French was doing his best to be reassuring. "There's no problem, Gibson is too stupid to be a problem,"
While Gibson had to fight to control himself, Smith was at her most efficient and reassuring as she backed up French. "There won't be any problem. We can handle Gibson."
Gibson's jaws clenched in silent fury. Handle me, can you, you bastards? We'll see about that.
Raus signaled to the two black-tie goons, indicating that he thought it was time to feed the bimbo to the entity. As the two men moved the girl toward the edge of the shaft, her legs suddenly sagged, as though she'd lost control of them. She burst out in another fit of giggles. Gibson found that there was something particularly hideous about the sound, about her total unawareness of what was about to happen to her. Then, somehow, awareness cut through whatever they'd given her or whatever she'd taken. She let out one long awful scream before they pushed her over the edge and then a second, even longer one as she fell that reverberated with echoes. There were sobs and sucking noises from the bottom of the shaft and finally a single obscenely satisfied belch. Gibson closed his eyes and bit down on the knuckle of his index finger. When he looked again, Raus and his party, now only six in number, were going back up the steps. A few seconds later, the door closed and there was the sound of it being locked from the outside.
Gibson let out a sigh from the heart. "Jesus Christ."
Nephredana stepped out of the alcove. "Them's the breaks."
"I don't know how you can take something like that so calmly."
"It wasn't my first human sacrifice."
"I guess not."
"I'm very, very old, Joe. Don't be attributing any phony innocence to me. I've truly seen it all."
"This isn't easy."
He had probably never said a truer word. He walked over to the edge of the well and looked down. He didn't have a clue what to think. In the bottom of the well there seemed to be a new smug quality to the green glow. Nephredana came and stood beside him. She also looked down into the shaft. "One day we're going to destroy that thing."
"I sure as hell hope so. Did you hear what those bastards were talking about?"
"They were talking about you."
"They seem to have plans for me. The word they used was 'crucial.' You think they can get me?"
Nephredana shrugged. "It depends on how crucial it is to you to stay away from them. You seem to be doing okay so far."
"I've only been away from them for a few hours,"
"For the fugitive, it's one hour at a time."
Gibson knelt down and touched one of the steel rings in the stonework. "How many people do you think have died here?"
"Probably hundreds. Maybe thousands over the years. Balg has been here for a very long time."
Gibson shook his head. "Balg? What's next? Necrom?"
Fury flashed across Nephredana's face, and she grabbed him angrily by the lapels of his tuxedo jacket and pulled his face close to hers. She was very strong.
"Don't even say that name. Not here, not ever. You don't have the faintest idea what you're talking about."
Her fingers were in his hair. He could feel her long nails against his scalp. She hissed into his face. "Never say that name. You humans are so ignorant that you're dangerous."
Then she kissed him. The kiss was electric. His whole body trembled, and it was some moments before he could break away. "Surely not here?"
Gibson couldn't tell whether the force in her whisper was anger or passion. "Yes, right here. There are a lot of ways to fight the power."
She was holding his face between her hands, her nails were digging into the skin of his cheeks, and her hands were icy. He was revolted by the idea of making love in this place, but he knew that he could never find the strength to resist. A slow, languid smile spread over Nephredana's face.
"I'm going to hurt you, Joe Gibson… and you're going to love me for it."
The White Room
THE CHARADE OF appearing to recover when there was, in reality, nothing from which to recover was proving harder than he had first imagined, and the sessions with Dr. Kooning were becoming a strain. Too much real anger was churning inside him, anger that boiled up despite the drugs and despite all his efforts to convince Kooning that he was emerging from what she considered to be fantasy and returning to the real. He constantly ran into the basic stumbling block of his deception. He had no existence and no history in this world, and if he let go of the "fantasy," all that remained was a blank slate. To Kooning, this was even more fascinating than a patient who was in the grip of a delusion. In psychiatry, the deluded were ten a penny; the real blank slate was rare and exotic. Gibson was now fully convinced that there was no way he was ever going to obtain any legitimate release from the clinic and that the only way out for him was going to be a breakout. The conviction was particularly strong on the days when Kooning took it into her head to probe him on the fine print of his paranoia.
"You claim, although apparently either living or wishing to live in the world of rock 'n' roll music, you've never heard of the Rolling Stones?"
Gibson nodded. He felt weighed down by the seeming contradictions that were built into his story. Only a certain dogged stubbornness kept him from curling up on the couch and refusing to answer. "Where I came from, there was no band called the Rolling Stones."
"Doesn't that tell you something."
Only the drugs stopped Gibson snarling. "It tells me that I have come back to a world that's been radically altered, altered to the extent that I no longer exist."
Kooning regarded him gravely. "That's a very interesting statement."
"Isn't it just? "
"Could it be that because of some crisis in your life, perhaps what you perceived as a failure to win the level of success and recognition that you thought you deserved in music, you fixed on one very successful group and decided that they had usurped what was rightfully yours?"
They must have been round this point a dozen times in previous sessions, and Gibson could see what was coming a mile off.
"You're telling me that the only way I could get what was rightfully mine was by blanking out this band, creating the illusion that they didn't exist."
Kooning smiled and nodded. "It does make a lot of sense, doesn't it?"
"It would, except that it isn't the case here."
"So how do you feel when I make such a suggestion?"
Gibson didn't bother to pretend. "I get scared. If I give up what you call my fantasy, what do I have left? There doesn't seem to be anything else. Without it, I'm quite literally nothing."
"Don't you think this is something we are going to have to work on?"
Chapter Ten
GIBSON WOKE FROM a hideous dream into an almost as hideous reality. In the dream, the well that contained Balg had given up its dead. One by one, and then in increasing numbers, an army of slow-moving, crawling luminous corpses had scrambled painfully over the rim of the shaft, dragged themselves across the flagstones, and started clawing their way up the stairs on their hands and knees while Gibson watched in horror. He had spotted Lancer, the president, in among the crowd, along with a host of friends and faces from his past: Gideon Windemere and Christobelle; Rob Tyler, the bass player from the Holy Ghosts who'd been the most bitter about the breakup of the band; even Desiree and the woman who'd been at his apartment the day that Casillas had come calling were part of this legion of the living dead.
He only recognized the woman that he'd seen seen sacrificed by the torn black lingerie still clinging to her green, decaying flesh. Instead of crawling to the stairs like all the others, she made straight for Gibson, giggling as she dragged herself toward him, the same mindless, stoned-out, space-case giggle that he'd heard the previous night, as she had swayed on the edge of the pit, staring uncomprehendingly at her death. Her black fingernails scraped on the granite flags, and her eyes had the vacancy of madness. He wanted desperately to get away from her but he found that he couldn't move. He was flat on his back, naked, exposed, and helpless, chained by the wrists and ankles to the iron rings set in the flagstones. He twisted and struggled until his wrists were raw and bleeding, but he couldn't free himself. He also didn't seem able to close his eyes, and he was compelled to watch as she agonizingly inched nearer, leaving a slime trail like a slug or snail.