Gerd sighed and bent his head down. He ran one hand through his sparse gray hair and grunted. "Och, Peter. Things are spinning out of control, as you guessed. Those men are convinced that you harvested a special sin from Manny Greer. The one we all crave to own: the Sin Of All Sins."
"But of course I didn't! The man was wiped clean, Gerd. I told you that. Nothing was there. Nothing!"
"I know that, and I believe that. Others do not."
"But why would anyone think that a low-life scumball like Manny would harbor such a hamartiaphilic treasure? It doesn't make any sense!"
"You are letting your brain speak instead of your heart, Peter," Gerd said. "Do you honestly think that sins select people according to their class in society? Do you believe that powerful sins are only destined to be affixed to powerful people? If so, you are wrong. Dead wrong. You have learned nothing of what I taught you!"
Gerd walked to the credenza in the parlor and poured himself a drink, his hands shaking visibly as he did so. "Sins are totally egalitarian by nature," he said. "They do not care if you are Manny the Thug, or Genghis Khan the Conqueror. They only want to be. To manifest. To cling."
"To be with us," I said.
"Yes. To be with every one of us. It is the only way they can achieve their bliss."
"And so Manny managed to glom onto the greatest sin in all the world?"
"According to my informants, yes. Look at it this way: We swim through an endless sea of sins, each of them desperate to gain connection with us. You and I can only see the ones that have 'made a landing,' so to say. And it does not take much to hook one. Just an impure thought, in many cases. Your man Manny apparently latched onto a . . . what's the word? A real doozy. The biggest doozy of them all. Or so I am led to believe."
"Incredible. But who could ever know that about Manny?"
"Someone who is both a sinner, and a sin-seer too," Gerd said. "Someone who wanted that sin for himself. Someone who is determined to obtain it at any cost. My visitors tonight were not working for themselves. They are obviously agents, in it only for the money. Their strings are being controlled by a higher person, unknown to us."
"But Gerd, tell me what sin could possibly be worse than, say, genocide, or serial murder? Or running scams on elderly people? Or bilking corporate investors out of millions? Manny couldn't have managed to top those. He was too stupid. What exactly is the Sin Of All Sins?"
The old man shook his head slowly. "Not anything we can conceive by way of speculation, Peter. It is something beyond our imagining. The Holy Grail of our Art. The quintessential sin, comprising a superfamily that subsumes all the others below it."
"If that's true, couldn't we project what it might look like from taxonomic analysis of known sin shape families?"
"Some have tried to do so," Gerd said. "I have seen various hypothetical renderings. The best guess is that it takes the form of a hyper-icosahedron. We think it must have enormous spectral energy. But who can know for sure?"
He raised his eyes and looked at the high chandelier in the center of the parlor. "Considering the stakes involved, perhaps it would be best for you to stay here with me for a time, for your own safety. I have plenty of spare room in this dusty old mansion. I will call in some old friends of mine who owe me a favor, to act as . . . bodyguards." He looked back down at me, lifted his eyebrows, and smiled.
I nodded back to him. I could buy a toothbrush at the local drugstore in the morning.
At this point, I was scared. The chances that I'd get any substantial help from the police were slim, and so I was thankful for Gerd's offer of protection.
****
Sins occupy a space just a tiny bit removed from the one that most people can see. They are like the steamy fog that rises from a hot asphalt road after a shower in the middle of summer. Nothing but humid air, really-but you never see it until after the rain and the sun conspire to bring it out.
Me, I was sick of being able to see them. As I lay restlessly in the unfamiliar bed, I cursed Gerd for developing my latent talent in the first place. In the end, it hadn't been worth it.
And worse thoughts came to me. For example, if every man and woman alive were infested with sins, how could anyone ever hope to enter Heaven? Jesus Christ may have been able to cast out sins from the living, but I saw no evidence that anyone else had ever done that.
Furthermore, what possible good could it do to "forgive" one for their sins? The sins didn't care. Ironically, they were sin-free. Whatever strange form of independent vitality they possessed, they had the same imperative as all other life forms: strive to exist. That is all. You might as well forgive a person for the e-coli that inhabited his gut. To me, it seemed an illogical concept.
The Bible defined the worst sin as blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, the only unforgivable sin. But surely it couldn't be that obvious, else we'd have already seen its manifestation in plentitude. Even so, since no one could actually understand the mystical nature of the Holy Spirit, maybe there was something to that notion. Maybe it took an incorrigible sinner like Manny to stumble upon that most perverse of thoughts or deeds.
And perhaps the physical manifestation of the Sin Of All Sins was not really all that breathtaking or complex to behold. It might be hard to identify, crammed amidst other sins. Maybe its spectral energy was actually not very strong. It very well may have disguised itself like that. Maybe it looked like the humblest of everyday sins.
I rolled and tossed in bed, trying to will my brain to stop operating. These thoughts worried me. Worried me deeply.
I knew that you couldn't destroy a sin's physical manifestation, even after the death of its original host. An early HCG study group had done experiments using all kinds of solvents, strong acids, flames, liquid nitrogen, noxious gases, you name it. All were totally ineffective. Sins were robust, and had an extraordinarily long physical lifetime. The oldest well-documented extant sin I knew about was HCG 28-147-1-1, a singular genus. It had been extracted from a religious relic, the knucklebone of St. Agothis, who had died in the third century C.E.
I suppose it was fortunate for hamartiaphiles that the plane sins occupied was only slightly askew from normal sight. Otherwise, collectors couldn't have appreciated their individual beauty.
And they were beautiful, to be sure. Each one splendid in its own illicit, unique way. Collectors assumed that the Sin Of All Sins was the most beautiful item in all the world. Some would kill for it. Beyond its inestimable tangible value, its ownership would secure one's legacy forever in the annals of the Hamartiaphily Collector's Guild.
Which was, I thought uncomfortably, just the sort of thing that would appeal to a person like Gerd Vanderhout.
****
I awoke to find myself tied immobile in a chair in Gerd's library, with the residual scent of chloroform in my nostrils about to make me retch.
"Please forgive me for this, Peter," Gerd said.
A couple of other elderly guys I didn't recognize stood on either side of me. One of them held a small pistol in his hand.
Henderson had been right. True fear is facing the business end of a loaded gun. I tried to look away from it, but couldn't. That small dark hole at the end of the barrel seemed to grow larger and larger, until it subsumed everything else in my vision.
I heaved once against my bindings as a surge of adrenaline coursed through my body, bearing its primary chemical instruction: fight or flight. I could do neither. Somewhere inside my head, panic quickly evolved into an odd sense of detachment. The room, the people inside it, the situation itself became surreal. I found my voice, surprised that it was so coherent under the circumstance.