The Beasts Of Valhalla

9

"Robby?" my mother whispered through the half-open door.

"I'm awake, Mom. Come on in."

My mother, slippers on her feet and quilted robe cinched loosely about her waist, came quietly into my room and sat down on the edge of the bed. The promise of dawn shone in her silver hair and softly spotlighted her face. She looked very old, very tired, very worried. She still seemed incredibly beautiful to me, as lovely as she had been in reality when she was young. Only her eyes were absolutely unchanged; even beneath a veil of anxiety, they shone like beacons.

"Coop Lugmor called twice during the night," she said softly. "Said he was calling from some pay phone out on the highway. He wants you to go over there as soon as possible. He sounded very strange."

"I'll bet he did," I said wryly. Jake Bolesh had undoubtedly paid him a visit.

"He said he had something important to tell you."

That surprised me; I'd assumed he was simply in a big hurry to cut any ties. "Okay, Mom, I'll take care of it later. I'm sorry he woke you up."

"He didn't wake me. I heard you get up, looked out the window later, and saw you leave in that funny outfit. I've been so worried about you."

I sat up in bed, took her right hand and pressed it against my lips. "You shouldn't worry," I said, kissing the translucent, parchmentlike flesh of her hand.

"Robby, there's a strange odor about you. Did you have an upset stomach?"

The Fluosol-DA I'd absorbed was still transpiring out of my system through my lungs and skin. "No, Mom. I'm all right."

"Where did you go, son?"

"Out drinking and womanizing," I said with a large grin, again kissing the back of her hand.

"Please, son."

"Mom," I replied seriously, "I've never lied to you or Dad, and I don't want to have to start now. I can't tell you where I went. It's not that I don't want to, but that I can't. I have to ask you to trust me and believe that I wouldn't intentionally do anything wrong."

"Oh, I know that, Robby, and it goes without saying that I trust you."

"I wouldn't intentionally do anything to hurt you and Dad, or any member of our family."

"You wouldn't intentionally hurt anyone."

"I'm going to ask you not to mention to anyone that I went out last night. That's important. It's not for me."

"What you're doing is very dangerous, isn't it?"

"Yes," I said after a pause.

"I heard you come in and clean up, and then I heard you moving around down in the root cellar. Did you leave something down there?"

"Yes, but it won't be there for long. I just have to figure out what to do with it."

"I won't ask you what it is, Robby. I know you're thinking of me and your father; if you don't want us to know something, it's for a good reason."

"Did Dad hear me go out or come in?"

"I don't think so. He won't tell you, but he hasn't been feeling well at all. He stays active during the day because he wants to put on a good show for you, but he's exhausted at night."

"When this is over, the three of us will go away someplace and be together. Okay?"

My mother gently stroked my hair with both her hands, and I was startled to see tears in her eyes. "I've always loved you so much, Robby," she murmured in a choked voice. "You were God's special gift to me-so clever, so good. I've always been so proud. Every day since you were born I've thanked God for you, and for giving me Garth to protect you when you were a boy."

"Thank you, Mom. I love you very much."

Tears were flowing freely now, but she still managed to smile. I reached out to brush away her tears, but she grabbed both my hands and clasped them to her breast. "You want to hear something strange, Robby? Even with all this crazy and dangerous business you've gotten into as a private detective, I've never really worried about you. I know you've almost been killed a number of times-but I still didn't really worry about you. I believed that you were also very special in the eyes of God, and that God wouldn't let any harm come to you. There's something different happening now."

"God's a very busy woman, Mom, and I imagine I'm hard to keep track of under the best of circumstances."

"Don't be blasphemous, Robert," my mother said sternly, unsmiling.

"I didn't mean to be, Mom," I said quickly, thoroughly chastened. "Just trying to lighten up the conversation."

"I've had a recurring dream every night since you and Garth came here," she said distantly. My mother was still weeping, still deadly serious. "It's a dream of death and destruction, the same each time. Somehow you, Garth, and a man I've never seen before are at the center of it all. There are strange creatures no one has ever seen before. God weeps over the whole earth as He holds you and Garth in His arms. In this dream both my sons are dead, Robby, and the earth is changed forever."

I pulled my hands from her grasp, cradled my mother's face, kissed her eyes. "Believe me, sweetheart, it's just something you ate."

"Robby," she sobbed, "please don't make fun of me."

"I'm not, Mom. Nothing is that serious, and none of it is worth a single one of your tears. Garth isn't even here-and I don't want him here."

