The stink swelled too, but he hadn't vomited yet and he didn't intend to, so Baku forced the warning bile back down to whence it had come. He would go toward the smell. He would go toward the busy machines and into the almost frigid interior. His plan was simple, but big: He would turn the building off. All of it. Every robot, light, and refrigerator. There would be a fuse box or a power main.

As a last resort, he might find a dry place to start a fire.

On he went, and the farther his explorations took him, the more he doubted that a match would find a receptive place to spark.

Dank coldness seeped up through his shoes and his feet dragged splashing wakes along the floor. He slipped and stretched out an arm to steady himself, leaning his knuckles on the plaster. The walls were wet, too. He wiped the back of his hand on his pants. It left a trail of slime.

The clank of machines pounded harder, and with it the accompanying smell insinuated itself into every pore of Baku's body, into every fold of his clothing.

But into the heart of the warehouse he walked-one knife in each hand-until he reached the end of the corridor that opened into a larger s.p.a.ce-one filled with sharp-angled machines reaching from the floor to the ceiling. Rows of belts on rollers shifted frosty boxes back and forth across the room from trucks to chilled storage. Along the wall were eight loading points with trucks docked and open, ready to receive shipments and disperse them. He searched for a point of commonality, or for some easy spot where all these things must come together for power. Nothing looked immediately promising, so he followed the cables on the ceiling with his eyes, and he likewise traced the cords along the floor. Both sets of lines followed the same path, into a secondary hallway.

Baku shuffled sideways and slithered with caution along the wall and toward the portal where the electric lines all pointed. Once through the portal, Baku found himself at the top of a flight of stairs. Low-power emergency lights illuminated the corridor in murky yellow patches.

It would have to be enough.

When he strained to listen, Baku thought he detected footsteps, or maybe even voices below. He tiptoed towards them, keeping his back snugly against the stair rail, holding his precious knives at the ready.

He hesitated on the bottom stair, hidden in the shadows, reluctant to take the final step that would put him firmly in the downstairs room. There in the bas.e.m.e.nt the sad little emergency lights were too few and far-between to give any real illumination. The humidity, the chill, and the spotty darkness made the entire downstairs feel like night at the bottom of a swimming pool.

A creature with a blank, white face and midnight-black, lidless eyes emerged from inside an open freezer. It was Sonada's manager, or what was left of him.

"You," the thing accused.

Baku did not recoil or retreat. He flexed his fingers around the knife handles and took the last step down into the bas.e.m.e.nt.

"You would not eat the sushi with us. Why?" The store manager was terribly changed without and within; even his voice was barely recognizable. He spoke as if he were talking around a mouthful of seaweed.

Baku circled around the manager, not crossing the floor directly but staying with his back to the wall. The closer he came, the slower he crept until he halted altogether. The s.p.a.ce between them was perhaps two yards.

"Have you come now for the feast?" the manager slurred.

Baku was not listening. It took too much effort to determine where one word ended and the next began, and the message didn't matter anyway. There was nothing the manager could say to change Baku's mind or mission.

Beside the freezer with its billowing clouds of icy mist there was a fuse box. The box was old-fashioned; there were big gla.s.s k.n.o.bs the size of biscuits and connected to wiring that was as frayed and thick as shoelaces. It might or might not be the heart of the building's electrical system, but at least it might be connected to the rest. Perhaps, if Baku wrenched or broke the fuses, there was a chance that he could short out the whole building and bring the operation to a halt. He'd seen it in a movie he'd watched once, late at night when he couldn't sleep.

If he could stop the electricity for even an hour-he could throw open the refrigerators and freezers and let the seafood thaw. Let it rot. Let it spoil here, at the source.

The manager kept talking. "This is the new way of things. He is coming, for the whole world."

"So this is where it starts?" Baku spoke to distract the manager. He took a sideways shuffle and brought himself closer to the manager, to the freezer, to the fuse box.

"No. We are not the first."

Baku came closer. A few feet. A hobbled scuffing of his toes. He did not lower the knives, but the manager did not seem to notice.

"Tell me about this. Explain this to me. I don't understand it."

"Yes," the manager gurgled. "Like this." And he turned as if to gesture into the freezer, as if what was inside could explain it all.

Baku jumped then, closing the gap between them. He pushed with the back of his arm and the weight of his shoulder, and he shoved the manager inside the freezer.

The door was a foot thick; it closed with a hiss and a click. Only if he listened very hard could Baku hear the angry protests from within. He pressed his head against the cool metal door and felt a fury of muted pounding on the other side.

