Colby had swiveled to follow J"s movements across the large room. "You are familiar with the work of the American student of the unusual, Charles Fort?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact. I"ve read his book Wild Talents, and couldn"t help but notice the similarity between his "Fortean Events" and the things that the Ngaa has been doing."
"Then you understand the implications. The Ngaa has invaded our universe many times in the past and may continue in the future. I"ve studied the Ngaa. I think I"ve studied this being more than any other living man, and in my studies I"ve found that others have gone before me, attempting to uncover the true nature of the creature, if one can call it a creature. Charles Fort was not the only one, by any means. Some of them have, I think, come much closer than he did."
"Who, for example?"
Colby searched through the piles of papers and books on his desk and came up with a sheaf of papers. "I don"t know who wrote this pamphlet, but I suspect it was a turn-of-the-century occultist named DeCastries."
J took the copy and examined it. It was perhaps twenty pages long, on eight and a half by eleven sheets. The t.i.tle caught his eye. "Megapolisomancy." J raised a questioning eyebrow.
"DeCastries had a theory that what we call hauntings or Fortean events were caused by some sort of paramental beings that were attracted by large cities, that somehow fed off the life energies of the ma.s.ses of people jammed together there. I think he had at least part of the truth. The Ngaa seems to like big cities, but it has been known to function outside them."
"Where did you get this thing?" J was leafing through it, reading a line here, a line there.
"I joined an occultist society called the Rosicrucian Order. Their world headquarters is just south of here, in San Jose. I worked my way up from level to level until I reached the point where they would allow me to read the books they keep in their restricted library, books they won"t show the general public or even the novices, though I should tell you the books they do let the novices see are quite amazing. I found a great deal, there in the restricted stacks, but this was so interesting I took the liberty of copying the more relevant pa.s.sages."
J read aloud, ""Gargantuan tombs or monstrous vertical coffins of living humanity, a breeding ground for the worst of paramental ent.i.ties." Just the sort of hocus-pocus one would expect to find in the library of some lunatic fringe secret society."
"Laugh if you will," Colby said soberly, "but if you look into the matter you"ll find that so-called lunatic fringe occultist secret societies have had a hand in every major political upheaval in history. There were Masons in the American Revolution, Rosicrucians in the French Revolution, the Vril Society backing Hitler. There was Rasputin, the Compte de St. Germaine, so many others. Surely you, of all people, are aware that there are things that are not told to the ordinary man in the street."
"Hmm. Yes. You have a point." J sat down across the desk from Colby and began idly fishing around in the pile of books and papers. "All the same, here"s something more my style." He picked up a paperback copy of The Star Rover, by Jack London.
"Ah yes," Colby said. "London"s last major work. As you may recall, it is about a man who can travel freely through s.p.a.ce and time, as freely as our friend Richard Blade."
"What are you trying to tell me?"
"London was a friend of DeCastries, and the center of a literary coterie that included the poet George Sterling and the fiction writers Ambrose Bierce and Clark Ashton Smith, the same coterie that founded, in 1909, the prestigious California Writers Club. There were others in the group whose reputations have been less lasting, who have been unjustly eclipsed by the more famous members. Nora May French, for example. And there was some sort of scandal about the founding of the California Writers Club that all writers on the subject hint at but none explain. DeCastries, Bierce, Smith, London, French, Sterling . . . They knew something, J! They knew something about the X dimensions, and they knew something about the Ngaa."
"What makes you so sure?"
"It runs like an obsessive undercurrent through the work of all them, now hidden, now openly revealed. Ambrose Bierce writes about invisible beings in his "The d.a.m.ned Thing," London takes up the same theme in "The Shadow and the Flash," and Smith repeats it in "The Double Shadow." And all of them wrote of other worlds, exactly the sort of worlds Richard Blade has so often visited. Have you read "Poseidonis" by Smith? "Before Adam" by London? "Wine of Wizardry" by George Sterling?"
"No, I"m sorry. My reading has been in other areas."
