Wildcards

THE LONG, DARK NIGHT OF FORTUNATO

by Lewis Shiner

All he could think about was how beautiful she'd been when she was alive.

"I got to ask you can you identify the remains," the coroner's man said.

"It's her," Fortunato said. "Name?"

"Erika Naylor. Erika with a K."

"Address?"

"Sixteen Park Avenue."

The man whistled. "High class. Next of kin?"

"I don't know. She was from Minneapolis."

"Right. That's where they all come from. You'd think they had a hooker academy there or something."

Fortunato looked up from the long, horrible wound in the girl's throat and let the coroner's man see his eyes. "She wasn't a hooker," he said.

"Sure," the man said, but he took a step backward and looked down at his clipboard. "I'll put down 'model.'" Geisha, Fortunato thought. She had been one of his geishas. Bright, funny, beautiful, a chef and a masseuse and an unlicensed psychologist, imaginative and sensual in bed. She was the third of his girls in the last year to be neatly sliced to pieces.

He stepped out onto the street, knowing how bad he looked. He was six foot four and methedrine thin, and when he slumped his chest seemed to disappear into his spine. Lenore had been waiting for him, huddled in her black fake-fur jacket, even though the sun had finally come out. When she saw him she put him straight into a cab and gave the driver her address on West 19th.

Fortunato stared out the window at the long-haired girls in embroidered denim, at the black-light posters in the store windows, at the bright chalk scrawled over all the sidewalks. It was nearly Easter, two winters past the Summer of Love, but the idea of spring left: him as cold as the morgue's tile floor. Lenore took his hand and squeezed it, and Fortunato leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes.

She was new. One of his girls had rescued her from a Brooklyn pimp named Ballpeen Willie, and Fortunato had paid five thousand dollars for her "contract." It was well known on the street that if Willie had objected, Fortunato would have spent the five thousand to have Willie hit, that being the current market value of a human life.

Willie worked for the Gambione Family and Fortunato had knocked heads with them more than once. Being blackhalf black, anyway-and independent gave Fortunato a feature part in Don Carlo's paranoid fantasies. The only thing Don Carlo hated worse were the jokers.

Fortunato wouldn't have put the killings past the old man except for one thing: he coveted Fortunato's operation too much to tamper with the women themselves.

Lenore came from a hick town in the mountains of Virginia where the old people still talked Elizabethan. Willie had been running her less than a month, not long enough to grind off the edges of her beauty. She had dark red hair to her waist, neon-green eyes, and a small, almost dainty mouth. She never wore anything but black and she believed she was a witch.

When Fortunato had auditioned her he'd been moved by her abandon, her complete absorption in carnality, so much at odds with her cool, sophisticated looks. He'd accepted her for training and she'd been at it now for three weeks, turning only an occasional trick, making the transition from gifted call girl to apprentice geisha that would take at least two years.

She led him up to her apartment and stopped with the key in the lock. "Uh, I hope its not too weird for you." He stood in the doorway while she walked through the room, lighting candles. The windows were heavily draped and he didn't see any appliances except a telephone-no TV, no clocks, not even a toaster. In the barren center of the room she'd painted a huge, five-pointed star surrounded by a circle, right onto the hardwood floor. Behind the sensual smells of incense and musk was the faint sulfurous tang of a chemistry lab.

He locked the front door and followed her into the bedroom. The apartment was thick with sexuality. He could barely move his feet through the heavy, wine-colored carpet; the bed was canopied, with red velvet curtains, and so high off the floor it had stairs leading up to it.

She found a joint in the nightstand, lit it, and handed it to Fortunato. "I'll be back in a second," she said.

He took his clothes off and lay down with his hands behind his head, the joint hanging out of his mouth. He took a lungful of smoke and watched his toes uncurl. The ceiling overhead was deep blue, with constellations dabbed on in phosphorescent yellow-green. Signs of the zodiac, as far as he could tell. Magic and astrology and gurus were very hip right now. People at trendy Village parties were always asking each other what sign they were and talking about karma. For himself, he thought the Aquarian Age was just so much wishful thinking. Nixon was in the White House, kids were getting their asses shot off in Southeast Asia, and he still heard the word "nigger" every day. But he had clients who would love this place.

