her breath, keeping back from the stream of panicked people heading for the lifeboat deck. It shocked her how people were prone to the most grotesque displays of selfishness—even, or perhaps especially, the privileged. She hadn’t seen the crew and staff carrying on, shrieking and yelping and running around. She couldn’t help but think of the contrast with the dignified and self-restrained end of the passengers on theTitanic . The world had certainly changed.
When she felt herself again, she continued down the corridor, keeping close to the wall. The auxiliary bridge was at the forward end of the ship, directly below the main bridge—Deck 13 or 14, she recalled. She was currently on Half Deck 7—and that meant she had to ascend.
She continued along the corridor, past deserted cafés and shops, following the signs for the Grand Atrium—from which, she knew, she could better orient herself. Within minutes she had passed through an archway and reached a semicircular railing overlooking the vast hexagonal space. Even at this most extreme of times, she could not help but marvel at it: eight levels high, with glass elevators running up two sides, graced with innumerable little balconies and parapets draped with passionflowers. Grasping the railing, she looked out and down into the Atrium. The sight was shocking. The King’s Arms—the elegant restaurant five levels below—was almost unrecognizable. Cutlery, half-eaten food, trampled flowers, and broken glass were strewn across the floor. Overturned tables, spilling their contents, were scattered everywhere. It looked, she thought, as if a tornado had come through. People were everywhere—some running across the Atrium, others circling aimlessly, still others helping themselves to bottles of wine and liquor. Cries and shouts filtered up toward her.
The glass elevators were still operating, and she headed toward the nearest. But even as she did so, a loud rumble filled the vast space: a growl from deep within the bowels of the ship itself.
And then the Atrium began to tilt.
At first, she assumed it was her imagination. But no: looking up at the great chandelier, she saw it was slanting to one side. As the deep growl grew in intensity, the chandelier began to vibrate, tinkling and jangling crazily. Dahlberg quickly backed into the protection of an archway as pieces of cut crystal began raining down, bouncing like hail among the tables, chairs, and railings.
My God
, she thought.
What’s happening?
The heeling grew more acute and she gripped the brass railing fixed to a pillar at one side of the archway. With a scraping noise, chairs and tables in the restaurant below started sliding to one side, slowly at first, then gathering speed. Moments later, she heard the crashing and breaking of glass as the wall of bottles on the elegant bar at one side of the restaurant came down.
She clung to the railing, unable to take her eyes from the carnage occurring below. Now the great Steinway concert grand in the center of the Atrium began to move, sliding on its casters until it careened headlong into the huge statue of Britannia, which shivered into pieces and fell in a ruin of broken marble.
It was as if the ship were caught in the viselike grip of a giant and, despite the groaning, protesting engines, was being forced onto its side. Dahlberg gripped the railing as the slant grew worse and all manner of things—chairs, vases, tables, linens, glassware, cameras, shoes, purses—came tumbling past her from the balconies above to land in the Atrium with staccato thuds and crashes. Over the din of cries and yells she heard a particularly sharp scream from above; a moment later, a short, thickset woman with frizzy blonde hair and wearing a supervisor’s uniform came hurtling past from an upper balcony, still screaming, and careened into the piano below with a horrifying crash, the ivory keys scattering, the strings popping in a bizarre symphony of high- and low-pitched twangs.
With a squeal of metal, the elevator nearest to her shuddered in its vertical housing, and then—with a popping of glass that ripped through the entire Atrium—the entire tube shattered all at once and began to fall in slow motion like a glittering glass curtain. The wreck of the elevator—now nothing more than a steel frame—was jarred out of its channel and swung loose on its steel cable. She could see two people aboard, clinging to brass bars inside the elevator cage and screaming. As she watched in horror, the elevator frame swung crazily across the vast interior of the Atrium, spinning as it went, then slammed into a row of balconies on the far side. The people inside were thrown into the air, tumbling down, down, to at last be lost in the chaotic jumble of furniture and fixtures now jammed up against the lower wall of the King’s Arms.
Dahlberg gripped the brass rail with all her strength as the floor continued to dip. A new sound suddenly erupted from below, loud as a massive waterfall, accompanied by a rush of cold salty air so strong it nearly blew her off her perch; then white water poured into the lowest level of the Atrium and began boiling up, a vicious surge churning with pulverized furniture, fixtures, and broken bodies. At the same time the huge chandelier above her head finally ripped lose with crack of iron and plaster; the huge glittering mass fell at an angle, crashed into the parapet just opposite her, then cartwheeled down the side of the Atrium, throwing off great masses of glittering crystal like pulverized ice.
The cold, dead smell of the sea filled her nostrils. Slowly—as if from far away—she began to realize that, despite the awful destruction taking place all around her, the ship didn’t appear to be sinking; at least not yet. Instead, it was heeling over and shipping water. The engines continued to roar, the ship continued to surge forward.
Dahlberg collected her thoughts, tried to drown out the sounds of crashing glass, roaring water, and screaming. Much as she wanted to, there was nothing she could do to help anybody here. What she could do,had to do, was inform the bridge that the lifeboats were not an option as long as the ship was moving. She looked around and spied a nearby stairwell. Carefully gripping the rail, she half crawled, half clung her way along it until she reached the stairwell, canted at a crazy angle. Gripping the banister with all her might, she began hauling herself upward, one step at a time, heading for the auxiliary bridge.
73
SPECIAL AGENT PENDERGAST STARED AT THE BIZARRE THING OF MIST and darkness that enveloped him. Simultaneously, he felt the cabin shudder and lean; a deep and powerful vibration hammered up from below. Something violent was happening to the ship. He fell backward, tumbled over an armchair, and slammed into a bookcase. As the ship tilted farther he could hear a sonorous fugue of destruction and despair sounding throughout it: screams and cries, crashing, breaking, the deep thrum of water along the hull. Books came tumbling down around him as the cabin rolled to a desperate angle.
He struck it all from his mind, focusing on the thing—the most bizarre thing. Within the animate smoke, an apparition was faintly visible: rolling red eyes, fanged smile, clawed hands outstretched as it enveloped him, its expression that of need and intense hunger.
Several things flitted almost instantaneously through his mind. He knew what this was, and he knew who had created it, and why. He knew he now faced a fight, not only for his life, but for his very soul. He braced himself mentally as the thing caught him in a clammy embrace, overwhelming his senses with the cloying odor of a damp, rotting cellar, of slippery insects and sagging corpses.
Pendergast abruptly felt calm wash over him—the indifferent, liberating calm he had so recently discovered. He had been taken by surprise; he had little time to prepare; but he could tap into the extraordinary mental powers the Agozyen had set free within his mind and, in so doing, emerge victorious. This contest would be a test for those powers, a baptism by fire.
The thing was trying to enter his mind, probing with damp tendrils of will, of pure desire. He let his mind go blank. He would give it no purchase, nothing to fasten on to. With breathtaking speed, he brought his mind first to the state ofth’an shin gha , the Doorstep to Perfect Emptiness, and thenstong pa nyid —the State of Pure Emptiness. The thing would enter and find the room empty. No—there would not even be a room for it to enter.
Vaguely, he was aware of the entity searching the emptiness, drifting, malevolent, eyes like glowing cigarette tips. It thrashed about, seeking an anchor, like a cat sinking in a bottomless ocean. It was already defeated.
It ceased thrashing—and suddenly, like lightning, it wrapped its greasy tendrils around him, sinking fangs directly into Pendergast’s mind.
A jolt of terrible pain seared through him. He responded immediately with the opposite tack. He would fight fire with fire, create an impassible mental barrier. He’d wall himself off with pure intellectual noise, deafening and impenetrable.
In the dark void, he summoned a hundred of the world’s most important philosophers and set them all to conversation: Parmenides and Descartes, Heraclitus and Kant, Socrates and Nietzsche. At once, dozens upon dozens of arguments sprouted—of nature and consciousness, freedom and pure reason, truth and the divinity of numbers—forming a storm of intellectual noise stretching from horizon to horizon. Scarcely breathing, Pendergast maintained the construct through sheer force of will.
A ripple coursed through the susurrus of dialogues, like a drop of water on the surface of a black pond. As it spread outward, the nearest conversations of the philosophers fell silent. A silent hole formed in the center, like the eye of a storm. Implacably, the smoke ghost drifted through the hole, coming closer.
Instantly, Pendergast dissolved the innumerable debates, drove the men and women from his mind. With great effort, he purged himself of conscious thought once again. If such a purely rational approach would not work, perhaps a more abstract one would.
Quickly, he arrayed in his mind the thousand greatest paintings of the Western tradition. One after another, in chronological order, he allowed them to fill up to the edges the entire frame of his consciousness; he willed their colors, brushstrokes, symbols, hidden meanings, allegories subtle and obvious, to flood his entire consciousness. Duccio’sMaestà; Botticelli’sBirth of Venus; Masaccio’s Trinity; Fabriano’sAdoration ; Van Eyck’sBetrothal of Arnolfini burst again and again upon his mental landscape, drowning all thought with their complexity, their ravishing beauty. He continued through them, faster and faster, until he approached the present, Rousseau and Kandinsky and Marin. Then he went back and started over from the beginning, moving still faster now, until all was a blur of color and shape, each image simultaneously held in his mind in overwhelming complexity, allowing the demon no foothold . . .