"Read them, my friend! You will see that this little band of writers and poets had somehow learned to catch at least glimpses of what is out there somewhere, in the X dimensions. And you will see that they had met, out there, the Ngaa. In 1973 the Mirage Press published a collection of fragmentary essays and letters of Clark Ashton Smith ent.i.tled Planets and Dimensions. Here, let me show you." He rummaged through the stack and came up with an unpretentious white-jacketed paperback.
J took the book and read, " "About 1918 I was in ill health and, during a short visit to San Francisco, was sitting one day in the Bohemian Club, to which I had been given a guest"s card of admission. Happening to look up, I saw a frightful demonian face with twisted rootlike eyebrows and oblique fiery-slitted eyes, which seemed to emerge momentarily from the air about nine feet above me and lean toward my seat. The thing disappeared as it approached me, but left an ineffaceable impression of malignity, horror and loathsomeness."
"He saw it," insisted Colby. "He saw it in broad daylight. Clark Ashton Smith saw the Ngaa, as it chose to show itself to him. I have spent my every spare moment since coming to America in places like the Rosicrucian Library, the Bancroft Library of the University of California, the California Room of the Oakland Public Library and Oakland"s Jack London Room at the Jack London Museum in Glen Ellen, where Russ Kingman, the curator, has helped me track down obscure information unknown to all but the most devoted Jack London aficionados. Bit by precious bit, a picture has formed. Yes, bit by bit, like a man reconstructing a dinosaur from a million tiny bones, I have reconstructed the lives of those men and women who, in the early years of the twentieth century, found a route into another world.
"It was all part of what Jack London termed a "search for a natural explanation for the supernatural." London, you know, had a mother who was a spirit medium, yet he early fell under the influence of Marxist dialectical materialism. For him, at least, some way of harmonizing the spiritual with the material was a psychological necessity. The others, each in a different way, felt the same need.
"The search was part hobby, part obsession, and it led them into researches into the occult, pursued off and on over most of their adult lives. Together with H.P. Lovecraft, with whom Smith carried on an extensive correspondence, they evolved the theory that there were creatures of some sort trapped in another dimension who had once ruled Earth and sought to return and rule it again, and that attempts by these beings to break through into our world explained all the various strange events usually ascribed to supernatural causes. These writers formed a kind of brotherhood, vowed to secrecy and, if and when any one of them sensed the Ngaa coming for them, to suicide."
J was surprised. "Suicide, Dr. Colby?"
"Yes, suicide. One thing they found out which you may not yet have guessed is that the Ngaa, under certain conditions, has the power to kidnap someone from our dimension and return with him to its own dimension. Against such an abduction, death was their only defense."
"What finally happened to them all?"
"About DeCastries I know almost nothing. He is such an obscure figure he may be a fictional character, invented by the others, or a pen name for someone. Jack London"s Wolf House mansion in the wilderness of the Valley of the Moon burst into flames and was totally gutted the night before London was to move into it, and the fire remains unexplained to this day. Not long after, London died, and London buffs are still debating whether it was by natural causes, suicide or murder. Nora May French and George Sterling poisoned themselves. Ambrose Bierce wrote a postcard to a friend from Mexico saying "Pray for me-real loud," then vanished without a trace, though the U.S. government searched for him for years."
"What about Clark Ashton Smith?"
"After a brief career as a writer of weird tales, he abandoned literature and became a hermit, spending the rest of his life sculpting horrible yet frightfully lifelike statues of monsters."
Of the mansion"s former use as a ballet school, there remained only a few reminders. One of these was the floor to ceiling mirrors in the gymnasium. These mirrors faced each other in such a way that J, when he looked into one of them, seemed to see a line of replicas of himself, a line that stretched in two directions to infinity. It was a vaguely disquieting illusion, but nevertheless it was in the gym that J installed his scrambler phone, on the wall, plugging in to a pre-existing outlet. The room was almost never used during the summer, when the patients could get their exercise out of doors, and California was at this time suffering a kind of out-of-season summer, one of the worst droughts in its history. There were, of course, no telephone outlets in the patients" rooms, and J was now living in one of these rooms.
