Gene Ralston.
He could see it hovering there in the darkness, against the blue background, but still he only saw the word General—from an angle, out of the corner of his eye, as if it were sneaking up on him from behind. There were the French voices mixed in there, too. And there was something else—no, someone else. Someone terrifying.
Nergal, Edmund thought. Nergal was there, too!
E + N-E-R-G-A-L = G-E-N-E-R-A-L!
It was Nergal. There could be no doubt about that. Nergal was terrifying. So was Edmund now. And with him Edmund was the General. Together they would—but—
Edmund pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, scrunched his forehead, and tried to remember. He thought he could feel the old gooiness creeping back in, but the image of the silver stitching would not expand, would not stretch out into Gene Ralston or anything else that he could recognize. And then all trace of the gooiness disappeared.
C’est mieux d’oublier.
Edmund opened his eyes and scooped up one of the notebooks from the floor—snatched a pen from amid the mess on the kitchen table and opened the notebook to the first page. His grandfather’s writing, symbols and words that Edmund didn’t understand. Everything appeared to be written in French, but Edmund couldn’t be sure—felt like he couldn’t be sure of anything anymore.
There had to be a message in here somewhere. Nergal was speaking to him. Edmund could feel it, could see it in his mind—
E + N-E-R-G-A-L = G-E-N-E-R-A-L!
That was the formula!
Edmund scribbled the letters G-E-N-E-R-A-L-S-T-O-N on the inside cover of the notebook—quickly took out the word NERGAL, and was left with E-S-T-O-N.
The answer came to him immediately.
“Of course!” Edmund said—his mind, his body relaxing at once into the bliss of total understanding. “Move the letter E the end, and you get the word stone.”
Edmund wrote it down next to Nergal.
NERGAL STONE, or STONE NERGAL, depending on how you wanted to look at it.
“The Nergal Stone,” Edmund said, smiling. “The stone seal depicting the sacrifice to the god Nergal. Gene Ralston equals the Nergal Stone! Just like the god who visited me all those years ago, the formula, the message pointing me toward the seal had been there all along! Right on Rally’s coveralls!”
One of the cats poked its head out from around the re-cliner—licked its chops and gazed up at Edmund quizzically.
“I understand,” Edmund said with tears of joy.
He drove back to the farmhouse and hid the medicine bottle and the notebooks under the floorboards in his mother’s old bedroom. That was the proper place for secrets, he thought.
Then he drove back to Rally’s and called the police. That was the sensible thing to do, he figured; it was best to just tell the truth about how he found Rally dead in his La-Z-Boy. Surely, if they investigated further, they would have a record of his phone call an hour earlier. Surely, if they investigated further, they would be able to establish Rally’s time of death shortly afterwards.
Edmund told the sheriff that the old man had sounded depressed when he talked to him on the phone—was babbling nonsense, he said, and what a shame he hadn’t gotten there sooner. He gave this as his official statement and then left—not before, of course, offering once again to be of whatever assistance he could. No, Edmund thought, it didn’t take a fat Adolf Hitler lookalike to tell the scene was a suicide; but telling the truth (well, almost the truth) was smart just to be on the safe side.
But why was Edmund even worried about all that? After all, he had nothing to do with Rally’s death.
Or did he?
What was it Rally had said on the phone? “I reckon it was only a matter of time.” Yes, Edmund thought, Rally had understood c’est mieux d’oublier; had obviously heard those words before and seemed almost resigned when he spoke again afterwards.
And hadn’t Rally seemed afraid of Edmund since his return from Iraq? Afraid of something that went beyond the old man’s connection to the illegal absinthe production?
Edmund thought about this on the ride home—scoured his memory banks, searching for an answer—but saw only the General there; the silver stitching of the formula, and the signs and messages that had been there from the God of War since the day he was born.
And when he arrived back at the farmhouse, Edmund concluded that perhaps Rally had sensed the change in him; sensed that the time had come, and that Nergal had returned to claim what was rightfully his.
Indeed, Edmund thought, perhaps because Rally had worn the Nergal message in his name—the Nergal Stone in the Gene Ralston that had been like a tattoo on his chest for all those years—perhaps Eugene “Rally” Ralston recognized deep down the terror that had returned with him from Iraq.
“I have returned,” Edmund said to himself as he pulled up to the farmhouse. He sensed Nergal speaking in him, too, and looked down at his chest, to the left pocket of his shirt and half expected to see a patch there. There wasn’t one, of course, but Edmund saw the potential for his own Nergal Stone underneath. Something more lasting. Something that could not be destroyed or torn away like Rally’s silver stitched name patch; something as durable as the carved Nergal Stone itself.
A tattoo. Yes. But of what?
The answer would come to him eventually, he thought. And once he was certain the business with Rally and the illegal absinthe was finally over, he would need to start readying the farmhouse. He knew what needed to be done, but he wasn’t exactly sure how. That would all be revealed eventually, too, he thought.
In Nergal’s messages.
But would Edmund Lambert be smart enough to decode all the messages? Would he be worthy enough to stand shoulder to shoulder with Nergal in the end?
Edmund took a deep breath and told himself not worry about all that; for when he looked down past his chest to his stomach; when he thought about the searching and looked for it deep inside his belly, a breeze whispered back at him through a window in his mind.
“Finally, Edmund. Finally.”
Yes, after all these years, the searching was over.
After all these years, the answer finally had come.
PART IV
EXITING
Chapter 54
Names, names, and more names—thousands of them scattered before him—but Andy Schaap held out hope.
The cemetery.
Yes, he thought as he bounced his ring on his desk. The cemetery was the beginning for the Impaler. The first star in his personal logo. The star off of which the rest of his constellation would be built.
But why the cemetery? Because the Impaler had a connection there that went beyond the name of Lyons. Schaap was sure of it. Someone important to him was buried there; someone who was connected to the identity on earth that needed to be remapped in the eyes of the lion in the sky. Planting Rodriguez and Guerrera outside the wall directly east of the Lyons plot was only part of the equation, as was the cemetery’s connection to the other murder sites that made up the Starlight Theater logo.
All theory, of course, and nothing really on which to base his assumptions other than a gut reading of the evidence so far. But Andy Schaap was sure he was on to something; and this little side investigation was going to be his baby. He’d gotten hold of the cemetery records soon after Markham left. That was good. That meant he could follow his leads alone; might even get a little credit for all the hard work he’d done.