If the psycho with the knife didn't put him out of business. Lenore knelt beside him on the bed, naked. "You have such beautiful skin." She ran fingertips over his chest, raising gooseflesh. "I've never seen a color like this before." When he didn't answer she said, "Your mother is Japanese, they told me:"

"And my father was a Harlem pimp."

"You're really fucked up about this, aren't you."

"I loved those girls. I love all of you. You're more important to me than money or family or… or anything."

"And?"

He didn't think he had anything else to say until the words started coming out. "I feel so… so goddamned helpless. Some twisted son of a bitch is killing my girls and there's nothing I can do about it."

"Maybe," she said. "Maybe not." Her fingers tangled in his pubic hair. "Sex is power, Fortunato. It's the most powerful thing in the universe. Don't ever forget that."

She took his penis in her mouth, working it gently with her tongue like a piece of candy. It stiffened instantly and Fortunato felt sweat break on his forehead. He put out the joint with a wet fingertip and dropped it over the edge of the bed. His heels skidded on the icy slickness of the sheets and his nose filled with Lenore's perfume. He thought of Erika, dead, and it made him want to fuck Lenore hard and long.

"No," she said, taking his hand from her breast. "You brought me in off the streets, you're teaching me what you know. Now its my turn."

She pushed him down flat on his back, his arms over his head, and ran her black-polished fingernails down the tender skin over his ribs. Then she began to move over his body, touching him with her lips, her breasts, the ends of her hair, until his skin felt hot enough to glow in the dark. Then, finally, she straddled him and took him into her.

Being inside her gave him a rush like a junkie's. He pumped his hips and she leaned into it, taking her weight on her arms, her hair waterfalling around her head. Then, slowly, she lifted her eyes and stared at him.

"I am Shakti," she said. "I am the goddess. I am the power." She smiled when she said it, and instead of sounding crazy it just made him want her even more. Then her voice broke into short, rattling breaths as she came, shuddering, throwing her head back and rocking hard against him. Fortunato tried to turn her over and finish it but she was stronger than he would have believed possible, digging her fingers into his shoulders until he relaxed, then caressing him again with aching slowness.

She came twice more before everything turned red and he knew he couldn't hold back any longer. But she sensed it too, and before he knew what was happening she had pulled away and reached down between his legs, pushing one finger hard into the root of his penis. It was too late to stop and the orgasm took him so hard that it lifted his buttocks completely off the bed. She pushed his chest down with her left hand and held on with her right, cutting off the sperm before it could shoot out, forcing it back inside him.

She's killed me, he thought as he felt liquid fire roar back into his groin, burning all the way through to his spinal cord and then lighting it like a fuse.

"Kundalini," she whispered, her face sweating and intent. "Feel the power."

The spark rocketed up his backbone and exploded in his brain.

Eventually he opened his eyes again. Time had come out of the sprockets of the projector and he saw everything in single, unrelated frames. Lenore had both arms around him. Tears ran out of her eyes and down his chest.

"I was floating," he said, when he finally thought to use his voice. "Up around the ceiling."

"I thought you were dead," Lenore said.

"I could see the two of us. Everything looked like it was made out of light. The room was white, and it seemed like it went on forever. There were lines and ripples everywhere." He felt a little like he'd had too much cocaine, a little like he had his fingers in a socket. "What did you do to me?"

"Tantric yoga. It's supposed to… I don't know. Give you a charge. I never heard of it taking anybody so hard before." She turned her face up to him. "Did you really get out? Out of your body?"

"I guess." He could smell the peppermint shampoo she used on her hair. He took her face in both his hands and kissed her. Her mouth was soft and wet and her tongue flickered against his teeth. He was still diamond-hard and he started to shake with wanting her.

He rolled onto her and she guided him inside where he could feel her burning for him. "Fortunato," she whispered, her lips still so close that they brushed his when they moved,

"if you finish, you'll lose it. You'll be so weak you can barely move. "

"Baby, I don't give a shit. I never wanted anybody this much." He pushed himself up on his forearms so he could see her, his hips thrusting frantically. Every nerve in his body was alive, and he could feel the power surging through them, then slowly drawing back, massing somewhere at the center of his body, ready to roar out of him, to pump him dry, leave him weak, helpless, drained…

He pulled away from her, rolled to the end of the bed, and bent double, clutching his knees. "Jesus!" he screamed. "What the fuck is happening to me?"

She wanted to stay with him, but he sent her to geisha class anyway. He would be here, he promised, when she got home.

