Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter

The bus was almost empty. Once south of Alabama Street it drove fast, hardly stopping, through a wasteland of car lots and small industrial businesses. By the time they bumped over the railroad crossing on McDaniel, Russ was the only passenger. It was only then that he realized, too late, the meaning of the unconscious summons which had woken him. He had forgotten to call home. He had been so disturbed by missing Pat that morning, and still more by finding Cindy there in his place, that it had completely slipped his mind. Oh well, he’d call tomorrow with the news that the operation had been a success. They wouldn’t freak out if they didn’t hear from him for one day.

He got off at the stop he’d used that afternoon, crossed the road and walked up the street opposite. It was even hotter and stickier here than it had been downtown, and the air was laced with patches of exotic scent. Cicadas grated away in the undergrowth over a bass section of whinnying frogs. Russ felt as though he’d stumbled into one of those old jungle movies they had on TV about three in the morning.

He climbed the hill, gripping the suitcase in a palm already damp with sweat. Quite a few people seemed to be out on their porches. He hadn’t noticed them at first, mere shadowy presences in the pervading darkness. It was only the soft murmur of voices, punctuated by the occasional throaty laugh, which gave them away. But once he started looking, he realized they were everywhere. No one said anything as he passed, but he knew they were watching him.

This was something he hadn’t expected. Why the hell couldn’t they have drawn a place like that suburb where Pat got lost the night before, an all-white neighborhood where everyone homed in, clustering around the electronic hearth in their widely spaced, secluded properties? He’d much rather have gone in there, even if it had a security system and those little metal tags in the lawn marked Armed Response. But you didn’t get to choose. They’d performed the calculations the usual way, and this was the address that came up. It was meant to be, so it would be. He tried to comfort himself with this thought.

When he rounded the corner of the block, near the top of the hill, a figure detached itself from the still torrent of vines which had engulfed a retaining wall on the other side of the street. Russ found himself wishing that he’d taken his gun out of the case. Then something about those jerky, uncoordinated movements reassured him that this was one of his own kind. A moment later he recognized his partner.

“You got the piece?” Pat asked him.

“Piece?” Russell queried vaguely.

“The gun, man! C’mon, let’s go!”

Pat was transformed, taut and wired like one of life’s natural go-to guys. Despite his narbo outfit, the suit a size too small by the looks of it, you could sense the energy he was giving off. Just being around him made Russell feel woozy from lack of sleep, stale air and too much thinking. He opened the suitcase and handed Pat one of the revolvers, pocketing the other himself.

“We’ll cruise by a couple of the other houses first,” he said. “Set up our cover.”

Pat waved impatiently.

“Fuck that, man! Let’s just do it! Get in, get out, don’t screw around.”

His air of urgency was so strong that Russ hesitated, a moment too long to insist.

“OK,” he murmured.

It was all wrong, he knew, letting the initiate lead like this. On the other hand, Pat’s mood might change again at any moment, leaving him with a cowering wimp on his hands. Better to ride the moment.

They set off along the side street running parallel to McDaniel. Up here there didn’t seem to be so many people out on the porches. In fact many of the houses looked abandoned. Maybe they were going to clear the area and put up more projects. Pat strode along, humming some staccato melody under his breath. Russell could hardly keep up. He glanced curiously at his partner.

“You been drinking?”

“I had a shot with a greeny back,” Pat replied carelessly. “Man, that stuff sure works, you don’t use it all the time.”

“That’s way out of line!” Russell snapped. “You know we’re not supposed to do drink or drugs when we’re-”

“Hey, what is this? ‘The floggings will continue until morale improves?’ Don’t treat me like a little kid.”

“Hold it right there!”

Russell gripped his partner’s arm and pulled him around.

“You want me to call this whole thing off right now?”

Pat shook his head quickly.

“OK! Then remember I’m in charge here. I don’t want to go down because you’re too snockered to stick to the game plan.”

They rounded the corner into Carson Street-322 was the sixth house on the left. Russell opened the suitcase again. The copy of The Watchtower was lying right on top, but the pamphlets seemed to have wriggled down to the back somewhere.

“Hey!” said Pat.

The beam of light falling on the suitcase from the streetlamp behind was suddenly cut off.

“Hand it over, motherfucker!”

Russell straightened up, still holding the magazine. There were three of them, no more than fourteen or fifteen years old by the looks of it, all black. The one who had spoken had a body like a barrel. He was wearing a Star Trek T-shirt and a pair of jeans which looked two sizes too big even for him. He and one of the others had pistols, the third a knife.

“We’re just children of God,” Russell found himself saying, holding up The Watchtower like a sign. “We’re spreading the word of the Lord in this neighborhood.”

The squat guy waved his chunky snub-barreled automatic.

“I don’t give a fuck who you are, honky! Hand over your shit or your ass is history!”

That was all they’d needed to do, Russell realized a moment later, when it was too late to do anything. Just hand over their wallets and watches and the suitcase and let the three youths run off with them. Instead, Pat pulled his pistol and shot the guy in the chest and stomach.

“Christ Almighty!” cried the other gunman, a skinny kid in tight red pants and a basketball jersey.

Russell could have taken him there and then, but he hesitated a second too long, knowing he wasn’t empowered to kill them. There was a flash of steel, then a grinding sound as the knife hit one of his ribs. Another shot, much louder, sent Pat spinning away. Then something huge hit Russell harder than he had ever been hit before. He tasted blood, mixed in with the dirt of the street. There were other sounds, other sensations, but he had no names for them. It didn’t matter. Pretty soon they faded, like everything else.

At that point, of course, I still thought I had a choice. Not just about staying or going, or even falling in love, but about things like how I spent my time. So I was disconcerted to find that, like all the others, I was expected to attend a lecture on the poetry of William Blake every afternoon.

The lectures were given by Sam. That first one lasted two and three-quarter hours, and seemed even longer at the time. I learned later that they often were longer, particularly when things threatened to fall apart. The one Sam had given on the day after the news about Dale Watson came through apparently lasted well over six hours, starting right after lunch and going on until well after dark. I didn’t understand then, of course, that Sam was struggling to retain control, and that his labored exposition of Blake’s so-called prophetic books was merely a means to this end. This was just one of many things I didn’t understand.

My only previous contact with Blake’s work had been in a class I took at college. Like a lot of people back then, I’d been seduced by the idea that Blake was an acidhead born ahead of his time. All that stuff about seeing the universe in a grain of sand, we’d been there, done that. Hell, we’d seen it in an empty Coke bottle, a crumpled cigarette packet, a capsized cockroach. We were old hands at relative reality, and although Blake had never actually dropped himself (but it was hard to score good shit back then) and tended to maunder on at times (but it could have been really neat if Pink Floyd had set it to music), we decided in a slightly patronizing way to add the old buffer to our gallery of proto-hippies like Huxley, Hesse and the rest. We knew where he was coming from. It also didn’t hurt that the professor who taught the class was young and hip and, according to the student guide, graded generously.