The blur of colors wavered, began to melt. The low rough form of the tulpa shouldered its way through the kaleidoscope of images, a sink of darkness, sucking everything in as it grew ever nearer in his mind.
Pendergast watched it approach, frozen like a mouse under the gaze of a cobra. With a huge effort, he tore his thoughts free. He was aware of his heart beating much faster now. He could sense the thing’s ardent appetite for his essence, hissoul . Desire radiated out from the smoke ghost like heat. This awareness sent a prickle of panic through him, little poppings and blisterings at the edges of his consciousness.
It was so much stronger than he had ever imagined. Clearly, anyone without the unique mental armor he now enjoyed would have succumbed to the tulpa immediately, without struggle.
The thing came closer still. With something close to despair, Pendergast fell back into the realm of absolute logic, releasing a torrent of pure mathematics across the increasingly fractured landscape of his mind. The tulpa glided through this defense more quickly than ever.
It remained unaffected by every device he had tried. Perhaps it was, in fact, invincible . . .
And now, quite suddenly, the full extremity of his peril was laid bare. For not only was the thing attacking his mind but his body as well. He could feel his muscles jerking in uncontrollable spasms; feel his heart labor; feel his hands clench and unclench. It was terrible and terrifying, a double possession of mind and physical form. Dissociation from his body, so vital to maintaining the state ofstong pa nyid , grew ever harder to uphold. His limbs fell increasingly under the control of the tulpa; the effort needed to ignore his physical form became increasingly acute.
And then came the moment when it grew impossible. All his carefully constructed defenses, his feints and ploys and stratagems, fell away. And all Pendergast could think about was mere survival.
Now the old family mansion on Dauphine Street rose before him, the memory palace that had always promised refuge in the past. He ran toward it with desperate speed. The yard was crossed in a heartbeat, the front steps taken in a bound. And then he was inside, panting with exertion, fumbling with the locks and door chains.
He turned, back pressed against the doorframe, looking around wildly. The Maison de la Rochenoire was silent and watchful. Ahead, at the end of a long and shadow-haunted hallway, he could see the curve of the grand foyer, with its matchless collections of curiosities and objets d’art, and the double-curved sweep of staircases leading to the second floor. Still farther on, wrapped in gloom, lay the library, its thousands of leather-bound volumes dozing beneath a thin mantle of dust. Normally, this prospect filled him with tranquil pleasure.
Right now, all he felt was the atavistic dread of the hunted.
He raced down the refectory hall, heading toward the foyer, forcing himself not to look over his shoulder. Reaching the foyer, he wheeled around, eyes searching desperately for a place of concealment.
From behind came a shiver of cold, clammy air.
His gaze fell on an arched doorway, little more than a tracery of black against black in the polished woodwork of a far wall. Beyond, he knew, lay the stairway leading down to the basement and—beyond that—to the rambling chambers and catacombs of the mansion’s sub-basement. He knew of literally hundreds of niches, crypts, and hidden passages down there in which he could secret himself.
He moved quickly toward the closed door, then stopped. The thought of cowering in some dark, damp cul-de-sac—waiting, like a cornered rat, for the thing to find him—could not be borne.
With increasing desperation, he raced down the back corridor, through a set of doors and into the kitchens. Here there was a confusing warren of dusty pantries and maids’ ports, and he tore through them, searching for some safe haven. It was fruitless. He whirled around again, gasping for breath. The thing was here, he could feel it—and growing closer all the time.
Without wasting another moment he ran back to the foyer. He hesitated only a second, staring wildly around at the polished wood cabinets, the glittering chandelier, the trompe l’oeil ceiling. There was only one possible bolt-hole, one place he might be safe.
He raced up the curving staircase to the second floor and ran as quickly as he could down the echoing gallery. Reaching an open door halfway down on the left, he leapt through it and slammed the door behind him, turning the lock savagely in the key and throwing the deadbolt.
His room—his own room. Although the mansion had burned long ago, he had nevertheless always been safe here. It was the one place in his memory construct so well defended that nobody—even his own brother, Diogenes—could ever penetrate.
The fire crackled in the grate, and candles guttered on the side tables. The air was perfumed by woodsmoke. He waited, his breathing gradually slowing. Just being back in the warm indirect light had a calming effect on him. His heartbeat decelerated. To think that, not long before, he had sat in this room, meditating with Constance, taking on new and unimagined mental powers. It was ironic, even slightly mortifying. But no matter. Soon—very soon—the danger would pass and he could emerge again. He’d been frightened, badly frightened, and with good reason: the thing that had already enveloped him in the physical world had almost enveloped him in the psychical world as well. He had been mere minutes from having his life, his memories, his soul, everything that defined him as a human being, rent asunder. Butit would not penetrate here. It could not, never, never . . .
All at once he felt that sensation again, close on the back of his neck: a moist, chill breath of clammy air, heavy with the stench of damp earth and rustling, oily insects.
With a cry, he rose to his feet. It was there already , in his room, curling toward him, its red-and-black face contorted into the rictus of a smile, vague gray arms extending out toward him with a gesture that would have been almost tender if it were not for the claws . . .
He fell back and it was on him immediately, violating him in the most horrible fashion, spreading in and down and throughout, sucking, relentlessly sucking, until he felt something deep inside him—some essence so very deep he had never been aware that it lay at the core of his being—begin to swell, slip loose, distort . . . and he realized with a shudder of pure horror there was no hope for him anymore—no hope at all.
Constance clutched the bookshelves, rooted by fear, as Pendergast lay on the living room floor, against the wall, deathly still, haloed in mist. The ship continued to tilt, things crashing around her, the roar of water outside rising as the ship heeled. More than once she had tried to stretch out a hand to him, but she had been unable to keep hold, with the violent slanting of the cabin and the crash of books and objects around her.
Now, as she watched, the bizarre and fearful thing that had covered Pendergast like swamp vapor began to shift and break apart. Hope that had left her heart during the brief, dreadful vigil now suddenly returned: Pendergast had won. The tulpa was vanquished.
But then, with a new thrill of horror, she saw that the tulpa was not dispersing—it was instead sinking
into
Pendergast’s body.
Suddenly, his clothes began to twitch and writhe, as if countless cockroaches were skittering about beneath them. His limbs convulsed, his frame animated as by a foreign presence. His facial muscles spasmed and vellicated. His eyes opened briefly, staring out at nothing, and in that brief silvery window she saw depths of terror and despair as deep as the universe itself.
A foreign presence . . .
Suddenly, Constance was conflicted no longer. She knew what she had to do.
She stood up, forced her way across the room and up the bizarrely slanting staircase, and passed into Pendergast’s bedroom. Ignoring the heeling of the ship, she searched through one drawer after another until her hand closed over his Les Baer .45. She pulled out the weapon, drew back the slide to ensure there was a round in the chamber, then clicked off the safety.
She knew how Pendergast would want to live—and how he would want to die. If she couldn’t help him in any other way, at least she could help him with this.
Weapon in hand, she exited the bedroom and—taking tight hold of the railing—descended the slanting stairs to the living room.
74
LESEUR STARED AT the plated red bow of the Grenfell as the Canadian ship desperately backed its screws, trying to swing itself out of the way of theBritannia even as the great ocean liner yawed into it at flank speed.
The deck of the aux bridge shook as the podded propulsion systems strained under the extreme maneuver forced upon them. LeSeur didn’t even need to glance at the instruments to know it was over: he could extrapolate the trajectories of the two ships merely by staring out the bridge windows. He knew they were each on a course that would bring them together in the worst possible way. Even though the Grenfell ’s headway had fallen off three or four knots while it tried to maneuver, theBritannia was still driving forward at full power with its two fixed screws while the aft pods, rotated ninety degrees, delivered a sideways thrust that was swinging its stern around like a baseball bat toward theGrenfell .
“
My God, my God, my God
. . .” LeSeur heard the chief engineer repeating to himself, a continuous sotto voce prayer, as he stared out the window.
The aux bridge shuddered, tilting at an even crazier angle. The deck warning systems had lit up as the lowest decks shipped water. LeSeur heard a chorus of fresh sounds: the screeching and tearing of plated steel, the machine-gun popping of rivets, the deep groaning of the ship’s immense steel frame.
“My God,”
whispered the engineer again.
A deep boom sounded from below, followed by a violent shimmy, as if the hull of the ship had been rung like a massive bell. The violence of it threw LeSeur to the floor; and as he rose to his knees a second boom rocked the aux bridge, slamming him sideways into the corner of the navigation table and gashing his forehead. A framed photograph of theBritannia ’s launching, with Queen Elizabeth presiding, popped free of its screw mounts and cartwheeled along the floor, shedding pieces of glass, skidding to a halt in front of LeSeur’s face. With a sense of unreality, he stared at the queen’s serene, smiling visage, one white-gloved hand raised to the adoring crowd, and then for a moment he felt a horrible wash of failure—hisfailure. He had failed his queen, his country, everything he stood for and believed in. He had allowed the ship to be taken over by a monster. It was his fault.
He grabbed the edge of the table and pulled himself up, feeling a rivulet of warm blood running down into his eye. With a savage sweep of his hand he wiped it away and tried to recover his senses.