The apartment seemed vast and empty without her, and he had a sudden, chilling vision of Lenore alone on the street, with Erika's killer still loose.

No, he told himself. It wouldn't happen again, not this soon.

He found a gaudy oriental robe in her closet and put it on, and then he walked back and forth through the apartment, pacing out the inaudible hum in his nervous system. Finally he stopped in front of the bookcase in the living room.

Kundalini, she'd said. He'd heard the name before and when he saw a book called The Rising Serpent he made the connection. He took it down and started to read.

He read about the Great White Brotherhood of Ultima Thule, located somewhere in Tartary. The lost Book of Dyzan and the vama chara, the lefthand path. The kali yuga, the final, most corrupt of ages, now upon us. "Do whatever you desire, for in this way you please the goddess." Shakti. Semen as the rasa, the juice, of power: the yod. Sodomy that revived the dead. Shape shifters, astral bodies, implanted obsessions leading to suicide. Paracelsus, Aleister Crowley, Mehmet Karagoz, L. Ron Hubbard.

Fortunato's concentration was absolute. He absorbed every word, every diagram, flipped back and forth to make comparisons, to study the illustrations. When he finished he saw that twenty-three minutes had passed since Lenore walked out the door.

The trembling in his chest was fear.

In the middle of the night he reached out to touch Lenore's cheek and his fingers came away wet. "Are you awake?" he said.

She rolled over and huddled tight against him. The warmth of her naked skin electrified and soothed him at the same time, like the taste of expensive whiskey. He combed through her hair with his fingers and kissed her fragrant neck. "What are you crying for?" he said.

"It's stupid," she said. "What?"

"I really believe in that stuff. Magick. The Great Work, Crowley calls it." She pronounced magic with a long a and Crowley with a long o like the bird. "I did the Yoga and learned the Qabalah and the Tarot and the Enochian system. I fasted and did the Bornless Ritual and studied Abramelin. But nothing ever happened."

"What were you trying for?"

"I don't know. A vision. Samadhi. I wanted to see something besides a goddamned Greyhound stop in Virginia where they try to lynch kids for growing out their hair. I wanted out of myself. I wanted what happened to you this afternoon. And it happened to you and you don't even want it."

"I read some of your books tonight," he said. In fact he'd read two dozen of them, nearly half of her collection. "I don't know what's going on, but I don't think it's magic. Not like that guy Crowleys magic. What you did to me set it off, but I think it was something already inside. me."

"You mean that spore thing, don't you? That wild card virus?" She had tensed up involuntarily, just at the mention of it.

"I can't think of anything else it could be."

"There's that Dr. Whatsisname. He could check you out. He could probably even fix you back, if that was what you wanted."

"No," he said. "You don't understand. When I read those books I could feel all those powers they talked about. Like if you were a high diver and you read about some complicated dive you'd never done, but you knew you could do it if you practiced on it. You said I didn't want this, and maybe I didn't, not right at first. But now I do." There was one picture, among the giant sex organs and impossible contortions of a Japanese pillow book: the Tantric magician, forehead swollen with the power of his retained sperm, fingers twisted in mudras of power. He had stared at it until his eyes burned. "Now I want it," he said.

"You've definitely drawn a wild card," the little man said. "An ace, I'd say."

Fortunato had nothing in particular against white people, but he couldn't stand their slang. "Could you put that in plain English?"

"Your genetics have been rewritten by the Takisian virus. Apparently it was dormant in your central nervous system, probably in the spine. The intromission apparently gave you quite a jolt, enough to activate the virus."

"So now what happens?"

"The way I see it, you've got two choices." The little man hopped up onto the examining table across from Fortunato and brushed long red hair back over his ears. He looked like he should be in a rock band or working in a record store. He didn't make a convincing doctor. "I can try to reverse the effects of the virus. No guarantees there-I've got about a thirty-percent success rate. Every once in a while people end up worse than before."

"Or?"

"Or you can learn to live with your power. You wouldn't be alone. I can put you in touch with other people in your situation. "

"Yeah? Like the 'Great and Powerful Turtle'? So I can fly around and pull people out of wrecked cars? I don't think so."

"What you did with your abilities would be up to you."

"What kind of 'abilities' are we talking about?"

