The Western Lands Page 6

Suddenly the critic feels his carefully tended WASP connections falling about his feet like toilet paper. He considers sending a letter to the management to complain of the doorman's discourtesy, and decides against it. After all, a strange dog that comes into one's apartment, and then disappears—

  "Disappeared, did it? Sniffed it up, more likely."

  Arriving at his usual restaurant, Chandler sees the maître d' at the far end of the room seating a party, so he moves slowly toward his customary table. The maître d' turns and starts toward him with his practiced smile, which suddenly fades.

  "I'm sorry, Mr. Chandler, but we do not permit pets in the dining room."

  "Pets? What do you mean?"

  "The dog that followed you in, sir."

  "But I have no dog."

  "I saw it distinctly, sir. A small black dog."

  "Came in from the street most likely. It certainly isn't mine."

  The maître d' looks unconvinced. . . . "Hummm, must be under something."

  He calls a waiter, who peers resentfully under the table. "Nothing there . . ."

  The sole isn't up to standard, and the critic's lunch is spoiled.

  Chandler arrives at the office a little after three.

  "Go right in, Mr. Allerton is expecting you."

  New girl can't even get the editor's name right. He knocks lightly and steps in.

  To his confusion a stranger comes out from behind the desk to shake hands, a youngish man with blond hair and brown eyes, who seems to float a few inches off the floor and then floats back to his seat.

  "Shocking about Karl, isn't it?"

  "What? I didn't know."

  "Complete nervous breakdown."

  "When did this happen?"

  "Yesterday afternoon . . . became violent I understand . . . thought he was being followed by a black dog."

  Chandler was profoundly shaken. Karl had always been known for his icy reserve.

  "Where is he? We were close friends, you understand."

  The new editor shrugged.

  "Upstate somewhere, I believe." He leafed through some proofs on his desk. "Mr. Chandler . . . this review of W. S. Hall's latest book . . . you say categorically that it is a poor novel but you don't say why."

  "But . . ." My God, didn't this punk know anything?

  "But?" The young man raised a pencil-thin eyebrow inquiringly.

  "Well . . . I understood . . ." Why, his orders had been crystal clear: trash it all the way.

  "You understood?"

  "I understood that an unfavorable review was indicated."

  "Indicated? We are trying to maintain standards of impartial appraisal. After all, this is what criticism is all about. I suggest that you submit a rewrite for consideration."

  Short Eyes, known as See, and the House Dick, known as Prick, are unofficial operatives of Special Operations. Prick is a burly ex-policeman with a cop's florid face and a cop's mean, angry eyes. They are rarely used against enemy agents, but rather against civilian targets: writers, artists, filmmakers, intellectuals, inventors and researchers who are considered a danger to Big Picture.

  Big Picture involves escape from the planet by a chosen few. The jumping-off place is Wellington, New Zealand. After that, an extermination program will be activated. Needless to say, Big Picture is a highly sensitive project. Even to suspect the existence of Big Picture is unwholesome. As the poet says: "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?"

  Both operatives are trained in unarmed defense in the rather unlikely contingency of counterattack. Usually the target is too overwhelmed to consider immediate physical retaliation. And the attack occurs when the target is at his most vulnerable. The operatives have an unerring instinct for choosing the right time.

  See is a more intricate artifact than Prick, an experiment in the creation of artificial character, computer-made for the target. He is the diametric opposite of the target in every way. In appearance he is completely undistinguished: not handsome, not ugly, not tall, not short, dark hair, gray eyes, thick ankles, and equipped with a dumpy, doughy, stupid wife.

  The target has attended a literary conference in Harrowgate. It was a disaster. Fear seemed to blanket the hotel, the stunted garden behind the hotel, the conference hall. Holding the microphone, he found his hand shaking.

  The first train back to London is jammed, and the writer takes a first-class seat. Every seat in his compartment is taken. Sitting opposite him is a youngish man, reading Officers and Gentlemen. As the train pulls into Victoria Station, the man looks at him, eyes contracted in spitting hate like a poison toad. The writer drops his box of matches. Later he glimpses the same man at the head of a long taxi line. The hate and loathing in See's eyes is designed to key in all the worst moments of the target.

  Prick is drinking heavily and putting on weight. Big Picture is moving into its final phase as they take over presidents, prime ministers, cabinet members and intelligence agencies. The few dissenting voices are no longer considered important. Prick finds his services less and less required. He is in fact a source of potential embarrassment to the department. Twice they have bailed him out of jail for assault and disorderly conduct charges.

  "Next time you're on your own."

  Feeling in need of a quick drink, he stops into a pub at World's End. There are two men halfway down the bar and a pub bulldog curled on the floor behind them. The bartender is wiping the bar. Prick is about to call the bartender and give his order, when the dog looks at him and growls. Its lips curl back from yellow fangs and the hair on its back stands up.

  "What's wrong with your dog?"

  "Nothing." The bartender goes on mopping his bar. "He just don't like those kind of noises."

  "What noises?"

  "The noises you were making."

  "But . . ." The two men turn and regard him with stony disapproval. They are obvious hard cases. "Bloody Hell . . . you're crazy!" he says and walks out quickly.