When he was comfortable believing that the manager would not be able to interfere, he removed his ear from the door. He turned his attention again to the fuse box, regarding it thoughtfully.

Then, one after the other, the fuzzy white pods of light were extinguished.

Darkness swallowed the stray slivers of light which were left.

The bas.e.m.e.nt fell into perfect blackness.

And the heavy thing that struck Baku in the chest came unseen, unheard, but with all the weight of a sack of bricks.

The shock sent him reeling against the freezer door. He slammed against it and caught himself by jabbing his knives into the concrete floor, the door, and anything else they could snag.

Somewhere nearby the thing regrouped with a sound like slithering sandbags. Baku's ear told him that it must be huge-but was this an illusion of the darkness, of the echoing acoustics? He did not know if the thing could see him, and he did not know what it was, only that it was powerful and deadly.

On the other side of the room Baku's a.s.sailant was stretching, lashing, and reaching. Baku flattened his chest against the wall and leaned against it as he tried to rise, climbing with the knives, sc.r.a.ping them against the cement blocks, cutting off flecks and strips of paint that fluttered down into his hair and settled on his eyelashes.

A loud clank and a grating thunk told Baku that his knives had hit something besides concrete. He reached and thrust the knife again. He must be close to the fuse box; he'd only been a few feet away when the lights went out.

The thudding flump that accompanied his opponent's movement sounded louder behind Baku as he struggled to stand, to stab. Something jagged and rough caught at his right hand.

A warm gush soaked his wrist and he dropped that knife. With slippery fingers he felt k.n.o.bs, and what might have been the edge of a slim steel door panel. He reached for it, using this door to haul himself up, but the little hinges popped under his weight and he fell back down to his knees.

The monstrous unseen thing snapped out. One fat, foul-smelling limb crashed forward, smacking Baku's thighs, sweeping his legs out from underneath him.

His bleeding right hand grazed the dropped knife, but he couldn't grasp it. Holding the remaining blade horizontally in his left hand, Baku locked his wrist. When the creature attacked again, Baku sliced sideways.

A splash of something more gruesome than blood or tar splashed against the side of the face.

He used his shoulder to wipe away what he could. The rest he ignored. The wet and b.l.o.o.d.y fingers of his right hand curled and fastened themselves on a small shelf above his head.

The thing whipped its bulk back and forth but it was not badly hurt. It gathered itself together again, somewhere off in the corner. If Baku could trust his ears, it was shifting its attack, preparing to come from the side. He rotated his left wrist, moving the knife into a vertical position within his grip. He opened and closed his fingers around it. To his left, he heard the thing coming again.

Baku peered up into the darkness over his head where he knew the fuse box now hung open.

The creature scooted forward.

Baku hauled himself up and swung the fine German steel hard at the box, not the monster-with all the weight he could put behind it. It landed once, twice, and there came a splintering and sparking. Plastic shattered, or maybe it was gla.s.s. Shards of debris rained down.

One great limb crushed against Baku and wrapped itself around his torso, ready to crush, ready to break what it found. The man could not breath; there in the monster's grip he felt the thing coil itself, slow but wickedly dense, as if it were filled with wet pebbles.

In the center of the room the beast's bulk shuddered unhappily as it shifted, and shuffled, and skidded. The appendage that squeezed Baku was only one part of a terrible whole.

Before his breath ran out, before his hands grew weak from lost blood and mounting fear, Baku took one more stab. The heavy butcher's blade did not bear downward, but upward and back.

The fuse box detonated with a splattering torrent of fire and light.

For two or three seconds Baku's eyes remained open. And in those seconds he marveled at what he saw, but could have never described. Above and beyond the thunderous explosion of light in his head, the rumbling machines ceased their toil.

The current from the box was such that the old man could not release the knife, and the creature could not release its hold on the old man.

As the energy coursed between them, Baku's heart lay suddenly quiet in his chest, too stunned to continue beating. He marveled briefly, before he died, how electricity follows the quickest path from heaven to earth, and how it pa.s.ses with pleasure through those things that stand in water.

Whilst the greater number of our nocturnal visions are perhaps no more than faint and fantastic reflections of our waking experiences-Freud to the contrary with his puerile symbolism-there are still a certain remainder whose immundane and ethereal character permits of no ordinary interpretation, and whose vaguely exciting and disquieting effect suggests possible minute glimpses into a sphere of mental existence no less important than physical life, yet separated from that life by an all but impa.s.sable barrier.

"Beyond the Wall of Sleep" H.P. Lovecraft (1919).