He immediately realized that something significant had just happened to the ship. The deck was righting itself at increasing speed, and theBritannia surged forward, no longer yawing but now moving straight ahead. Fresh alarms sounded.
“What on earth—?” LeSeur said. “Halsey, what’s happening?” Halsey had scrambled to his feet, and he stared at the engine panel, his face blanked out with horror.
But LeSeur didn’t need Halsey to explain. He suddenly understood what had happened: the Britannia had torn off both of its aft rotating pods—essentially, its rudder. TheGrenfell was now almost dead ahead, a few dozen seconds from impact. TheBritannia had stopped swinging into her and was now driving toward her in a straight line.
LeSeur grabbed for the radio.
“Grenfell!”
he cried. “Stop backing and straighten out! We’ve lost steerage!”
The call was unnecessary; LeSeur could already see a massive boiling of water around Grenfell ’s stern as her captain understood implicitly what he had to do. TheGrenfell trimmed itself parallel to the Britannia just as the two ships closed in on each other.
There was a rush of sound as the Grenfell ’s bows passed theBritannia ’s, the ships so close LeSeur could hear the roaring of water, compressed into a wind tunnel formed by the narrow space between the two hulls. There was a loud series of bangs and screeches of metal as the port bridge wing of the Grenfell made contact with a lower deck of theBritannia, trailing vast geysers of sparks—and then, quite suddenly, it was over. The two ships had passed.
A ragged cheer rose up over the alarms on the auxiliary bridge, and LeSeur could make out a corresponding cheer coming over the VHF from the
Grenfell
.
The chief engineer looked over at him, his face bathed in sweat. “Mr. LeSeur, we lost both aft pods, just tore them right off—”
“I know,” LeSeur replied. “And the hull’s breached.” He felt a swell of triumph. “Mr. Halsey, let the aft bilge spaces and compartments six and five flood
.
Seal the bilge bulkheads amidships.”
But Halsey did nothing but stand there.
“Do it!”
LeSeur barked.
“I can’t.”
“Why the hell not?”
Halsey held out his hands. “Not possible. The bulkheads seal automatically.” He pointed at an emergency panel.
“Then
unseal
them! Get a team down there to open the hatches manually!”
“Can’t,” repeated Halsey helplessly. “Not when they’re flooded. There’s no override.”
“God
damn
this automation! What’s the status on the other two pods?”
“Operational. Each delivering full power to the screws. But our speed is down to twenty knots.”
“And with the aft pods gone, she’ll be steering with engine power now.” LeSeur glanced over at the officer of the watch. “ETA Carrion Rocks?”
“At this speed and heading, thirty-five minutes, sir.”
LeSeur stared out the bridge windows at the forecastle of the Britannia , still pounding relentlessly through the seas. Even at twenty knots they were screwed. What were their options? None that he could see.
“I’m giving the order to abandon ship,” he said.
A stillness enveloped the bridge.
“Excuse me, sir—with what?” the chief engineer asked.
“With the lifeboats, of course.”
“You can’t do that!” cried a new voice—a feminine voice.
LeSeur looked over and saw that the female member of Gavin Bruce’s team, Emily Dahlberg, had entered the auxiliary bridge. Her clothes were torn and sopping. He stared at her in surprise.
“You can’t launch the lifeboats,” she said. “Gavin and Niles Welch attempted a test launch—their boat ruptured.”
“Ruptured?” LeSeur repeated. “Where are Liu and Crowley? Why haven’t they reported back?”
“There was a mob on the lifeboat deck,” Dahlberg said, breathing heavily. “Liu and Crowley were attacked. Maybe killed. The passengers launched a second boat. That one burst open when it hit the sea, as well.”
This was greeted by shocked silence.
LeSeur turned to the chief radio officer. “Activate the automatic abandon-ship message.”
“Sir, you heard her!” Kemper spoke up. “Those boats would be no better than floating coffins. Besides, it takes forty-five minutes to load and launch the lifeboats under ideal circumstances. We’ve got thirty. We’ll impact when all the passengers are standing crowded on the half decks—which are open, all steel and struts. It’ll be a massacre. Half of them will go overboard and the rest will be beaten to hell.”
“We’ll get as many on as we can, hold them on the boats until impact, and then launch.”
“The force of the impact may derail the boats. They’ll be jammed up in the half deck and there won’t be any way to launch them. They’ll go down with the ship.”
LeSeur turned to Halsey. “True?”
The man’s face was white. “I believe that is correct, sir.”
“What’s the alternative?”
“We get the passengers into their cabins and have them brace for impact.”
“And then what? The ship’ll go down in five minutes!” “Then we load and launch the lifeboats.”
“But I just heard the impact may
derail
the lifeboats!” LeSeur realized he was hyperventilating. He forced himself to slow down.
“At twenty knots, there’ll be less damage, less of an impact. At least some lifeboats will remain railed and ready to launch. And with less of an impact, maybe we’ll have more time before . . . we sink.”
“Maybe? That’s not good enough.”
“That’s all we’ve got,” said Halsey.
LeSeur wiped the blood out of his eye again and flung it away with a snap of his fingers. He turned again to the chief radio officer. “Send a message over the PA. All passengers are to report to their quarters immediately—no exceptions. They are to don the flotation devices found under their bunks. They are then to get in their berths, feet facing forward, in fetal position, and cushion themselves with pillows and blankets. If they can’t reach their cabins, they are to get into the closest chair they can find and assume a protective position—hands clasped behind the head, head between the knees.”
“Yes, sir.”
“
Immediately
after impact they are all to report to their lifeboat assembly stations, just as in the drills. They are to take absolutely nothing with them but their PFDs. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.” He turned back toward his terminal. A moment later, a siren went off and his voice sounded over the public address system, giving the orders.
LeSeur turned to Emily Dahlberg. “I guess that goes for you, as well. You’d better return to your cabin.”
She looked back at him. After a moment, she nodded.
“And Mrs. Dahlberg? Thank you.”
She left the bridge.
LeSeur watched the hatch close behind her. Next he turned a baleful eye on the CCTV displaying a grainy image of the helm. Mason was still standing there, one hand draped on the wheel, the other lightly resting on the two fore pod throttles, maintaining heading by slight adjustments to the speed of the screws.
LeSeur pushed the transmit button on the internal bridge-to-bridge intercom and leaned into it. “Mason? I know you can hear me.”
No answer.
“Are you
really
going to do this?”
As if in answer, her white hand moved from the throttle to a small covered panel. She flicked off the cover, pulled two levers, then returned to the throttles, pressing both as far forward as they would go. There was a throaty rumble as the engines responded.
“Jesus,” said Halsey, staring at the engine panel. “She’s redlining the gas turbines.”
The ship surged forward. With a sick feeling, LeSeur watched the speed indicator begin to creep up. Twenty-two knots. Twenty-four. Twenty-six.
“How is this possible?” he asked, flabbergasted. “We lost half our propulsion back there!”
“She’s goosing the turbines way beyond their specs,” said Halsey.
“How high can they go?”
“I’m not sure. She’s pushing them past five thousand rpms . . .” He leaned over and touched one of the dials, as if in disbelief. “And now she’s redlining all four Wärtsilä diesels, directing the excess power to the two remaining pods.”
“Is that going to burn them out?”
“Hell, yes. But not soon enough.”
“How long?”
“She could go on like this for . . . thirty, forty minutes.”
LeSeur glanced at the chartplotter. The
Britannia
was back up to almost thirty knots and the Carrion Rocks were twelve nautical miles ahead. “All she needs,” he said slowly, “is twenty-four.”
75
PENDERGAST LAY PROSTRATE IN A SCREAMING NIGHT. HE HAD MADE one final, almost superhuman effort to defend himself, rallying all the newfound intellectual powers the Agozyen had conferred upon him—and exhausting them in the process. It had been no use. The tulpa had sunk into the marrow of his bones, into the deepest core of his mind. He felt a dreadful alienness within himself, like the depersonalization of the worst kind of panic attack. A hostile entity was relentlessly, implacably devouring him . . . and like a man in the paralysis of a nightmare, he was incapable of resistance. It was a psychic agony far worse than the most appalling physical torture.
He withstood it for an endless, indescribable moment. And then, quite suddenly, blessed darkness rushed over him.
How long he lay—unable to think, unable to move—he did not know. And then, out of the darkness, came a voice. A voice he recognized.
“Don’t you think it’s time we spoke?” it said.
Slowly—hesitantly—Pendergast opened his eyes. He found himself in a small, dim space with a low, sloping roof. On one side was a plaster wall, covered with childish treasure maps and scrawled imitations of famous paintings in crayon and pastel; on the other, a latticed doorway. Weak afternoon light trickled through the lattices, revealing dust motes floating lazily in the air and giving the hidden space the otherworldly glow of an undersea grotto. Books by Howard Pyle, Arthur Ransome, and Booth Tarkington lay scattered in the corners. It smelled pleasantly of old wood and floor polish.
Across from him sat his brother, Diogenes Pendergast. His limbs were sunk into deep shadow, but the latticed light revealed the sharp contours of his face. Both his eyes were still hazel . . . as they were before the Event.
