Chapter Twenty

JONATHAN WOULD HAVECLAWED out through the sides of the van if he had been able. "It's a damn cage! They've caged us like a couple of chimps." He prowled the luxurious interior, checking the door, the walls, feeling for some opening, some weakness.

They accelerated, decelerated, turned corners, until he lost all sense of direction.

"Sit down, Jonathan."

"If I could get this door open we might be able to jump when they slow down."

"There'll be a car following. They're very well organized."

He went to her. "We have to try."

"We have to think about what's happening to us, about What might happen when they open the door."

A sudden change in the tire sounds told Jonathan something. "We're crossing the Fifty-Ninth Street bridge, going into Manhattan."

"Jonathan, you and I are vulnerable. We feel like ordinary people, and I doubt if we have the resources to deal with whatever we're facing. We could even be brainwashed."

"They picked the wrong man for brainwashing. I can't be brainwashed—I know too much about the brain."

The van slowed, turned another corner.

"We're liable to stop soon, Jonathan. Whether you can be brainwashed or not, I want you to—"

He hated that idea. "I can't be!"

"Just listen. I want you to remember one thing at all costs. We may be mutated in a thousand different ways, but we can live ordinary lives if we try. We love each other, and we want as normal and human a life as we can have." She put her arms around him. "If we forget that, they win!"

"What's the game, though? What do they win?"

She sobbed. "Just remember what we want."

The van stopped. He found her lips with his own. A cheerful young man opened the doors and with firm, gentle hands drew them apart. "We're home now," he said. "Please come inside."

"The hell I will," Jonathan replied. He broke away, leaping down from the van and managing about ten feet along the sidewalk before he was surrounded by more of them than he could resist. The most pleasant of them, a smiling, pin-neat man in a crisp linen suit, showed Jonathan a vicious little knife.

"There is also the way of pain," he said affably, shouldering Jonathan between two of his friends. "You're best off cooperating."

The house was shockingly familiar. He stood looking up at the aged brownstone edifice, decorated by rows of glaring gargoyles. He had always assumed that it housed university data storage. To his knowledge, he had never been beyond the basement labs.

To the east little golden clouds floated above the skyline. Dawn was coming. The house itself was subtly transformed. The wide bay windows, which had been backed by dark curtains, now stood open.

A bell rang, and sleepy children's voices filtered out.

This was the Titus School, the secret training-ground of the Night Church. Jonathan and Patricia had grown up here.

He was hustled into the foyer where Patricia was being ushered along by one of the most fantastic creatures Jonathan had ever beheld.

Instead of the usual black broadcloth this nun wore a rich maroon silk habit. Her wimple was starched and gleaming, black instead of white. She was beautifully made up with eyeshadow and lipstick. The small foyer was filled with the scent of musky perfume.

She supported Patricia, who dragged along the floor as if fainting. When she saw Jonathan, though, she made a visible effort to pull herself together. She looked at him through haunted, tear-streaked eyes. "Don't you remember her, Jonathan?" she shouted. The nun began hurrying Patricia toward the rear of the foyer. "She's Sister Saint John, the one I put up in my apartment, the one who raised me from the time I was thirteen!" Her voice echoed, desolate.

"Patricia!" Strong hands grabbed his arms. He kicked. He had to get to her. "Let me go!"

"I remember now! She was at the Spirit too! She was there with Mary! Oh, God, help me! Help me!"

His ears roared, his blood thundered in his veins. "Patricia!"

A great clang. An iron door had closed on her.

He had not counted on them being separated. The sudden, irrevocable fact of it brought a new wave of effort, and he struggled against the men who were holding him, screaming into the silence that had followed the clang of the door. "I love you! I love you!"

His own shouts were absorbed by the cavernous hall. "Jonathan," a voice said when he stopped, "we're going to take you up to your room now."

They didn't release their grip even a little as they walked him across the marble floor. He could see that the hall was circular, with fluted columns supporting a small interior dome. Dim light glowed through round windows in the dome. At the rear was a sweeping horseshoe staircase that embraced a tiny, wire-enclosed elevator.

The car was waiting behind its brass grill. Two of the men pushed Jonathan in. The three of them filled the small space.

They rose in smooth silence, passing up in the cage until the floor of the lobby seemed seventy feet below. There was a click and it stopped. The men opened a door on the far side. Beyond was a corridor, softly lit with lamps in wall sconces. The walls were cream; the floor was thickly carpeted in tan.

"You'll remember the senior men's floor," said one of the men as the three of them left the elevator.

