Douglas Child - The Wheel of Darkness

Aloysius Pendergast stood before her, dressed in black as usual, his hands clasped in front of him, smiling.

“Welcome,” he said.

The room was large and beautiful, with paneled wainscoting. A fire burned in a marble fireplace, and an old clock on the mantel chimed the hours, beside an antique gasogene and several cut-glass tumblers. A stag’s head mounted on the wall looked out with glassy eyes across a desk piled with leather-bound books and papers. The oak floor was covered with rich, dense carpeting, over which expensive Persian carpets had been laid in turn. Several comfortable wing chairs were scattered about, some with open books lying on their seats. It was an extremely comfortable, well-used, luxurious space.

“Come and warm yourself by the fire,” he said, motioning her forward.

She moved closer to the fire, keeping her eyes on Pendergast. There was something different about him. Something strange. Despite the utter reality of this room and this house, the edges of his form were indistinct, blurry, slightly transparent, as if he wasn’t quite there.

The door shut behind her with a dull thud.

He held out his hand for hers, and she gave it to him. He grasped it, suddenly very hard, and she tried to withdraw, but he pulled her toward him. His head seemed to waver, to bulge and dissolve; the skin cracked, and a glow emerged from within; and then his face peeled away and fluttered down in burning threads, revealing a visage that Constance recognized. It was the indescribable face of the Kalazyga demon.

She stared at it, strangely unafraid, feeling its warmth, drawn to it with a mixture of fear and attraction. It seemed to fill her with fire: the ineffable, all-consuming, triumphant fire she had felt in her mad pursuit of Diogenes Pendergast. There was a purity to it that awed her.

“

I am will

,” it said, with a voice that was not sound, but thought. “

I am pure thought burned clean of any vestige of human sentiment. I am freedom. Join with me

.”

Fascinated, repelled, she again tried to withdraw her hand, but it held fast. The face, terrible and beautiful, drew closer to her. It wasn’t real, she told herself, it was only a product of her mind, the image of one of the thangkas she had contemplated for hours on end, now recreated by this intense meditation.

The Kalazyga demon drew her toward the fire. “

Come. Into the fire. Burn off the dead husk of moral restraint. You will emerge like the butterfly from its chrysalis, free and beautiful.

”

She took a step toward the fire, hesitated, then took another, almost floating over the carpeting toward the warmth.

“Yes,” said another voice. Pendergast’s voice. “This is good. This is right. Go to the fire.”

As she drew closer to the flames, the heavy guilt and mortification of murder that had lain on her shoulders melted away, replaced by a sense of exhilaration, the intense exhilaration and dark joy she felt when she saw Pendergast’s brother tumble off the edge of La Sciara into the red-hot depths below. That momentary ecstasy was being offered to her now, forever.

All she had to do was step into the flames.

One more step. The fire radiated its warmth, licking up into her very limbs. She remembered him at the very edge, the two of them locked together in a macabre caricature of sexual union, struggling at the roaring edge of La Sciara ; her unexpected feint; the expression on his face when he realized they were both going over. The expression on his face: it was the most horrifying, most pitiful, and yet most satisfying thing she had ever seen—to revel in the face of a person who realizes, without the shadow of a doubt, that he is going to die. That all hope is gone. And this bitter joy could now be hers forever; she could be free to experience it again and again, at will. And she would not even need overweening vengeance as an excuse: she could simply murder, whoever and wherever, and again and again revel in the hot blood-fury, the ecstatic, orgiastic triumph . . .

All hope is gone . . .

With a scream, she writhed in the grip of the demon, and with a sudden, immense force of will she managed to break free. She threw herself back from the fire, turned and ran through the door, and suddenly she was falling, falling through the house, through the basements, the sub-cellars, falling . . .

66

THE STORM RAGED BEYOND THE OPEN RAILS OF HALF DECK 7, SPRAY sweeping across the deck despite their being sixty feet above the waterline. Liu could hardly think over the boom of the sea and the bellow of the wind.

Crowley came up, as soaked as he was. “Are we really going to try this, sir?”

“You got a better idea?” Liu replied irritably. “Give me your radio.”

Crowley handed it over.

Liu tuned it to channel 72 and pressed the transmit button. “Liu here, calling Bruce, over.”

“This is Bruce.”

“How do you read me?”

“Five by five.”

“Good. Buckle yourself into the coxswain’s station at the helm. Welch should take the seat across the aisle.”

“Already done.”

“Need any instructions?”

“They seem to be all right here.”

“The lifeboat’s almost completely automatic,” Liu went on. “The engine starts automatically on impact. It’ll drive the lifeboat away from the ship in a straight line. You should throttle down to steerageway speed only—they’ll find you quicker that way. The master panel should be pretty self-explanatory to a nautical man.”

“Right. Got an EPIRB on this crazy boat?”

“Two, and they’re actually the latest GPIRBs, which transmit your GPS coordinates. On impact, the GPIRB automatically activates at 406 and 121.5 megahertz—no action required on your part. Keep the lifeboat’s VHF tuned to emergency channel 16. Communicate with me through channel 72 on your handheld. You’re going to be on your own until you’re picked up—the Britannia isn’t stopping. Both of you stay strapped in at all times—you’re going to take a few barrel rolls in these seas, at the least.”

“Understood.”

“Questions?”

“No.”

“Ready?”

“Ready.” Bruce’s voice crackled over the handheld.

“Okay. There’s a fifteen-second automatic countdown. Lock down the transmit button so we can hear what happens. Talk to me as soon as possible after you hit.”

“Understood. Fire away.”

Liu turned to the freefall launch control panel. There were thirty-six lifeboats, eighteen on the port side and eighteen on starboard, each with a capacity of up to 150 people. Even launching one boat virtually empty like this, they still had plenty of capacity to spare. He glanced at his watch. If it worked, they’d have fifty minutes to evacuate the ship. A very doable proposition.

He murmured a short prayer.

As he initiated the launch sequence, Liu began to breathe a little easier. It

was

going to work. These damn boats were overengineered, built to withstand a sixty-foot free fall. They could take the extra strain.

Green across the board. He unlocked the switch that would began the countdown on lifeboat number one, opened the cover. Inside, the little red breaker-lever glowed with fresh paint. This was a hell of a lot simpler than in the old days, when a lifeboat had to be lowered on davits, swinging crazily in the wind and roll of the ship. Now all you had to do was press a lever; the boat was released from its arrestors, slid down the rails, and fell sixty feet to land, nose first, in the sea. A few moments later it bobbed to the surface and continued on, driving away from the ship. They’d been through the drill many times: drop to recovery took all of six seconds.