Chapter Six

THE PERMANENT GLOOM OF RAYNE STREET surrounded Jonathan the moment he turned from busy MacDougal. Rayne was a narrow cobbled lane between MacDougal and Sullivan, like Gay Street and Aldorf Mews one of Greenwich Village's hidden streets. Here NYU had placed its data storage facilities in the enormous black hulk of the house that dominated the short block. In the basement they had found room for Jonathan's lab. He hated the place, hated its dampness, its inconvenient distance from campus, and above all, the dark gargoyled ugliness of the building itself. The sun never shone on Rayne Street, not even at high noon. It was one of the few New York streets still cobbled with the round stones that had seen carriages and wagons and had resounded to the clatter of hoofs. Jonathan's footfalls were the only sound that disturbed it now. He looked up at the front of the house. At least the place was well kept. A small brass plaque on the door announced NEW YORK UNIVERSITY DIGITAL DATA STORAGE FACILITY. Under the stoop was another door, this time with a plastic sign: PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY DEPT. LAB B.

Jonathan was expecting the lock to be stiff". He hadn't used it in three weeks, but it turned easily. The iron door opened without a squeak.

The hallway beyond was pitch black, Jonathan fumbled for the switch, found it, and turned it on.

Nothing happened.

He cursed. Here he was in the middle of a sunny morning and he was going to have to feel his way down a dark hallway because an indifferent university administration had put his lab in this hole.

The door swung closed behind him. He flipped the light switch a few more times, uselessly, then began moving along the hall, feeling for the door to the lab. Fortunately it was the only one in this wall. It led to what had once been the wine cellars and basement storerooms of the old building.

Jonathan became aware of a curious trick of sound in the enclosed hallway. His own breathing sounded like it was coming from the darkness beside him. The effect was so realistic that he waved his arms out into the middle of the hallway. Nothing there, of course.

He began to search the wall more urgently, sweeping his hand up and down, feeling for the door jamb. He really wanted to have some light.

Perhaps it was another trick of sound, but he heard distinct scuttlings. Rats. Disgusting. He clapped, he shouted "Hey!"

Then he heard something that silenced him. He became very still, listening. There were human footsteps coming down the stairs at the far end of the hall.

Jonathan shrank back. This was a closed facility. Nobody worked upstairs. His first thought was that some drifter had gotten in here.

A beam of intense white light dazzled him. He shielded his eyes with his forearm. Fearful thoughts passed through his mind, of death at the hands of a maniac.

"Who are you?" The voice was old and harsh. It did not sound completely sane.

"Banion. This is my lab."

"You can't come in here. The facility is closed."

Now it made sense. He was confronting a watchman. "Look, this is my lab. I'm not a student, I'm a professor. So please get that flashlight out of my eyes and shine it on the door so I can see the keyhole."

The beam did not waver. Instead it came closer, until it was blazing in Jonathan's face. "Go home, young man. You mustn't come here." The voice was so old, and the tone like ice.

Jonathan knew when he was being threatened. And it infuriated him. With a single, quick motion he reached up and snatched the flashlight from the old man's hand. There was an instant of surprisingly powerful resistance, then the old man sighed and quite intentionally let go of the light. As he did Jonathan came into contact with his hand. It was a shocking sensation. Jonathan had never felt skin so hard and cold. More like stone than skin. He imagined that a mummy's hand might feel like that. A dry claw.

"You're mad to come here! You're putting yourself in great danger!"

Jonathan turned the light around, catching just a glimpse of the man before he turned his back. What he saw made him gasp: bright green eyes set in a labyrinth of wrinkles, a tiny slit of a mouth open in an infuriated snarl.

Then the old man was gone, his feet rat-tatting up the stairs. A door slammed.

Good riddance. The university had a nerve hiring senile old fools like that to guard the facilities. Budget, probably.

Jonathan selected the right key from his chain. Getting in was easy now that he had the use of the flashlight.

He entered his lab, making a mental note to call the university's maintenance department and complain to them about their watchman. Obviously unbalanced, not to mention being far too old for the job.

Jonathan had come to his lab in the quiet of a summer morning to try and discover once and for all if he had done that terrible thing to Patricia. He couldn't bear to name it. He simply could not accept the idea that her hurt and his dream were a coincidence, not even with the vindication of the police polygraph. He needed his own instruments to tell him if there was some hidden corruption in his soul.

