I opened my eyes as I was pulled into a clean and well-lit room. People wearing green surgical suits were waiting. At first I thought my knee was about to be fixed, then I remembered what was going on. Behind the people was a bed with a long black box above it, cables and leads with suction pads hanging down. I couldn’t recall ever having seen anything like it.
The silent men in the leather aprons lifted me onto the bed and secured my arms and legs.
“Rugby league,” I said to myself. “Try. Drop goal. Penalty. Conversion.” I noticed that the underside of the box above me consisted of complex machinery-digital devices, electrical circuits and the like. I got a bad feeling about what was in store for me.
I smelled rubbing alcohol and felt a damp swab on my arm. Then a needle was slipped into a vein.
“Try. Drop goal. Penalty. Conversion,” I kept repeating.
I tensed myself to fight the loss of consciousness that I was expecting, but it didn’t come. I felt as if I were floating in the air, but I remained at least partly alert. The box above the bed was lowered, stopping only a few inches from my face. Then all the lights went out.
I kept silently repeating my rugby-league mnemonic. It was effective in countering the panic I was feeling in what had become a very enclosed space. Then lights came on all over the base of the box and a whirring noise started up.
“Hello,” said a soothing female voice. “Stay calm. Nothing unpleasant is going to happen.”
“Try. Drop goal. Penalty. Conversion,” I continued saying to myself.
Suddenly I felt latex-covered fingers on my eyes. They were pulling open the eyelids. Something metallic was attached to them and involuntary tears flowed. I wondered if they were going to blind me and my heart started to thunder. I tried to cry out, but found that my voice had gone missing.
“There we are,” said the woman. “That wasn’t too bad, was it?”
She was lucky I wasn’t able to tell her what I was thinking.
“Now, enjoy the show.”
A screen was lit up above my face. Strident martial music began to play and images of men in suits and the occasional woman appeared. I tried to identify them, but recalled no names. I had the impression they were all politicians, but I couldn’t be sure. Then the images started to change more rapidly and I lost track.
I went back to my rugby-league mnemonic, trying to ignore the pain around my eyes. But it was soon dashed from my mind as the brassy music rose to a crescendo and a picture of a hard-eyed man appeared. I knew I’d seen him before, I even knew he was the devil incarnate, but I couldn’t place him or remember his name.
The whir of the machine became louder and the images on the screen started to move so fast that I could no longer distinguish what they were. Then every nerve in my body seemed to be energized and I felt my back rise from the bed. I was being asked an incomprehensible question repeatedly, in a tone that required an answer, but I couldn’t speak, couldn’t scream as my whole being seemed to take fire and my head throbbed.
Then I heard the words at last.
“You will obey every command that you are given, will you not?”
I fought against the urge to respond positively, trying to get the words of my mnemonic going again. Then I saw how to give myself a chance.
“Yes,” I said, aware that the power of speech had returned to me. “Yes, I will obey every command.”
But deep down I was still repeating Try. Drop. Goal. Penalty. Conversion.
Until a siren sounded and I fell into the deepest of holes.
When I came round, I didn’t have a clue where I was. My head was ringing with strange sounds and I saw a blur of colors and shapes. Gradually my vision cleared, but my ears were still filled with discordant voices. There was a foul stench in my nostrils. I tried to move, but my arms and legs were confined. I looked down and saw that I had been tied to a wheelchair. I was wearing paper clothes again. I felt a twinge of alarm and glanced around. What I saw wasn’t reassuring.
I was at the back of a long hall with no windows. In the dim light I made out a mass of people of both sexes, their limbs jerking about. Many of them were young and muscular. They were all naked and were crying out words that I couldn’t understand. At the front there was a heap of large stones with a large upturned cross projecting upward from it. I began to get a very bad feeling.
Then a tall figure wearing a black robe appeared, hands raised high. I blinked and shook my head. I wasn’t seeing things. The face was larger than it should have been and seemed to be carved out of stone. I remembered where I’d seen the like-on the sides of churches. An uglier…gargoyle…would have been hard to find, the features twisted, eyes bulging and nose spread wide as if having sustained heavy blows.
Another figure followed, this one clearly male-he was naked, a huge erection moving to and fro as he pranced about, cracking a short whip. But his head was not human. It was that of a carnivorous animal, its jaws open to reveal vicious yellow teeth, and without having to think, I knew immediately the word: hyena.
The gargoyle began to speak, the voice low and masculine. It sounded all around me, and I saw speakers on the walls. I also noticed the animal corpses hanging from the wooden panels-everything from rabbits and foxes to large creatures, bears. They must have been killed where they were suspended, as there was dark blood on the walls and pooled on the floor. That accounted for the stink. Looking closer, I realized that all the animals’ eyes had been mutilated. Some were hanging from their eye sockets.
“Silence, my fellow worshippers,” the gargoyle was saying. “Listen to the antiGospel of our lord and master. ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was with Lucifer, and the word was Lucifer.’”
The people in the hall broke into loud screams of approbation. A particularly crazed young man caught my eye-he dragged his nails down his bare chest hard enough to draw blood. I had seen him before. He had been in command of the firing squad.
The gargoyle spoke again. “Our lord Lucifer demands a blood sacrifice today, as he does every day. Bring on the victim!”
The man in the hyena head ran to the side, wielding his whip, but I was struggling to keep my eyes open now. Images were cascading before them, lines of men in uniform that went on and on. Then everything abruptly disappeared.
As I fell into the darkness, I heard a long, desperate scream.
Three
Hinkey’s Bar was in a back street near the Washington Navy Yard, less than a mile south of the U.S. Capitol. It took up the ground floor of a crumbling building. The upper floors were home to a dope dealer, a producer of Internet porn, and several sad-eyed people who couldn’t afford anything better. Hinkey himself was in his seventies. He’d been a minor-league baseball player in his youth and his exploits on the diamond were all he talked about. He sat in a corner with a bottle of cheap bourbon in front of him, while his son-known to regulars as Hinkey Part Two because, paradoxically, he bore no resemblance to his old man-ran the place with an attitude that veered between indifference and scorn, depending on the state of his hangover.
Back in the seventies, Hinkey had realized the place wouldn’t last much longer on its clientele of working-class alcoholics and slumming students. He hit on the idea of hiring bands, particularly cheap and talent-free ones he could pay in beer. The old man was tone-deaf, so he didn’t care if the musicians played rock, punk, post-punk, grunge or whatever shit was in fashion. Not blues or soul, though. The black man’s music wasn’t his thing. He never got big crowds, but for three nights a week he made a half-decent profit. Hinkey Part Two wasn’t tone-deaf, but he was into equal opportunity-he hated all music and all the people who came to listen. As for the bands, they featured the worst kind of lowlifes-tuneless, loudmouthed, thieving scum. The only time anyone saw Hinkey Part Two smile was when the audience threw glasses at the musicians.