"No, I won't," Jonathan muttered. He really didn't want to listen to that sort of muck. They were not going to use disorientation techniques to confuse him. It was going to be a lot harder than that. His mind turned once again to Patricia. "When will I see her again?"

"At your wedding."

"Surely that's been canceled."

"No, it's going ahead just exactly as you planned."

No matter what else might happen, at least he was certain to see her again. "Here's your room, Jonathan. Your uncle will be in shortly." Before he could resist or say another word they had thrust him through a door and closed it behind him.

"No!" He grappled with the knob, hammered the unyielding metal. He kicked the door so viciously it sent a shock all the way up his leg and caused him to fall backward onto the floor, which he hit with a bone-rattling crash. For a moment, he lay still. Then he went to the window, but found he couldn't even raise the sash to get his hands on the bars beyond it.

When he looked around for something to use to break the glass, he was frozen with astonishment.

He knew this room.

He knew it perfectly, utterly, completely.

It was his room, his own boyhood room. The Hallicrafters was there on the desk, with the model Gemini capsule sitting on it. His bookcase held all his wonderful old friends, Tom Sawyer, The Once and Future King, the Complete Shakespeare, the Mary Renault novels, Life's Picture History of the Earth.

The bedspread was the one Mother had made, with his name embroidered in red on a background of the Orion constellation. His telescope stood at the foot of the bed under a dust cover, just where he had left it when—

When?

A long time ago. He knelt down, gingerly removed the cover. There it was, his beloved Celestron, the treasure of his youth.

It had been a long time since he had thought of astronomy, of those wonderful autumn nights up in the Connecticut woods with Jerry Cochran, climbing a hillside and searching out Wolf 457 or Saturn or the Crab Nebula. Jerry. His boyhood idol. Tall, cool, a brilliant scientific mind. Jerry's seven years' seniority made him almost godlike to the younger boy. If Jonathan had modeled himself on anybody, it had been Jerry Cochran.

We walked the star path, he and I.

He grew very still as the awesome power of memory began pouring his true past up from his depths. He remembered his old friend with almost sacred vividness, his brown eyes, his great broad smile and the sword-sharpness of his mind.

"Jerry." He touched the Celestron, his fingers caressing its controls. What wonders we found with this thing, you and I. "Earth is just a green bubble in the void, Jonathan. Less than a speck of dust. Out here, lost, falling toward the unknown." You were wise for your years, Jerry, so very wise.

The room was a museum of his own past. There at the bottom of the bookshelf were The Winter Noisy Book and The Fire Engine Book and all the other books of babyhood, Mother Goose and The Encyclopedia of Things and Hiawatha and Olly Olly Oxen Free.

And in the big drawer under the bed—pull it out—yes, there were his models, the wonderful, intricate airplanes constructed of balsa and paper, flown by rubber bands at high summer evening when the breeze was still. His Rascal 18 racer, his P-51 that never flew well because it was too heavily doped, even in the remains of Jerry's Cessna 182 that had met fatefully with the rose trellis in—in—

Uncle's front yard?

Who was Uncle, and where was that bungalow full of furniture a little boy mustn't touch?

Never mind that now. He went to the Hallicrafters, turned it on. The heterodyne wail of shortwave met his ears as he twisted the knob back and forth. Yes, here was the BBC and there was Cuba and there Radio Moscow, and down along there were the Africans and the Arabs, and in the middle the rest of the Europeans, Netherlands with its concerts and Germany with its language lessons, and France and Italy and Spain.

Oh, yes, on a thousand deepest nights Jerry and I were at this radio, turning the dial ever so slowly from wonder to wonder.

Let's hear what Khrushchev's got to say about the election.

The Royal Shakespeare is doing Measure for Measure on the BBC tonight.

We don't want to miss the Cuban-English—Language News.

We were two adventurers of the mind. And what a wonderful time we had . . . when I was normal. When I was myself.

But there were other times.

"Let me out of here! I can't stand it in here!"

"I see you're beginning to come back to us."

"Who—"

He was a dried-up, incredibly ancient man. Only his bright green eyes had any life. His face was a badland of creases, age-rotted skin stretched across sharp old bones. He wore a beautifully tailored black suit and a silver-gray silk shirt. His head was framed by a white vapor of hair. On his fingers there were complex rings. Jonathan saw skulls and intricate cabbalistic symbols in the gold, and ruby eyes and open jaws. Only his thumbs were without jewelry.

"My dear nephew." He opened his arms. Behind him in the hallway stood a young man easily six foot five, his arms folded, watching from the shadows.

Jonathan did not move toward the little gargoyle with the open arms. He had no uncle.