Was he an unconscious psychopath?

He imagined the demon's loom clicking eagerly as strand by strand it pulled his life apart. He had come to think of Satan as a sort of neurological shadow, a speck of dark potential in the electrochemical bath that floats the soul. He could no longer be sure that the shadow was not an actual, outside force. Evil for its own sake seemed increasingly to him to be a real power in the world.

Certainly when it was abroad, when the owls and jackals announced Lilith wandering, those she caressed could not resist her beauty—nor fight her talons.

He moved among the covered instruments. During the term he had been making the first really detailed map of microvoltages in the human brain. His work was highly technical, but beneath all the statistics were the mystery and romance of pure science: he and others like him were cracking the code of the mind.

The room was full of galvanic sensors of various kinds, but mostly there were computers: Apples and small IBMs to handle the statistical work, terminals connected to the big Cray 2000 at MIT that was his main tool. He used the Cray to do the sensitive high-speed signal recognition that was needed to separate the various brain waves into their hundreds of component parts and analyze each in isolation from the others. This gave him a virtual electronic window on the mind, vastly more sensitive than any that had been developed before.

There were also racks of Petri dishes, used for culturing microorganisms, lined up against one wall. He stopped. He ran his fingers along the edge of one of the racks. Strange. He didn't remember authorizing anybody to install such equipment here.

In the middle of the wall, what had been a closet door was now marked in block letters: vector storage. It was locked.

He didn't do work on bacteria. He didn't even know how. As he looked around him he could see evidence of another's recent presence. There was a lab chart with annotations dated only yesterday. On the floor was the cover of a coffee container. Somebody had been working here within the past twenty-four hours.

The university must have allocated unused space to another project. Odd. Was it like NYU to do something like that and not bother to tell him? He couldn't seem to remember.

He stood in the center of the dim, warm room, wondering. That persistent, distant clicking was the sound of footsteps on the sidewalk above this end of the basement. Demon's loom. His was a gothic soul.

The clicking died away. Maybe they had told him about this biology equipment. Not remembering something like this fitted with a theory of amnesia. If he didn't remember somebody installing a bacterial experiment in here maybe he didn't remember other things either.

Somehow he must uncover enough of the mechanism of his mind to determine the truth.

He had come to realize that horror and disgust were not his only reactions to the rape. His body vibrated eagerly at the thought of it. It was awful, repulsive. And yet, when he remembered her lying there in that hospital there came over him a sneering, hateful contempt that was at odds with everything he believed and loved about himself.

Off in the corners of his mind there were also violent bits of memory that seemed to go beyond the rape—a screaming face, a closing coffin, thuds and howls . . . long marble staircases, lines of chanting nuns, the garrote and the strappado and the rack. . . .

Was it another life, some horrendous past? Unlike Patricia he did not discount reincarnation just because it was against Catholic doctrine. Had he at some time in the past been a victim of the Inquisition, suffered in the dungeon of some elegant Spanish palace?

No, that wasn't quite right.

"Inquisitor." He whispered the word as he might the name of a present danger. "Inquisitor." Mother had uttered the word early this morning, then waved away his question about it.

Inquisitor. His hands were shaking, his legs seemed about to give way. The old man's lunatic warning sounded again in his mind. He went to the door, flipped on all the fluorescent lights, then locked it securely to the outside.

He remembered.

A priest, walking smartly across an airport lobby, his hair neatly parted on the right, his well-fed face mixing self-assurance and contentment, his shoes clicking on the floor.

Then the face turns, sees Jonathan, changes. Hate replaces contentment and the face becomes terrible, relentless, and cruel. But this time the Inquisition is not successful. A tall young man, a man Jonathan admires, grabs the priest and forces him into a car.

Next memory: the priest is naked, chained to the wall of a cellar. Questions are coming, one after another: Who is your Inquisitor-General? How did you find us? On and on, while the tall man removes strips of skin from the naked priest's body.

Jonathan is hiding in a corner, behind some shelves full of empty Petri dishes.

From the priest's mouth a ceaseless prayer: Jesus, thou art with me, Jesus, thou art with me, Jesus, thou art with me.

Help the priest! I side with the priest!

