Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter

As the man approached the desk, an electronic bleep sounded in the back room. He dropped the black tubular bag he had carried six blocks from the stop where the Greyhound bus had set him down. A woman in Lurex hot pants and a tight-fitting sweater drifted in through the open doorway. Her nails were elaborately painted, her feet bare.

“How are you today?” she said.

“You got a room?” the man asked. “Yeah, I guess you got a room.”

The woman made a show of consulting a large ring binder with handwritten entries.

“How long you staying?”

The man shrugged.

“Maybe a few days.”

“Forty bucks gets you a suite with a kitchenette.”

“Whatever.”

He handed over two crisp twenty-dollar bills. The woman examined them carefully, then glanced at the man and flashed a smile, as though apologizing for her caution.

“First time out for these babies, looks like.”

She caught the look in the man’s eyes and her smile vanished.

“Third on the left-hand side,” she said in a hard voice, plucking a key from one of the hooks on the wall. “Check-out is at ten. You want to keep the room, it’s another forty.”

The man picked up his bag and walked down the driveway to the sunken parking lot. The cabins were built of brick patched with sheets of metal. The matt beige paint was flaking off like diseased skin to reveal a drab green. He unlocked the door corresponding to his key number and went in. There was a bed, a table, a sofa, a television, a toilet and shower. The one small window had the same lace curtains as the reception area. It did not open. The air was stuffy, with a sickly scent of mildew. The man set down his heavy bag, locked the door and lay on the bed, staring up at the scabrous rows of ceiling tiles.

How long would he be staying? As long as it took. He was in no hurry. From now on, everything must be perfect. One call, to establish the address, then the visit. He had no idea where it would be. He didn’t even know which state he’d have to go to. It would most likely be someplace back East, but it could be anywhere, even right here in this town. There was simply no way of knowing.

In the old days, every detail had been worked out weeks and even months in advance. The system had seemed so flawless. The prophet Los selected those worthy of initiation. He gave them a life and demanded a life in return. That was only just. After that, everything was controlled by the rigorous lottery of chance. The target city was located in the state where the novice had been born. That was where he had entered the false life, the state of Generation, and that was where he must return to perform the ritual which freed him from his native state. Mark had been born in Texas, so his initiation had taken place in Houston. Lenny was from a small town in Missouri, so he’d gone to St. Louis to become his eternal self, Palambron. Russell was from somewhere around here, so he’d come to the Seattle area to celebrate his passage into the state of Eden.

And now they were all dead. It was a bitter blow, when so much loving care and attention had gone into their rebirthing. First the novice’s personal number was calculated. You took an ordinary pocket calculator, the kind you can buy at any drugstore, powered by a solar cell-by Sol, which is another name for Los. You keyed in the month, day and year of the subject’s birthday, then pressed the square root key to obtain the magic string of numbers which expressed the root of his existence, the secret DNA code of his eternal self.

It was so beautifully simple! Say the person was born on September 11, 1958. You tapped in 0, 9, 1, 1, 5, 8, then hit?. That gave you the sequence 30192383. The novice and the initiate who would accompany him then took the boat across to Friday Harbor, where there was a public library. They went to the reference section and consulted the White Pages phone book for the city in question. They looked up the page corresponding to the first three digits of the personal number and took a photocopy of it which they brought back to the island.

Now began the arduous task of determining the exact address. Each page of the phone book contained approximately 440 entries, arranged in four columns. The calculation involved running through all the permutations of the remaining digits of the novice’s personal number. In the case of the man born on September 11, 1958, this meant finding the ninth entry from the beginning, then the 92nd from that, then the 923rd, the 9,238th, the 92,383rd, the 2,383rd, the 383rd and the 83rd. The third entry after that one was the target address.

It wasn’t necessary to count the entries by hand, of course, although some people preferred to do so. One of the men with a mathematical flair had come up with a formula for calculating the correct result once the number of entries in each column had been counted, and this was always used as a check. So there was never the slightest question in the novice’s mind that the house to which he would go had been selected in accordance with the divine will, expressed through the agency men call chance. As a result, he was freed of all doubt and empowered to perform the ritual, knowing that the victims were mere specters created by a loving God to permit the illusion of evil in a world where only good existed.

