Conspiracies

"Not this week, they're not. Most of them, including Frayne Canfield, I'm sure, will be in Manhattan for the first annual SESOUP conference."

Lew started toward the front door. Jack followed.

"Is that where she promised to 'blow all other theories out of the water' with her Grand Unification Theory?"

"The very same."

"And Roma will be there too, I assume?"

"Of course. He put it all together."

Jack felt as if a weight suddenly had been lifted from his shoulders. All the possible suspects in one place—perfect.

"When's it start and how do I get into this conference?"

"Day after tomorrow, but you can't get in. Members only—and only one guest each."

"Then I'll be yours."

"I'm not a member. I'm Mel's guest."

"Why so restrictive?"

"I told you—it's very exclusive. This is serious business for them."

"I want you to get me in."

"Why? Mel won't be there."

"Yeah, but I bet the person who knows where she is will be."

"Yes," Lew said, his Adam's apple moving in and out as he nodded. "I can see that. I'll see what I can work out. But you'll need a cover story."

As they stepped out the front door, movement on the street caught Jack's eye. At the far corner of the property to his right, a black sedan began pulling away from the curb. He watched its rear end coast away.

He wondered about that. Had they been followed? He didn't remember seeing any cars parked on the street when he arrived.

"Why do I need a cover story?" he asked Lew.

"I assume you're not planning to go up to people and ask them if they've seen Melanie Ehler lately."

"Well, no. I figure you'll introduce me around—"

"But you need a reason to be there and a connection to Mel. I'll think on it. The conference is in the Clinton Regent—you know the place?"

"Vaguely. Not exactly the Waldorf."

Far from it. If Jack remembered correctly, the Clinton Regent was in Hell's Kitchen.

"Well, SESOUP's membership isn't exactly poor, but the typical midtown room rate is over two hundred dollars a night, plus twenty-five percent additional in taxes. That would strain a lot of budgets. Roma got the Regent to give us a more affordable rate if we could fill the whole hotel, which we will."

"Okay. I'll see you there Thursday morning. What time?"

"Registration opens at noon. Meet me in the lobby around eleven-thirty. I'll have something cooked up for you by then."

They parted—Lew heading back to Shoreham, Jack to Manhattan.

He rubbed his fingers against his pants leg. Why couldn't he get them to feel dry?

7

He awakens feeling wet. He turns on the light and sees that his sheets are red. He leaps from the bed with a cry of alarm. The sheets, top and bottom, are soaked with red, so are his shorts and T-shirt.

Blood. But whose?

Then he notices that his right palm is full of thick red liquid ... trickling from his index and middle fingertips—the ones that touched Melanie Ehler's painting earlier. Squeezing the fingers to stanch the flow, he hurries to the bathroom, but stops halfway when he spots the easel and canvas set up in the center of his front room.

He stares in cold shock. Where the hell did that come from? This is his home, his fortress. Who could have—?

As Jack steps warily into the front room, he recognizes the painting. He saw it earlier at Lew Ehler's house, the disturbing one in Melanie's study, only now the glistening impasto swirls are alive on the canvas, twisting and contorting into Gordian tangles of black and purple pigment, and from deep within the kinetic madness of those tortured coils, meteoric crescents of yellow glare briefly, then disappear.

Jack rotates slowly, searching for the intruder, and when he completes the turn, he sees that the canvas has changed—no, is changing as he watches. The color is leaking away, draining like a tainted transfusion from a befouled IV bottle into a pool on the rug before the easel. The stain spreads quickly, too quickly for Jack to step back and avoid it. But instead of feeling pigment ooze against his bare toes, he feels nothing—nothing against his skin, nothing but air beneath his soles.

Jack windmills his arms wildly, reaching for something, anything to stop his fall. Somehow the paint has eaten through his floor and he's plunging into the apartment below. He twists, clutches at the edge of the hole, but his fingers slip on the slick pigment and he plummets into the waiting darkness.

He lands catlike, in a crouch, and knows immediately that he's not in the second floor apartment. Neil the anarchist may not be a personal hygiene poster boy, but he's never smelled this bad. Jeez, what is it? Choice strips of three-day-old roadkill folded into rotten eggs and left out in the sun to warm might come close.

And worse ... Jack recognizes it.

But it can't be.

And then he realizes that he's not crouching on wood flooring or carpet, but metal grating—cold, and slick with a sheen of engine oil. Some sort of catwalk. He looks up—a tangle of ducts and wiring, but no sign of the hole that dropped him here. And from far below ... light—faint, flickering off the steel plates of the inner walls of a ship's hull ...

"Shit!" Jack whispers.

He knows where he is—the Ajit-Ruprobati. But it can't be. Not possible. He sank this rustbucket and everyone aboard it—human and non-human—last summer. This old freighter rests and rusts now in the silt of lower New York Harbor. No way he can be aboard it ...

Which means this must be a dream. But it sure as hell doesn't feel like one. He had nightmares about this place and the creatures it harbored for months after he damn near died sinking it, but never this real.

The creatures ... the rakoshi ... Jack feels every muscle in his body recoil at the thought of them. If the ship is back and awash with their stink, then they too must have returned from the Land of the Dead.

Movement below catches his eye. Jack freezes as a massively muscled, shark-snouted creature glides along another catwalk directly below his. It stands six or seven feet tall and the flickering light plays over its glistening cobalt skin as it moves with sinuous grace.

A rakosh.

Jack wants to scream. This isn't happening. He killed these creatures, incinerated every damn one of them in this very hold last summer. But Jack doesn't dare even to breathe. Hold statue-still until it passes, then find a way out—fast.

But as the creature moves beneath him, it slows, then stops. In a strobe-flash of motion it whirls into a hissing crouch, its head darting back and forth as it sniffs the fetid air.

Does it sense me? Jack wonders as his heart races even faster. Or does it simply sense something different?

The rakosh tips back its shark-like head and looks up. As Jack gazes into the glowing yellow slits of its eyes, he fights a primal urge to jump up and run screaming from this abomination.

I'm in the dark up here, he tells himself, forcing calm. I'm on the far side of this steel mesh. If I don't breathe, don't blink, it won't see me. It'll move on.

Finally, it happens, just as he hoped. The creature lowers its head and looks around, indecisive. It turns, but as it starts to move away, Jack sees something falling through the mesh of his perch. Something small ... globular ... red.

A drop of his blood.

He watches in horror as the ruby bead drifts like a snowflake toward the rakosh's head, splatters against its snout. He cannot move as a dark tongue snakes from a lipless mouth and licks the smear, leaving no trace.

What happens next is blurred: a hiss, the flash of bared teeth, a three-taloned hand thrusting up, bursting through the steel mesh as if it were window screen, grabbing Jack's bloody hand and yanking it down through the opening. Jack cries out in terror and pain as his right shoulder slams against the mesh. He tries to wrench his hand free but the rakosh's grip is like a steel band.