This had been their hideout, the tiny room they had fashioned beneath the back stairs in the old house: the one they’d called Plato’s Cave. Its creation was one of the last things they had done together, before the bad times began.
Pendergast stared at his brother. “You’re dead.”
“Dead.” Diogenes rolled the word around, as if tasting it. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. But I’ll always be alive in your mind. And in this house.”
This was most unexpected. Pendergast paused a moment to examine his own sensations. He realized that the dreadful, probing pain of the tulpa was gone, at least for the moment. He felt nothing: not surprise, not even a sense of unreality. He was, he guessed, in some unsuspected, unfathomably deep recess of his own subconscious mind.
“You’re in rather dire straits,” his brother continued. “Perhaps more dire than any I’ve seen you in before. I’m chagrined to admit that, this time, they are not of my devising. And so I ask again: don’t you think it’s time we spoke?”
“I can’t defeat it,” Pendergast said.
“Precisely.”
“And it cannot be killed.”
“True. It will only leave when its mission is done. But that does not mean it cannot be mastered.”
Pendergast hesitated. “What do you mean?”
“You’ve studied the literature. You’ve experienced the teachings. Tulpas are undependable, unreliable things.”
Pendergast did not immediately reply.
“They might be summoned for a particular purpose. But once summoned, they tend to stray, to develop minds of their own. That is one reason they can be so very, very dangerous if used—shall we say?—irresponsibly. That is something you can turn to your advantage.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“Must I spell it out for you,
frater
? I’ve told you: it is possible to bend a tulpa to your will. All you have to do is
change its purpose
.”
“I’m in no condition to change anything. I’ve struggled with it—struggled to the end of my strength—and I’ve been bested.”
Diogenes smirked. “How like you, Aloysius. You’re so used to everything being easy that, at the first sign of difficulty, you throw up your hands like a petulant child.”
“All that makes me unique has been drawn from me like marrow from a bone. There’s nothing left.”
“You’re wrong. Only the outer carapace has been torn away: this supposed superweapon of intellect you’ve recently taken upon yourself. The core of your being remains—at least for now. If it was gone, completely gone, you’d know it—and we wouldn’t be speaking now.”
“What can I do? I can’t struggle any longer.”
“That’s precisely the problem. You’re looking at it the wrong way: as a struggle. Have you forgotten all they taught you?”
For a moment, Pendergast sat staring at his brother, uncomprehending. Then, quite suddenly, he understood.
“The lama,” he breathed.
Diogenes smiled. “Bravo.”
“How . . .” Pendergast stopped, began again. “How do you know these things?”
“You know them, too. For the moment, you were simply too . . .
overwrought
to see them. Now, go forth and sin no more.”
Pendergast glanced away from his brother, toward the stripes of gold light that slanted in through the latticed door. He realized, with a faint surprise, that he was afraid: that the very last thing he wanted to do was step out through that door.
Taking a deep breath, he willed himself to push it open.
Yawning, passionate blackness took him once again. Again came the hungry, enveloping thing: again he felt the dreadful aliennesswithin him, thrusting its way through his thoughts and limbs alike, insinuating itself into his most primitive emotions, a violation more intimate and ravening and insatiable than anything he had ever imagined. He felt utterly, impossibly alone, beyond sympathy or succor—and that, somehow, seemed worse than any pain.
He took one more breath, summoning his last reserves of physical and emotional strength. He knew he would have only one chance; after that, he would be lost forever, consumed utterly.
Emptying his mind as best he could, he put aside the ravening thing and recalled the lama’s own teachings on desire. He imagined himself on a lake, quite saline, precisely at body temperature, of indeterminate color. He imagined himself floating in it, perfectly motionless. Then—and this was hardest of all—he slowly stopped struggling.
Do you fear annihilation?
he asked himself.
A pause.
No.
Do you care about being subsumed into the void?
Another pause.
No.
Are you willing to surrender everything?
Yes.
To give yourself to it utterly?
More quickly now:
Yes.
Then you are ready.
His limbs convulsed in a long shudder, then relaxed. Throughout his mental and physical being—in every muscle, every synapse—he felt the tulpa hesitate. There was a strange, utterly inexpressible moment of stasis. Then, slowly, the thing relaxed its hold.
And as it did so, Pendergast let a new image—single, powerful, inescapable—form in his mind.
As if from far away, he heard his brother speak again:
Vale, frater
.
For a moment, Diogenes became visible again. Then, as quickly as he had come, he began to fade away.
“Wait,” Pendergast said. “Don’t go.”
“But I must.”
“I have to know. Are you really dead?”
Diogenes did not answer.
“Why did you do this? Why did you help me?”
“I didn’t do it for you,” Diogenes replied. “I did it for my child.” And as he faded into the enfolding dark, he gave a small, enigmatic smile.
Constance sat in the wing chair at Pendergast’s feet. A dozen times, she had raised the gun and pointed it at his heart; a dozen times, she had hesitated. She had hardly noticed when the ship righted itself suddenly, when it drove forward again at high speed. For her, the ship had ceased to exist.
She could wait no longer. It was cruel to let him suffer. He had been kind to her; she should respect what, she was certain, would be his wishes. Taking a strong grip on the weapon, she raised it with fresh resolve.
A violent shudder raked Pendergast’s frame. A moment later, his eyes fluttered open.
“Aloysius?” she asked. For a moment, he did not move. Then he gave the faintest of nods.
Suddenly, she became aware of the smoke ghost. It had materialized by the agent’s shoulder. For a moment it was still. Then it drifted first one way, then another, almost like a dog searching for a scent. Shortly, it began to move away.
“Do not interfere,” Pendergast whispered. And for a moment Constance feared the dreadful change was still over him. But then he opened his eyes again and looked at her, and she knew the truth immediately.
“You’ve come back,” she said.
He nodded.
“How?” she whispered.
When he answered, it was in the faintest of voices. “That which I took on when I beheld the Agozyen has been burned away in my struggle. Not unlike the lost wax process in metal casting. All that now remains is the . . . original.”
Weakly, he raised one hand. Without another word, she knelt at his side, grasped it tightly.
“Let me rest,” he whispered. “For two minutes—no more. Then we must go.”
She nodded, glanced at the clock on the mantel. Over her shoulder, the tulpa was gliding away. As she turned to watch, it drifted—slowly, but with implacable purpose—over the still form of the unconscious Marya; through the front door of the suite; and on into mystery.
76
LESEUR STOOD ON THE AUX BRIDGE AND STARED OUT THE WALL OF forward windows. The ship’s bow bulled through the heavy seas at high speed, the hull slamming, green water periodically sweeping the forecastle. The fog was lifting, the rain had almost ceased, and visibility had risen to almost a mile.
Nobody spoke. LeSeur had been racking his mind for a way out. There was none. All they could do was monitor the electronics over which they had no control. The chartplotter showed the Carrion Rocks to be two nautical miles dead ahead. LeSeur felt the sweat and blood trickling down his face, stinging his eyes.
“ETA Carrion Rocks in four minutes,” said the third officer.
The lookout stood at the window, binoculars raised and white-knuckled. LeSeur wondered why the man felt it was so important to see the rocks coming—there was nothing they could do about it. Nothing.
Kemper laid a hand on his shoulder. “Sir, I think you need to issue instructions to the bridge personnel to assume defensive positions for . . . for the upcoming collision.”
LeSeur nodded, a sick feeling in his stomach. He turned and signaled for attention. “Officers and personnel of the bridge,” he said. “I want everyone on the floor, in fetal position, feet facing forward, heads cradled in hands. The collision event will not be a short one. Do not rise until the vessel is clearly DIW.”
The lookout asked, “Me as well, sir?”
“You, too.”
Reluctantly and awkwardly, they lay down on the floor and assumed their defensive positions.
“Sir?” Kemper said to LeSeur. “We can’t afford an injured captain at the critical moment.”
“In a minute.”
LeSeur took one last look at the CCTV trained on the bridge helm. Mason remained calmly at the helm, as if on the most routine of crossings, one hand draped casually over the wheel, the other caressing a lock of hair that had escaped from under her cap.
Out of the corner of his eye he caught something beyond the bridge windows, and shifted his gaze.
Directly ahead and about a mile off, LeSeur could see a light-colored smudge emerge out of the mist, which resolved itself into a ragged line of white below the uncertain horizon. He immediately knew it was the immense groundswell breaking over the outer edges of the Carrion Rocks. He stared in horrified fascination as the line of white resolved into a tearing expanse of combers boiling and erupting over the outer reefs, exploding over the rocks and sending up geysers as tall as small skyscrapers. And behind the churning white water he could see a series of rocky masses looming up like the black, ruined towers of some grim castle of the deep.
In all his years at sea, it was the most terrifying sight he had ever seen.
“Get down, sir!” Kemper cried from his position on the floor.
But LeSeur could not get down. He could not take his eyes off their looming end. Very few human beings had looked into hell itself—and to him, this cauldron of writhing water and jagged rockswas hell, the real hell, far worse than mere fire and brimstone. A cold, black, watery hell.
Who were they kidding? Nobody would survive—nobody.
Please, God, just make it quick.
