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Page 16.
"Stop," Cartouche said.
"Four," Alecto said.
Dr. Night said: "Or you can have a forgettable funeral right here in the Valley of the Temples."
Cartouche shrieked: "I'll do whatever you want."
"Five," Alecto said.
"You must frame your words correctly," Dr. Night said. "Correct thinking frames correct words."
"I agree. I want to work for you."
"Six," Alecto said.
"Think fast," Dr. Night said. "Four seconds before you die. Wrong thinking frames wrong words."
"I want to belong to Black Umbrella."
"Seven"
"With feeling," the hidden voice said. "Make me believe you."
"I want to give my life to you. Please accept me!"
“Eight.”
Dr. Night said: "That's a good boy."
Alecto lowered the gun.
Dr. Night said: "Well done, Mr. Cartouche. You are now one of us. If you ever betray me, you face a horrifying end. Do you vow to give your life to Black Umbrella?"
"I do!" Louis sobbed. "I do!" Louis clutched the arm rests and trembled like a man with malaria. Sweat and tears streamed down his face. His teeth chattered amid quaking chin and jowls.
"Congratulations," said Alecto.
"Yes," Cartouche said, as relief flooded him. "I am one of you. I decided it. To hell with Anaconda. Tell me what you wish, and I will decide how best to help you achieve our common goal. I want to stop everything that's bad in the world. Only you should rule, Dr. Night."
"The goal, Mr. Cartouche, is for me to bring peace and prosperity to the world as the first absolute ruler in its history. We already have many allies in our fight against the world's nations and corporations. There are the shadowy descendants of the lost dynasties—Maxentian, Habsburger, Romanovski, Napoleonic, Byzantine, the last Romans of the West, the Assassins in the east, the spirit dancers of the Great Plains. Think of the secret services of Tibet that the Chinese Reds dreaded more than anything else because they fought with spirit tools—and the Communists are gone. Stalin laughed when warned about the Pope. Stalin, who only understood terror, violence, and murder, said: Show me the Pope's divisions. But the Pope was playing with a spiritual deck, and Stalin had not a clue. Where is Stalin’s pathetic empire now? Dust in the sands of the ages, along with so many other historically brief, crappy ideas.
"I could go on, reciting the litany of the dead and lost who are prepared to walk again and seize back the power that was stolen from them by the same ruthless types whose corporate mandate is today inscribed in the text books of business schools: There is no mission besides maximizing the wealth of corporate shareholders. There is no god besides moolah.
"Among the corporations there is no god—no morality, no truth, no higher power—than money. There is no lie too great, and no depravity too base, if it supports the corporate profit motive. But today, with Black Umbrella, we begin anew with a fresh mandate from heaven itself: there is no greater good than truth, justice, and correct leadership, under a Great Shepherd who watches over the world's people in the night."
And that, Cartouche, thought, makes you just another of history's many madmen and charlatans. He quickly banished the thought for fear that Dr. Night or Alecto could read his mind. What had he said? Metrics. All around him. He must be careful of what he thought.
He surrendered to terror, deep in the mind, where Blum reached his darkest and most intimate thoughts. Nothing could remain hidden from this Biggest Brother. Louis hated himself for it, but could not help it. Terror was the ultimate weapon of mind control, the ultimate seduction. Louis longed to grovel on the ground like a dog. He wished to crawl around and lick Dr. Night's feet. Black Umbrella had won.
Alecto put the automatic away. "Come, Mr. Cartouche, we have prepared a feast for you, and then you will bathe and party with seven lovely women.” She laughed. “They are not virgins, but all the more experienced. It will be the most unforgettable night of your life—a celebration of your new happiness."
As she spoke she turned to walk away but offered a hand, held behind her, for him to take.
Cartouche lunged to his feet and took her hand, but it slipped from his grasp like thin air.
She walked away, a graceful goddess, and the screen overhead went dead with one final chuckle from Dr. Night, which echoed among the great pillars.
Blanching, Cartouche realized that, the whole time, the woman brandishing the gun to kill him had been a phantom—a holographic projection.
He had no time to digest this insight, for at that moment, from behind him, came a woman's harsh laughter.