  It is then he notices that a small gray dog is following him. He whirls and kicks. The dog moves behind him. He tries several times but the dog is always behind him no matter how quickly he turns.

  The dog soon becomes an obsession. It will follow him for several blocks and then disappear. At length he buys a heavy blackthorn cane. For several days the dog is absent. Then, as he is walking down Old Brompton Road, where the Empress Hotel used to be, the dog is once again at his heels: a small gray dog with a strange, fishy odor. At the corner of Old Brompton and North End Road he whirls, sweeping the cane behind him. The cane encounters empty air. Prick stumbles and falls into the path of a laundry truck.

  Prick's accidental death is small item on the back page. See reads it and he doesn't like it. He is a methodical man with a photographic memory. He rents a typewriter and chronicles a detailed account of the contracts he has fulfilled for British military intelligence: "I Was a Professional Evil Eye for MI-5." He deposits the envelope with a solicitor, to be dispatched to The News of the World, People, and the more conservative media, including the London Times, in the event of his demise, by accident or otherwise.

  In MI-5 there are raised eyebrows. "I think Prick got drunk and fell in front of a car, period. And good riddance."

  "Good riddance to be sure, but . . ."

  Same office, five days later:

  "See's got the wind up, threatening to go to the media. Wants money and a new identity in America."

  "He should live so long."

  The operative drops an envelope on the table. "That's the original, from his solicitor's safe. What we substituted is insane, paranoid ravings."

  "Ah, very good. I think Henry can handle it."

  See is having a beer at a corner table in a pub on North End Road.

  "Who are you fucking staring at?" Four skinheads with bovver boots ranged along the bar.

  "Look, I wasn't staring."

  The boy contracts his eyes into a grimace of hate.

  "You wasn't staring?" They spread out, moving forward.

  See
regained consciousness in the emergency room.

  "You took quite a beating. Nothing broken, luckily. However, there may be a delayed concussion. We'd advise you to stay in the hospital forty-eight hours at least."

  "No. I'm all right."

  The intern shrugged.

  A brown dog followed See out of the hospital. He couldn't shake it. It was, he decided, a tracking device. They are trying to find out where the envelope is. Well, he isn't such a fool as to go to his solicitor's office.

  Arriving at his bed-sitting room, he opened the street door and shut it quickly. But when he opened the door of his room, the dog slid in ahead of him. He made a grab for it, and needle-sharp teeth slashed his hand.

  "Bloody Hell." He bolted the door. "Now I've got the son of a bitch."

  He went to the desk and took a .22 semiauto with a silencer from a hidden compartment. He started looking under chairs, poking in closets, his hand dripping blood.

  "Must be in the bathroom." He looked behind the bathroom door, glanced into the mirror. It was all over in a few seconds.

  A Spec Ops agent talks to the Medical Examiner: "Anything unusual about this one?"

  "Hmmm, yes, several things. First, location of the wound, in the middle of the forehead . . . an awkward angle. Evidently he was standing in front of the bathroom mirror. Usual place is the temple, or, for those in the know, up through the roof of the mouth. Police call it 'eating the gun' or 'smoking it.' And the wounds on his hand, like a barracuda's bite."

  "Couldn't it have been broken glass? He may have shoved his fist through a window. We have reason to believe he was irrational."

  "I don't think so. There were no glass splinters, and the scratches all slant one way."

  "A cat perhaps?"

  "Room was locked from the inside. Your man Henry, who had been tailing the target, summoned police. The officer who went in with your operative is sure that no animal slipped out."

  Spec Ops doesn't like it: unknown perpetrator, unknown motive, unknown M.O. Assuming that the motive was retaliation instigated or carried out by a recipient of the special services of Prick and See, then the perp must realize that these operatives were simply paid servants. His next step would be to proceed against their employers. And how are they to protect themselves against an Unknown?

  Bradbury, Spec Ops head, has heard rumors of Margaras, an international intelligence organization owing allegiance to no country or any known group. He has discounted the rumors as absurd—where does the money come from? Now he is having second thoughts, and he is not a man who likes to entertain second thoughts.

  So why did they alert the masters by starting with the servants? Reluctantly, he recognizes a procedure frequently used by his own department, known as "shaking the tree." They intended to alert the masters, hoping to scare them into precipitate, ill-advised action.

  "Get me the file on Prick and See all the way back."

  The files go back to 1959, twenty-five years. Quite a few of the targets are now dead. It doesn't take him long to find his man: William Seward Hall, the writer, of course. Hall had opposed the use of Prick and See, and resigned in protest over the Spec Ops project.

  "You don't understand this Hall character. He won't quit. He'll just come back harder. I say terminate."

  "I think Prick and See will teach him a lesson, with just the right shade of show-you."

  They taught him a lesson all right, Bradbury thinks: unrelenting hate and deadly persistence. Idiots! You have an enemy like that, you terminate. You don't leave the job half done.