And then his eye caught a movement on the CCTV. Mason had seen the rocks herself. She was leaning forward, eagerly, as if urging the ship onward by sheer willpower, yearning it on to its watery grave. But then an odd thing happened: she jumped and turned, staring with fright at something offscreen. Then she backed up, away from the wheel, a look of pure terror on her face. Her movement carried her out of the field of the camera, and for a moment nothing happened. Then there was a strange burst of static on the screen, almost like a cloud of smoke, crossing the field of view in the direction Mason had retreated. LeSeur slapped the CCTV, assuming it was a glitch in the video feed. But then his audio headset, tuned to the bridge frequency, transmitted a gut-chilling scream—Mason. She reappeared, staggering forward. The cloud—itwas like smoke—whirled about her and she breathed it in and out, clawing at her chest, her throat. The captain’s hat tumbled off her head and her hair flew out wildly, snapping back and forth. Her limbs moved in strange, herky-jerky spasms, almost as if she were fighting her own body. With a thrill of horror, LeSeur was reminded of a marionette struggling against a controlling puppeteer. Writhing with the same, spastic movements, Mason approached the control panel. Her smoke-shrouded limbs convulsed in fresh struggle. Then LeSeur saw her stretch forth her hand—unwillingly, it seemed—and press a button. The cloud seemed to sink deeper into her, thrusting itself down her throat, while she clawed at the air, arms and legs jerking now in agony. She fell to her knees, hands up in the caricature of prayer; then she sank, shrieking, to the floor, out of sight of the camera’s view.
For a second, LeSeur stood motionless, staring at the screen in surprise and disbelief. Then he grabbed the radio, punched in the frequency for the guards posted outside the bridge. “LeSeur to bridge security, what the hell’s going on up there?”
“I don’t know, sir,” came the reply. “But the Level Three alert’s been lifted. The security locks on the bridge hatch just disengaged.”
“Then what the hell are you waiting for?” he screamed. “Get in there and turn hard aport,
hard aport, you son of a bitch, now, now, now
!”
77
EMILY DAHLBERG HAD LEFT THE AUXILIARY BRIDGE AND, AS ordered, was making her way back to her cabin. The ship was still proceeding at what seemed like full speed. She descended a staircase to Deck 9, walked along a corridor, and emerged again onto a balcony overlooking the highest level of the Grand Atrium.
She paused, shocked at the sight that greeted her eyes. The water had drained away into the lower decks, leaving a tangled wreckage of sodden and broken furniture, wires, seaweed, wood paneling, ripped-up carpet, broken glass, and—here and there—a motionless body. The place stank of seawater.
She knew she had to get to her cabin and brace for the collision. She’d listened to the argument on the auxiliary bridge, heard the announcement over the PA system. But it occurred to her that her cabin, here on Deck 9, might not be a good place to be. It seemed a better place might be on one of the lower weather decks, near the stern, where she would be farthest from the point of impact and could perhaps jump into the sea afterward. It was, of course, a pathetic hope, but at least it seemed a better risk than being trapped in a cabin a hundred and twenty feet above the water.
She ran down a set of stairs, descending another eight levels, then stepped through an archway and began picking her way sternward, through the sodden debris littering the floor of the Grand Atrium. The elegant wallpaper of the King’s Arms restaurant was stained and darkened, with an encircling line of kelp showing the high-water level. She passed the ruined piano, looking away when she noticed one crushed leg protruding heavily from the sound box.
With everyone in their cabins, the ship seemed strangely still, unpopulated and ghostlike. But then she heard a sound nearby—a sobbing—and, turning, noticed a bedraggled boy of perhaps eleven years old, shirtless, soaking wet, crouching amid a scatter of debris. Her heart swelled with pity.
She made her way over to him. “Hello, young man,” she said, trying to keep her tone as light and as even as possible.
He stared at her and she extended a hand. “Come with me. I’ll take you out of here. My name is Emily.” The boy took her hand and she helped him to his feet, then took off her jacket and placed it around his shoulders. He was shaking with terror. She put an arm around him. “Where’s your family?”
“My mum and dad,” he began in an English accent. “I can’t find them.”
“Lean on me. I’ll help you. We don’t have much time.”
He gave one more gulping sob and she hustled him out of the Grand Atrium, past the Regent Street shops—shuttered and deserted—and then along the side corridor leading to the weather deck. She stopped at an emergency station for two sets of life vests, which they put on. Then she led the way over to the hatch.
“Where are we going?” the boy asked.
“Outside, onto the deck. It’ll be safer there.”
Within moments of opening the hatchway and helping the boy step out, she found herself drenched by wind-driven spray. Above, she could see airplanes, circling uselessly. Keeping a tight hold on the boy’s hand, she made her way to the rail, preparing to head aft along the deck. The engines screamed and throbbed, shaking the ship like a terrier shaking a rat.
She turned back, looking at the boy. “Let’s go—” she began. Then the words died in her throat. Over the boy’s shoulder, ahead of theBritannia ’s bow, she could see a line of leaping white surf thrown up against a dead-black row of huge, tooth-like rocks. An involuntary cry escaped her lips. The boy turned and stared. The wall of death was approaching at high speed. There would be no time to reach the stern, no time to do anything but brace for the impact.
The boom of the surf against the rocks reached her, a deep vibration that seemed to thrum through her body. She put her arms around the boy. “Let’s just stay here,” she said breathlessly. “We’ll crouch down against the wall.”
They took shelter against the superstructure, the boy, now crying again, bundled in her arms. A scream sounded from somewhere above her, a forlorn sound like a lost seagull.
If she had to die, at least she would die with dignity, with another human being in her arms. She held the boy’s head against her chest, closed her eyes, and began to pray.
And then the sound of the engine changed. The ship heeled over with a new motion. Her eyes flew open, almost afraid to hope. But it was true—the ship was beginning to turn. Rising, she brought the boy back to the rail, hardly believing her eyes as the booming line of surf edged closer, yet not quite as fast now. As the ship continued to yaw, the steepening groundswell pounded the hull, throwing up sheet after sheet of water, but in between them she could see the black rocks swinging past the bow—turning, turning—and then they were running parallel and the monstrous line of surf passed on the starboard side, the nearest rocks almost close enough to touch as they ran past, the ship’s hull slamming through the steep-walled waves.
And then, suddenly, the last moiling tooth fell aft, the boom of the surf faded, and the ship headed on, noticeably slower now. And over the whine of the engines and the wrack of the surf, she could hear another sound now: the sound of cheers.
“Well,” she said, turning to the boy. “Shall we go find your mum and dad?” And as she walked back to the hatch on shaking legs, Emily Dahlberg allowed herself a small smile of relief.
78
SCOTT BLACKBURN SAT, CROSS-LEGGED, IN THE RUINS OF THE PENShurst Triplex. The stateroom salon was a perfect whirlwind of destruction—rare china, precious crystal, exquisite oil paintings, jade and marble sculptures—now so much bric-a-brac, lying strewn about and piled up against one wall in a tangled, broken heap.
Blackburn was oblivious to it all. Throughout the crisis, he had taken shelter in a closet with his precious, his most prized, hisonly possession, cradling it and protecting it from any harm. And now that the worst had passed and they were headed into port—as he’d always known they would—he had lovingly replaced it on its golden hook in his salon.
His possession—that was wrong. Because, if anything, it possessed
him
.
Pulling the monastic robes more tightly around his athletic frame, he sat on the floor in front of the Agozyen, assuming the lotus position, never once allowing his eyes to drift toward the mandala. He was alone, wonderfully alone—his private maid was gone, perhaps dead, for all he knew—and there would be nobody to disturb his communion with the unending and the infinite. His frame shivered in involuntary pleasure at the mere expectation of what was to come. It was like a drug—the most perfect, ecstatic, liberating drug—and he could never get enough of it.
Soon, the rest of the world would share his need.
He sat quietly, his heartbeat and mental restlessness slowing in turn. Finally, with a deliberation that was both delicious and maddening, he permitted his head to rise and his eyes to gaze upon the infinite wonder and mystery of the Agozyen.
But even as he did so, something intruded on his private world. An inexplicable chill caused his limbs to tremble beneath the silken wraps. He realized that a stench was settling over the room—a smell of fungus and the deep woods, completely overpowering the mellow fragrance of the butter candles. Disquiet chased away his feelings of expectation and desire. It was almost as if . . . but no, that wasn’t possible . . .
In sudden apprehension, he turned to look over his shoulder. And to his transcendental horror and dismay,it was there—not bent on hunting down his enemy, but rather closing in on him with a hunger and desire that was palpable. He quickly rose to his feet but already it was upon him, penetrating him, filling his limbs and his thoughts alike with its burning, all-consuming need. He reared back with a gargling scream, falling over a side table and crashing to the floor, but already he felt his living essence being sucked from him, pulled relentlessly and utterly into a black and unquiet void from which there was no return . . .
Soon, quiet once again settled over the Penshurst Triplex. The guttural cries and sounds of struggle faded into the smoky, salt-heavy air. A minute passed, then two. And then the front door to the suite was opened with a passkey. Special Agent Pendergast stepped inside. He paused in the entryway, taking in the scene of devastation with pale eyes. Then, stepping over the clutter of broken objets d’art with the finicky precision of a cat, he made his way into the salon. Scott Blackburn was sprawled across the carpet, motionless, limbs shrunken and contorted into odd angles, as if bones and sinew and viscera had all been sucked from him, leaving a loose, empty sack of skin. Pendergast gave him only the most cursory of glances.