At last the torture stops. The torturer goes upstairs for a Coke. Jonathan is left alone, astonished, horrified that his friend, his hero, could do such things to another human being. The priest, his eyes watery and bloodshot, must know that his end will not be long in coming. He fixes his gaze on the boy who has crept forward, his own eyes tearing with pity. Words pour in a torrent from the priest's parched mouth. "Young man, they're going to destroy humanity for your sake, yours and the girl's. Turn against them! Accept Christ! Please, listen to me. Your friend Jerry is evil, your uncle is evil, they are creating... death ... they are Satan's . . . oh ... Satan's friends." Then the eyes roll and the head sinks forward, the chin touching the oozing, flayed chest.

No, that isn't a memory. You're imagining, spinning tales around the biology experiments that shouldn't be here.

You're hysterical.

With an effort Jonathan pushed the mad imaginings out of his mind. Again he regarded his sophisticated instruments, the ones that were familiar. They could sense and record brain waves; that's what they were all about. If he could find out where a thought like the one he had just had was physically coming from in his brain he could easily tell whether it was a memory or not.

Jonathan went over to the cubicle, took the complex, wire-covered sensor helmet in his hands.

How was he going to work the controls while wearing this thing? Its cable wasn't long enough.

Jonathan cursed silently. Without an assistant there was no way he could use the equipment.

And the alternative was not at all desirable.

At CalTech they were experimenting with a certain drug. It could be inhaled like cocaine, but it had no euphoric effect. On the contrary, it stimulated the brain's deepest memory centers and caused an almost incredible flow of vivid recollections.

This was N, alpha doporinol 6-6-6, a complex triumph of the biochemist's craft. It was synthesized from naturally occurring brain chemicals. So far the cost was eight thousand dollars an ounce. There were a few grams of it in the refrigerator. Jonathan had been asked to duplicate some of CalTech's experimental results but he had shut the lab for the summer before carrying out the work.

He went to the refrigerator. It was not your ordinary Frigidaire. This refrigerator was bolted to the floor and had a combination lock. Some of the drugs kept there, tranquilizers and such, were much in demand on college campuses. Others, like 6-6-6, were valuable.

Back behind the bottles of Valium and Quaaludes were foil packets with hand-lettered labels. Jonathan took out the packet of 6-6-6. The crystals inside crunched like sugar when he opened the foil. Ideally, the drug should be suspended in a saline solution and introduced to the nasal membrane via an aspirator. But Jonathan did not have time for that. He measured out a moderate dose, four grains, on the sensitive laboratory scale. Then he ground it fine with pestle and mortar. He poured it from the mortar to the flat of a spatula and raised it to his nose.

He inhaled.

There was a gentle, pleasant aroma.

Jonathan felt no change. He went into one of the subject cubicles and lay down on the couchette. Still nothing.

Why do there have to be bars on my window, Mother?

The boy's voice was so clear and real that Jonathan jumped up.

That had been him, Jonathan Titus Banion, as a child.

Bars? Had there been bars on the windows of their old apartment? He didn't remember it that way . . . and yet he did.

We've got to keep them out, to keep them away from you. The bars are against them.

This was uncanny. It had been her voice, but she wasn't here.

He could see the walls of the bedroom in which she had said those words. But he didn't recall wallpaper like that, with moons and planets and rockets on it.

But where, then, did this memory come from?

The old man from the hallway came around the end of a lab bench. His emerald eyes flashed. Beneath the fluorescent lights his skin was powder-gray. He looked dead. Hallucinatory phenomenon, of course. Jonathan blinked his eyes, but he could not make the illusion disappear. The old man spoke. "You must not try the door to the past, Jonathan. It's dangerous for you. Terribly dangerous."

"Who in hell are you? How dare you come into my lab!"

The man shifted and wavered, half mirage and half real. Jonathan blinked but the image remained vague. In an odd way the old man seemed to fit among these recollections. "Danger," the old man said, "danger in these memories!" Then he was swinging a red lantern and Jonathan knew that this time he was an hallucination. NYU maintenance personnel didn't carry such lights. The real watchman was probably off sleeping under the stairs.

The false one symbolized a powerful barrier in Jonathan's mind against the very act of remembering.

But how? A barrier like this didn't just come out of nowhere. It had to be created. As wild as it sounded, almost the only explanation was that a highly sophisticated hypnotist had been at work on him.

Then what of those other imaginings a moment ago—the Inquisition, the tortured priest? "They're going to destroy humanity for your sake, yours and the girl's." Hadn't the priest said something like that?

