Michael Dibdin: Dark Specter

In fact the couple turned out to be perfectly pleasant, for Californians. Kristine quickly firmed up an arrangement which would leave her two hours of blissful solitude that afternoon. As she led Thomas up the flights of wooden steps from the beach to the lodge on the cliffs behind, she felt her familiar old Pollyanna self reemerging. It had been a good idea to leave Seattle, but she was always glad to get back. She would just laze around the house and let the rest of the world look after itself. Maybe Eric’s lingering influence had been partly responsible for her crisis. She should take a tip from Paul Merlowitz, and stop worrying about things she couldn’t control.

About the time that Kristine Kjarstad and her son left the beach to have lunch, a man walked into the office of a motel on Aurora Avenue North in Seattle. This was very different from the one at Ocean Shores. Aurora had once been a bustling thoroughfare, part of Highway 99 linking British Columbia and Mexico. Now all the through traffic used the interstate, and Aurora was a run-down strip of discarded dreams and broken promises. The motels which had survived were mostly on the brink of Chapter Eleven, while some of the sleazier ones functioned as business locations for the prostitutes who worked the avenue.

The one the man had chosen was on a long narrow lot between a gun shop and an auto-wrecking yard. A massive neon display on a stand sunk in a brick planter read Tuk-Inn Motor Lodge. The office was a fake log cabin with access lanes on either side leading to the rooms. It smelled of mold and cheap air freshener. There were dirty lace curtains over the windows, sad plants in pots, wallpaper with a photograph of mountain scenery repeated over and over, and a plastic sign in mock embroidery stitch that said IF YOU WANT A PLACE IN THE SUN, YOU HAVE TO PUT UP WITH A FEW BLISTERS.

As the man approached the desk, an electronic bleep sounded in the back room. He dropped the black tubular bag he had carried six blocks from the stop where the Greyhound bus had set him down. A woman in Lurex hot pants and a tight-fitting sweater drifted in through the open doorway. Her nails were elaborately painted, her feet bare.

“How are you today?” she said.

“You got a room?” the man asked. “Yeah, I guess you got a room.”

The woman made a show of consulting a large ring binder with handwritten entries.

“How long you staying?”

The man shrugged.

“Maybe a few days.”

“Forty bucks gets you a suite with a kitchenette.”

“Whatever.”

He handed over two crisp twenty-dollar bills. The woman examined them carefully, then glanced at the man and flashed a smile, as though apologizing for her caution.

“First time out for these babies, looks like.”

She caught the look in the man’s eyes and her smile vanished.

“Third on the left-hand side,” she said in a hard voice, plucking a key from one of the hooks on the wall. “Check-out is at ten. You want to keep the room, it’s another forty.”

The man picked up his bag and walked down the driveway to the sunken parking lot. The cabins were built of brick patched with sheets of metal. The matt beige paint was flaking off like diseased skin to reveal a drab green. He unlocked the door corresponding to his key number and went in. There was a bed, a table, a sofa, a television, a toilet and shower. The one small window had the same lace curtains as the reception area. It did not open. The air was stuffy, with a sickly scent of mildew. The man set down his heavy bag, locked the door and lay on the bed, staring up at the scabrous rows of ceiling tiles.

How long would he be staying? As long as it took. He was in no hurry. From now on, everything must be perfect. One call, to establish the address, then the visit. He had no idea where it would be. He didn’t even know which state he’d have to go to. It would most likely be someplace back East, but it could be anywhere, even right here in this town. There was simply no way of knowing.

In the old days, every detail had been worked out weeks and even months in advance. The system had seemed so flawless. The prophet Los selected those worthy of initiation. He gave them a life and demanded a life in return. That was only just. After that, everything was controlled by the rigorous lottery of chance. The target city was located in the state where the novice had been born. That was where he had entered the false life, the state of Generation, and that was where he must return to perform the ritual which freed him from his native state. Mark had been born in Texas, so his initiation had taken place in Houston. Lenny was from a small town in Missouri, so he’d gone to St. Louis to become his eternal self, Palambron. Russell was from somewhere around here, so he’d come to the Seattle area to celebrate his passage into the state of Eden.

And now they were all dead. It was a bitter blow, when so much loving care and attention had gone into their rebirthing. First the novice’s personal number was calculated. You took an ordinary pocket calculator, the kind you can buy at any drugstore, powered by a solar cell-by Sol, which is another name for Los. You keyed in the month, day and year of the subject’s birthday, then pressed the square root key to obtain the magic string of numbers which expressed the root of his existence, the secret DNA code of his eternal self.

It was so beautifully simple! Say the person was born on September 11, 1958. You tapped in 0, 9, 1, 1, 5, 8, then hit?. That gave you the sequence 30192383. The novice and the initiate who would accompany him then took the boat across to Friday Harbor, where there was a public library. They went to the reference section and consulted the White Pages phone book for the city in question. They looked up the page corresponding to the first three digits of the personal number and took a photocopy of it which they brought back to the island.

Now began the arduous task of determining the exact address. Each page of the phone book contained approximately 440 entries, arranged in four columns. The calculation involved running through all the permutations of the remaining digits of the novice’s personal number. In the case of the man born on September 11, 1958, this meant finding the ninth entry from the beginning, then the 92nd from that, then the 923rd, the 9,238th, the 92,383rd, the 2,383rd, the 383rd and the 83rd. The third entry after that one was the target address.

It wasn’t necessary to count the entries by hand, of course, although some people preferred to do so. One of the men with a mathematical flair had come up with a formula for calculating the correct result once the number of entries in each column had been counted, and this was always used as a check. So there was never the slightest question in the novice’s mind that the house to which he would go had been selected in accordance with the divine will, expressed through the agency men call chance. As a result, he was freed of all doubt and empowered to perform the ritual, knowing that the victims were mere specters created by a loving God to permit the illusion of evil in a world where only good existed.

The man rolled up off the bed, covering his face with his hands and gasping as though struggling for breath. When he finally removed his hands, both they and his face were wet with tears. It was such a joyful, liberating truth, and they had labored so long and hard to demonstrate themselves worthy of possessing it! Yet it had come to nothing. They were all dead, and that could mean only one thing: they had never been alive in the first place.

Chance might appear to be a mere lottery, but he knew that it possessed a rigorous logic, and one that must be obeyed. Whatever it cost him, he had to submit to God’s will. If his friends and allies were dead, it was because they had been specters from the beginning, every one. It wasn’t just a question of this or that person not working out, a Dale Watson here, a Russell Crosby there. The wholesale nature of the holocaust which had occurred demonstrated that once and for all.