He whirled, and saw Alecto—the real Erin Yes—standing behind his chair holding a compact, dead-black, Underworld-issued Czech-made submachine gun. As her harsh and cruel laughter rippled around him, she discharged a brief burst of .438 caliber rounds whose noise rolled around in the air, and shattered a high-hanging glass light shade.
"Welcome back to the world of the living. Enjoy your dinner, Mr. Cartouche, and all that comes with it, because you are a lucky man. You made the right decision, or you would be dead now." So saying, she lowered the weapon and came around, striding past him. For a moment, he thought he smelled sulfur. A major product of the Agrigento region was sulfur, such as lined the valleys of the Underworld in western mythology. It was a yellow crystal, like golden glass. It was also said to line the cliffs and crevices of hell. As Alecto walked, the air around her was sharp with the pepper aroma of her gunshots. "Come, but never try to take my hand or touch me. I'll guide you to the feasting room, and the dancers and flute players will take care of you for the night—whatever you wish is yours." She smiled broadly. "It's our way of saying welcome aboard, and thank you. We demand your all, but we are generous in all that we give."
As he followed her to a distant chamber with a brightly lit table, he saw stunning women there, each different from the others. The room around them resounded with conversation and laughter. The air throbbed with the music of a live six-string chamber orchestra composed entirely of beautiful women in white, elegant tuxedo gowns called she-xedos in this year's fashion magazines.
The other seven women held drinks. They chatted in pairs and trios as they stood about. A few sat on the back rests of couches. One or two leaned against a grand piano, under a glittering chandelier, where one of the musician women, in a she-xedo with back bare, played animatedly, rocking from side to side as her fingers raced up and down the ebonies and ivories. All the smilers and talkers had fine skin, lovely hair, and perfect white teeth. They wore tasteful silk dresses in colors—only one in black, the color of night, rage, and vengeance. The women nodded to each other while talking. Their eyes began to take notice of the approaching Cartouche.
Alex said: "They are the opposite of the Gorgons. These are the Eumenides, pleasant ones. They are the Roman Graces. They will please you tonight."
Cartouche felt utterly relaxed now, having faced death and come away a wealthy and fortunate man for the first time in his life. His conversion had been as sudden and stunning as St. Paul struck deaf and thrown from his horse by lightning on the path to Damascus. Paul left for Damascus as a persecutor, and, after wandering deaf and blind in the ghost-haunted desert, he arrived in Damascus not as a murderous judge, but as one of the persecuted. In like transformation, Cartouche arrived as a terrified, impoverished, exiled little man, and now strode across the hall. He was free of fear, lacked for nothing material, and felt completely a member as in a great family. If there was the faintest tingle of apprehension—that something was not right—he brushed it aside in this overwhelming bath of the senses.
He recognized one particularly beautiful, shapely girl in a black dress among the Graces at the dinner table ahead—stacked as it was with wines and steaks and ales and cakes. His heart throbbed as he recognized the Belgian girl who'd sat near him at the Villa Caproni in Palermo. "Mademoiselle Tissy!" he said.
She turned, saw him, raised her glass, and gave him a dazzling smile while running a smooth, tanned pinkish hand suggestively down her front. "Monsieur Cartouche, it is so nice to see you again."
He felt balmy at the beautiful, golden smile of the Belgian woman as she drifted across the floor toward him. Her hips swayed gracefully as she walked. She was meant for him. He would give himself to her. He wanted her more than anything else in the world. How had he known this earlier that day in Palermo? Telepathy? Had Dr. Night and Alecto known this, and set them up?
Tissy had intrigued him from the first, but men like Cartouche did not land women like her in real life. She had leaned close to him, over the table, while fetching his water. He'd inhaled he atmosphere of her body. She'd let him peer through the fabric of her secrets, and glimpse the untouchable in that scented conference room at the Villa Caproni. Cartouche, a reclusive man who had hardly ever been intimate with any woman, would have loved to roll blissfully with her, hold her while she held him, and trade kisses. He would give his life to possess her.
What Louis could not know yet was that Dr. Night, in declaring war on the world’s powerful corponations, had opened untold new doors of war and gates of hell. The world’s powers had teeth of their own—among them Sigma 2020, the Camelback Consortium subsidiary company whose masters and contractors included Claire Lightfield and Compass News’ Johannes Rector, not to mention their top field operative—Jack Gray, agent of last resort, called into action when all else failed.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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