But there isn't any reason to destroy anything for us.

He sat up on the edge of the couchette and rubbed his sweaty face. Bits and pieces of memory were still breaking through the hypnotic wall, induced by the powerful action of the drug to move toward a surface they could not quite reach.

Like a crust formed on lava, his mind shifted and cracked, and where it cracked the searing ugliness beneath drove him buck.

This was not his doing. He was not amnesiac; somebody had intentionally set out to conceal his past from him. And this somebody had a great deal of skill. Hypnotism was a gross craft. To practice it with such delicacy was right at the limits of modern technique, perhaps even a little beyond.

He could feel a titanic struggle building in him between the drug and the barrier. Frantic, sweating, dizzy, he lurched out of the cubicle. There was no antidote to 6-6-6; he should never have taken it without controlled supervision.

The room was hot, terribly hot. He had to have water. But the least movement sent him slumping and reeling with dizziness. His head pounded, waves of nausea staggered him.

So you want to know why we protect you? Look, then, my boy, look at the work of the Inquisition that seeks you!

He was surrounded by a rising wall of flames. He was being touched by them, and their touch was hideously painful. He was attached to the stake by an iron collar.

His hands were free; he tore at the iron. He kicked the logs until sparks flew up around him. Outside of the flames he could see a great and gaudy crowd, men and women and children. Along the edges of his pyre little boys roasted potatoes to sell to the mob. And the mob chanted: "Evil, evil, evil! Satan's child, save yourself!"

But I'm not Satan's child! I'm—I'm . . . something else.

He looked up into the royal enclosure, to one pale female face, her skin like milk, her eyes crystal-green, her hair as blond as a sunlit cloud. From her eyes there flowed cooling love. She was composed, but he knew how deeply tragic she felt.

As the flames rose around him and he died in torment he fixed on those eyes, and saw in them the triumphant secret: Our nights were not in vain, my senor, for I am with child. There will be another generation.

Jonathan lurched against a bench, knocked a computer to the floor with a crash and a cascade of shattered electronic chips.

As he collected himself he realized that the fire wasn't a dream any more than the tortured priest was a dream. They were both memories.

But what kind of memories? And what sort of a monster would have them?

The priest was recent, but that fire had burned a long time ago.

In the fire there is exaltation; the pain is your triumph.

How dare you preach to me, Lucinda, when I have to endure the stake!

Martyred husband.

O Lucinda Pantera, you are the image of my dreams, the woman who has always been beside me. Angel Lucinda.

Angel Patricia. You are also Patricia, and all other women I and my ancestors have loved.

Seeking the edge of the future, we go on. By breeding the two lines together again and again, age by age, millennium by millennium, we are creating a masterpiece.

A masterpiece of evil. Something far darker than mankind. Something unencumbered by impulses toward the good.

Something unspeakably monstrous!

Jonathan was on the floor. "No!" His mouth was dry, his face smeared with tears. "No, it mustn't be!"

He could almost see it, almost smell it, and it was hideous and stank of rotted flesh.

And it was in this room.

Danger, the old man wailed, danger!

The bits and pieces of the shattered computer had cut into Jonathan viciously. He touched a gash on his palm, tasted his blood.

Something was crouched just the other side of the lab bench, breathing softly. Jonathan was so frightened he literally could not move.

It was the thing humankind with its inquisitions and persecutions has been trying to prevent through the ages.

The anti-man, ugly where man is beautiful, bad where man is good, the very essence of evil.

But it wasn't on the other side of the lab bench, not really. That was only his imagination, it had to be.

Yes, but your imagination is still dangerous! It's trying to make you stop thinking these thoughts.

"I won't stop thinking. I remember the anti-man. It's been bred over thousands of years. And it's—"

He looked at his own hands, turned them slowly over and over in the merciless fluorescent light.

Cro-Magnon was bred out of Neanderthal and destroyed Neanderthal. Homo sapiens was bred out of Cro-Magnon and destroyed him. In the same way the anti-man will destroy what you call mankind. It is only following nature's law. There is nothing bad about it.

"It's Satanic! Hell's answer to the creation of God!"

Homo sapiens is a defective species, and like all of nature's mistakes, it is going to become extinct. You of all people should love the anti-man. You will be its father.

Jonathan felt his skin beneath his jeans, the slight dampness of his crotch pressed by his briefs. In him was a new species?

