I said, “Good for him.”
“He says he wants to meet.”
I threw up my hands. “We might as well! Anybody have anything else they want to do before we go fight the monster? Anybody need to run to the DMV, get your license renewed?”
Amy said, “You want to swing by the doctor?”
21. WE ALL MUST LEARN FROM KURT RUSSELL’S TRAGIC MISTAKE
Marconi traveled in two huge RVs he used as tour buses, one for the man himself and another for his production crew. He was even less interested in anonymity than John—his enormous face was airbrushed on the side, though I noted it was on the production crew’s bus, where Marconi’s was a nondescript white and gold. Meaning, if a crazed fan tried to force their way onto the bus to murder Marconi, they’d likely get the wrong one. I wondered if he kept a bearded assassination double in there.
John, Amy, and I we were sitting pressed shoulder-to-shoulder in the cramped office in the rear of the bus, which it turned out was where he’d taken our Skype call earlier. The wall with the accolades was in fact the least interesting of the four—the rest of the room was stuffed with exotic artifacts. Whether these were genuine items collected from haunted houses and dig sites or cheap props created to look good in the background of his TV show, I didn’t know. If it was the former, I was guessing it wasn’t exactly legal to take some of them from their countries of origin. There was a crystal skull, a golden chalice, and an ancient-looking spear with a head of chiseled obsidian. Alongside these were seemingly random items—a Raggedy Ann doll, a clay bust of Lionel Richie, and in the corner, a one-armed concrete snowman covered in bird shit. On his desk, Marconi’s pipe was leaning against an antique figurine that looked like some kind of Egyptian god, only it had an enormous, erect penis almost as big as its torso, the figure’s left hand wrapped around the shaft.
Marconi asked everyone if we wanted a bottle of water, John and I declined, Amy said yes, as she always does. She must just like getting free stuff. When he returned and handed her the bottle, he nodded toward the penis figurine and said, “I thought you’d like that one. It’s the Egyptian god Min, popular in the fourth century B.C., the god of fertility. It is believed that during the coronation of a new Pharaoh, he would be required to masturbate in front of the crowd, to demonstrate that he himself possessed the fertility powers of Min. If you have watched a State of the Union address, you will find that the ritual has not changed much.”
He took a seat behind his desk.
He said, “It appears social media rumors have coalesced around the idea of a white winged creature, snatching the town’s children and building a great nest of their bones in one of this region’s many abandoned buildings.”
I said, “Yeah, we may have accidentally started that rumor. You have to admit that’s way more straightforward than the truth.”
“There is no element of truth to it, as far as you know?”
“I … don’t think so? Shit, I don’t know. I have no idea what’s happening anymore.”
“Does such a creature exist? My team said if the YouTube video is a fake, it is an excellent one.”
John said, “It exists, we’ve seen it up close. Very close. Don’t think it eats children though.”
I said, “Not much meat on them.”
“Perhaps the subject of another episode, then. Is the situation the same as when we last spoke? Two larvae loose, ten set to arrive at any moment?”
I said, “As far as we know. And Amy objects to killing them because they look like children.”
Amy stared down Marconi and said, “Could you shoot a child in the face because somebody else was insisting it was really a monster?”
Marconi put on a pair of wire frame reading glasses and said, “You are living in a cruel world, Ms. Sullivan. You see that oak tree, by the parking lot? That tree is a murderer, it would commit genocide if it could. Those leaves serve two purposes—to collect sunlight to nourish the tree, and to block sunlight from anything below it. Its height is a result of competition—growing taller than the plants next to it, getting between them and the sun. Starving them out. When you stroll through a tranquil forest, you are actually walking through a battlefield—it’s just that the attacks and counterattacks occur too slowly and quietly for you to perceive their ruthlessness. Do you enjoy the smell of fresh cut grass? What you are smelling is a chemical panic signal, released by each blade in the moment its head was severed. That is the nature of the universe in which we live. Thus, if another species has designs on mankind, the choice has been made for us.”
I said, “Exactly.”
Marconi said, “However, it is very easy to fall into the fallacy held by every violent zealot and corrupt policeman in the world, the idea that we are always faced with only two options—fierce violence and cowardly inaction. Real life provides us with a vast array of nuanced choices. As for me, I try to hold to one central rule, in all circumstances—do not act out of ignorance.”
I said, “Well, I’d never get out of bed.”
“With that in mind,” said Marconi, “we need a reliable method for seeing through the worker swarm’s camouflage, one that does not require the observer to ingest any extraordinarily dangerous substances. I have a method I’d like to test, but I need a specimen.”
I said, “Is it like that questionnaire they used on the humanoid robots in Blade Runner?”
Amy said, “The Voight-Kampff.”
“I’ve got that whole Rutger Hauer speech memorized, if that will help. As far as a specimen, I guess you could try to bring in the Knoll girl, if the parents will cooperate.”
Marconi shrugged, making a show of being casual. “Of course. But if you do not mind, I would like to test it now, just to get a general feel for the process. With those of us in the room. Get some control results down before diving in with an actual specimen. There will be no battery of confusing questions, just some cameras and an audience of some friends working off-site.”
None of us moved. We all just looked at Marconi, in silence.
He said, “It won’t take but a few minutes.”
I turned to John and said, “Marconi thinks we’re doppelgangers.”
Amy, looking the most nervous of the three of us, said, “This is part of the test, by the way. Seeing if we’re willing to do it.”
Marconi said, “That should actually put you at ease. If you were not human, there would be a substantial risk of you becoming violent at the mere suggestion of a test. And, as you can see, I have taken no unusual precautions for such an eventuality.”
Yet already, there has been too much hesitation.
John said, “All right, but if we do this, we do it right. I don’t want some bullshit like Kurt Russell pulled in The Thing where we’re all tied up in the same room with somebody when they monster out. We go in one at a time, lock the door, everybody else waits outside the room, ready to escape.”
I said, “That is the exact sort of thing a hive of shape-shifting monsters would suggest.”
“We’ll see about that.” John turned his eyes on Marconi and said, “I assume we’ll need to be nude for this?”
* * *
We did not. John volunteered to go first. Marconi started setting up an array of various types of cameras on his desk, all pointing at his chair.
“In situations like this,” he said, “I have had some success with layers of remote perception. You mentioned earlier that the Mikey Payton doppelganger was able to maintain his camouflage even through a live video feed, from outside the motel room. But every living entity has limitations. Here, I have four different devices—digital video, heat signature, ultraviolet, and a sensor pulled from a video game peripheral which creates a 3D map of the physical objects in the room using a method similar to sonar. The feeds from each are monitored by dozens of members of an Internet message board located in various parts of the world, who will each be able to observe the feeds and type up, via text, exactly what they are seeing. Members cannot see what the others are posting, and thus cannot be influenced as a group.