  The door dog is a limited artifact. Our most versatile agent is Margaras, the dreaded White Cat, the Tracker, the Hunter, the Killer, also known as the Stone Weasel. He is a total albino. All his body hair is snow-white, and his eyes are pearly white disks that can luminesce from within, a diffuse silver light, or can concentrate into a laser beam. Having no color, he can take all colors. He has a thousand names and a thousand faces. His skin is white and smooth as alabaster. His hair is dead white, and he can curl it around his head in a casque, he can ruffle it or stick it up in a crest, and he's got complete control of all the hairs on his body. His eyebrows and eyelashes flare out, feeling for the scent. His ass and genital hairs are wired for a stunning shock or a poison deadly as the tentacles of the Sea Wasp.

  There are those who say we have violated the Articles by invoking Margaras. He is too dangerous. He can't be stopped once he gets the scent. He has not come justa smella you.

  As Margaras closes in, the light waxes brighter and brighter with a musky smell flaring to ozone as the light reeks to a suppurating electric violet. Few can breathe the reeking, seeking light of Margaras. Nothing exists until it is observed, and Margaras is the best observer in the industry.

  "Open up, Prick. You got a Venusian in there."

  "I'll kill you, you filthy sod!"

  LIGHTS—ACTION—CAMERA

  The chase comes to a climax. All around him dogs howl and whimper and scream and moan as Margaras moves closer.

  "What you want with me?"

  "What you asking me for?"

  Give him the light now, right in the face, enough to see the worn red upholstery of the first-class seat with a brass number through his transparent fading shell, fading with a stink of impacted mortality, a final reek of hate from shrieking silence, the pustules on his face swell and burst, spattering rotten venom in the breakfast room.

  "Mrs. Hardy, help! He's gone bloody mad! Call the police! Call an ambulance!"

  Margaras can follow a trail by the signs, the little signs any creature leaves behind by his passage, and he can follow a trail through a maze of computers. All top-secret files are open to him. The rich and powerful of the earth, those who move behind the scenes, stand in deadly fear of his light.

  The dim silver light of Margaras can invade and wipe out other programs. He is the Call. The Challenge. The Confront. His opponents always try to evade his light, like the squid who disappears in a spray of ink.

  Preferences in food and wines, evaluation of pictures, music, poetry and prose. An identikit picture emerges, charged with the energy of hundreds of preferences and evaluations. He can hide in snow and sunlight on white walls and clouds and rocks, he moves down windy streets with blown newspapers and shreds of music and silver paper in the wind.

  Being albino, Margaras can put on any eye color, hair color, skin color, right up until he "whites" the target. "Push," "off," "grease," "blow away" are out: "White" is in. The White Purr: without color, he attracts all colors and all stains; without odor, he attracts all odors, the fouler the better, into smell swirls, whirlpools, tornados, the dreaded Smell Twisters, creating a low-pressure smell wake so that organic animals explode behind them, the inner smells sucked into the Stink Twister round and round faster faster throwing out a maelstrom of filth in all directions, sucking in more and more over a cemetery and the coffins all pop open and the dead do a grisly Exploding Polka. Privies are sucked out by the roots with old men screaming and waving shitty Montgomery Ward catalogues.

  Odors can also be the most subtle and evocative agent for reaching past memories and feelings.

  "The nuances, you understand."

  The wise old queer Cardinal, oozing suave corruption, slowly slithers amber beads through his silky yellow fingers as the beads give off tiny encrusted odor layers. "Ah, a whiff of Egypt . . ."

  Chlorine from the YMCA swimming pool, the clean smell of naked boys . . . and the differences, my dear. Just whiff this, from before World War I, when people traveled with steamer trunks and no passports. I mean, of course, the people who mattered. Comfortable, isn't it? And smell the Twenties . . . those dear dead days, hip flasks, raccoon coats.

  Now sniff way back, to a time before homo sap made his perhaps ill-advised appearance. Notice the difference? Nobody out there. Nobody to talk to. Nobody to impress. Hollywood moguls simply drop dead, like divers with their air lines cut. Personally, I find it exhilarating. I can fancify how I would have done i
t all. Ah, well . . .

  And you know the difference between the air before August 6, 1945, and after that date: a certain security. No one is going to explode the atoms you are made of... with a little strength and skill one could outlive himself . . . but now . . .

  Margaras is on the Dead Dream case. If you intend to destroy an individual or a culture, destroy their dreams. This is happening now on a global scale.

  The function of dreams, they tell us, is to unlearn or purge the brain of unneeded connections—according to this view what goes through the mind in a dream is merely the result of a sort of neural housecleaning. They also suggest that it may be damaging to recall dreams, because doing so might strengthen mental connections that should be discarded. "We dream in order to forget," they write.

  But Joe knows that dreams are a biologic necessity, like sleep itself, without which you will die. Margaras is sure this is war to extermination. Sure, forget your biologic and spiritual destiny in space. Sure, forget the Western Lands. And make arrangements with a competent mortician.

  But desperate struggle may alter the outcome. Joe is tracking down the Venusian agents of a conspiracy with very definite M.O. and objectives. It is antimagical, authoritarian, dogmatic, the deadly enemy of those who are committed to the magical universe, spontaneous, unpredictable, alive. The universe they are imposing is controlled, predictable, dead.