You have already learned more than you should. Now you must be made to forget. You will confront the thing behind the bench, and it will tear these past few minutes from your mind.

"No!"

I think yes. I think yessssss.

The voice in Jonathan's mind became one with the breathing behind the lab bench. It merged into the hissing, terrible and loud, of something primal and big. Then came a slipping, sliding sound, weighty rubbing against the floor, and the black gleaming head of an enormous snake appeared around the corner of the table. It had coppery scales and eyes like yellow-green stones.

In them was not the savage blankness of the reptile species. Instead there was something far worse—burning, unquenchable rage mixed with the self-mocking irony of great intelligence.

It came elegantly along, its huge body sweeping in great loops. Jonathan was utterly revolted, and yet also fascinated. Nothing, not even the threat of death itself, could tear him from those staring green eyes.

But 6-6-6 isn't supposed to be a hallucinogen. Sloppy testing, California. This is an effect you didn't mention in the protocols.

The serpent had coiled into a great shiny mass of scales just in front of Jonathan. It reared its head until it was level with his own face.

It was so very real, even to the snake mites running along the edges of its mouth. Jonathan drew himself up from his prone position. The snake rose almost magically, facing him, staring at him over a space of mere inches.

He stood fully erect. Impossibly, the snake had now risen up out of its coil, still face to face with him.

"What are you?"

I guard your memories. I live inside you.

"My God!"

Back and forth it swayed, back and forth. Its eyes regarded Jonathan evenly. He realized that, in spite of all the fear it evoked in him, there was great beauty in it. He stretched out his hand, palm up. The huge head laid itself in his palm, and the membranes over the eyes slid down, giving them a milky green appearance.

An invisible claw seemed to take hold of his arm, to make him draw the head closer and closer to his own sweating face. Up close it was terrible to see, the face of a snake with such extreme intelligence in it that it seemed more than human. Much more. Satan would create such a face.

With a snap of its body the snake plunged its head between Jonathan's lips, forcing itself into his mouth.

He could feel the hard, cold scaliness of it, was made to gag as its tongue tickled the back of his throat. His helpless gagging enabled it to jam itself farther down, to fill his gullet. Now the thickness of the body distended his lips, compressed his tongue, made his jaws click. Fear and loathing shot through him. He threw himself back, grabbed at the heavy, surging coils. As the snake worked its way down into him he clawed at its slick flesh with frantic hands. He couldn't breathe, could barely make a sound. He could feel the head probing against sphincters as it made its way deep into him, past his esophagus and into his stomach. The deeper it got, the faster it went. Huge masses of coils began sweeping past his snatching, batting hands.

Then it was gone, only the tail tickling his throat. He felt as dense as thick paste, hideously full. His stomach was distended, his belt broken, his pants torn open. And the coils could be seen surging and billowing beneath the skin of his belly.

Heavily, he sank to the floor. He was utterly, completely revolted. As a teenager he had tried LSD. Compared to this the lysergic illusion was a mere daydream.

All at once a terrible cramp doubled him over. He retched, spattering the tiles around him with flecks of blood.

He lay a long time, groaning, wanting to give way to nausea, unable to do so.

When at last the sensation passed and he could straighten up, his belly was no longer distended. He had not only swallowed the demon snake but somehow absorbed it. Now It was part of his body, of his soul.

There had been something else, some memory.

"I've got to remember!"

What?

It was gone. He was left with the horrible feeling that he had let some vital piece of information slip through the cracks in his mind. Another unreported side effect of 6-6-6. Those idiots at CalTech were going to get a hell of an angry letter. Ought to sue the jerks. He hitched up his pants slammed the refrigerator and locked it, kicked the bits of broken computer under a table, and staggered out of the lab

As he went down the corridor and emerged into the sunlight he began to feel a little better, although the smell of hot dogs from a streetcorner vendor brought renewed nausea.

Of course it had been an hallucination. There was no question about that. The snake was such an obvious unconscious symbol, exactly the sort of thing one might see on a bad trip. There hadn't been proper testing of 6-6-6; that was the long and short of it.

Everything that had happened, from the moment he took the drug, could be discounted.

He wanted to drink, to laugh in the sun just for an afternoon, to somehow forget the insane horror he had jus experienced. Too bad it was clouding over. The best antidote would be the pleasure of a sunny day.

A very sunny day.