* OLD VIRGINIA *

Laird Barron.

On the third morning I noticed somebody had disabled the truck. All four tires were flattened and the engine was smashed. Nice work.

I had gone outside the cabin to catch the sunrise and p.i.s.s on some bushes. It was cold; the air tasted like metal. Deep, dark forest at our backs with a few notches for stars. A rutted track wound across a marshy field into more wilderness. All was silent except for the m.u.f.fled hum of the diesel generator behind the wood shed.

"Well, here we go," I said. I fired up a Lucky Strike and congratulated my pessimistic nature. The Reds had found our happy little retreat in the woods. Or possibly, one of my boys was a mole. That would put a pretty bow on things.

The men were already spooked-Davis swore he had heard chuckling and whispering behind the steel door after curfew. He also heard one of the doctors gibbering in a foreign tongue. Nonsense, of course. Nonetheless, the troops were edgy, and now this.

"Garland? You there?" Hatcher called from the porch in a low voice. He made a tall, thin silhouette.

"Over here." I waited for him to join me by the truck. Hatcher was my immediate subordinate and the only member of the detail I'd personally worked with. He was tough, competent and a decade my junior-which made him twice as old as the other men. If somebody here was a Red, I hoped to G.o.d it wasn't him.

"Guess we're hoofing it," he said after a quick survey of the damage.

I pa.s.sed him a cigarette. We smoked in contemplative silence. Eventually I said, "Who took last watch?"

"Richards. He didn't report any activity."

"Yeah." I stared into the forest and wondered if the enemy was lurking. What would be their next move, and how might I counter? A chill tightened the muscles in the small of my back, reminded me of how things had gone wrong during '53 in the steamy hills of Cuba. It had been six years and in this business a man didn't necessarily improve with age. I said, "How did they find us, Hatch?"

"Strauss may have a leak."

It went without saying whatever our military scientists were doing, the Reds would be doing bigger and better. Even so, intelligence regarding this program would carry a hefty price tag behind the Iron Curtain. Suddenly this little field trip didn't seem like a babysitting detail anymore.

Project TALLHAT was a Company job, but black ops. Dr. Herman Strauss picked the team in secret and briefed us at his own home. Now here we were in the wilds of West Virginia, standing watch over two of his personal staff while they conducted unspecified research on a senile crone. Doctors Porter and Riley called the shots. There was to be no communication with the outside world until they had gathered sufficient data. Upon return to Langley, Strauss would handle the debriefing. Absolutely no one else inside the Company was to be involved.

This wasn't my kind of operation, but I'd seen the paperwork and recognized Strauss' authority. Why me? I suspected it was because Strauss had known me since the first big war. He also knew I was past it, ready for pasture. Maybe this was his way to make me feel important one last time. Gazing at the ruined truck and all it portended, I started thinking maybe good old Herman had picked me because I was expendable.

I stubbed out my cigarette and made some quick decisions. "When it gets light, we sweep the area. You take Robey and Neil and arc south; I'll go north with Dox and Richards. Davis will guard the cabin. We'll establish a quarter mile perimeter; search for tracks."

Hatcher nodded. He didn't state the obvious flaw-what if Davis was playing for the other team? He gestured at the forest. "How about an emergency extraction? We're twenty miles from the nearest traveled road. We could make it in a few hours. We could make for one of the farms; somebody will have a phone-"

"Hatch, they destroyed the vehicle for a reason. Obviously they want us to walk. Who knows what nasty surprise is waiting down that road? For now we stay here, fortify. If worse comes to worst, we break and scatter. Maybe one of us will make it back to HQ."

"How do we handle Porter and Riley?"

"This has become a security issue. Let's see what we find; then I'll break the news to the good doctors."

My involvement in Project TALLHAT was innocent-if you can ever say that about Company business. I was lounging on an out of season New York beach when the telegram arrived. Strauss sent a car from Virginia. An itinerary; spending money. The works. I was intrigued; it had been several years since the last time I spoke with Herman.

Director Strauss said he needed my coolness under pressure when we sat down to a four-star dinner at his legendary farmhouse in Langley; said he needed an older man, a man with poise. Yeah, he poured it on all right.

Oh, the best had said it too-Put his feet to the fire; he doesn't flinch. Garland, he's one cool sonofab.i.t.c.h. Yes indeed, they had said it-thirty years ago. Before the horn rims got welded to my corrugated face and before the arthritis bent my fingers. Before my left ear went dead and my teeth fell out. Before the San Andreas Fault took root in my hands and gave them tremors. It was difficult to maintain deadly aloofness when I had to get up and drain my bladder every hour on the hour. Some war hero. Some Company legend.