"I can't say for sure. It looks like they're still coming on. The EEG shows strong telekinesis. The Kirilian chromatograph shows a very powerful astral body that I expect you can manipulate. "

"Magic, is what you're saying."

"No, not really. But it's a funny thing about the wild card. Sometimes it requires a very specific mechanism to bring it under conscious control. I wouldn't be surprised if you need this Tantric ritual to make it work for you."

Fortunato stood up and peeled a hundred from the roll in his front pocket. "For the clinic," he said.

The little man looked at the money for a long time, and then he stuffed it in his Sgt. Pepper jacket. "Thank you," he said, like it hurt him to get the words out. "Remember what I said. You can call me anytime."

Fortunato nodded and walked out to look at the freaks of Jokertown.

He'd been six years old when Jetboy exploded over Manhattan, had grown up with the fear of the virus, the memory of the ten thousand who'd died on the first day of the new world. His father had been one of them, lying in bed while his skin split open and healed itself over and over again, the whole cycle not taking more than a minute or two. Until one of the cracks opened through his heart, spewing blood all over their Harlem apartment. And even while the old man lay in his coffin, waiting his turn for a two-minute funeral and a mass grave, he kept splitting open and healing, splitting and healing.

The memory never faded, but in time it got pushed aside by newer ones. Gradually Fortunato came to believe that nothing was going to happen to him. For those the virus didn't touch, life went on the way it always had.

He realized early on that he was going to have to make his own way. From listening to his mother complain about American women he came up with the idea of the prostitute as geisha; at age fourteen he brought home a stunning Puerto Rican girl from his high school for his mother to train. That had been the beginning.

He looked up and saw that night had fallen while he'd been walking aimlessly through Jokertown. The grays and pastels had turned to neon, street clothes to paisley and leopard prints. Just ahead of him demonstrators had blocked off the street with a flatbed truck. There were drums and amps and guitars up there and a couple of heavy-duty extension cords running in through the open door of the Chaos Club.

At the moment the stage was empty except for a woman with long red curly hair and an acoustic guitar. A banner behind her read S.N.C.C. Fortunato had no idea what the letters stood for. She had the audience singing along with some folk song or other. They all went through the chorus a couple of times without the guitar, and then she took a bow and they clapped and she got down off the back of the truck.

She wasn't beautiful in the way Lenore was; her nose was a little large, her skin was not that good. She was in the radical uniform of blue jeans and work shirt that didn't do anything for her. But she had an aura of energy he could see without even wanting to.

Women were Fortunato's weakness. He was like a deer in their headlights. Even as low as he felt he couldn't help but stop and look at her, and before he knew it she was standing next to him, shaking a coffee can with a few coins in the bottom.

"Hey, man, how about a donation?"

"Not today," Fortunato said. "I don't have a lot of politics.' "You're black, Nixon's president" and you don't have any politics? Brother, have I got news for you."

"Is all this about being black?" Fortunato didn't see another black face in the crowd.

"No, man, it's about jokers. Whoa, did I strike a nerve or something?" When Fortunato didn't answer she went on anyway. "You know how long the average life expectancy of a joker in 'Nam is? Less than two months. If you take the percentage of jokers in the U.S. population and divide it by the percentage of jokers in 'Nam, you know what you get? You get about a hundred times too many jokers over there. A hundred times, man!"

"Yeah" okay" so what do you want me to do about it?"

"Make a donation. We're going to get lawyers on this and stop it. It's the FBI, man. The FBI and SCARE. It's like McCarthy all over again. They've got lists of all the jokers and they're drafting them on purpose. If they can walk and hold a gun, they're not even getting a real physical" it's off to Saigon. It's genocide" pure and simple."

"Yeah, okay." He dug out a twenty and dropped it in the can.

"You know what I wish?" She hadn't even noticed the size of the bill. "I wish those fucking aces would do something about their own, you know? What would it take for Cyclone, or one of those other assholes" to wipe out those files? Nothing" man, nothing at all, but they're too busy getting headlines." She started to walk away and then she looked in the can. "Hey, thanks, man. You're okay. Listen, here's a flyer. If you want to do some more, call us."

"Sure," Fortunato said. "What's your name?"

"They call me C.C.," she said. "C. C. Ryder."

"Is it the same C. C. as up there?" He pointed to the S.N.C.C. banner.

C.C. shook her head. "You're funny, man" she said" and smiled once and faded into the crowd.