Patricia's words came back to him: We may be mutated in a thousand different ways, but we can live ordinary lives if we try.

Much wisdom in that.

"You act like a cornered rat, Jonathan. I must confess I'm disappointed. I expected more of the Prince."

Crazy. But backed up by a powerful guard. And the windows behind Jonathan were barred.

"Frightened of me. How embarrassing. Am I too ugly for you?" He raised his hands, which arthritis had turned to oak gnarls. There was in this man a density of menace. "You find me ugly, you of all people. You may have a handsome appearance, but inside you are far uglier than I!"

"Get away from me."

"You are the monstrum."

"You need a psychiatrist, you're a paranoid schizophrenic. I can help you. I want to help you."

The sparks of eyes twinkled. "On the contrary, Jonathan, it is I who can help you. You must prepare, you know. The Ritual Marriage is tonight."

Jonathan backed away from the eerie old man.

"Let me touch you, nephew." The hands, trembling, came out toward him. Jonathan cast around, grabbed the radio, raised it over his head.

"Stop! Don't come any nearer!"

The old man stepped aside and his guard began moving into the room.

Jonathan hurled the Hallicrafters with all his might—and the guard caught it, rocking back on his heels and drawing a gasp of breath. He stood with the enormous radio in his hands, looking at Jonathan. Slowly, he smiled.

"Jerry!"

He put the radio down and locked Jonathan in a strong embrace. "Be careful," the old man said. "Remember, It beat a man to death just a few hours ago."

What a lie. The man had hardly even been knocked unconscious. "I am a human being, so don't call me 'It!' And I barely touched that man, as you well know."

"You crushed his chest and broke his back in three places. You all but tore his head off and popped his skull."

"And you are not human, you are the monstrum."

"Shut up! Stop calling me that idiotic name!" He thought of the brain scans he had done of himself and Patricia, the incredible results. Monstrum. So that was what he was called. And she too. She had the same brain-wave pattern. Monstrum.

He turned his gaze to Jerry, just as he had when he had needed help as a boy. Friend and teacher, Jerry had also been his bodyguard. A confused welter of memories flooded him as he looked at his friend.

The old man soon shattered the moment. "Come on, Jerry. Leave him to his memories for now." He indicated an envelope on the desk. "There's a letter that will explain a great deal. 1 suggest you read it."

They began to leave the room. "Wait!" Jonathan cried, but before he could stop them the door was closed and locked.

Jonathan was furious. This time he lunged at the window, smashing the glass with his hands, uncaring of gashes, and grappled with the bars. He yanked them and yanked them and kicked them and tried to spread them. And was defeated by them.

He picked up the Hallicrafters, which Jerry had placed neatly back on the table, and threw it against the door. It shattered into glittering electronic bits but the door did not move.

What in hell was going to happen next? He realized that this playing on his emotions, dehumanizing him by calling him "It," suggesting that he was brutal beyond his own self-understanding, was all part of an attempt to break him. And a much more skillful attempt than he had expected. But he told himself that he understood what was being done to him, and his understanding would preserve him.

We love each other, and we want as normal and human a life as we can have. Patricia had said that. He repeated it to himself like a prayer.

He longed for her strength. If he could just spend one more minute in her arms he would have the energy to cope with another year of the old man's weird emotional games.

"What have you done with her?" His voice was absorbed by the walls. Frantically, aware of how wild animals must feel when first captured, he tested them. Behind the familiar wallpaper of soaring rockets and moons and Saturns and floating spacemen was plaster. And from the solid thunk when he tapped it, the plaster was spread on concrete. The room was more tightly made than any prison.

It was his old room, all right. The apartment he remembered was just a hypnotic suggestion. This was where he had grown up, this prison.

As the realization sunk in, a change began to come over him. The curtains that hid his past were being made to part by the glut of familiar associations.

Nineteen Rayne Street was the Titus School, where he had been a privileged student. The Prince, they had called him. With a cold shudder he remembered his own tragedy: he was a seasonal king, doomed to die in the very act of procreation.

The most excruciating sorrow filled him. If that was true then all their dreams of happiness, of escaping to the world of regular people, were hopeless. He had learned at his mother's knee—there will come a day, a glorious day. . . .

He looked at the letter the old man had referred to. Should he read it, or did it contain some further confusing trick? He picked it up.

On the envelope were three words: "For my son."

It was from Mother!

He opened it. The words leaped at him like fiery beasts, tearing away the last vestiges of the hypnosis which had held him in its thrall.

When the letter said "remember yourself," he did just that.

He remembered his pride in being the monstrum, and his love of the demons.

