Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter

The descent into Atlanta was bumpy, the landing hard. It was pouring with rain, sheets of it falling from a sky the color of mud. They exited the plane, passing through an intermediate zone of clammy air before the air-conditioning took over. It was like walking through a hot shower. Among the crowd at the gate was a tubby black man with glasses and a mustache holding a piece of cardboard with Kristine’s name written on it in pink marker.

“Were you sent to pick me up?” she asked him.

“You Miss Kjarstad?”

He pronounced it perfectly.

“That’s right.”

“I figured you far taller, more intense,” the man went on with a broad smile. “The Nike type. Charlie told me about that. He was very impressed, you knowing Greek and all.”

She recognized the voice now. He had called her the day before to make final arrangements for her visit.

“You’re Lamont Wingate, right?”

The man stuck out his hand.

“Pleased to meet you.”

Kristine turned to introduce her companion.

“This is Detective Eileen McCann of the Evanston City Police. She also has an interest in this case.”

Lamont Wingate shook Eileen’s hand too.

“It’s my pleasure to welcome you to Georgia, ladies.”

“But I thought we arranged to meet at the hospital,” Kristine said. “There was no need to come all the way out here to the airport.”

Lamont Wingate suddenly looked serious.

“Yeah, well, there’s been a change of plan, you see. I’ve been trying to reach you all day. If I’d known you were in Evanston, I’d have called there. The thing is, I’m afraid you’ve made a wasted trip.”

Kristine felt her stomach contract painfully.

“What do you mean?”

“That guy you came to talk to? He’s dead.”

“No!”

It was a shriek. Eileen McCann put her hand on Kristine’s arm.

“You mean he had a relapse?” she demanded.

Lamont Wingate shook his head.

“Did it hisself. Called the night nurse as she passed on her way back from tending to another patient and asked her for a drink. She went off to get it, he lifted a hypodermic needle off her cart. Time they found him, it was too late. ‘Exsanguinated,’ they called it at the hospital. Found an artery and stuck the needle right in there. Blood pressure does the rest. The mattress was soaked right through.”

He shook his head sadly.

“I sure am sorry you ladies had to come all this way for nothing.”

As the boat slowed and turned, making for the pier, I was able to distinguish the marks on the hull, large white letters reading POLICE. I almost broke out laughing.

“Well, Sam, looks like the cops have decided to pay you a visit anyway!”

I set down the binoculars and turned to relish my moment of triumph. Then I saw the rifle lying on the bed, and remembered the doctrine that Sam had taught his followers, the Secret that gave them the power of life and death over everyone else. I suddenly had visions of a violent clash with the law followed by a long siege with an uncertain ending. The essential elements were all in place: a tightly knit group of people in the grip of mass psychosis who believed themselves to be chosen and protected by God, and who had access to an arsenal of automatic weapons.

Sam had been staring at me all this while, biting his thumb compulsively. Maybe he sensed what I was thinking, because at the same moment I dived at the bed and grabbed the rifle, be burled himself at me and almost knocked it out of my hands. But I managed to hang on, twisted around and freed myself enough to smash the butt down on his head. He let go and sank to the floor with a moan.

I backed away, pointing the gun at him.

“OK, Sam, you want to test your little theory? Go right ahead! Let’s see if God miraculously stops the bullet in midair before it has a chance to blow your fucking brains all over the wall! Or maybe it’ll just bounce off you. What do you think?”

I was hysterical with rage and loathing. I wanted to riddle him with bullets, blow him away, demonstrate once and for all the reality of my existence by annihilating his.

“I guess I was wrong,” Sam murmured, sitting up. His head was bleeding, I noted with pleasure.

“I guess you were! Hey, looks like I cut your scalp open when I hit you back there. Tell me, is your pain real? You see, I have no way of knowing. Maybe you’re one of those specters you were talking about, just a piece of scenery in the great cosmic farce!”

“First Dale, then Russ and Pat, Mark and Rick. And now you, Phil. I was wrong about all of you. I’ve been wrong all along. Maybe there is no one else. Maybe I am alone.”

Bursts of gunfire resounded in the distance, one-two-three, one-two, one-two-three-four. Sam crawled to his feet.

“Hold it!” I told him.

He didn’t pay any attention. Throwing a quick glance out of the window, he ran from the room.