My mother stopped crying, sighed heavily, stared hard at me. There was still love in her eyes, but there was also a hard glint, like sun on snow. "Rodney Lugmor didn't shoot Tommy, did he?"

"No," I said quietly, transfixed by her eyes and her unexpected strength. "They were both murdered-probably drugged or beaten unconscious someplace else, then taken to the stream on Coop Lugmor's farm and shot. Also, there's absolutely no evidence that they had a homosexual relationship. That doesn't mean a whole lot to me, but it may to you and Dad."

"It will mean something to Janet and John."

"Well, they can't know. I'm sorry, Mom. I'm only telling you this because you're old; I don't think even these men will lean on you unless they believe I've shared information with you. I won't ask you to keep secrets from Dad, but neither of you can repeat anything I've said tonight to anyone; not even to Janet, and especially not to John."

"Do you know who did this thing?"

"I know who pulled the trigger. I know where to find the men responsible, but only one of their names."

"What are you going to do about it, Robby?"

"Probably nothing." The words tasted bitter and sharp, but they rang true. As the sun had come up, so had answers and realizations dark and cold enough to eclipse the dawn, at least for me.

"I don't understand, son," my mother said quietly.

"Mom, ever since I got home I've been lying here, thinking, trying to decide what I can do. I keep getting an image of a single man trying to harvest the Great Plains with a scythe."

"If these men are murderers, and you can prove it, there must be a way to bring them to justice."

"You're wrong, Mom. You see, I might manage to cut down a half acre or so; I could… punish… the man who shot Tommy and Rodney, but he's nothing more than a small, very rotten potato who was taking care of other people's business and erasing their mistakes. Knowing that, maybe I get frustrated and start shouting at the sky, telling things I know. You know what happens? A great wind comes up across all those millions of acres I haven't managed to touch. That wind howls like nothing you've ever heard before; it's colder than any winter, and it keeps gaining velocity. It immediately drowns out my shouts and blows me away forever, but it doesn't stop there; it keeps blowing. It comes here, into this home and Janet's home, into the homes of all our relatives. People who've had any contact with me in Peru County could catch cold, Mom. Some of them could die. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

"Nothing that evil or powerful could exist here. This is America."

"It certainly is. God bless America."

"Yes," my mother said with a frown, obviously puzzled by my lone. "God bless America." She paused and patted my head, just like a mother. "You thought my dream was exaggerated, Robby. Well, I think your story about a wind on the Great Plains is exaggerated."

"It isn't, Mom. Believe me, it can happen if I make the wrong move. In this case, any move at all would be a wrong move."

"We have laws here. Justice."

"I can't do something that may harm the people I love, Mom. I should've got smart quicker, gone home sooner."

My mother slapped me across the face, hard. In the thirty-six years of my existence, it was the first time either of my parents had hit me. I was so stunned by her action that I didn't even feel the blow. Shocked and numb, I simply sat and stared at her as she reared back to hit me again, then thought better of it.

"That's the first time I've ever hit you, Robby, because this is the first time you've ever made me angry and ashamed of you!" Her voice, usually so soft and gentle, was trembling with fury. "First I hear you tell me you know that your nephew and another boy were murdered, and in the next breath you tell me that you're not going to do anything about it. You won't even tell me who did it. How terribly, terribly arrogant of you, Robert! You're not God!"

"Mom- "

"If you've become a coward so quickly, tell me what you know and I'll damn well do something about it!"

The first time I'd ever heard her swear; it was turning into a week of firsts. I continued to sit with my lower jaw hanging open.

"Oh, Robby, Robby," she continued, whispering in my ear as she caressed the spot on my cheek where she'd slapped me. "I'm sorry I hurt you, but you can't worry about me or your dad, or about anyone else. You have to decide and do what's right; you have to relearn something I thought I'd taught you a long time ago. You see, God put both good and evil in the world in equal amounts in order to make us free, and to enable us to test ourselves so that we could grow and become strong as spiritual beings. At the beginning, good and evil were equally balanced. People have no control over evil, but good is different. Every time someone does something for somebody else, it creates a little piece of goodness that wasn't there before. But if a just person sees evil and chooses to do nothing about it, a little good leaks out of the world. That hurts everyone, everywhere. Don't you cause any good to leak away, son. That would make the tragedy of Tommy's death even worse."