"I will speak to you in the voice of the dry leaves," Belial had said. As Jonathan read of his vision it returned to him: Belial, so hideous that he was beautiful, his unblinking eyes filled with so much intelligence that it was shattering to look into them. Belial was freezing wind on a winter's night, moonlight playing on empty snow, clear space pierced by stars.

Belial was a skull, brown and cracked, bursting with worms.

"Mother! What have you done to me? Mother! Mother!"

He rushed through the rest of the letter, squinting at it as if the words might jump off the page and pierce his eyes. At the end he threw it to the floor, turned away from it. Remembrance blazed in his mind:

He and Patricia belonged to the Night Church, had been born into it and raised by it.

He remembered loving it. Yes, but he had been mad then. He could not believe in something so obviously evil ... so dangerously crazy.

Technology had lifted the Night Church to immense power. With their bacteria they could certainly destroy the world.

And they are mad, as I was until I began walking the path of ordinary human beings.

No matter how bad he is there is something sacred in every man on earth, something deeply right that grants him and all his fellows their lives, and seems to suggest that they procreate, and fill the earth with their kind.

In the old days Jonathan had thought of human beings as having less of a claim to life than even the lowest animals, because of all the species mankind was the most defective.

He did not think that now. In hiding Jonathan among ordinary people Mother had awakened in him his own ordinariness, had made him realize that he was only, finally, and utterly human—and that was a very fine thing to be.

Even as these thoughts raced through his mind he felt the monstrum within him stirring in its fitful sleep, the oozing, black coils of its evil shifting wakefully in his soul.

It could not wake up on its own, but they could wake it up, Mother and Jerry and Uncle Franklin. They could and they would.

He had to get out of here! If he was so brilliant surely he could find some way to escape.

He recalled the flickering strangeness of his own brainwave patterns as they raced across the oscilloscope.

Like all the beasts, you will do what your nature demands of you.

He had seen his strangeness in the equipment he had himself designed.

He and Jerry had worked side by side in their labs. "You tend to the future," Uncle had said. "You are creating a teaching machine for your son." He put his arm on Jerry's shoulder. "He will take care of the past."

The coldest, most hideous feeling came over Jonathan as memories of exactly what was done in Jerry's lab came back to him. Disease vectors. Delivery systems. Contagion intensities.

A Titus School graduate had joined the U.S. Army in 1975, and delivered over the next five years vast amounts of classified data on biological weapons.

Anthrax 4 median, which killed in twelve hours.

Parrot fever mutant 202, death in four hours.

Bubonic positive 1, death in thirty minutes.

He suddenly had the most poignant impression of his life in Queens—the simple joy of having a hamburger at Farrell's. Down the counter some schoolkids would be giggling over Cokes. A couple of bus drivers would be huddled in a booth. Somebody might play "Lay Lady Lay" on the jukebox.

"Jerry, you can't kill them! You haven't got any right!"

Jonathan had a new mission, and not much life left in which to fulfill it.

"We're wrong! We are not the law!"

"You will reacquire the moral precision that has always supported you," Mother had written in her letter. "You will know the rightness of our cause." And she had written: "The earth's will is toward evolution. It is your privilege to enact it."

"No! We don't know anything about the will of the planet! We're mistaken, we're doing something terrible!"

Bubonic positive 2 had killed in thirty seconds, but it could not live outside a human host. Transmission only by physical contact.

"Oh, God! Jerry—let me out of here! Jerry, does bubonic 3 work? Does it work?"

His memory was now so clear that he could almost see the bacterial colonies in the microscope, swarming and propagating right out of their media.

And he could smell the animal rooms, the sharp scent of fear, the thick odor of sickness. In his mind's eye he saw the rats, exploding with buboes as soon as they were exposed to bubonic positive 3, dying within seconds, and the sheep within minutes, ba-a-a, ba-a-a-a-a, as great welts rose and turned purple beneath their coats, then burst as they knelt and vomited and gasped and fell twitching.

And the rhesus monkeys, brachiating frantically in their cages, screaming, clawing their throats open, buboes raising their arms so that they looked like they were doing the turkey trot as they scurried about, and coughing blood and pus and dying amid their own offal, their eyes fixed on the unearthly figures who tormented them, Jerry and his assistants in their green isolation suits and helmets.

"Oh, no. No!" He ran back and forth across the room, hurling things to the floor, grappling with the mattress, pointlessly searching the desk for a phone.

There was no phone.

They had been about to carry out a human test of bubonic 3—murder somebody, just to test—

My dear God, what have we done? He asked, but he knew perfectly well. Jerry had created from the bacillus Yersinia pestis a mutant, hyperactive strain that reproduced itself almost instantaneously. It was respiratory, spread through the air. It could be delivered by simply propagating it from a small plane.