He folded up the flyer and stuck it in his pocket and turned off the Bowery. All the talk about jokers had left him feeling disconnected. Just down the street was a mirror-walled club called the Funhouse, owned by a guy named Desmond who had a trunk instead of a nose. He was one of Fortunato's customers, always wanting a geisha with finer skin or darker hair or a sweeter face than Fortunato could find for him. Fortunato could not stand the thought of seeing him just then.

On the side streets hardly anyone wore masks anymore" and eyes stared back defiantly at him from upside-down faces or heads the size of cantaloupes. Your new brothers and sisters" he told himself. For every ace there were ten of these, lurking in alleys while the lucky ones put on capes and talked their lame jargon and jetted around fighting each other. The aces had the headlines and the talk shows, and the freaks and cripples had Jokertown. Jokertown and the jungles of Vietnam, if C. C.'s story was right.

But the only place Fortunato wanted to be was back in Lenore's apartment, making love to her. And this time he would let go, and if it made him weak it wouldn't matter, and things would go back to the way they always had been.

Except that sooner or later the killer was going to move again. Vietnam was halfway around the world, but the killer was right here, maybe in this very block.

He stopped walking, looked up, and saw that his subconscious had brought him right to the alley where they told him they'd found Erika.

He thought about what C.C. had said. Using power to take care of your own.

When Lenore had jolted him out of his body he'd seen things he'd never seen before, swirls and patterns ou energy that he had no name for. If he could get out again he might see something the cops had missed.

A wino in a long, filthy overcoat started at him. It took Fortunato a second to realize the man had long, floppy, basset ears and a moist, black nose. Fortunato ignored him, shutting his eyes and trying to remember the feeling.

He might as well have been trying to think himself to the moon. He needed Lenore but he was afraid to bring her here. Could he do it at her place, then fly back here? Would he be able to keep it going that long? What would happen to his physical body if he did?

Too many questions. He called her from a pay phone and told her where to meet him.

"Do you have a gun?" he asked. "Yes. Ever since… you know."

"Bring it."

"Fortunato? Are you in trouble?"

"Not yet," he said.

By the time he got back to the alley with Lenore he'd drawn a crowd. They all wore Salvation Army leftovers: baggy pants, ripped and stained flannel shirts, jackets the color of dried grease. One short old woman looked like a wax museum statue that had started to melt. Off to her right was a teenaged boy, standing next to a rack of garbage cans, vibrating. When the vibrations got to a certain pitch the cans would bang together like a spastic cymbal section and the woman would turn on them in a fury and kick at them. The others were less obviously deformed: a man with suckers on the ends of his fingers, a girl whose features had been squared off with ridges of hardened skin.

Lenore held onto Fortunato's arm. "What now?" she whispered.

Fortunato kissed her. She tried to pull away when the audience of freaks started to snicker, but Fortunato was insistent, opening her lips with his tongue, moving his hands over the small of her back, and finally she began to breathe heavily and he felt the power stirring at the base of his spine. He moved his lips down Lenore's shoulder, her long fingernails digging into his neck, and then he raised his eyes until he was looking at the dog-man. He felt the power flow into his eyes and voice and said, quietly, "Go away."

The dog-man turned and walked out of the alley. One at a time he ordered the others away and then he said, "Now," and guided her hand into his trousers. "Do it to me, what you did before." He slid his hands up under her sweater and moved them slowly over her breasts. Her right hand closed over him and her left went around his waist, comforting him with the weight of her S amp;W. 32. He closed his eyes as the heat began to build, letting the brick wall behind him take his weight. In seconds he was ready to come, his astral body bobbling like a loosely held balloon.

And then, like stepping sideways out of a moving car, he slipped free.

Every brick and candy wrapper glistened with clarity. As he concentrated, the rumble of traffic slowed and deepened until it was barely audible.

They'd found Erika in a doorway deep in the alley, severed arms and legs stacked like firewood in her lap, head attached by less than half the thickness of her neck. Fortunato could see the stains of her blood deep within the molecules of the concrete, still glowing faintly with her life essence. The wood of the doorframe still held a trace of her perfume and a single thread of ash-blond hair.

The baritone murmur of the street dropped to a vibration so low that Fortunato could feel the individual wave peaks pass through him. Now he could see the indentation Erika's body had made in the concrete stoop, the infinitesimal trace her shoes had pressed into the asphalt. And beside them the footprints of her killer.

