The screaming had stopped, and the buzz-saw sounds. Hartmann had feared they might go on forever. He gagged on the reek of friction-burned hair and bone.
He felt like something from a medieval fable as painted by Bosch: a glutton presented with the fullest of feasts, only to have it turn to ashes in his mouth. Puppetman had drawn no nourishment from the terrorists' dying. He'd been nearly as terrified as they.
A humming, coming closer: Moritat, The Ballad of Mackie the Knife. The mad ace was locked in killing frenzy now, stalking toward him with his terrible hand still dripping brains. Hartmann writhed in his bonds. The woman Mackie had impaled was a dead weight across his legs. He was going to die now. Unless…
Bile surged up his throat at what he was going to do. He choked it back, reached for a string, and pulled. Pulled hard. The humming stopped. The soft tocking of clogs on wood stopped. Hartmann looked up. Mackie leaned over him with glowing eyes.
He pulled Anneke off Hartmann's legs. He was strong for his size. Or maybe inspired. He pulled Hartmann's chair upright. Hartmann winced, dreading contact, fearing death. Fearing the alternative almost as much.
His own breathing nearly deafened him. He could feel the emotion swelling within Mackie. He steeled himself and stroked it, teased it, made it grow.
Mackie went to his knees before the chair. He unfastened the fly of Hartmann's trousers, slipped fingers inside, tugged the senator's cock out into the humid air and fastened his lips around the glans. He began to pump his head up and down, slowly at first, then gaining speed. His tongue went caduceus round and round.
Hartmann moaned. He couldn't let himself enjoy this.
If you don't it's never going to end, Puppetman taunted. What are you doing to me?
Saving you. And securing the best puppet of all.
But he's so powerful-so… unpredictable. Involuntary pleasure was breaking his thoughts into kaleidiscope fragments. But I've got him now. Because he wants to be my puppet. He loves you, the way that neurasthenic bitch Sara never could.
God, God, am I still a man?
You're alive. And you're going to smuggle this creature back to New York. And anyone who stands in our way from now on will die.
Now relax and enjoy it.
Puppetman took over. As Mackie sucked his cock, he sucked the boy's emotions with his mind. Hot-wet and salty, they gushed into him.
Hartmann's head went back. Involuntarily he cried out. He came as he had not come since Succubus died.
Senator Gregg Hartmann pushed through a door from which the glass had long since been broken. He leaned against the cold metal frame and stared into a street that was empty except for gutted cars and weeds pushing up through cracks in the pavement.
White light drilled him from the rooftop opposite, fierce as a laser. He raised his head, blinking.
"My God," a German voice yelled, "it's the senator." The street filled up with cars and whirling lights and noise. It didn't seem to -take any time at all. Hartmann saw magenta highlights struck like sparks off Tachyon's hair, and Carnifex in his comic-book outfit, and from doorways and behind the automotive corpses appeared men totally encased in black, trotting warily forward with stubby machine pistols held ready.
Past them all he saw Sara, dressed in a white coat that was the defiant antithesis of camouflage.
"I… got away," he said, voice creaking like an unused door. "It's over. They-they killed each other."
Television spotlights spilled over him, hot and white as milk fresh from the breast. His gaze caught Sara's. He smiled. But her eyes drilled into his like iron rods.
Cold and hard. She's slipped away! he thought. With the thought came pain.
But Puppetman wasn't buying pain. Not tonight. He drove himself into her through the eyes.
And she came running for him, arms spread, her mouth a red hole through which love-words poured. And Hartmann felt his puppet wrap her arms around his neck and makeupstreaked tears gush onto his collar, and he hated that part of him that had saved his life.
And down away where light never was, Puppetman smiled.
MIRRORS OF THE SOUL
Melinda M. Snodgrass
April in Paris. The chestnut tress resplendent in their pink and white finery. The blossoms drifting like fragrant snow about the feet of the statues in the Tuileries Garden, and floating like colorful foam atop the muddy waters of the Seine.
April in Paris. The song bubbling incongruously through his head as he stood before a simple gravestone in the Cimetiere Montmartre. So hideously inappropriate. He banished it only to have it return with greater intensity.
Irritably Tachyon hunched one shoulder, took a tighter grip -on the simple bouquet of violets and lily of the valley. The crisp green florist's paper crackled loudly in the afternoon air. Away to his left he could hear the urgent bleat of horns as the bumper-to-bumper traffic crawled up the Rue Norvins toward Sacre-Coeur. With its gleaming white walls, cupolas, and dome the cathedral floated like an Arabian nights dream over this city of light and dreams.
The last time I saw Paris.
Earl, his face holding all the expression of an ebony statue. Lena, flushed, impassioned. "You must go!" Looking to Earl for help and comfort. The quiet; "it would probably be best." The path of least resistance. So strange from this of all men.
Tachyon knelt, brushed away the petals that littered the stone slab.
Earl Sanderson Jr. "Noir Aigle" 1919-1974
You lived too long, my friend. Or so it was said. Those busy, noisy activists could have used you better if you'd had the grace to die in 1950. No -even better-while liberating Argentina or freeing Spain or saving Gandhi.
Laid the bouquet on the grave. A sudden breeze set the delicate white bells of the lilies to trembling. Like a young girl's lashes just before she was kissed. Or like Blythe's lashes just before she wept.
The last time I saw Paris.
A cold, bleak December, and a park in Neuilly.
Blythe van Renssaeler, aka Brain Trust, died yesterday… Gracelessly he surged to his feet, dusted the knees of his pants with a handkerchief. Gave his nose a quick, emphatic blow. That was the trouble with the past. It never stayed buried.
Straddling the slab was a large elaborate wreath. Roses and gladiolas and yards of ribbon. A wreath for a dead hero. A travesty. A small foot came up, sent the wreath tumbling. Contemptuously Tachyon walked over it, grinding the fragile petals beneath his heel.
One cannot propitiate the ancestors, Jack. Their ghosts will follow.
His certainly were.
On the Rue Etex he hailed a cab, fished for the note, read off the name of the Left Bank cafe in rusty French. Settled back to watch the unlit neon signs flash past. XXX, Le Filles! "Les Sexy." Strange to think of all this smut at the foot of a hill whose name translated as the Mountain of Martyrs. Saints had died on Montmartre. The Society of Jesus had been founded on the hill in 1534.
They proceeded in noisy and profane lurches. Bursts of heart-stopping speed followed by neck-wrenching stops. A blare of horns, and an exchange of imaginative insults. They shot through the Place Vendome past the Ritz where the delegation was housed. Tachyon hunkered deeper into his seat though it was unlikely he would be spotted. He was so sick of them all. Sara, quiet, sleek, and secretive as a mongoose. She had changed since Syria, but refused to confide. Peregrine flaunting her pregnancy, refusing to accept that she might not beat the odds. Mistral, young and beautiful. She had been tactful and understanding and kept his shameful secret. Fantasy, sly and amused. She had not. Hot blood washed his face. His humiliating condition was now public to be sniggered at and discussed in tones ranging from the sympathetic to the amused. His hand closed tightly on the note. There would be at least one woman he could face without embarrassment. One of his ghosts, but more welcome than the living right now.
She had chosen a cafe on the Boulevard Saint-Michel in the heart of the Latin Quarter. The area had always despised the bourgeoisie. Tachyon wondered if Danelle still did. Or had the years dampened her revolutionary ardor? One could only hope it had not dampened her other ardors. Then he remembered, and shrunk down once more.