Stepping over the body, he approached the Agozyen. Taking great care to avert his eyes, he reached out as one might reach toward a poisonous snake. He let the silken shroud fall down over the face of the painting, felt carefully around the edges to ensure that every inch was covered. Then—only then—did he turn to face it, lift it from its golden hook, carefully roll it up, and tuck it under his arm. And then he withdrew silently and swiftly from the suite.
79
PATRICK KEMPER, CHIEF SECURITY OFFICER OF THE BRITANNIA , STOOD on the bridge and watched Cabot Tower, perched on a bluff at the entrance to St. John’s Harbour, glide past. A dull thudding of rotors sounded as yet another medevac chopper took off from the forecastle with a load of severely injured passengers. The medevac flights had been going continuously since the storm abated and the ship had come within chopper range of the coast. The sound of rotors changed timbre as the helicopter rose, temporarily passing through the bridge’s view, swung round, and disappeared overhead. It was like a war zone on the ship—and Kemper felt like a shell-shocked soldier returning from the front.
The great ship passed through the Narrows and continued to slow, its two podded screws grinding and shuddering. LeSeur and the St. John’s harbor pilot struggled to maintain control of the now unwieldy ship: stripped of its rotating propulsion pods, theBritannia had all the maneuverability of the floating carcass of a whale. The only berth at St. John’s able to take the vessel was in the container port, and as two assisting tugboats pushed the ship to starboard the long, rust-streaked platform came into view, surrounded by a cluster of giant container cranes. The berth had been hastily vacated by a VLCC, which was now anchored in the harbor.
As the Britannia continued to turn toward the berth, Kemper saw that the quayside looked like a scene out of a disaster movie. There were dozens of emergency vehicles, ambulances, fire trucks, morgue vans, and police cars ready to receive the dead and injured, a sea of flashing lights and distant sirens.
Kemper was beyond exhausted. His head pounded and his vision was blurry from lack of sleep and nonstop stress. Now that their ordeal was over, he found himself speculating on the grim aftermath: the Maritime Board of Inquiry hearings, the testimonies, the lawsuits, the relentless press, the shame and the blame. For the first order of the day would be assigning blame. He knew well that he, as chief security officer, along with LeSeur—who was one of the most decent men Kemper had ever worked with—would bear the brunt. They would be lucky to escape criminal charges, especially LeSeur. Cutter had survived, and he would be an implacable enemy.
He glanced at LeSeur, who was huddled with the harbor pilot over the ECDIS, and wondered what the first officer was thinking. Did he know what lay ahead? Of course he did—he was no fool.
The Britannia was now moving only under tug power, being eased into its berth. Beyond, above the tower and on the far side of the harbor, he could see the hovering news choppers, kept out of the ship’s airspace but getting in plenty of shots from a distance. No doubt the damaged and limping outline of the Britannia was being broadcast live on millions of television screens at this very moment. It was one of the worst—or at least most bizarre—maritime disasters of recent history.
He swallowed: he better get used to it. This was going to be his life from now on: Patrick Kemper, chief security officer on the maiden voyage of theBritannia . That’s what he would be known as until long after he was dead. It would be his dubious claim to fame.
Forcing these thoughts out of his mind, he focused on the ship’s security screens. At least all systems had been stabilized—which was more than he could say for the vessel itself. He could only imagine what it must look like from the quay: the lower port portholes and balconies bashed in by the sea, the starboard side of Deck 6 peeled open like a sardine can by the bridge wing of theGrenfell . The insides were even worse. As they had limped in toward St. John’s, Kemper had done a security inspection of the lower decks. The sea had punched in through every piece of glass on the port side below Deck 4—portholes, plate-glass windows, and balconies alike—the water ripping through the shops, restaurants, casinos, and corridors with the force of a flash flood, smashing and piling everything up in the corners and leaving behind a mess worthy of a hurricane. The lower decks stank of seawater, old food, and dead bodies. He had been horrified to see how many people had been killed or drowned in the flood, their mangled bodies strewn about or wedged horribly among piles of debris, some even dangling from ceiling fixtures. In all, more than one hundred and fifty passengers and crew had lost their lives and nearly a thousand more had been injured.
The tugs slowly brought the great vessel into position. He could hear, faintly through the bridge windows, the sirens and bullhorns shrieking as the emergency responders geared up to receive the hundreds of injured passengers and crew still on board the ship.
He wiped his face and ran an eye once more down the security systems panels. He needed to focus on the miracle that most of them were still alive—the miracle that had happened on the bridge just before the Carrion Rocks. The miracle he could not explain, and never would be able to explain.
The ship began to creep into place alongside the quay. Great hawsers, used as springlines, were dropped on the quay and manhandled over massive bollards by teams of longshoremen. LeSeur broke away from the vector radar. “Mr. Kemper,” he said, his voice the very quintessence of exhaustion, “we will be docked in ten minutes. Please make the announcement we discussed regarding evacuation procedures.”
Kemper nodded, then keyed up the public address system and spoke into the bridge mike. “ Attention all passengers and crew: the ship will be docking in ten minutes. Seriously injured persons will be evacuated first. Repeat: seriously injured persons will be evacuated first. All others must remain in their staterooms or the Belgravia Theatre and await further instructions. Thank you.”
Kemper could hear his own voice echoing over the PA system on the bridge, and he hardly recognized it. He sounded like a dead man speaking.
80
ALIGHT DRIZZLE OF RAIN FELL FROM THE EARLY MORNING SKY as LeSeur leaned against the teak rail of theBritannia ’s bow, looking back over the enormous vessel. He could see the dark crowds of passengers pressing forward along the decks, and he could hear, drifting up with the rain, their querulous voices as they jockeyed for position before the gangway, every one trying to get off the ship as quickly as possible. Most of the emergency vehicles had left, and now it was time for the uninjured passengers to disembark. Over his shoulder, lined up on the quay, were ranks of buses ready to take people away to area hotels and homes that had been volunteered by Newfoundlanders.
As the deckhands were preparing to remove the gangway rope, the raised voices of the crew on board mingled with the shrill voices of complaint and threat from the passengers. It amazed LeSeur how these people still had the energy to be outraged. They were damned lucky to be alive.
Ropes, construction tape, and movable stanchions had been set up in a jerry-rigged effort to direct and manage the efficient processing of the passengers. At the head of the line he could see Kemper, who appeared to be giving his people the final directions on what to do: each passenger had to be identified and photographed—by orders of the RCMP—and directed to their assigned bus. No exceptions.
They were not going to like it, LeSeur knew. But the corporation had to create some kind of legal record of who had disembarked from the ship if they were ever to sort out the missing from the injured and the healthy. Corporate wanted a photograph, he was told, because they didn’t want healthy passengers later suing for injuries. It was still, even after all that had happened, about money, first, foremost, and last.
The gate over the gangway was lifted and the dark stream of passengers came rolling down, like a ragged line of refugees. And wouldn’t you know it: the first off was a burly man in a filthy tux, shoving his way past the women and children. He came charging down the ramp, yelling, and in the windless air his voice carried all the way to the bow. “God damn it, I want to talk to the man in charge here! I will not be photographed like some criminal!”
He burst through the press of debarkation crew members at the base of the gangway, but the St. John’s stevedores and RCMP officers who had been called in to assist were not to be trifled with. They blocked his way, and when he resisted they slapped cuffs on him and took him aside.
“Get your hands off me!” came the man’s shout. “How dare you! I manage a twenty-five-billion-dollar hedge fund in New York! What is this, Communist Russia?”
He was promptly bustled off to a waiting paddy wagon and shoved inside, yelling all the way. His fate seemed to have a salubrious effect on anyone else thinking of making a scene.
With effort, LeSeur tuned out the voices raised in complaint and outrage. He understood why they were upset and sympathized with them, but the bottom line was that this was the fastest way to get them off the ship. And there was still a serial killer to be found.
Kemper came up alongside him and leaned against the rail, watching the flow of people from a broader vantage point. They shared a moment of exhausted, silent commiseration. There didn’t seem to be anything to say.
LeSeur’s thoughts turned to the board of inquiry hearings that lay ahead. He wondered just how he was going to explain the bizarre . . .thing he had witnessed attack Mason. It had been like a demonic possession. Ever since it happened, he had been going over the sequence of events in his mind—dozens of times—and yet he was no nearer understanding what the hell he had seen than when he first witnessed it. What was he going to say?I saw a ghost possess Captain Mason? Now matter how he couched it, they would think he was being evasive, or that he was crazy—or worse. No, he could never tell the truth about what he saw. Ever. He’d say, instead, that Mason had some kind of fit, an epileptic attack perhaps, and leave out the rest. Let the medical examiners figure out what happened to her limp, deflated body.
He sighed, watching the endless files of people shuffling along in the drizzle. They sure didn’t look so high and mighty now; they looked like refugees.
His thoughts kept returning obsessively to what he’d seen. Maybe he hadn’t seen it at all; maybe it had been a glitch in the CCTV feed. It could have been, in fact, a speck of dust trapped inside the camera, magnified a hundred times, joggled about by the vibration of the ship’s engines. His stress and exhaustion had led him to see something that wasn’t there.