I put my arms around my mother and kissed her. Then, resting my head on her shoulder, I heaved a deep sigh. "Reverend Blackwood tell you that?"

"My heart tells me that."

"Is Dad up yet?"

"By now, yes. He's probably shaving."

"Well, you go up and talk to him for a half hour or so. I'm going to make a phone call I don't want either one of you to hear."

Information gave me the number I wanted. I wrote it down, then sat and stared at the telephone. I had a real dilemma; the federal government rearing up in front of me, my mother behind me, and I wasn't sure whom, which, I feared most.

I'd been a little slow on the uptake. It should have occurred to me much earlier that there was only one group not included in the

Fortune 500 that could afford to piss away the kind of money the Volsung Corporation represented, and that was the merry pranksters of the Pentagon. The nation's military establishment was engaged in illegal gene-splicing experiments, secure in its belief that it was safe from discovery in paid-off Peru County, Nowhere, U.S.A. I didn't know what they were up to, didn't want to; putting a stop to Pentagon hanky-panky would be out of my league even if most of my relatives weren't living on Volsung's doorstep. I might whisper something in Ralph Nader's ear if I ever got the chance, but the best I could hope for was to get a pass to kill Jake Bolesh personally, and assurances that the scalps of the men who had authorized Volsung's "enforcer" to kill two boys would be lifted.

How to accomplish that without bringing the roof down on everybody was the problem. The trick was to get this great, often myopic, meat eater to take a little nip out of itself and leave everyone else alone.

Finally I picked up the receiver again and dialed the number in Omaha, two hundred and thirty-five miles away. The phone was answered on the second ring.

"Federal Bureau of Investigation. Agent Randall speaking."

"Agent Randall, my name is Dr. Robert Frederickson. I'm a professor of criminology, as well as a private investigator licensed by the state and city of New York. If you don't mind, I'll wait while you check my credentials on that National Registry I know you gentlemen keep. You'll find out I'm a straight arrow. My P.I. license number is J A 044- "

"I've heard of you, Dr. Frederickson," the agent replied drily. "What can I do for you?"

"I'm calling from Peru County. I'd like you and two or three other agents to load up and pay me a visit. I need your help to nail one very crooked county sheriff who just happens to be a murderer. It's important that you get here as quickly as possible, because right now he could be in the process of destroying vital evidence."

There was a prolonged silence, then: "It sounds like a problem lor the State Police."

"Uh-uh. I'm not sure how far the corruption has spread; we're talking very big payoffs here. You're the only people I can trust, and you can slip in with a violation of civil liberties wedge."

What I didn't mention was that I feared the State Police might be plugged in to whatever Volsung really was, but there was a good chance, however strange or ironic, that the F.B.I, wasn't. The Defense Intelligence Agency, like the Central Intelligence Agency, didn't think too much of the F.B.I., and the respective agencies shared information only at the point of a cannon.

"You'll have to give me more details, Frederickson. Tell me exactly what the problem is."

I gave him a good version, some of it truth, some of it fiction, all of it designed to make the agent on the other end of the line believe I had a great deal more hard evidence than I actually did. I carefully avoided any mention of the Volsung Corporation. The F.B.I, might be temporarily ignorant of the secret government research facility, but that didn't mean Randall might not do some checking and find out if I even hinted at its existence. In my present position, I was finished if it were even suspected that I'd been inside the Volsung Corporation complex. Bolesh would kill me on sight if he found out, and the F.B.I, would probably deliver me to Bolesh if Randall ever put all the pieces together. The information I had on Volsung and the Valhalla Project, whatever that might be, had to be meted out in very small bits, if at all, only when absolutely necessary, and only in the right company and situation. Those cards were the only hand I had, or was likely to get. Played right, they could get me what I wanted; one card laid down at the wrong time, or in the wrong sequence, could get me dead. I was balanced on a taut high wire, and the green felt was a long way down.

Randall was silent for a long time after I'd finished. "Okay, Frederickson," he said at last. "I'll look into it."

"You'll come here and look into it?"

"Right."

"Now? I told you he's probably destroying- "

"I'll get there as soon as I can."

"Do you have a plane or helicopter?"

That produced an irritated sigh, and I knew I was pushing too hard.

"I drive a 'seventy-five Pontiac that hasn't been tuned in fifteen months."

"We can meet at my parents' farm," I said, and gave him the address and directions.

"I'll be there in a few hours."

"Please step on it, Agent Randall. And bring some serious firepower."