The man rolled up off the bed, covering his face with his hands and gasping as though struggling for breath. When he finally removed his hands, both they and his face were wet with tears. It was such a joyful, liberating truth, and they had labored so long and hard to demonstrate themselves worthy of possessing it! Yet it had come to nothing. They were all dead, and that could mean only one thing: they had never been alive in the first place.

Chance might appear to be a mere lottery, but he knew that it possessed a rigorous logic, and one that must be obeyed. Whatever it cost him, he had to submit to God’s will. If his friends and allies were dead, it was because they had been specters from the beginning, every one. It wasn’t just a question of this or that person not working out, a Dale Watson here, a Russell Crosby there. The wholesale nature of the holocaust which had occurred demonstrated that once and for all.

He alone had survived. That proved his reality, but also his solitude. From now on, he would have to shoulder the terrible burden of the Secret all by himself. The mystics of the Cabala had taught that as long as there was one enlightened man left alive, God would spare the world for his sake. It was an awesome responsibility to hold the destiny of all Creation in your hands, but he had no choice.

There would be no more mistakes, no more false disciples. From now on, he would trust nobody but himself. He would live quietly and alone, invisible to every eye but God’s. But first he had a debt to pay, a sacrificial offering to mark his acceptance of the great task which had been entrusted to him. He had pledged his faith in blood, and now that pledge must be renewed. Only thus could he be cleansed, and all the errors and confusion of the past erased.

He opened the black bag and lifted out the handcuffs and the roll of tape he’d bought in Everett, then the Cobray automatic pistol. He wouldn’t use that, though. Sometime in the next few days he’d swing by the gun shop next door and pick up a.22 revolver and some Stinger ammunition. A couple of boxes should be enough. Whatever else might have gone wrong, there was nothing wrong with the method itself. It was tried and tested, and he would stick to it.

He weighed the Cobray in his hand, thinking over his next move. It would be best to let things settle down for a couple of days before doing anything. This was a perfect place to hole up. All they wanted was money, and he had plenty of that. It hadn’t always been that way. Back in the early days, each initiation had to be funded by the novice going off and taking some lousy job for a couple of months. But that had all changed with Rick’s arrival. His was the only case where the victims had been selected personally instead of in the regular way. But Los made the rules, and he could break them. As he’d said at the time, the test of faith was even greater when the individuals concerned were your own father and mother.

There had been a stunned silence when the news was announced. You could see them all wondering if they’d have been able to do it themselves. It had been hard enough for some of them to agree never to see their parents again, never mind having to hold a gun to their heads and expose their sham existence for what it was, a mess of meat and bone and tissue. But Rick had wanted to do it. He hated them both, especially his mother, who had never lifted a finger to stop the abuse he had suffered as a child. He figured his father didn’t know any better, but she should have stepped in and done something. Well, she hadn’t, and now he would.

Whatever Rick’s feelings were, the financial rewards for the group had been substantial. The sale of the family house, plus the life insurance and various investments, had netted almost a quarter of a million dollars. The other son, Matt, would have got a share of that, but Rick had scores to settle with him too. A telephone call had been enough to send Matt, who had a plumbing business, out in response to a nonexistent emergency around about the time the cops arrived at the parents’ luxurious suburban house, alerted by a neighbor who had seen flames. They found the father and mother dead, their chests blasted away by a shotgun. The weapon was not recovered. The fire had been caused by a pan of oil which the mother had apparently been heating on the stove when she was attacked. There was no sign of forced entry, and neither the sophisticated alarm system nor the family’s German shepherd dog had responded to the intruder.

Since Rick was supposedly in Mexico-he’d crossed the border a week before, then paid a coyote to smuggle him back with a group of illegal immigrants-it was only a matter of time before the police began to suspect the other brother. No one was surprised when Matt was found in his truck up in the mountains, his head blown away by a blast from the shotgun he was holding, and which had also been used to kill his parents. Rick had set up the meeting, stressing the need for secrecy, on the pretext of working out a fake alibi if Matt was arrested.

As a result, the estate had come to Rick, and through him to the rest of them. The money had been deposited in a bank in Bellingham and was accessible via the Accel and Interlink systems at any one of millions of cash machines all over the country. He could afford to wait weeks, even months, until it was perfectly clear that the police suspected nothing.

