Chapter Fifteen
“Camera”
Half angel half eagle
One eye on the world
The phone was ringing, so Iggy answered it, and damned if she didn't tip over the beaker on the way there. "Yeah?" she said as she reached for the paper towels.
"Doctor Drasil?" came the voice from the other end: none other than Riggs, direct from Herschberg, Minnesota.
"Yeah." Careful, careful, don't let any of this shit hit your skin, you've been having bad enough dreams as it is.
"How are the tests going?"
"Hellish. You want the bad news, or the bad news?"
"Just tell me what your results are."
She sighed and carefully tossed the damp towels into the garbage. "All three of your water supply samples were tainted. That's the bad news. The bad news is that they're tainted with a happy little hallucinogen with a name as long as your arm and a carbon chain even longer. PMD80, it tends to be called for short."
"This does not tell me much."
"You want the numbers? Three ppm in the water fountain sample alone. Riggs, this shit is dangerous. It's erratic. It can lie dormant in the system for days, weeks, months—whether it's some kind of hormonal signal for release, or some random factor, nobody knows—then blam, out of nowhere, visuals, aurals, George Michael doing the funky chicken on the White House lawn. Three ppm is more than enough to account for what the locals have been seeing."
"How about collating those reports?"
She turned to the Mac humming quietly away by the burbling glass sculpture of retorts and burners and beakers and test tubes, called up Excel, loaded the Creepo file. "Seventeen sightings of that disappearing wall, including those two psycho cops; five sightings of UFOs, three of them describing the same thing—a glowing pillar or spire of light—eleven sightings of ghosts; four sightings of werewolves; a couple cowering in their basement waiting for the Martians to invade; and then there's the county coroner's fuckup with the Mankevich girl's body or bodies or whatever. All since Thursday, thirteen November, nineteen ninety. Funny thing, this."
"What?"
She scrolled down the screen a little lower. "Missing persons report—Jack Bitsumi, turned out he'd been on Northwestern Flight 451. Bitsumi is the name of the guy who did the preliminary work on PMD80."
"Really. How exciting."
"Riggs, that could be important—"
"Doctor Drasil. As I am the one in command of the field operation currently, perhaps it should be left up to me what is and is not pertinent to the case at hand. You are in a lab in Washington, D.C., and thus hardly in any position—"
"Not much longer."
"Excuse me?"
"I said not much longer."
"I see. As my hearing is in perfect condition, Doctor, and as my information seems to be a bit outdated, perhaps you would prefer elucidation to merely repeating yourself."
Iggy just had to grin at that. "Due to the possible contamination of Herschberg's water supply, Central wants a fully staffed lab on the scene to run more extensive tests. That's me. I'm on the five AM flight."
"Then perhaps I shouldn't keep you awake any longer. See you tomorrow." Click.
Iggy grinned and walked back over to her interrupted experiment, while Riggs frowned at the phone. This was going to complicate matters.
She thought with slightly wrinkled brow for precisely three and one quarter minutes, then continued unsealing the vial of water before her, marked "Herschberg Reservoir. 2:55 PM/21 Nov 90." She picked up an eyedropper, dipped it into another vial also full of a colorless liquid (although if one looked closely enough one could see the faintest of rose tints), this one marked "PMD80 (diluted)." She squeezed an infinitesimal drop into the first vial, resealed it, and set it aside. Her brow refurrowed, and she pondered carefully for another minute and a half, approximately.
Yes. Her current course of action was still the best for an economic resolution to the entire crisis, despite Central's attention. In fact...
Her brow furrowed deeply for five minutes.
She then smiled.
She applied a new label to the PMD80 vial, one she'd typed earlier that afternoon using the typewriter which belonged to the man she intended to frame for the dosing of Herschberg. The new label read, simply, "Happy jOy Juice." She looked at her watch. Ten seventeen PM of a Friday evening. In approximately four hours she could sneak this into the proper apartment—but first, as per revised plans, a side trip to the reservoir, with the second vial—which she held up. It was full of a sluggishly lurid pink liquid, sickly viscous. It was labeled "PMD80 (undiluted)."
More than enough.
It was really too bad about Mr. Moore, however—the only aspect of her scenario that was not, aesthetically speaking, to her liking. No one in their right minds would ever testify as to what a quiet young man he'd been. If only he hadn't gotten on her nerves, yelling about those werewolves.