On his first day at Dr. Saxton Colby"s sanitarium, J had telephoned Copra House, "keeping in touch," as he put it. He had phoned again on the second day, the third and the fourth. It was not until the fifth day that he had finally phoned Lord Leighton at the Project. He had reasoned, on a conscious level, that Copra House would inform him if there was any trouble in the underground computer complex, but perhaps on an unconscious level he was afraid of what Leighton might have to tell him, afraid that the Ngaa had not left London but had remained behind to work some new mischief.
"Lord Leighton here."
"This is J, old boy."
"Don"t "old boy" me. You took your b.l.o.o.d.y time ringing me up. Been too busy sunning yourself at the seaside with those American film stars, I fancy."
"No such luck. Tell me Leighton, how has it been going there?"
"If you mean by that, have I been having trouble with things that go b.u.mp in the night, the answer is no. Since you left, everything"s been quiet. Quiet as a tomb, you might say. How about at your end?"
"Quiet here, too. We had a bit of trouble with the Ngaa immediately after takeoff, but since then nothing."
"That"s good news at any rate."
"I"m not so sure."
"Oh? The Ngaa has picked up its toys and gone home, and now you miss it?"
"No, no, but I"m getting a feeling about how the Ngaa operates. For example, I saw a picture of Dr. Colby"s daughter Jane, the one who might have committed suicide."
"And she looked exactly like the little girl you saw from the window of my study?"
"No, she looked completely different. Colby"s daughter had black hair in bangs. The girl I saw was a blonde with a pony tail."
"My word! Then who was it that you saw?"
"It was the Jane Colby I had expected to see. MacMurdo never actually described her, so I put together an image in my head of what a girl of that age, living in the states at that time, ought to look like. The Ngaa plucked that image out of my mind and presented it to me as a reality, knowing I"d accept it because it fulfilled my preconceived ideas. You see what I"m driving at?"
"Not really."
"The Ngaa believes in giving people what they want. That"s how it ropes people in, you see. That"s how it roped in Dr. Colby, by allowing him to believe his daughter had returned to him."
"Does Colby still believe that?"
"No, his researches have convinced him the so-called ghost he saw in Scotland was a pure illusion. He didn"t like that conclusion, but he accepted it when the evidence became overwhelming. He"s a father, Leighton, but he"s also a scientist, and the scientist in him finally won the argument. It was a brutal disillusionment."
"A pity, but I still don"t see . . "
"Think, Leighton, think! What do we want most now? To be rid of the Ngaa! So the Ngaa, like a good genie, is granting our wish, but only until we drop our guard. Then I promise you the Ngaa will be back, and with a few surprises we may find decidedly unpleasant."
"Hmm. You may be right. But where will the Ngaa turn up, there where you are or here?"
"Here, I think. Richard is here."
"That should make the Prime Minister happy. His flunkies have been crawling like lice all over the installation, making a b.l.o.o.d.y nuisance of themselves for the last few days. They"re doing an inventory, they say, with an eye toward liquidating our a.s.sets. I hope you haven"t forgotten the PM"s ultimatum. He said he"d shut us down if Richard wasn"t normal within two weeks. Eight days of that two weeks are gone already. We"ve only six days left. Do you think we"ll make the deadline?"
J sighed. "I don"t know. We"re progressing."
"Could Richard give a reasonable imitation of a sane man?"
"So long as n.o.body asked him anything about the last ten years."
"Not good enough, I"m afraid. But bear in mind that we don"t need a real cure, just one real enough to fool the PM and his examiners."
J was about to reply with some angry objection, but instead got a grip on himself and said, "I"ll keep that in mind." Leighton was only being his usual pragmatic and brutally frank self.
"Anything more to tell me, old boy?" Leighton added.
"No."
"Then I"ll ring off. I"m frightfully busy keeping these idiots from breaking things."
"One question, Leighton. Have you left the settings the same on KALI?"
"Yes. You think we might . . ."
"It"s possible." J thought, It"s possible, even though the PM has forbidden it, even though the danger is beyond calculation. It"s possible that we may have to send Richard Blade through into the Ngaa"s dimension.