Yes, that was it. That had to be it.
But then he thought of what they’d found on the bridge: the bizarre, sacklike corpse of Captain Mason slumped on the floor, her bones like so much mush . . .
He was shaken from his thoughts by the approach of a familiar figure: a portly man with a walking stick and a white carnation on his spotless lapel. Immediately, LeSeur felt his guts turn to water: it was Ian Elliott, principal director of the North Star Line. No doubt the man had flown here to preside personally over his public keelhauling. At his side, Kemper made a small, strangled sound. LeSeur swallowed—this was going to be even uglier than he’d imagined.
Elliott strode up. “Captain LeSeur?”
LeSeur stiffened. “Sir.”
“I wanted to congratulate you.”
This was so unexpected that, for a moment, LeSeur didn’t understand what he’d heard. Perhaps it was all a hallucination—God knew he was tired enough to be seeing things.
“Sir?” he asked in a very different tone of voice.
“Thanks to your courage, seamanship, and level-headedness, the Britannia is still afloat. I don’t know the whole story yet, but from what I do know, things could have turned out very differently. I wanted to come here and thank you personally.” And he stuck out his hand.
With a sense of unreality, LeSeur shook it.
“I’ll let you get on with the disembarkation. But once all the passengers are off, perhaps you could fill me in on the details.”
“Of course, sir.”
“And then there’s the question of the
Britannia
.”
“Question, sir? I’m not sure I understand.”
“Well, once she’s been repaired and fitted out, she’ll need a new captain—won’t she?” And then, giving him a small smile, Elliott turned and walked away.
It was Kemper who broke the silence. “I don’t frigging believe it,” he murmured.
LeSeur could barely believe it either. Perhaps this was just the spin the North Star public relations people wanted to put on things—to paint them as heroes who saved the lives of over twenty-five hundred passengers. Perhaps not. In any case, he wasn’t going to question it. And he’d be happy to tell Elliott everything that had happened—at least,almost everything . . .
His thoughts were interrupted by the approach of an RCMP officer.
“Which of you is Mr. Kemper?” the man asked.
“I’m Kemper,” the chief of security said.
“There’s a gentleman here from the FBI who wants to speak to you.”
LeSeur watched as a thin man stepped out of the shadows of the superstructure. It was the FBI agent, Pendergast.
“What do you want?” Kemper asked.
Pendergast stepped forward into the light. He was dressed in a black suit and his face was as gaunt and corpselike as anyone coming off the ill-fated ship. Tucked under one arm he carried a long, thin mahogany box. Next to him, linked in the other arm, was a young woman with short dark hair and dead-serious eyes.
“Thank you, Mr. Kemper, for a most interesting voyage.” And with that, Pendergast eased his arm from the woman’s support and slipped a hand into a valise he carried.
Kemper stared at the man in surprise. “There’s no need to tip the ship’s officers,” he said curtly.
“I think you’ll want this tip,” Pendergast replied, extracting an oilskin-wrapped package from the valise. He extended it toward Kemper.
“What’s this?” Kemper asked, taking the package.
The man said nothing more. He merely turned, and then he and the woman melted back into the early-morning shadows, heading toward the moving masses of people.
LeSeur watched as Kemper untied the oilskin.
“Looks like your three hundred thousand pounds,” he said, as Kemper stared in silent astonishment at the soiled bundles of notes.
“Strangest man I ever met,” Kemper said, almost as if speaking to himself.
LeSeur didn’t hear him. He was thinking again of that demon-haunted shroud that had engulfed Captain Mason.
Epilogue
SUMMER HAD FINALLY COME TO THE LLÖLUNG VALLEY. THE Tsangpo River roared over its cobbled bed, fed by melting snows in the great mountains beyond. Flowers mortared the cracks and hollows of the valley floor. Black eagles soared above the cliffs, their high-pitched cries echoing from the great wall of granite at the valley’s head, mingling with the steady roar of the waterplume leaping off its rim and feathering down onto the rocks below. Beyond rose up the three massive peaks, Dhaulagiri, Annapurna, and Manaslu, swathed in eternal glaciers and snow, like three cold and remote kings.
Pendergast and Constance rode side by side up the narrow track, trailing a pack pony on whose back was tied a long box wrapped in a canvas manty.
“We should be there before sunset,” Pendergast said, gazing at the faint trail that wound up the granite face.
They rode on for a while in silence.
“I find it curious,” Pendergast said, “that the West, so advanced in many ways, is still in the dark ages when it comes to understanding the deepest workings of the human mind. The Agozyen is a perfect example of how much more advanced the East is in this area.”
“Do you have any further thoughts on how it might work?”
“As a matter of fact, by coincidence I read an article in the
Times
that might shed some light on it. It was about a recently discovered mathematical object known as E8.”
“E8?”
“E8 was discovered by a team of scientists at MIT. A supercomputer, running for four years, had to solve two hundred billion equations in order to draw an image of it—an admittedly very imperfect image. There was a crude reproduction in the newspaper, and when I saw it I was struck by its resemblance to the Agozyen mandala.”
“What does it look like?”
“It’s quite indescribable, an incredibly complex image of interlocking lines, points, and surfaces, spheres within spheres, occupying nearly two hundred and fifty mathematical dimensions. They say E8 is the most symmetrical object possible. Even more than that, physicists think that E8 may be a representation of the deep inner structure of the universe itself, the actual geometry of space-time. Incredible to think that, a thousand years ago, monks in India somehow discovered this extraordinary image and committed it to a painting.”
“Even so, I don’t understand. How could just looking at something like that alter one’s mind?”
“I’m not sure. The geometry of it somehow lights up the neural networks of the brain. It creates a resonance, if you will. Perhaps on a deep level our brains themselves reflect the fundamental geometry of the universe. The Agozyen is a rare intersection of neurology, mathematics, and mysticism.”
“Extraordinary.”
“There are many things the dull Western mind has yet to appreciate about Eastern philosophy and mysticism. But we’re starting to catch up. Scientists at Harvard, for example, have just begun to study the effect of Tibetan meditative practice on the mind—and to their amazement they discovered that it actually causes permanent physical changes in the brain and body.”
They reached a crossing of the Tsangpo. The river was shallow and broad at the ford, running merrily over a shallow bed of cobbles, the rushing sound of water filling the air. Gingerly their horses stepped into the torrent and picked their way across. They came out on the far side and continued on.
“And the smoke ghost? Is there some kind of scientific explanation for that?”
“There’s a scientific explanation for everything, Constance. There are no such things as miracles or magic—only science we haven’t yet discovered. The smoke ghost was, of course, a tulpa, or ‘thoughtform’—an entity created through an act of intense, focused imagination.”
“The monks taught me some of the tulpa-creation techniques, but they warned me of the danger.”
“It’s extremely dangerous. The phenomenon was first described to the West by the French explorer Alexandra David-Néel. She learned the secrets of creating a tulpa not far from here, near Lake Manosawar. As a lark she tried it out and, it seems, began visualizing a plump, jolly little monk named Friar Tuck. At first, the monk existed only in her mind, but in time he began to take on a life of his own, and she glimpsed him at odd moments, flitting about her camp and frightening her fellow travelers. Things went downhill; she lost control of the monk and it began to morph into something bigger, leaner, and far more sinister. It took on a life of its own—just like our smoke ghost. She tried to destroy it by reabsorbing it into her mind, but the tulpa strenuously resisted and the end result was a psychic battle that almost killed David-Néel. The tulpa on board theBritannia was the creation of our friend Blackburn—and itdid kill him.”
“So he was an adept.”
“Yes. He traveled and studied in Sikkim as a young man. He realized immediately what the Agozyen was, and how it could be used—much to Jordan Ambrose’s misfortune. It was no concidence it ended up with Blackburn; there was nothing at all random in its movements through the world. You might say the Agozyensought Blackburn out, using Ambrose as a medium. Blackburn, with his billions and his dot-com savvy, was in a perfect position to spread the image of the Agozyen across the globe.”
They traveled a moment in silence. “You know,” Constance said, “you never did explain to me how you sent the tulpa after Captain Mason.”
Pendergast did not answer immediately. Clearly, the memory was still extremely painful. At last, he spoke. “When I freed myself from its grasp, I allowed a single image to form in my mind: the Agozyen. In essence, I implanted that image in the tulpa. I gave it a new desire.”
“You changed its prey.”
“Exactly. When the tulpa left us, it sought out the other living beings who had gazed on the Agozyen—and, in the case of Mason, somebody who was, indirectly at least, bent on its destruction. And the tulpa annihilated them both.”
“And then?”
“I have no idea where it went. Things having come full circle, as it were, perhaps it returned to whatever plane it was summoned from. That, or it simply vanished with the death of its creator. It would be interesting to hear the views of the monks on this question.”
“So it was an agent for good in the end.” “One could say that—although I doubt goodness is a concept that it would either understand or care about.”
“Nevertheless, you used it to save the
Britannia
.”
“True. And as a result I feel a little less mortified at having been wrong.”
“Wrong? How?”
“Assuming all the killings were the work of one person—a passenger. In point of fact, Blackburn only killed one person—and he did that on dry land.”