"Look, Roger, I don't care about Cuba. It's ancient history, pal." Sitting across the table from Strauss at his farmhouse with a couple whiskey sours in my belly it had been too easy to believe my colossal blunders were forgiven. That the encroaching specter of age was an illusion fabricated by jealous detractors of which great men have plenty.

I had been a great man, once. Veteran of not one, but two World Wars. Decorated, lauded, feared. Strauss, earnest, blue-eyed Strauss, convinced me some greatness lingered. He leaned close and said, "Roger, have you ever heard of MK-ULTRA?"

He was right. I forgot about Cuba.

The men dressed in hunting jackets to ward the chill, loaded shotguns for possible unfriendly contact, and scouted the environs until noon. Fruitless; the only tracks belonged to deer and rabbits. Most of the leaves had fallen in carpets of red and brown. It drizzled. Black branches dripped. The birds had nothing to say.

I observed Dox and Richards. Dox lumbered in plodding engineer boots, broad Slavic face blankly concentrated on the task I had given him. He was built like a tractor; too simple to work for the Company except as an enforcer, much less be a Russian saboteur. I liked him. Richards was blond and smooth, an Ivy League talent with precisely enough cynicism and latent sadism to please the forward thinking elements who sought to reshape the Company in the wake of President Eisenhower's imminent departure. Richards, I didn't trust or like.

There was a major housecleaning in the works. Men of Richards' caliber were preparing to sweep fossils such as myself into the dustbin of history.

It was perfectly logical after a morbid fashion. The trouble had started at the top with good old Ike suffering a stroke. Public rea.s.surances to the contrary, the commander in chief was reduced to a sh.e.l.l of his former power. Those closest saw the cracks in the foundation and moved to protect his already tottering image. Company loyalists closed ranks, covering up evidence of the president's diminished faculties, his strange preoccupation with drawing caricatures of d.i.c.k Nixon. They stood by at his public appearances, ready to swoop in if he did anything too embarra.s.sing. Not a happy allocation of human resources in the view of the younger members of the intelligence community.

That kind of duty didn't appeal to the Richards' of the world. They preferred to cut their losses and get back to slicing throats and cracking codes. Tangible objectives that would further the dominance of US intelligence.

We kept walking and not finding anything until the cabin dwindled to a blot. The place had been built at the turn of the century; Strauss bought it for a song, I gathered. The isolation suited his nefarious plots. Clouds covered the treetops, yet I knew from the topographical maps there was a mountain not far off; a low, s.h.a.ggy hump called Badger Hill. There were collapsed mines and the moldered bones of abandoned camps, rusted hulks of machinery along the track, and dense woods. A world of brambles and deadfalls. No one came out this way anymore; hadn't in years.

We rendezvoused with Hatcher's party at the cabin. They hadn't discovered any clues either. Our clothes were soaked, our moods somber, although traces of excitement flickered among the young Turks-attack dogs sniffing for a fight.

None of them had been in a war. I'd checked. College instead of Korea for the lot. Even Dox had been spared by virtue of flat feet. They hadn't seen Soissons in 1915, Normandy in 1945, nor the jungles of Cuba in 1953. They hadn't seen the things I had seen. Their fear was the small kind, borne of uncertainty rather than dread. They stroked their shotguns and grinned with dumb innocence.

When the rest had been dispatched for posts around the cabin I broke for the latrine to empty my bowels. Close race. I sweated and trembled and required some minutes to compose myself. My knees were on fire, so I broke out a tin of a.n.a.lgesic balm and rubbed them, tasting the camphor on my tongue. I wiped beads of moisture from my gla.s.ses, swallowed a glycerin tablet and felt as near to one hundred percent as I would ever be.

Ten minutes later I summoned Doctor Porter for a conference on the back porch. It rained harder, shielding our words from Neil who stood post near an oak.

Porter was lizard-bald except for a copper circlet that trailed wires into his breast pocket. His white coat bore stains and smudges. His fingers were blue-tinged with chalk dust. He stank of antiseptic. We were not friends. He treated the detail as a collection of thugs best endured for the sake of his great scientific exploration.

I relayed the situation, which did not impress him much. "This is why Strauss wanted your services. Deal with the problem," he said.

"Yes, Doctor. I am in the process of doing that. However, I felt you might wish to know your research will become compromised if this activity escalates. We may need to extract."

"Whatever you think best, Captain Garland." He smiled a dry smile. "You'll inform me when the moment arrives?"

"Certainly."