“Stop or I’ll shoot!”

But I didn’t. Despite my fantasies of blasting him away, when the moment came I couldn’t pull the trigger. Then I remembered the rack of guns next door, and ran after him. But Sam rushed straight on through and out into the hall. His footsteps hammered briefly over the wooden boards, then fell silent.

I had no idea what he intended to do, but my priority was to contact the police. I was so intent on this that I didn’t notice the diminutive figure in the doorway of the last room until we collided. The child went sprawling. I barked an apology, and then time stopped as I realized that he was my child, my son, David.

He recovered before I did.

“Hi, Dad,” he said.

He seemed more shy than surprised to see me.

“What’s that?” he asked, pointing at the gun I was carrying.

I whispered his name, my eyes filling with tears. I could see at once it scared him. Here he’d been for so long, trying to pretend that everything was all right when he knew it wasn’t, and now the person he’d always counted on to make it right was falling to pieces in front of him.

“Hi, guy,” I said casually, drying my eyes and giving him a hug. “How’ve you been?”

“OK. Is Mom here?”

I should have expected this, but it threw me. I could only shake my head.

“Where is she?”

It was only then that I noticed Ellie, stretched out on the sofa with an air of petulant abandon.

“She’s not here,” I said to David. “Look, we’ve got to-”

The sound of gunfire filled the air again, a long burst followed by several single shots.

“Fuck’s going on?” grumbled Ellie, gathering her robe around her.

I took David’s hand and led him outside. It sounded as if the situation down at the waterfront was deteriorating rapidly. If the police had come under fire, they couldn’t be expected to care too much about any given individual’s exact role in the island community. The last thing we needed was to get caught up in a firefight between Sam’s latter-day Templars and a SWAT team who saw everyone on the island as a potential cop-killer.

The scene outside was one of frantic confusion. Everyone there had heard the shots, and they were milling about in the yard in front of the hall, waiting for someone to tell them what to do. Maybe I could have swung them behind me if I’d had the right speech ready, told them that Sam was the false Messiah and that I had come to bring them the truth. They might have believed me, or at least enough of them to influence the outcome.

As it was, I just said, “The police are here. Sam’s gone to talk to them.”

They stared at me with a kind of mute horror, as though they had just been addressed by a domestic animal. I was a nonperson for them, I remembered, a mere mock-up of a human being. The sounds I made were of no more significance than the cries of the gulls overhead. Gripping David’s hand, I started to push my way through them. At first the crowd melted away as we approached. Then I saw the lean blond standing in our way.

“Hi, ’Lissa,” said David.

“Leave the boy,” she told me.

She sounded mean and determined. The crowd started to close in around us.

“You’re going to have to take him,” I said, raising the gun. “And it won’t be so easy this time.”

I turned so that I had the wall at my back. I don’t know how the confrontation would have ended, but at that moment Sam appeared, sprinting at top speed up the trail, arms and legs pumping, face white and strained.

“The apocalypse is at hand!” he shouted. “The dark powers are massing in the vales of Ulro!”

This wasn’t addressed to anyone in particular. Sam was in rhetorical mode, singing arias to the crowd teeming in his mind. Then he saw me and David and Melissa and the others, and switched registers. This was part of his power, I realized, the ability to move at a moment’s notice from front to back stage, to be at once the star tenor and the theater manager.

“There are three of them,” he gasped. “Mark, Rick and Lenny. They’re disguised as cops. They shot Andy and they’re coming here. We’ve got to be ready to deal with them.”

He looked at me, then turned to the crowd with a sad smile.

“I thought this man was my friend. I offered him the secret of life. I even brought his child back from the dead. Yet he rejected me.”

He lowered his head, displaying the clotted blood.

“Like the first Christ, I have been scourged. Like Him, I have been betrayed. But where He had only one Judas, I have a legion of traitors and spies at work amongst my disciples. But now the hour of reckoning is at hand! Now is the time for the true believers among you to stand up and be counted!”

He looked around them all with a sweeping gesture.

“Do any of you guys want out? If so, get moving! Because we don’t want anyone here who doesn’t belong here, right?”

There were scattered cries of “Right!” No one made any move to leave.

“OK,” said Sam quietly. “Everybody get inside the hall. Break out the guns and assume your positions, but don’t fire till I give the command.”