They led from the street to Erika's body and back again, and at the curb they met the imprint of a car. He had no idea what kind of a car it had been, but he could see the tracks it had left, thick and black and fibrous, as if it had been burning rubber the entire way.

He stopped for an instant and looked back at his material body frozen in Lenore's arms. Then he let the tracks of the car pull him out into the street, across to Second Avenue" then south to Delancey. He felt himself gradually weakening, his vision clouding up and the background noises of the city starting to shake the edge of his hearing. He concentrated harder" pulling the last reserves of strength out of his physical body.

The car turned north on the Bowery and paused in front of a shabby gray warehouse. Fortunato bore down on the sidewalk, saw the footprints as they crossed from the car to the building's front door.

He followed them upstairs. He felt as if he'd been tied to a giant elastic band and run to its limit. Each stair took more out of him than the last. Finally the footprints disappeared at the entrance to a loft, and he knew he was finished.

The traffic noise spun up to speed around him and he shot backward the way he'd come" drawn irresistibly home to his body. Blissful, exhausted" as if he'd drained himself in sex, he fell into it like a diver into a pool. Lenore staggered under his sudden dead weight and then he slid down into unconsciousness.

"No," she said, and rolled away from him. "I can't." She had purple circles under her eyes and her body was limp with exhaustion. Fortunato wondered how she'd been able to get him into a taxi and help him up the stairs to her apartment.

"I don't understand," he said.

"You build up a charge, and then sex burns it off. You see? The power, the shakti. Except with tantric magick you absorb the energy back into you. Not just yours, but whatever energy I give up to you."

"So when you come, you give up this shakti." "Right. "

"And you've given me all you have."

"That's right, big guy. I'm all fucked out." Fortunato reached for the phone.

"What are you doing?"

"I know where the killer is," he said, dialing. "If you can't give me the strength to take him, I'll have to get it somewhere else." He didn't like the way it came out but he was too tired right then to care. Tired and something else. His brain hummed with the knowledge of his power, and he felt it changing him, taking control.

The phone rang at the other end and then he heard Miranda answer it. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and turned back to Lenore. "Will you help?"

She closed her eyes and did something with her mouth that was almost a smile. "I guess a hooker should know better than to be jealous."

"Geisha," Fortunato said.

"All right," Lenore said. "I'll show her what to do."

They had a line each of cocaine and some intense Vietnamese pot. Lenore swore it would only help tune them into each other. Miranda, tall, black-haired, lush, the most physically adept of his women, stripped slowly to garter belt, stockings, and a black brassiere so thin he could see the dark ovals of her nipples.

Forty minutes later Lenore had passed out across the foot of the bed. Miranda, her head hanging down over the edge, arms spread in a mock crucifix, shut her eyes. "That's it," she whispered. "I can't come any more. I may never come again." Fortunato pushed himself up onto his knees. He was covered with an even sheen of sweat and he thought he could see a golden light radiating from underneath his skin. He saw himself in the mirror over Lenore's dresser and wasn't alarmed or even surprised when he saw that his forehead had begun to swell with power.

He was ready.

The cab let him off two blocks away on Delancey. He had Lenore's. 32 shoved in the back of his pants for insurance, hidden by his black linen jacket. But if he could, he would do the job with his own hands. Either way, the cops were not going to get a chance to put the killer back on the streets. His eyes wouldn't quite focus and he had to keep his hands in his pockets because he didn't trust them. For some reason he was not afraid at all. He felt fifteen again, like he'd felt when he started making it with the girls his mother trained. For months he'd been afraid to try because of what his mother might say or do; once he gave in he no longer cared.

It was the same now. He was reckless, charged with the dark scent and hot, moist pressure of sex, barely functioning in the real world at all. I'm going to face a killer, he told himself, but they were only words. In his guts he knew he was going to protect his women, and that was all that mattered.

He climbed the stairs to the loft. It was after midnight, but he could hear the stereo blasting the Rolling Stones' "Street-Fighting Man" through the steel door. He pounded on it with the bottoms of his fists.

He swallowed hard and his throat turned cold. The door opened.

On the other side was a boy of seventeen or eighteen, pale, thin, but well-muscled. He had long blond hair and a face that might have been beautiful except for an eruption of pimples around the chin, clumsily hidden with makeup. He wore a yellow shirt with black polka dots and faded denim bellbottoms.