The thought made him reach into the bag again. He took out a pair of pants and jacket in a dark, heavy material. They needed to be cleaned and pressed, but it might well be a nice touch to wear them when the time came. But first he had to find out where the house was and figure out the bus schedules. It might take days to get there, but that didn’t matter. He didn’t care how long or uncomfortable the journey was, just as long as he arrived safely.

And he would! He knew it, suddenly, with a surge of confidence and courage that made him want to leap in the air and holler exultantly. He would arrive and the others would depart, revealed for the shams they were. And the survival of the Secret would be ensured forever, sealed in their blood.

It was a Sunday morning, ten days after I was released. I had gone to run some errands at the local stores and now I was walking home, relishing the warm sunshine and the cool breeze and the stunning views of snow-capped mountains above the wooded ridges and valleys of the North Seattle skyline.

We had been in the house a week, and were still settling in. It had been made a condition of my release that I should remain in the state, available to the San Juan County investigators. At the same time, both Andrea and I wanted to get away-and to get David away-from the islands themselves which, beautiful as they were, held such horrific memories for us. When my lawyer mentioned a house in Seattle that was available for a few months at a reasonable rent, we jumped at the idea.

When I was finally given my conditional freedom, I had no expectations about anything or anyone from my former life. All that had been wiped clean. After being charged with crimes I had experienced only as a victim, nothing seemed impossible, or even unlikely. Normality had become a meaningless concept. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find that David had vanished again, and that everyone was conspiring to convince me that he had died back in Minnesota months before. As for Andrea, I no longer had any firm belief that she had ever existed in the first place. She was just one among many phantom figures I seemed to have encountered in the course of my hallucinatory experiences on the island.

So I was even more amazed than pleased to find her waiting for me when I emerged from my cell. Thanks to a benign sexism on the part of Sheriff Griffiths, Andrea had never been regarded as a suspect, and once he had taken a full statement from her she had been free to go. But she had stayed. That made all the difference. We both had to make plans, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world to make them together. After what we had just lived through, any arrangement was bound to seem provisional. Why not take the path of least resistance, rent this house that my lawyer had found and see how things turned out?

It had been Andrea’s testimony which had finally convinced the sheriff of my innocence. We had each been questioned separately and in great detail about the events of that fatal day, and our answers matched to a degree which ultimately made it impossible to believe that we were making it all up. One of the two survivors from the hall was Ellie, and she had been able to corroborate my story about the events leading up to the final horror. Finally, the police had talked to David. His story, told with the idiosyncratic clarity of a child’s vision, corresponded fully to Andrea’s and mine. That clinched it.

The investigators were now working on the theory that one of the dead gunmen had still been alive when the sheriff and his men approached the compound. Thinking they were enemies, he had opened fire, and had then died in the long interval before the helicopter arrived to illuminate the scene. All in all, I got the impression that the cops were asking me to stick around not because they had any further intention of charging me, but to try to lend an air of credibility to the fact that they’d arrested me in the first place.

That was fine with me. I had no wish to go home, and for that matter no home to go to. The events I had lived through had cut me off forever from my past, and called into question everything I had ever imagined in the way of a future. I was left with the present, and for the present I was content to settle into this pleasant house, knowing that whatever happened we would have to move out in a couple of months, but not oppressed by that knowledge. I no longer had any interest in long-term plans. I was content to live one day at a time, as long as I could live it with Andrea and David.

Through all this, David had of course been my major preoccupation. My feeling that his previous acceptance of the situation had been too good to be true had been confirmed. It seemed somehow to be linked with his being on the island. The moment we left, everything changed. He became withdrawn and intensely clinging. I couldn’t even go to the bathroom without finding him outside the door in tears when I came out. There was also the question of Rachael’s death, which I had ducked before. Now I told him the truth, although without mentioning that she had died by her own hand. He at first refused to believe that he would never see her again, then became preoccupied with the physical details of her present whereabouts. In fact Rachael had been cremated, but I spared David that knowledge too, particularly after what he had seen on the island. I said she was buried underground, and he wanted to know how deep and where and whether she had enough food and a phone. I explained that that was just her body, and that his mom was not really there. I added, with a twinge of hypocrisy, that some people believed that she was in heaven. David immediately decided this was right, and that she could see him and hear everything he said. I decided to go along with this and let him work out the truth for himself at a later date.