F. Paul Wilson: Crisscross

"Because it's connected to the Otherness?"

She nodded. "It was inspired by the Otherness, and has become its tool."

"How does a cosmic force inspire a cult?"

"Through a man whose drug-addled mind was open to influence when the Adversary was conceived—or I should say, reconceived ."

The Adversary… also known as the One… who moved about under even more identities and names than Jack… the Otherness's agent provocateur in this world… whose True Name Jack had learned only a few months ago…

Rasalom.

And Jack was pretty sure he could name the owner of that drug-addled mind.

"Cooper Blascoe told me he got the idea for Dormentalism from a dream back in the late sixties. Was that when Rasa—"

Herta's hand shot up. "Do not say his True Name! I don't want him to know where I am. And neither do you."

Jack hated to admit it, but she had that right. He'd had a taste of what this Rasalom guy could do. Pretty scary.

"What do you mean, 'reconceived'?"

"After millennia of striving to maximize the human misery that fed him, he was permanently eliminated shortly before World War II. At least that was what was thought. But in 1968, through a freak set of circumstances, he contrived to be reconceived in the womb of an unsuspecting woman."

The date rang a bell… Jack had been to a town where a "burst of Otherness" had occurred in 1968… been there a number of times. None of his visits had been pleasant, and he'd nearly lost his life there.

"That wouldn't have been in Monroe, Long Island, would it?"

She nodded. "It would. And that was not the first time he came back from the dead."

"Anya mentioned that he'd been reborn a number of times. But look, I've got to tell you, Cooper Blascoe didn't seem like a bad guy. Hard to believe a hippie like him was working for the Otherness."

"He was merely a pawn. His dream of the Hokano world that he turned into a pamphlet was Otherness-inspired. He planted the seed that Luther Brady later twisted into the monstrous entity of his church, to use as a tool to help the Otherness dominate this sphere."

Jack shook his head. "But as I understand it, the Otherness means to change everything here, make our reality living hell. Brady doesn't seem the type who'd try to screw himself. Unless of course he's insane."

"He is quite sane, but is possessed of the notion that the one who completes the Opus Omega—"

"Opus…?"

"Opus Omega: the Last Task, the End Work—burying those obscene columns in all the designated spots."

"You mean…" Jack pulled the flap of Anya's skin from his pocket and unfolded it for Herta to see "… in a pattern like this?"

A cloud of pain passed across the old woman's puffy face.

She sighed. "Yes. Just like that."

"So it all comes together. 'No more coincidences,' right? The flap of skin I can't throw away, your hiring me to infiltrate the Dormentalists where I'd get a view of Brady's globe and recognize the pattern… everything's been carefully orchestrated."

He felt like a goddamn puppet.

"'Orchestrated' gives me too much credit. No one—not the Otherness, not the Ally, and certainly not I—has that much control. People and objects are placed in proximity in the hope that certain outcomes will ensue."

"Is Brady in the same boat?"

"Luther Brady is driving himself. I doubt he has any concept of what the Otherness's new world order will be like, but I have little doubt that he believes that the man who completes the Opus Omega will be rewarded with an exalted position in it."

"But how does he even know about this Opus Omega?"

"He too had a dream, but his was of a map of the world. It showed the nexus points around the globe, each radiating lines toward the others. Wherever three lines crossed, the intersection glowed. He had no idea of its significance until a forbidden book, The Compendium of Srem , was delivered into his hands."

"Forbidden, huh? How exactly does a book become forbidden? Like banned in Boston?"

She offered him a tolerant smile. "In a way. It was banned in the fifteenth century by the Catholic church."

"Six hundred years… pretty old book."

"That was merely when it was banned. It's much older than that. No one is quite sure how old. The Compendium first came to the church's attention during the Spanish Inquisition when it was discovered in the possession of a Moorish scholar whose name is lost. He was put through unimaginable agonies before he died, but either could not or would not say who had given it to him.

"The Grand Inquisitor himself, Torquemada, is said to have been so re-pulsed after reading only a part of The Compendium that he ordered a huge bonfire built and hurled the book into the flames. But it would not burn. Nor would it be cut by the sharpest sword or the heaviest ax. So he dropped it into the deepest well in the Spanish Empire; he filled that well with granite boulders, then built the monastery of St. Thomas over it."

Jack gave a low whistle. "What the hell was in it?"

"Many things. Lists and descriptions of unspeakable rites and ceremonies, diagrams of ancient clockwork machines, but the heart of The Compendium is the outline of the Opus Omega—the final process that will assure the ascent of what it calls 'the Other world.'"

Jack felt a chill. "The Otherness. Even back then?"

"Surely you realize that this cosmic shadow war is about far more than humanity. The millions of years since the first hominid reared up on its hind legs are an eye blink in the course of the conflict. It began before the Earth was formed and will continue long after the sun's furnace goes cold."

Jack did know that—at least he'd been told that—but it was still hard to accept.

"And as with all forbidden things," Herta went on, "77ie Compendium could not stay buried. A small subsect of monks within the monastery spent years digging tunnels and secretly excavating the well. They retrieved the book, but before they could put it to use they were all slain and the book disappeared for five hundred years."

"If a boulder-filled well with a monastery overhead couldn't keep it out of circulation, where did it hide during those centuries?"

"In a place built by the Ally's warrior—"

"You mean the one Anya told me about—the one I'm supposed to replace? He's that old?"

Here was another thing Jack couldn't or wouldn't accept: Like it or not, he'd been drafted into this cosmic war.

"Much older," Herta said. "Almost as old as the Adversary. More than five centuries ago he trapped the Adversary in a stone keep in a remote pass in Eastern Europe. He sealed away many forbidden books there as well, to keep them out of the hands of men and women susceptible to the Otherness. But the fortress was broached by the German Army in the spring of 1941. Fortunately the Adversary was killed—albeit temporarily—before he could escape."

"But this Compendium thing made it out?"

"Yes. It and other forbidden books ended up in the hands of a man named Alexandru, one of the keep's caretakers. After the war he sold them to an antiquarian book dealer in Bucharest who in turn sold The Com-

pendium to an American collector. A quarter of a century later, the collector was murdered and the book stolen."

"Let me guess who was responsible for that: Rasa—I mean, the Adversary, right?"

"Not personally. He was a child at the time. But his guardian then, a man named Jonah Stevens, committed the crime and saw to it that The Compendium reached a recent college graduate named Luther Brady."

"And the book told him to start burying concrete columns at these spots around the globe?"

Herta shook her head. "Not start—finish. The Opus Omega had been begun long before, but there was no way for those ancients to reach certain parts of the Old World, let alone the New. Remember, The Compendium was already sealed in the Transylvania Alps when Columbus set sail for the Americas."