She frowned. She was definitely allowing things to get entirely too personal.
Time for the last building block in her revised plans. She picked up the phone and dialed the usual eleven digits, waited for the beep, and then punched in a twenty digit code.
"Central."
"Riggs here, Herschberg. We have a potential situation. Possibility of entire town to unknown radius under influence of PMD80, disseminated via water supply, pending tests by lab. Could go critical at any moment. Request National Guard on alert under command of squad-level task force at my disposal."
There was a five second pause.
"Granted."
She hung up.
Four more hours till she dosed the reservoir.
•
Get home, you're not alone
You just broke out of the danger zone
Norbert stepped off the escalator on the baggage, limo, and bus level of the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and almost bumped into Janis. "Um—" he said. "Excuse me," she said, and she continued past.
His heart was beating too hard, that's why it took him a minute or two to realize that the reason she hadn't recognized him was that she was too old to have been Janis.
He calmed his heart down, and his breathing.
And he followed her.
She met a balding man with sandy hair and a pudgy nose by the sign for the Overman Limo Company. Which had vans which made runs out to all the small towns on the west side of Minneapolis.
Like Herschberg.
Which was the one the man asked about.
Norbert was able to read the name tag on their large black suitcase. Mankevich.
Curiouser and curiouser.
•
In a taciturn dream
Standing eyes dazed and shining
Alastair felt like he was going to throw up.
He sipped from the goblet to cover this fact.
"Would you," he said, but it came out a bit too thick, and so he swallowed and continued, "mind repeating that?" and boy, wasn't this conversation just going remarkably well.
"They went after Ajax," said Pokey, in a voice that always sounded remarkably like someone had just slit his throat. "Used a zzygyx, one of those critters—"
"I know what a zzygyx is."
"It got out of hand and in addition to the plane's power interrupted the nervous systems of two passengers and moved on to the airfield's power grid before they could rein it in."
"And Ajax?"
"Escaped."
Alastair felt more and more these days as if he were trapped in a zen koan. Specifically, that one about the cliff, the tiger, and the strawberry. Further complicated by the fact that he could never tell which of the various elements encroaching at a rapid pace were which.
He sipped again.
Pokey made slobbery wet sounds; Alastair did not look closely, as was considered polite.
"Where?"
"Made it to Nome on foot, snatched Cabot out of his apartment, had him drive him to Fairbanks. Was dropped off at the airport. Where he—"
"Where?"
"Herschberg."
Damn that town. Already two agents had gone rogue there and a third had stumbled across a plot that should have been killed off five years ago. What had started as a simple plan to give the Dark a straw man to go tilting at had turned far too disturbingly dangerous.
Never mind that one of those agents had been set up to turn rogue in Herschberg. Alastair still wished a thousand generations' worth of curses upon the town's collective head.
"Has the Gaunt Man heard anything from Runs With the Nightmares?"
Pokey shook his head, always a fascinating process. Alastair tried not to stare. "Our people in Utah have squirreled Nightmares away in a safe house. Unless the old GM has a plant, which is far too subtle for his style, there's no way he's gotten word one."
"That's one for our team."
"Are you sure this place is safe?"
Pokey always asked that question. Alastair waved his arms. "Look. We're in the middle of a dead tank, one protected by spells of the most puissant defensive forces imaginable—"
"Yeah, yeah."
"Besides," and Alastair pulled a small flat box out of his hip pocket. "I swept it this morning. Certified bug free."
Pokey smiled, or tried to. "It isn't the bugs that worry me."
•
Fly us to the moon
High above our upturned faces
In the only house in all of Nome to have, at two eleven in the AM of a cold and late November, every light shining at once, one hundred watts or more in every socket, light streaming from the windows, light pouring under the door, and even the pale bulb above the stovetop and the flickering florescence of the medicine cabinet switched defiantly on, Gary Cabot slept.
He had not thought that he could sleep.
But gripped by the deathly exhaustion that came of nine hours of driving, five of waiting, six of debriefing, and four of staring sightlessly out the window waiting for who knows what ungodly visitor, he had finally tottered to his untidy bed, crawled around in a circle three times fast (a habit of which he was entirely unaware), and curled up under the blankets. Shivering.
He had not thought that if he slept, he would dream.
But all four of his limbs twitched. His nostrils flared.
In his dreams he chased an arctic hare endlessly across the wild uncluttered tundra.
And scented its fear.
•
•