"Don"t wait so long to call me again," Leighton said.
"I won"t. Goodbye, old chap."
"Goodbye."
J hung up, stepped back from the wall, and inspected his pocket.w.a.tch. As he did so, he could have sworn he saw something very odd out of the corner of his eye. He whirled to stare into one of the mirrors.
Had one of his many reflections moved more slowly than the others?
No, of course not. That was impossible.
The setting sun reddened the gray facade-it had once been white-of the sanitarium, a three-story pseudo-Grecian building of ample proportions. The front door opened and Zoe and Richard emerged, blinking and shading their eyes. They crossed the narrow porch, between the fluted Corinthian columns that framed the entrance, and descended the wide marble staircase. At the foot of the steps, on ma.s.sive rectangular pedestals, two lifesize white stone lions crouched. As she neared one of them, Zoe could not help but notice the poor animal had lost its left ear and the tip of its tail, and was badly cracked across the haunches.
She sighed and thought, Too bad.
Richard took her hand. Had he heard her sigh?
They walked along a broad stretch of paving. Weeds grew in the joins between the paving stones, and in the cracks in the stones themselves where the smooth pale surface was broken. She heard soft footsteps behind her but did not look around. She knew two guards were following her, armed with the ever-present air-propelled tranquilizer dart guns.
By the tall flagpole, as thick as a man"s arm, they halted.
Richard, squinting upward, said, "I don"t see the good old Union Jack." There was no flag on the pole at all.
Zoe laughed. "I doubt if anyone has thought of flying it."
Blade was half-serious, half-joking. "This place is a British possession, isn"t it? Like an emba.s.sy?" He let go of her hand.
"Not really, d.i.c.k. And I doubt if Dr. Colby wants to attract attention."
"You"re quite right, of course." He bent, grasped the pole and gave it an experimental tug. It remained firm in its base, though it gave a little, very little.
"What on earth are you doing?" she demanded.
"Nothing." He straightened, a thoughtful enigmatic expression on his tanned angular features. There were beads of sweat on his forehead, though the late afternoon air was quite cool. She wondered, Had he been trying to pull the flagpole up by the roots? Whatever for? She eyed his powerful torso. He wore a white short-sleeved T-shirt with his white slacks and tennis shoes. If he wanted to do something that insane, he could probably manage it. He noticed her looking at him and smiled. "Come along, Zoe. Let"s explore the grounds of our prison."
He began walking, drawing her along by the hand.
"This is no prison," she protested.
"Then let"s leave."
"You know we can"t do that, d.i.c.k."
"I rest my case, love. It is a prison."
"It"s a hospital. You"re here to get well."
"I"m not sick." He shot her a glance from his dark, glittering eyes. "And you"re not a nurse."
This was a reference to the white nurse"s uniform she was wearing. They had both come from England without clothing, and had been outfitted from the sanitarium"s supply of staff uniforms.
He had halted again and was looking through a grove of fragrant eucalyptus and pine trees at where the sun silhouetted the Golden Gate Bridge. He said, "I can"t believe the KGB would build a second Golden Gate Bridge just for me."
"What do you mean by that?"
"J says you"re an agent now, so I can tell you everything, can"t I?" As he spoke he studied her face.
"Of course."
"The Ruskies have a department called TWIN. They school some of their men there to look, act and think like every one of our important agents, so that, at the right moments, they can send in one of their doubles to replace one of us. They have training towns in Russia, you see. Exact duplicates of places in England and the USA."
"And you thought this was a duplicate Berkeley, somewhere in the Soviet Union?" She was awed. This kind of thinking, this professional, matter-of-fact, businesslike paranoia was new to her.
"The idea crossed my mind, love," Blade said lightly. "But even with their budget, the Ruskies wouldn"t build anything quite so grand. I"m prepared to believe, for the moment at least, that we are where you say we are, and that you are who you say you are."
"Well, thank you for that, anyway!" Zoe was indignant.
Richard began walking again. She ran a few steps to catch up.