The Chosen

^{CHAPTER ELEVEN}

His visions churned. His mind felt caught on the grapnel of a convulsive tilting nightmare.

He was watching himself…

But it was a nightmare, wasn’t it? He lay awake on the bed, the sunlight like a bar of white pain across his eyes.

A nightmare, he thought. Yeah. Hastily as it seemed, the conclusion helped him feel safe again.

It was a nightmare.

“Jesus Christ,” Paul Kirby muttered. The clock’s digital dial read 5:23 p.m. He’d slept the entire day away, which wasn’t like him at all. He was a writer, sure, and generally writers slept late. But… Five in the evening? he questioned himself. Must have picked up the flu or something.

Vera wasn’t here—of course not, she worked at two. Paul attempted to get out of bed, and an abrupt pressure in his head sent him right back down. Hangover, he realized, wincing. This was no flu. He’d been out drinking last night, hadn’t he? And—Holy shit!—was he hungover.

Slower this time, he got up. A glance in the mirror made him groan: naked, pale, dark circles like charcoal under his eyes. He curiously raised a hand to his face, and noted an excess of stubble. It felt like more than a day’s growth.

He stared into the mirror, bloodshot eyes going wide…

Vera, he thought. The thought turned to ice.

Nightmare.

He was watching himself…in the…nightmare…

He mouth tasted like a cat had pissed in it. Some nameless crust seemed flaked around his mouth and across his stomach. Suddenly he sneezed. Pain quaked in his skull, and into his hand he’d sneezed…blood.

“What the hell?” he slowly asked himself.

BAM! BAM! BAM!

Paul nearly shrieked at the hard thuds. Someone was knocking on the door. Correction—they weren’t knocking, they were pounding.

BAM! BAM BAM!

“Open up, Kirby!” hollered a sharp, muffled voice. “Your car’s in the lot, I know you’re in there!”

BAMBAMBAMBAMBAM!

“All right, already.” The thuds made his head hurt worse. But who could it be? I don’t owe anybody money, do 1? He pulled on his robe—the blue monogrammed one Vera had given him last Christmas—and straggled to the door.

“Open this fucking door, Kirby, before I kick it down!”

It was Tate, his editor at the City Sun. Paul opened the door and was almost bulled over by the big, beefy man.

“Where is it?” Tate demanded. Some mysterious rage pinked his face. His fists opened and closed at his sides.

“What are you so pissed off about?” Paul asked. “Take off your coat, have a seat—”

“I ain’t got time to have a fucking seat. I got a newspaper to put out, remember? So hand it over!’’

“Hand what over?”

“The first installment on the singles bar series. It was your bright idea, wonderboy, so where is it?”

“You’ll get it. It’s due Thursday noon.”

“Yeah, and that was five and a half fucking hours ago!” Tate bellowed. “Don’t tell me you don’t have it, Kirby. I got the whole weekend section set to go, and a big blank fifteen-hundred-word block sitting there waiting for your shit! Do you have it or not?”

Paul’s memory felt like a clogged artery. This was impossible. “It’s…Thursday?”

“Yes, you moron, it’s Thursday—that’s Thursday as in the day we send The Weekender to fucking press.” He thrust up his stout forearm—for a second, Paul thought he was going to hit him—and pointed to the date squares on his watch. thurs it displayed.

“And who the hell do you think you are hanging up on my men?” Tate continued with his wrath. “And hanging up on me? Let me tell you something, wonder-boy. No writer, and I mean no fucking writer in this city hangs up on me!”

“I didn’t…” Paul faltered. Had he? Suddenly he recalled distant bells, distant voices. But they were part of the nightmare. They had to be. “I…hung up on you?”

“You’re goddamn right you hung up on me! What the fuck’s wrong with you, Kirby? You on drugs? You lose half your orbital lobe the last time you took a shit?”

Paul could only look back in unblinking turmoil. Blurred images began to sift through his memory, pieces of colors, slabs of sounds, and distantly unpleasant sensations. For one frightened second, he didn’t even feel real.

“I—I’ve been sick, I guess,” he stumbled. “The flu or something.” His memory struggled to disbirth the rest, but nothing came. He fitted together the few facts he had on hand. I’m a metropolitan journalist. The very pissed off man standing in front of me is the editor in chief of the biggest paper in the city. I owe him a story, and the story was due over five hours ago. And I don’t have it.

“I don’t have it,” Paul said.

“I didn’t think so,” Tate replied. At once his voice tremored down, the prickling rage supplanted by low disgust. “I should’ve known you were a fuck up, Kirby. You’re out. You’re never getting published in my paper again. Period. And that advance I gave you? I want it back. If you don’t give it back, I will sue you, and if I have to go to the trouble of suing you, hear this. I will devote my life to seeing that you never get published, anywhere, ever again.”

Paul felt ablaze in shame. Nothing like this had ever happened before. Worst part was, he had no idea how any of it had come about. What’s wrong with me? he pleaded with himself. I don’t even know what day it is.

“I’m sorry,” was all he could say. “I’ll give you back your check. Give me a couple of hours, I’ll have the piece for you. I’ll even write the rest of the series for free. Give me a chance to make it up to you.”