Vector analysis indicated that 21.235 hours would elapse from propagation to complete contagion of a given population. After the first one million individuals the rate of transfer would be very rapid, with a potential of seven hundred and fifty million further infections within another fifty-three hours.

Jonathan wanted to help them, to somehow warn them. But Jonathan was a seasonal king come to the end of his time.

He heard the thundering music that would awaken the monstrum, remembered how it felt to change.

"Oh, God, you've got to help me! You've got to get me out of here! Please, somehow, plea-a-se!"

The disease would be fatal in 98.237 percent of the cases and so damaging in the remainder that the individuals would succumb to other diseases, especially given the chaotic nature of the social infrastructure in which they would find themselves.

The memories rushed like fiery, hurtling meteors through Jonathan's mind. His nightmares were a pleasure compared to this.

Jerry had read a paper to the assembled Scientific Unit of the Night Church: "The causative organism is a short bacillus which often displays bipolar staining with Giemsa stain. The positive 3 form always displays staining, but the poles reveal flagella under light. The positive 3 is motile."

"Shut up! Shut up!"

"The incubation period varies from a matter of seconds in a newborn human infant to three to five minutes in a healthy adult male of substantial volume. Onset is abrupt, associated with deep chills. Temperature rises from 41C to 42.5C (106F to 108F). Pulse will be rapid and thready, buboes will appear upon elevation of temperature. The femoral or inguinal lymph nodes will be the usual primary sites of involvement. The nodes will initially be tender but firm, sclerosing rapidly and becoming filled with pus. Bursting of the nodes indicates that terminal praeludium has commenced."

"Help! Get me out of here! I've got to tell somebody! I've got to warn them!"

Mike! I've got to get word to Mike.

He began a more organized attempt to free himself. Again and again he ran against the door, using his own body as a battering ram. It hurt when his shoulder impacted the metal but he didn't care. He had overwhelming humanitarian reasons for getting out. The fact that he might break a bone in the process was of little consequence, as long as it did not prevent him from reaching his goal.

The door clicked.

He was running with all his might when it swept open. He staggered out into the hall and hit the wall.

Strong arms enfolded him. "Cool down, Jonathan. It's all right, you're home, you're safe."

"Let me go! You're crazy, Jerry, you and all the others." The arms tightened around him. "Please, listen to me. This is all insane."

Jerry put something against his shoulder, something that stung.

"Jerry, you're a good man. A fine man. Best friend—" It got harder to talk. "Best friend I ever . . .oh, Jerry, it's obscene, it's . . ." He realized that he had just been sedated. The hypodermic Jerry had used was lying on the carpet, glittering in the soft light. Jonathan looked at it, his mind seeming to sink into the reflections. "Not the plague . . . no . . ."

"Sh, take it easy, guy. Get some sleep."

Jonathan's mind tried a final struggle. I'm letting him drug me, put me to sleep! I mustn't sleep, I haven't got the time!

Then Jerry picked him up and carried him to his bed.

"Now, just relax, loosen up your muscles, guy. Your uncle says you need a little rest before you learn anything more, and I think he's right. Don't you think so?"

"N-n-mmm . . ."

"Sure he is. Sure."

Resistance just wasn't possible. Deadening, black, hostile waves carried Jonathan away.

To the place where the serpent lived. Laughing, lifeless eyes, so cunning, so sensual, so dangerous ...

You are the guilty one, Jonathan, you, you, you. . ..

"Please—"

You will hurt her!

"No!"

You will thrust and crush and tear!

"No, No, NO!"

He sat straight up, sweating, his mouth parched, his hands shaking uncontrollably.

The sun was setting beyond the garden wall, casting warm light into his room. Down below he could hear the rhythm of fresh-voiced Titus schoolgirls chanting jump-rope rhymes. This was the hour between dinner and evening study hall, known as the Strolls, when the students had the freedom of the courtyard.

Farther away there were traffic noises, a horn, a shout, and ordinary children laughing together out on Sullivan Street.

The sounds of ordinary people. At that moment Jonathan would have cheerfully traded places with the smallest, most humble human being in the world. The taste he and Patricia had gotten of outside life had been so sweet.

If only they could somehow warn that innocent world of the danger it was in.

Somehow.

He looked down at his own perfect hands. The violence he knew to be in himself literally was another creature, coiled beneath his own soft skin. And It did not want to escape from the Night Church.

No, indeed. It wanted to get married!

If It is the beast, the monstrum—then so am I.

I beg to die.