“What are you doing here?” I croaked.
“Just fuck me!”
She sounded impatient to get it over. The next thing I knew she was on top of me, her breasts in my face, trying to cram my flaccid cock inside her. We tussled like that for a while, but she was dry, and her clumsy and increasingly frantic attempts to force penetration removed any remaining traces of desire on my part. My prick had collapsed to a little bundle of slack flesh, as though trying to make itself invisible. I rolled her off me and pushed myself up on one elbow, looking down at her.
“You’ve got to fuck me!” she cried with a mixture of petulance and fear. “You’ve got to!”
“You don’t even want to.”
“Just do it!”
She heaved herself up with surprising energy and started wrestling with me again. I pushed her off.
“Cut it out, Ellie!”
“What’s the matter?” she cried in what sounded like real distress. “What am I doing wrong?”
I stroked her hair.
“It’s not you,” I said. “It’s the whole thing that’s wrong. I haven’t even spoken a word to you, and here you are climbing into my bed and trying to rape me. What the hell’s going on?”
She fixed me with a determined stare. Just as she had been trying too hard to be sexy, now she was trying too hard to be adult.
“Sam sent me. I’m supposed to bring you to see him. But first we’ve got to fuck.”
I ran my eyes over the chunky, pubescent body which wore its womanhood like a badly fitting prom dress.
“Why?” I asked.
“I don’t know! You’ve just got to do it! If you don’t, he’ll say it was my fault and he’ll beat me up.”
I looked her in the eyes. There was no doubt that she meant exactly what she said.
“Has he beaten you before?” I asked.
But she was already regretting her candor.
“Listen, you going to fuck me or what?”
I got out of bed.
“Consider it done.”
“But we haven’t done it!”
I started to get dressed.
“So? Who’s to know? Is he going to give you a swab test or something?”
I tossed over a light cotton bathrobe I found lying on the floor, which she must have discarded before I awoke.
“Listen, Ellie, I’ll tell him you fucked me all ends up. I’ll swear you were the best piece of ass I ever had in my life and you made me come ten times in a row. And if he lays a finger on you, you come straight here, OK?”
She pulled on her robe with a sniff of disdain.
“I don’t need nobody to look after me,” she said in a tough little voice. “I can take care of myself just fine.”
Even though she had been acting under orders, I got the distinct impression that Ellie felt resentful that her advances had been spurned. I followed her out into the open spaces of the hall, barely illuminated by the early-morning light. There was no one around. Ellie marched resolutely across the boards to Sam’s door and knocked four times, a little rhythmic figure that sounded like a code.
“Who is it?” said a voice inside.
“Me,” Ellie replied.
“Phil there?”
“Yeah.”
“Anyone else?”
“No.”
There was a loud thump. The door opened a crack and Sam’s ferrety features appeared. He inspected us for a moment with a beady eye, then threw the door open. The automatic rifle in his hands was pointing right at us.
“Come on in,” he snapped. “Close the door after you. Ellie, put the bar on.”
The girl picked up a length of wood from the floor and slipped it into the metal brackets bolted to each side of the door frame. Only then did Sam lower his weapon.
“Hi, Phil,” he said tonelessly. “Did Ellie show you a good time?”
“She sure did! Best wake-up call I ever had.”
Sam smiled coldly. He nodded at Ellie.
“Get in the bedroom.”
She obeyed without a word. Sam laid the rifle down on the sofa and waved me to a chair.
“We’ve got a problem,” he said.
“I kind of figured we might.”
He sat facing me on the sofa.
“We’re going to have to move along a lot faster than I was planning. It’s too bad. It’s way better to let the whole thing grow on you gradually, until you’re not just ready for the truth but hungry for it!”
A look of power took possession of his face for a moment, then faded.
“In my dreams, it was all so different! You were ready, open, desperate! And then we’d have done the whole thing right, with a big hit of acid. The stuff you can get these days is twice as powerful as anything we ever had! It completely rewires your brain, lets you see the truth that’s been staring you in the face all along. But there’s no time, and anyway I need you straight.”
He leaped to his feet.