"You want something?" he finally asked.

"To talk to you," Fortunato said. His mouth was dry and his eyes were still not focusing right.

"What about?"

"Erika Naylor." The boy had no reaction. "Never heard of her."

"I think you do."

"You a cop?" Fortunato didn't answer. "Then fuck off." He started to close the door. Fortunato remembered the alley, ordering the jokers away. "No," he said, staring hard into the boy's colorless eyes. "Let me in."

The boy hesitated, looking stunned, but not giving in. Fortunato hit the door with his shoulder, knocking the boy all the way back into the loft and onto the floor.

The room was dark and the music deafening. Fortunato found an overhead light switch and flipped it on, then took an involuntary step back as his brain registered what he saw.

It was Lenore's apartment twisted into perversion, the hip, sexy fashion of occultism taken all the way into torture and murder and rape. As in Lenore's apartment there was a fivepointed star on the floor, but this one was hasty, uneven, scratched into the boards with something sharp and then splattered with blood. Instead of velvet and candles and exotic wood, there was a gray-striped mattress in one corner, a pile of dirty clothes, and a dozen or more Polaroid pictures tacked to the wall with a staplegun.

He knew what he was going to find, but he walked over to the wall anyway. Of the fourteen nude, dismembered women he recognized three. The latest, in the lower righthand corner, was Erika.

He couldn't think with the music blaring at him. He looked around for the record player and saw the blond boy get up onto shaky legs and stumble toward the door. "Stop!"

Fortunato shouted, but without eye contact it didn't mean anything.

Enraged and panicking, Fortunato charged. He caught the boy around the waist and drove him into the bare plasterboard wall.

And then suddenly he was trying to hold on to a raging animal, all knees and fingernails and teeth. Fortunato pulled away instinctively and watched the razor edge of an enormous switchblade flash between them, slicing through his jacket and his shirt and his skin, coming away outlined in red.

I'm going to die, Fortunato thought. The gun was stuck in the back of his pants, too far away to reach before the blade came around again, cutting deeper, sliding all the way in. Killing him.

He looked at the blade. Before he knew what he was doing he was staring hard at it, concentrating, the way he had when he read the books in Lenore's apartment, the way he had in the Jokertown alley.

And time slowed.

He could see not only his own blood on the knife, but the blood of the others, of Erika and all the other women in the photographs, washed away, but still held in the memory of the metal.

He backed away from the insane blond boy, moving with dream slowness through thickened air, but still moving faster than the boy or his knife. He reached behind him, felt the slick grips of the gun under his fingers. The Rolling Stones had slowed to a dirge as he brought the gun around, pointed it at the boy, saw the pale eyes go wide.

Don't kill him, he thought suddenly. Not until you know why. He shifted the barrel until it pointed at the boy's right shoulder, and pulled the trigger.

The noise started as a vibration in Fortunato's hand, accelerated like a rocket, became a roar, a short bang of thunder, and then time was rolling again, the boy rocking back with the impact of the bullet but his eyes not showing it, scooping the knife out of his useless right hand with his left and lurching forward again.

Possessed, Fortunato thought with horror, and shot him through the heart.

Staggering back, Fortunato pulled his shirt open and saw that the long, shallow cut across his chest had already stopped bleeding, would not even need stitches. He slammed the door to the hallway and walked across the room to kick out the plug of the phonograph. And then, in the strangled silence, he turned to face the dead boy.

The power rippled and surged inside him. He could see the blood of the women on the dead boy's hands, see the trail of blood that led from the crude pentagram on the floor, see the tracks where the boy had stood, the shadows where the women had died, and there, faintly, as if it had been somehow erased, the marks left by something else.

Lines of power still lingered inside the pentagram, like heat waves shimmering off a highway in the desert. Fortunato ground his hands into fists, felt cool sweat trickle down his chest. What had really happened here? Had the boy somehow conjured a demon? Or had the boy's madness just been a tool in something vastly larger, something infinitely worse than a few random killings?

The boy could have told him, but the boy was dead. Fortunato went to the door, put his hand on the knob. He closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the cold metal. Think, he told himself.

He wiped his fingerprints off the pistol and threw it next to the body. Let the cops draw their own conclusions. The Polaroids should give them plenty to think about.