Tate’s expression turned astonished. “I was born at night, Kirby, but not last night. What do you think I am, a fucking idiot? You think I’m stupid. I used to like you, you know that? I used to think you were one squared-away kick-ass journalist. But all I gotta do is take one look at you now to know what you really are. You’re a fuckin’ cokehead, Kirby, and if you ask me, there’s nothing more disgusting in the fucking world. Drugs are for losers, Kirby, for assholes who don’t give a shit about anything but their own cheap thrills. Don’t you realize that the people you buy that shit from are the same evil motherfuckers who hook nine-year-olds on crack? Don’t you understand that every single penny you give them only makes them stronger? You’ve let yourself become part of the same machine that’s tearing this country up. Your talent, your career, all the great things you could’ve been you’ve thrown out the fucking window, and for what? For cheap thrills. And why? Because you don’t give enough of a shit about yourself or anyone else to be strong enough to live right. So go on and feed your head, Kirby. I could care less. You make me sick.”

Tate’s entire monolog left Paul standing rigid as a granite statue. What was he talking about? Paul had never used drugs in his life. “I’m not a cokehead,” he eventually said, after the shock wore off. “I’ve never even used it once, and—”

“Don’t hand me a load of shit,” Tate cut him off. “You’re making an ass of yourself. Take a good look in the mirror, sport. You say you got the flu? Don’t insult me. You’re sweating, and your eyes are all fucked up. You’re shaking like you’re standing on a live wire. You’ve got blood leaking out of your fucking nose, for God’s sake.” Tate paused to rein some of his disgust. “I’m leaving now, Kirby, and I’m gonna try real hard to pretend that I never knew you. In fact, I’m ashamed that I ever published you in my paper. It makes me want to puke knowing that the money I’ve paid you for your stories was used to buy drugs. It makes me sick to my fucking stomach that I used to think you were a good writer. You’re not a writer, Kirby. You’re just another shuck and jive, don’t-give-a-shit, cocaine-snorting loser…”

Tate walked out of the apartment and slammed the door. Paul felt riddled in shock. He wiped his upper lip, and his hand came away red. And he was shaking, he was sweating. But there was one thing he knew without doubt. He was not a drug user. The entire confrontation was too impossible to even contemplate.

But his memory still hung before him like a black hole. He couldn’t remember the last four days. I better call Vera, he realized. Find out what the hell’s going on.

His joints ached when he went to the phone. He couldn’t even remember The Emerald Room’s number; he had to look it up.

“Vera Abbot, please,” he said when the hostess picked up.

A long pause, “I’m sorry, sir, but she’s…gone.”

Paul frowned. “What do you mean gone?”

“She quit a few days ago, for some job in north county.”

Quit her job? “That’s impossible,” Paul countered. “I—”

“Apparently,” the hostess persisted in the rumor, “she caught her fiancé cheating on her, so she took another job the next day and left town. And she took three of our best people with her…”

Listening further would’ve been useless. Paul’s senses blanked out. Something in his psyche snapped, like a bone cracking, and his eyes blurred. He dropped the phone.

Strange—and awful—visions showed him things. He stared ahead, at nothing. The small glass panes of the dining room cabinet reflected back his pallid, unshaven, and bloody-lipped face—

And in that face he saw the nightmare. Its whorls seemed to congeal above him.

“Oh my God,” the reflection whispered.

Then the memory crashed down.

««—»»

Lemi’s blade gleamed like molten silver. He used it with a calm and lavish finesse. Organs slid wetly from the cadaver’s sliced abdominal cavity; they landed on the floor in a sloppy, sort of crinkly sound. The corpse’s blood had long since gone dark.

The Factotum liked to watch Lemi work. He saw resolve in the young man’s eyes, determination and an almost reverent placidity. Faith, the Factotum thought. It was faith, he knew—a doubtless, unvacillating, and even radiant faith in the promise behind their tasks. Zyra was the same way: incorruptible in her loyalty to the Factotum and their calling.

Zyra, her beautiful eyes set in placid determination, undraped the female, who lay prone in the stark light. Bound and gagged, her face looked similarly stark-drained of its color by dread. She was plump, ebon-haired, and her light blue eyes would have been alluring were it not for the pink circles of shock about them, and the muddy smudges of mascara. Her entire body faintly trembled.

“Don’t be afraid,” the Factotum consoled her, not that she could reply. “Wondrous things await you. But you must have faith!” And he thought of sacrifices, of warm hearts plucked from opened bosoms and held high to the eyes of gods. He thought of the flesh consumed, and the blood drunk fresh from newly sliced veins. Time immemorial, his pondering persisted. All of history wears the same face. Good and evil are only masks which change like the seasons. The designs scarcely matter. It was all the same in the end. Heaven or hell. Abstinence or pleasure.

Denial or truth.

The Factotum chose truth. It was his own god which beckoned him now, with providence, with truth.

What a wondrous acknowledgement!

“The balm,” he instructed. “Calm her down; she’s terrified.”

Zyra knelt and opened the tiny hand-blown bottle. The bottle looked ancient. She dribbled several drops of the warm leahroot oil onto the gagged woman’s bare abdomen, then gingerly massaged it into her skin. She did this with great care, caressing the slippery oil over the plush belly, breasts, and legs. A pleasant, cinnamony fragrance rose up with the woman’s body heat. The fervid squirming began to wind down, then abated altogether when Zyra gently rubbed a few more drops between the abductee’s legs. Now the strained face relaxed, and her eyes—previously pried open by sheer terror—narrowed against the seeping repose of the balm.

“There,” the Factotum whispered. “That’s better.”

And it was. Everything was better. The Factotum felt becalmed in his surmise of the future. The silence, now, hung about his baldhead like a halo, or a static tiara as he lent a final, smiling gaze to his acolytes. “Take the corpse up,” he instructed Lemi, then, to Zyra, “And take her down.” His gaze seemed radiant on them. He thought of them as his children.

“Soon,” he added, “it will be time to begin.”

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