“In the most bizarre of ways. It seems that the Agozyen lifts the lid, as it were, unleashing the most buried of a person’s violent and atavistic impulses.”
“Yes. And that’s what confused me—the similar M.O. I assumed the murders had all been committed by the same person, when I should have understood that there were two different killers under the influence of the same malevolenteffect —the effect of the Agozyen.”
They had reached the base of the trail going up the cliff. Pendergast dismounted and, in a gesture of prayer, placed his hand upon the hugemani stone at the base. Constance followed, and they proceeded up the trail, leading their horses by the reins. At last, they reached the top, passed through the ruined village, and finally came around the shoulder of the mountain, spying the pinnacled roofs, towers, and sloping ramparts of the Gsalrig Chongg monastery. They passed the scree slope covered with weathered bones—the vultures had departed—and arrived at the monastery.
The gate in the outer stone wall opened almost before they had reached it. Two monks met them; one led off the two riding horses while Pendergast unpacked the cargo from the pony. He tucked the box under his arm, and he and Constance followed the monk through the ironbound doors into the monastery’s dark interior, fragrant with sandalwood and smoke. Another monk appeared with a brass candleholder and led them deeper into the monastery.
They came to the room with the golden statue of Padmasambhava, the Tantric Buddha. The monks had already gathered on the stone benches, presided over by the ancient abbot.
Pendergast placed the box on the floor and seated himself on one of the benches. Constance sat next to him.
Tsering rose. “Friend Pendergast and Friend Greene,” he said, “we welcome you back to monastery of Gsalrig Chongg. Please take tea with us.”
Cups of sweet buttered tea were brought out and enjoyed in silence. Then Tsering spoke again.
“What have you brought us?”
“The Agozyen.”
“This is not its box.”
“The original box did not survive.” “And the Agozyen?”
“Inside—in original condition.”
A silence. The ancient abbot spoke, and then Tsering translated. “The abbot would like to know: did anyone look upon it?”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“Five.”
“And where are they now?”
“Four are dead.”
“And the fifth?”
“I was the fifth.”
When this was translated the abbot rose abruptly and stared. He then walked over to Pendergast, grasped him with a bony hand, and pulled him to his feet with astonishing force. He stared into his eyes. Minutes passed in the silent room—and then the abbot finally spoke.
“The abbot say this extraordinary,” Tsering translated. “You burn off the demon. But you remain damaged, because once you experience ecstasy of the pure freedom of evil, you can never forget that joy. We will help you, but we can never make you whole.”
“I’m already aware of that.”
The abbot bowed. He bent down and picked up the box, handing it to another monk, who carried it off.
“You have our eternal thanks, Friend Pendergast,” said Tsering. “You have accomplished great feat—at great cost.”
Pendergast remained standing. “I’m afraid it isn’t quite over yet,” he replied. “You have a thief in your midst. It seems that one of your monks thought the world was ripe for cleansing and arranged for the theft of the Agozyen. We still must find that monk and stop him from doing it again—or the Agozyen will never be safe.”
Once this was translated, the abbot turned and looked at him, his eyebrows slightly raised. There was a hesitation. Then the abbot began to speak. Tsering turned to translate. “The abbot say you are correct, it is not over. It is not the end, but the beginning. He ask me to tell you certain important things. Please, sit down.”
Pendergast seated himself, as did the abbot.
“After you left, we discovered who released Agozyen into world, and why.”
“Who?” “It was the holy lama in the wall. The ancient one.”
“The immured anchorite?”
“Yes. Jordan Ambrose fascinated by this man and speak to him. The lama let Ambrose into inner monastery, talk him into stealing Agozyen. But not to cleanse the world. Lama have other reason.”
“Which was?”
“It is difficult to explain. Before you arrive in spring, his holiness the Ralang Rinpoche die. He is eighteenth incarnation of the Rinpoche who founded this monastery long time ago. We cannot continue as a monastery without our incarnated teacher. And so, when a Rinpoche dies, we must go out into world to find his reincarnation. When we do, we bring child back to the monastery and raise it as next Rinpoche. This has always been our way. When the seventeenth Rinpoche died in 1919 Tibet was free country, and it was still possible to go out and find his reincarnation. But now the eighteenth Rinpoche is dead, and Tibet occupied. Free travel for Tibetan monks is very difficult and dangerous. Chinese arrest Tibetan monks on missions like this, beat them, sometimes kill them. The holy man in wall knows many deep things. He knew of prophecy that say:when we cannot go out and find new Rinpoche, then new Rinpochewill come to Gsalrig Chongg instead. We will know this Rinpoche, because he will fulfill the prophecy written in our founding holy text of the monastery. It say:
When the Agozyen walks the Western Sea,
And darkness upon darkness wheel,
The waters shall rise up in fury,
And batter the great palace of the deep,
And ye shall know the Rinpoche by his guardian,
Who shall return with the Green Tara,
Dancing across the waters of the Western Sea,
From the ruined palace of the deep.
“So to test prophecy, holy man release Agozyen into the world to see who will bring it back. Because man who bring it back is the guardian of the nineteenth Rinpoche.”
Pendergast felt an emotion rare to him: utter surprise.
“Yes, friend Pendergast, you have brought the nineteenth Rinpoche to us.” Tsering looked at Pendergast with a slightly amused expression. And then he focused a pointed gaze on Constance.
She rose. “The guardian of the . . . excuse me, are you saying
I’m
the reincarnation of the Rinpoche? But that’s absurd—I was born long before he died.”
The monk’s smile deepened. “I do not speak of you. I speak of the child you carry.”
Pendergast’s surprise redoubled. He turned toward Constance, who was looking at the monk, an unreadable expression on her face.
“Child?” Pendergast said. “But you went to the Feversham Clinic. I thought—I assumed . . .”
“Yes,” Constance replied. “I went to the clinic. But once there, I found I couldn’t go through with it. Not even . . . knowing it was
his
.”
It was Tsering who broke the silence that followed. “There is an ancient prayer. It say:
Lead me into all misfortune. Only by that path can I transform the negative into the positive.
”
Constance nodded, one hand drifting unconsciously across the slight swell of her waist. And then she smiled: a smile that seemed half secretive, and half shy.
A Word From The Authors
The Preston
-
Child Novels
We are very frequently asked in what order, if any, our books should be read.
The question is most applicable to the novels that feature Special Agent Pendergast. Although most of our novels are written to be stand-alone stories, very few have turned out to be set in discrete worlds. Quite the opposite: it seems the more novels we write together, the more “bleed-through” occurs between the characters and events that comprise them all. Characters from one book will appear in a later one, for example, or events in one novel could spill into a subsequent one. In short, we have slowly been building up a universe in which all the characters in our novels, and the experiences they have, take place and overlap.
Reading the novels in a particular order, however, is rarely necessary. We have worked hard to make almost all of our books into stories that can be enjoyed without reading any of the others, with a few exceptions.
Here, then, is our own breakdown of our books.
The Pendergast Novels
Relic
was our first novel, and the first to feature Agent Pendergast, and as such has no antecedents.
Reliquary
is the sequel to
Relic
.
The Cabinet of Curiosities
is our next Pendergast novel, and it stands completely on its own.
Still Life with Crows
is next. It is also a self-contained story (although people curious about Constance Greene will find a little more information here, as well as in
The Cabinet of Curiosities
).
Brimstone
is next, and it is the first novel in what we informally call the Diogenes trilogy. Although it is also self-contained, it does pick up some threads begun in
The Cabinet of Curiosities
.
Dance of Death
is the middle novel of the Diogenes trilogy. While it can be read as a stand-alone book, readers may wish to read
Brimstone
before
Dance of Death
.
The Book of the Dead
is the culminating novel in the Diogenes trilogy. For greatest enjoyment, the reader should read at least
Dance of Death
first.
The Wheel of Darkness
, which you presently hold in your hands, is a stand-alone novel that continues to follow Pendergast and takes place after the events in
The Book of the Dead
.
The Non-Pendergast Novels
We have also written a number of self-contained tales of adventure that do not feature Special Agent Pendergast. They are, by date of publication,Mount Dragon, Riptide, Thunderhead , andThe Ice Limit.
Thunderhead
introduces the archaeologist Nora Kelly, who appears in most of the later Pendergast novels.
The Ice Limit
introduces Eli Glinn, who appears in
Dance of Death
and
The Book of the Dead
.
In closing, we want to assure our readers that this note is not intended as some kind of onerous syllabus, but rather as an answer to the questionIn what order should I read your novels? We feel extraordinarily fortunate that there are people like you who enjoy reading our novels as much as we enjoy writing them.
With our best wishes,
Copyright © 2007 by Splendide Mendax, Inc. and Lincoln Child
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Warner Books
Hachette Book Group USA
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our Web site at
www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com
.
First eBook Edition: August 2007
ISBN: 0-446-19906-0
1. Pendergast, Aloysius (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Government investigators—Fiction.
3. Americans—Himalaya Mountains—Fiction. 4. Archaeological thefts—Fiction. 5. Monks—
Fiction. 6.
Britannia
(Ship)—Fiction. 7. Ocean liners—Fiction. I. Child, Lincoln. II. Title.
Contents
Acknowledgments
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Epilogue A Word From The Authors
About this Title
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