He turned to go again, and again he couldn't leave the room.

You have the power, he told himself. Can you walk away from here, knowing you have the power, refusing to use it? Sweat ran down his face and arms.

The power was in the yod, the rasa, the sperm. Incredible power, more than he knew how to control yet. Enough to bring the dead back to life.

No, he thought. I can't do it. Not just because the thought made him sick to his stomach, but because he knew it would change him. It would be the point of no return, the point where he gave up being completely human.

But the power had already changed him. He had already seen things that those without it would never understand. Power corrupts, he'd been told, but now he saw how naive that was. Power enlightens. Power transforms.

He unfastened the dead boy's belt, unzipped the bellbottomed jeans, and pulled them of. The boy had craped and pissed in them when he died, and the smell made Fortunato wince. He threw the jeans in a corner and rolled the dead boy onto his stomach.

I can't do this, Fortunato thought. But he was already hard, and the tears rolled down his face as he knelt between the dead boy's legs.

He came almost immediately. It left him weak, weaker than he'd thought possible. He crawled away, pulling his pants back up, sick and disgusted and exhausted.

The dead boy began to twitch.

Fortunato got to the wall, pulled himself onto his feet. He was dizzy and his head throbbed with pain. He saw something on the floor, something that had fallen out of the dead boy's pants. It was a coin, an eighteenth-century penny, so fresh that it looked reddish in the harsh light of the loft. He put the penny in his pocket in case it meant something later.

"Look at me," he said to the dead boy.

The dead boy's hands clawed at the floor, gouging out bloody splinters. Slowly he pulled himself onto his hands and knees, and then lurched clumsily onto his feet. He turned and looked at Fortunato with empty eyes.

The eyes were horrible. They said that death was nothingness, that even a few seconds of it had been too much. "Talk to me," Fortunato said. Not anger anymore, but the memory of anger, kept him going. "Goddamn your white ass, talk to me. Tell me what this means. Tell me why."

The dead boy stared at Fortunato. For an instant something flickered there, and the dead boy said, "TIAMAT " The word was whispered, but perfectly clear. Then the dead boy smiled. With both hands he reached up to his own throat and ripped it bloodily out through the skin of his neck and then, while Fortunato watched, tore it in half.

Lenore was asleep. Fortunato threw his clothes into the garbage and stood in the shower for thirty minutes, until the hot water ran out. Then he sat by candlelight in Lenore's living room and read.

He found the name TIAMAT in a text on the Sumerian elements of Crowley's magick. The serpent, Leviathan, KUTULU. Monstrous, evil.

He knew beyond question that he had found only a single tentacle of something that defied his comprehension. Eventually he slept.

He woke up to the sound of Lenore closing the latches on her suitcase.

"Don't you see?" she tried to explain. "I'm just like a-a wall outlet that you come home to plug into to recharge. How can I live like that? You got what I always wanted, real power to do real magick. And you lucked into it, without even wanting it. And all the study and practice and work I did all my life doesn't mean shit because I didn't catch some fucking alien virus."

"I love you," Fortunato said. "Don't go."

She told him to keep the books, to keep the apartment too if he wanted. She told him she would write, but he didn't need magick to know she was lying.

And then she was gone.

He slept for two days, and on the third Miranda found him and they made love until he was strong enough to tell her what happened.

"As long as he's dead," Miranda said. "The rest I don't care about."

When she left him that night for her client, he sat in the living room for over an hour, unable to move. Soon, he knew, he would have to start looking for the other being whose traces he'd seen in the dead boy's loft. Even the thought of it paralyzed him with loathing.

Finally he reached for Crowley's Magick and opened it to Chapter V "Sooner or later," Crowley said, "the gentle, natural growth is succeeded by depression-the Dark Night of the Soul, an infinite weariness and detestation of the work."

But eventually would come a "new and superior condition, a condition only rendered possible by the process of death." Fortunato closed the book. Crowley knew, but Crowley was dead. He felt like the last human on a barren rock of a planet.

But he wasn't the last human. He was one of the first of something new, something that had the potential to be better than human.

That woman at the demonstration, C.C. She'd said you should take care of your own. What would it cost him to save hundreds of jokers from dying in the heat and rotting dampness of Vietnam? Not very much. Not very much at all.

He found the flyer in the pocket of his jacket. Slowly, with growing conviction, he dialed the numbers.