F. Paul Wilson - Ground Zero

“Mister Veilleur?”

He smiled and touched the brim of his cap. “Who shall I say is calling?”

“Jack and Louise.”

He turned and held the door for them. “He’s expecting you. Top floor.”

“Which apartment?” Jack said.

The doorman smiled. “There’s only one.”

“Only one?” Weezy whispered as they approached the elevator. “He has the whole floor?”

“I imagine he’s made a few good investments over the last few thousand years.”

Once in the elevator and on their way up, Jack pulled the Compendium from the backpack. Its covers and spine were made of some sort of metal stamped with letters and symbols.

“Careful,” he said as he handed it to her. “It’s heavy.”

She took it with both hands and stared at the cover. Jack remembered the first time he’d seen it, and knew what she was experiencing: The cover at first would seem decorated with two lines of meaningless squiggles, then they’d blur and morph into English. Two words. Compendium ran across the upper half in large serif letters; below it, half size, was Srem .

She gazed a moment then looked up at him with an awed expression.

“Then it’s true . . . it’s true what they said about the text.”

Jack nodded. “Yeah. It changes into the reader’s native language.” He smiled. “And it’s got capitalizitosis—big into uppercasing first letters. The Infernals and the One and the Adversary and the Ally . . . you’ll see.”

She opened it to a random page. “Ohmygod, Jack. Ohmygod! You weren’t joking. This is it, really it!” Her eyes widened. “But then that must mean that Mister Veilleur is really . . .”

“From the First Age. Yeah.”

He loved the look on her face, a desperate desire to believe battling a fear to commit to that belief, because here was proof of everything she had studied and pieced together and intuited since her teens.

The elevator doors slid open then and the man himself stood there smiling.

“Welcome,” he said, extending his hand to her. “Louise Connell, I believe.”

Weezy stood frozen, clutching the Compendium against her chest as she stared at him.

“Weez, you okay?” Jack said as the moment lengthened.

“Mister Foster?” She looked at Jack. “You didn’t say he was Mister Foster!”

What the hell was she talking about?

And then he saw it. How had he missed it? He’d met this man once in his boyhood, but he’d been known then as the reclusive Old Man Foster who owned a piece of the Pinelands near Jack’s hometown.

“Are you?” he said. “I had no idea.”

Veilleur nodded, his blue eyes twinkling. “It’s been decades, and I’ve aged since then.”

Still clutching the Compendium , Weezy managed to shake hands with him.

“Come in, come in,” he said. “I have someone else waiting to see you. It’s going to be like old home week, I fear.”

He was a big man, and his bulk had blocked their view of most of the rest of the apartment. But when he stepped aside they saw an elderly woman in a long black dress. She carried a cane and wore a black scarf around her neck. Beside her sat a three-legged dog.

Jack and Weezy spoke in unison.

“Mrs. Clevenger!”

Unlike Mr. Foster—Veilleur—she hadn’t aged a day. She and her dog had been something of a fixture around their hometown of Johnson when they were kids. She’d kept pretty much to herself and had been rumored by some to be a witch. By the time they finished high school she’d moved away.

But of course she wasn’t a witch, she was . . .

“The Lady!” Jack said. “That was you all along?”

She nodded.

I’m an idiot, he thought.

All these women with dogs traipsing in and out of his life and he never connected them with Mrs. Clevenger. Maybe he should have been less adamant about deserting his past and never looking back, because lately the past seemed to be inundating his present.

Weezy was staring at Mrs. C. “How can this be?” She turned to Jack. “You obviously know more about this than I do.”

“Not as much as you think.” He looked at the Lady. “I have a feeling today’s the day you’re going to bring me into the loop. Am I right?”

She nodded. “It is time, I think.”

Way past time as far as Jack was concerned.

11

Weezy’s mind whirled. Or maybe reeled was more like it.

They sat in the apartment’s great room, its huge windows overlooking Central Park’s Sheep Meadow. She didn’t know much about décor, but knew this place was way out of date. Guys from Interior Design would fight over the chance to do an extreme makeover. But she kind of liked it the way it was, with its dark paneling and strange curios and odd melange of mismatched paintings from all over and, perhaps, all time. A tray of sandwiches—homemade from the look of them—sat in the middle of a table set with crystal and china.

All very nice, except she was seated across from Mrs. Clevenger, a woman who had been elderly when Weezy was a kid, and should have passed on by now, but who looked not a day older than when she’d last seen her. Jack seemed to know her as someone else. He’d called her “the Lady.”

And Mrs. Clevenger was seated next to the man she’d recognized as Old Man Foster, who had aged, but was going by the name of Veilleur. She wondered how Jack hadn’t recognized him. Older, sure, but still a big man like Foster, and the blue eyes and high cheekbones were the same; even the beard was the same shape, though fully gray now.

Mr. Veilleur had announced at the beginning that he might have to excuse himself if his wife needed him. Apparently he’d given the help the afternoon off so they could have privacy.

When Weezy had asked if his wife would be joining them the old man said she was not having a good day.

She got the impression that Mrs. Veilleur didn’t have many good days.

So . . . already surreal with Mrs. Clevenger and Mr. Foster—Veilleur—there, but then Jack had launched into this tale of a cosmic shadow war between two vast, unimaginable, unknowable cosmic forces. They had no names, just the labels humans had attributed to them: the Ally and the Otherness.

She’d stifled a yawn. The old tale of Good versus Evil vying for control of Earth or humanity—its oh-so-valuable souls or bodies, or whatever. The same tale that every human culture had invented and reinvented through the ages. She’d heard it all before.

Or thought she had until Jack explained that Earth’s corner of reality was not the grand prize, just a piece—and not a particularly valuable one—on a vast cosmic chessboard . . . part of a contest between the two forces, with victory going to the one that could take and keep the most pieces. Commonly referred to as the Conflict, no one knew who was winning.

But these forces weren’t so simple as Good and Evil. More like neutral and inimical. The Ally was an ally only in so far as humanity’s purposes were in tune with its agenda, which it ruthlessly pursued. It would squash whatever got in its way with no more thought or concern than a human would give to swatting an annoying fly. As long as Earth’s corner of reality stayed in the Ally’s pocket, humanity could count on benign neglect.

The Otherness was another story. It was decidedly inimical because, in a sense, it devoured worlds, changing their realities, even their physics to an environment more to its liking. Almost vampiric in that it seemed to feed on the agonies it caused along the way. Humans shouldn’t take this personally—it did this wherever it gained control.

“The Conflict,” Jack said, “is what’s been fueling the Secret History.”

Weezy glanced at Mr. Veilleur and Mrs. Clevenger and found them nodding agreement.