The crowd started to disperse. The only one to linger was the scrawny blond.

“The kid should stay,” she said.

Sam glanced at her. He shook his head.

“We don’t want them here, Melissa. They’re dead. They always were, and soon they will be.”

This threat was clear enough. Sam’s people were arming themselves, and David and I would be legitimate targets. I picked him up and ran as fast as I could up one of the alleys between the cabins, getting into cover.

“Where’re we going?” asked David. “Why don’t we stay with ’Lissa?”

He sounded scared. I was too shocked to say anything. In the coming showdown between Mark and Sam, we would be legitimate targets for both sides. Neither would hesitate to shoot us down. They might disagree about Sam’s leadership, but both accepted the truth of the “Secret” he had been peddling. And stripped of its theological pretensions, this was simply a license to kill. Our only hope was to get as far away from the hall as possible. I made it as far as the last of the outbuildings before pausing to rest. In front of us stretched the zone of rough-cut scrub we had to cross to reach the relative safety of the woods.

“I want to go back,” said David.

“Don’t you want to see this neat place I found the other day?”

“What kind of place?” he asked doubtfully.

“It’s really cool. Kind of like a cave.”

“Is Mom there?”

I picked him up again and trudged on through the underbrush and around the stumps of the culled trees. When we were about halfway, there was a burst of gunfire from the hall. I crouched down, holding David tightly. Several more bursts of firing followed. They didn’t seem to be aimed at us, but I decided to keep down.

There were sounds on the hillside just above us. I threw myself down, hugging the ground, one hand over David’s mouth. A black-clad gunman had broken cover from the trees about twenty feet to our left. Even in his uniform and cap, I had no difficulty in recognizing Mark’s huge frame and menorah-like beard. We must have been visible from where he was standing, but fortunately his attention was fully occupied elsewhere. A further burst of gunfire from the hall was silenced by a single shot, deafeningly loud, from Mark’s weapon. The next moment he plunged past us down the hillside. By the time I risked taking another look he had reached one of the new buildings and taken cover behind the end wall.

There were further bursts of gunfire from the far side of the hall, and down toward the pier. It looked as though the attackers were executing a prearranged plan, two of them using the coastal path to circle around the hall while the third made a frontal approach. I knew that Mark and Rick had both served in the army, which might give them a slight advantage, but they were heavily outnumbered, and if they attempted to storm the hall they would be cut down. The most likely outcome seemed to be a stalemate, with the attackers unable to enter the hall and the defenders unable to leave. It occurred to me that Sam might come to regret having destroyed his phone link with the outside world.

“This is a stupid game,” David whispered.

I couldn’t have agreed more, even though I knew, as he mercifully didn’t, that it was a game of life and death. The stakes were about to be made very clear. I had just noticed that there was a third person marooned in no-man’s-land. That first burst of gunfire from the hall had not been directed at us or at the attackers, but at Andrea. Now she was working her way up the hillside toward us, bending low and taking cover every so often. I got up and waved to her.

“Over here!”

She saw me and stopped. A spray of bullets seethed through the vegetation all around, followed by an answering shot from Mark’s assault rifle. Andrea fell sideways, collapsing into the undergrowth. Without thinking, I jumped up and ran downhill toward the place where Andrea had disappeared. I saw her lying on the ground and threw myself at her like a football player going for the line.

She was alive. In pain, but alive. She had been hit just below the left elbow. By the way the arm was hanging, it looked like the bone was broken. There was a lot of blood.

“Dad?” said a panicky voice behind me. “Where you go, Dad?”

I turned, horrified. David was wandering around in the open with a look of terror on his face.

“Get down!” I called.

His face collapsed and he started to cry.

“Can you move?” I asked Andrea.

She shook her head.

“Go back to your son. You were doing fine until I butted in.”

“So were you, until I started yelling and waving. I’ll go get David, then we’ll fix you up.”

I crawled back to find David. He was terrified by now, though more by my sudden disappearance than by what was happening all around us, and I had a hard time getting him calmed down. We slowly made our way over to where Andrea was lying, going on our hands and knees. I foraged around until I found a reasonably straight length of fallen wood, which I lashed to Andrea’s forearm using strips of material torn from my undershirt. I did the work, while she gave me directions through clenched teeth. She had taken a first-aid course at some point and knew a lot more about it than I did. David looked on with interest.