“Remember I told you Mark’d gone to Friday to find out what happened to Russ and Pat? Well, it turns out the news wasn’t good. They called late last night. They’ll be back soon, Phil, and they won’t be bringing flowers.”
I stood up.
“Look, Sam, I wish you all the best in whatever doctrinal disputes you may be having with your followers, but you’ve got to understand that none of this has a fucking thing to do with me. Just tell me where my kid is, give me the phone and let me call a boat. I’ll be out of here in an hour, and you guys can hash out your exegesis of Blake’s later epics to your hearts’ content.”
He stabbed me with his eyes.
“I gave you Ellie,” he said quietly. “She’s my woman, Phil. No one else around here has had her. I mean, I’m trying to bond here!”
I didn’t say anything. Sam shrugged.
“You want the phone? It’s next door.”
I walked through to the middle room and looked around at the exercise equipment, the pool table, the wall-bars where Andrea said that one of the women had been tortured. Then I saw the twisted mess of plastic on the floor, and the bullet holes in the boards themselves.
“I guess I kind of lost it when Mark called.”
I turned around. Sam was standing in the doorway, the gun in his hands.
“He said a lot of bad stuff about me,” he went on. “A load of insulting bullshit. After a while I’d had enough, so I picked up this baby and …”
He pointed the rifle at the remains of the cellular phone and mouthed a soft explosion.
“Well, that was really smart!” I said. “Now if they do come back and try and make trouble, there’s no way you can call for help.”
“We don’t need help, Phil.”
He went over to the far wall and opened the doors to what I had assumed was a cue rack. Inside were about twenty weapons like the one he was carrying.
“We got the firepower and we got the manpower,” he said. “I spent the whole night working on the other guys. They’re all on deck. That just leaves you, Phil. Come on, let’s get to work.”
He strode back into the other room. I followed, stopping in the doorway.
“First I want to see my son,” I told him.
Sam stretched out on the sofa and yawned massively.
“No problem. I’ll send for him. Sit down.”
I took a seat on the chair facing Sam. He leaned forward intensely.
“Have you ever heard of the Secret of the Templars?” he asked.
My heart sank. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it was certainly something more original than this. One of the guys I worked with at the community college was a conspiracy buff who used to press books on me about supposed secret societies dedicated to concealing the fact that Jesus had survived his execution, married Mary Magdalene and founded a dynasty which had controlled the destiny of the world ever since. He also believed in flying saucers and the prophecies of Nostradamus, and was an avid chess player and computer nerd.
“The Templars,” Sam continued without waiting for an answer, “were the richest and most powerful bunch of motherfuckers in the medieval world, yet they were ruthlessly wiped out to the last man in this like show trial, right? The charges against them didn’t make any sense, but they were tortured into making confessions and then burned. So what was the deal? Lots of people believe that the official charges were just a cover for something too terrible to be mentioned. The truth is that the Templars were the guardians of a secret which they had learned from the Cabalists, who were these Jewish mystics-”
“Sam,” I said, holding up my hand. “Excuse me, but could we skip the history lesson?”
He wasn’t used to being spoken to like that. For a moment he looked at me in a way I had never seen before, and which scared me. Then he shrugged.
“Maybe you’re right. I’ve never done it this way before. It’s kind of hard to know where to start.”
He looked down at the floor for a moment.
“OK, let’s try something more recent. You remember that night at the Commercial Hotel? You remember that baby we were talking about, the one got cooked by its junkie mother? Have you seen what’s been happening in Africa? Sometimes they just cut the kids’ arms and legs off with machetes and let them bleed to death. Sometimes they-”
“I don’t need a catalog of horrors, Sam. Sure, bad stuff happens. So what?”
He seemed to make a deliberate effort to fix me with his eyes.
“So what about God?” he breathed.
I sighed.
“That’s not a problem for me, Sam. I don’t believe in God.”
Sam smiled unpleasantly.
“So what do you believe in? A universe controlled by the laws of the jungle, where species come and go and the individual counts for nothing, and in the end the whole shebang collapses into a black hole? Is that the kind of world you want to live in?”
“I don’t have a choice. But if I did, I’d rather live there than in a world ruled by an omnipotent Deity who lets all these horrors happen.”
Sam leaped to his feet and slapped his hands together.
