Kem Nunn - Tapping the Source

The gray-haired man, Ike noticed, was watching Milo and smiling. “I always wondered how you handled these things,” he said. Hound Adams unzipped the small leather bag and removed a needle and a syringe, also a light-colored cord.

“What is it?” Michelle asked. “Coke?”

“What the doctor ordered,” Milo answered. He was looking at Ike now. “Right?” he asked.

Ike didn’t answer. He looked at Milo and then he turned and looked at Hound Adams. He did it very deliberately. He turned his shoulder to Milo and his friends and he waited until Hound raised his eyes from the works in his hands. When he did, his face was still without expression—as if Ike were a perfect stranger. But Ike knew better. He knew what he was going to say; he only hoped that he could say it without his voice cracking. His heart was beating heavily, making it hard to breathe. “We don’t want it,” he said. “Neither of us. And no more movies.” He watched Hound Adams. “And we’re going to leave. Now.” He knew, of course, that it was not true, but it was something he wanted to say—for the record or some damn thing. He even reached behind him with one hand, as if to take Michelle’s, as if the two of them were going to step out into the aisle and go home.

Somewhere at his side, Ike heard Milo making a soft clicking sound with his mouth. He thought that Milo was shaking his head a bit too, sadly, from side to side, but he was not sure; he didn’t want to take his eyes off Hound. And Hound’s expression was starting to change just a bit now, or so it seemed to Ike; he was beginning to look rather tired again, as he had in Milo’s study. He was still not looking at Ike, however. He was very carefully putting his works back in the bag, and then setting the bag on the chair in front of Ike and Michelle. Then he looked up and for a moment their eyes met. And then Hound hit him.

He hit him so fast and hard that for a moment Ike was not even sure where he had been hit, only that something was very wrong, that he had lost his voice and that he was drowning. He was on his knees when Hound took possession of his arm, pinning it between his own bicep and upper body while Milo bent to roll Ike’s sleeve. Ike watched Milo—eyes fixed on the needle, mouth pursed in a disapproving fashion. He watched the cord go around his arm, and then he watched the needle slip under the skin. He was not sure what to expect. He waited for a rush but it did not come. There was instead a kind of gradual blurring, a slowing down, a slipping into darkness. The experience was not unlike the time the doctor put him out in King City to work on his leg. And somewhere, going down, he thought he heard Michelle scream and he tried to pull himself back, but it was no use. He was definitely going, going under. He could still see their faces, though—Hound and Milo peering down on him from this great height, cheek to cheek almost, it appeared to Ike, like a pair of surgeons about to lose a patient. Something funny, though, about those faces—Milo’s all pinched and dark, his little mouth puckered up like a hole in something. A spoiled child about to throw a tantrum. And given the power-lifter’s body that went with the face, Ike was able to take a certain comfort in his distance from it. Hound didn’t look angry. He looked something else, worried perhaps, or maybe even scared. But Ike was puzzled, in a curious and detached sort of way, that he should be the object of such concern. And then, and it was the last detail he would remember, he saw that they were not really looking into his face, but rather at his shoulder, at the tattoo that had come snaking out from beneath his rolled-up sleeve. And then Milo reached down—small thick fingers like pegs of iron, cold on Ike’s skin, and tore away the rest of the shirt so that they might have a look at the whole thing. And apparently they could not dig it. Imagine that. Ike smiled into Milo’s pouting mouth. He smiled into Hound Adams’s fear. Harley-Fuckin’-Davidson. The faces went away.

He thought there was a movie, though it might have been a dream. When he opened his eyes for the first time after getting the drug, the first thing he saw was fire. One fire was almost directly in front of him, others at either side, and there were more lights above the flames—different, white holes burning out of the night, hurting his eyes. And music, a kind of dull rhythmic drumming like the beat of his own heart and above that a thin, reedy wail. It was too much, really, to take in all at once. He felt sick and disoriented, lost amid the motion and noise—everything pulsing and swaying in time to that slow heartbeat rhythm. He closed his eyes once more and a light breeze kissed his face. The smoke of the fires hung on the breeze and burned behind his closed lids. Also on the breeze were the scents of brush and sage together with the damp rotting odor of a distant shoreline—and then something else as well, the heavy scent of incense rising with the smoke, growing quickly, heavier and sweeter, until it had blotted out all the others and clung to the night in an overpowering way. He felt on the verge of nausea and he opened his eyes.

There was a pole near each fire and from each pole an animal hung butchered. Above the fire nearest him he could make out light-colored fur matted with blood, black jaws and white teeth, a dark tongue. There was more blood on the pole. He looked away. He was seeing more now, taking more in, but it was like he was doing it all in slow motion—in time to that strange slow beat through the odd mix of lights, the smoke and incense. There was also the growing awareness of a dull ache beginning somewhere at the base of his skull, of an incredible weakness in his limbs. He saw that he was seated on the ground and that others were seated around him and that together they formed a great circle. Inside the circle formed by the people there was another circle of stones, and in the center of that circle there was the great stone ring with the flat rock in the middle and he realized for the first time where he was—that place at the edge of the cliff from which he had first glimpsed the house, the spot in which Preston had fought Terry Jacobs, and he remembered there had been a dead animal that night, too—white teeth and black tongue. Dead eyes.

The fires, and he could now see that there were four, burned at what might have been the four points of the compass—one at the edge of the circle nearest the sea, another at the edge closest to the forest, the remaining two at equal distance in between. He also saw that lines had been drawn in the earth. The lines led out, away from the center, connecting the stonework in the middle to the four fires that were between the ring of people and the ring of stones. The lines appeared to have been scratched into the ground, then spattered with blood.

Beyond the ring of people, of which Ike himself was a part, he could just make out the dim shapes of what appeared to be more figures—these, however, wore dark robes and hoods and it was hard to tell how many there were because they blended easily with the night. In places the fire lit patches of flesh—bare chests and faces like his own, but many others had blackened their skin with a dark paste. He looked for the source of the music; it did not seem to be coming from anyone he could see, but rather from the forest, as if the whole place had been wired for sound. At the far side of the clearing there appeared to be some kind of structure to which the brilliant white lights were attached, but the lights made it hard to look in that direction and he could not see much. Nor could he see anything of Milo Trax or Hound Adams. It was at this point, however, that he saw Michelle.

She was carried into the clearing by one of the robed and hooded figures. It must have been a man who carried her because the figure was tall and thick beneath the robes and strong enough to hold Michelle easily away from his chest in his arms. The man passed through the various circles until he stood at the center and there he stopped to place her upon that rectangle of rock that marked the very center of the rings. He placed her on her back and she was immediately bathed in a direct flood of light.