“You’ve put your finger on it, Phil! How can He permit such things to happen? That’s the whole point.”
“What about David?” I said.
Sam waved impatiently.
“Let’s look at it the other way. Supposing God did use His power to prevent evil, what would happen?”
“We’d all be a hell of a sight better off.”
“Materially, sure! But what about spiritually? If the innocent never suffered and the guilty never prospered, faith would be meaningless. We would be forced to acknowledge God’s existence. It’d be like trying to deny the law of gravity.”
I nodded.
“So you’re saying that baby got boiled alive as exhibit A in an ongoing theological demonstration?”
Sam smiled.
“God is both just and loving, Phil. He’s not into playing sadistic games. Never for a single moment does he permit one of his creatures to suffer.”
I stood up.
“What about when you beat up Ellie?” I demanded. “Are you saying her pain doesn’t really exist? That she’s just pretending to be hurt because she knows it turns you on?”
Sam searched me with his eyes.
“Ellie!”
The far door opened and Ellie walked toward us in her cotton robe.
“What?”
“Did you tell Phil here anything about our bedroom secrets?”
The look of betrayal she shot me was answer enough. Sam grabbed the rifle and jabbed the barrel into her stomach with a swift bayonet-like thrust. Ellie grunted and fell to the floor.
“Stop it!” I shouted.
Sam turned the rifle on me. He smiled lazily …
“I didn’t do that to punish her, Phil. I did it to enlighten you.”
Ellie lay at his feet, clutching her abdomen.
“Initiation usually takes us over a year,” Sam went on. “Sometimes longer. We don’t have that kind of time, so I’m having to come up with some new methods.”
He pointed to the injured girl.
“Tell me what she’s feeling, Phil.”
The rifle was still pointing at me.
“Is she in pain?” Sam asked.
“Of course.”
“How do you know?”
I fought to remain calm, to play this appalling game by the rules Sam had imposed.
“Because I know that if you get hit like that, it hurts.”
“That’s not what I asked, Phil. Sure, you’ve taken hits and they hurt. But how do you know this one hurt her?”
I stared at him blankly.
“You don’t!” he exclaimed. “You can’t! There’s simply no way we can ever know what another person is feeling, or whether they’re feeling anything at all!”
“‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’” I murmured. “‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’”
Sam stepped over Ellie’s prone form, gesturing rhetorically with his free hand.
“Yeah, I remember that class. The professor, what was his name? That old guy in the tweed jacket. Remember how he set fire to his pocket one time, putting his pipe back when it was still lit?”
There was a low moan from the floor behind him. Sam turned and prodded Ellie with his boot.
“Get the kid,” he said. “Bring him back here.”
The girl got to her feet, bent over, still holding her stomach. Sam waved toward the bedroom.
“Come on, Phil.”
I followed. Sam evidently had a point to make, and since he was holding both my son and the gun it seemed best to let him make it. He threw the rifle down on the bed, picked up the binoculars and scanned the scene outside.
“Where were we?” he asked without looking round.
“You were saying that we can never be sure another person really feels pain,” I replied. “But by the same token, we can never be sure they don’t.”
“Wrong!” Sam retorted, whirling round. “That’s the whole basis of the Secret! All the top theologians and philosophers have wrestled with this for thousands of years, but they’ve never come up with the solution! That’s because you can’t get there using mere rational thought. God has fixed it that way, because if the truth ever got out, His plan for the world would be destroyed. But He reveals the Secret to a few people in every age so that it won’t be lost forever. It’s kind of like a covenant.”
I found myself nodding thoughtfully, as though we were discussing steelhead fishing techniques.
“And you’re one of those people?” I prompted.
Sam nodded.
“It all happened that night I dropped that shit on the way back from the bar. Right there in that crummy house in Minneapolis, with you guys snoring your heads off all around. Divine revelation can happen anywhere, I guess, like Jesus being born in a stable. But it wasn’t till I got back from the war that I really saw the significance of the whole thing. Even then I found it hard. I thought I was alone, you see. I thought I was the only person who had ever been granted this terrible vision of the truth. It seemed like a curse which I had to bear on behalf of all mankind.”
