The dosage had been tricky to figure out. There were so many variables he had to consider. The bottle was 750 milliliters. Alcohol tended to break down the structure of the NME over time, so he had to consider how long would pass between injecting the substance into the bottle and when it would be opened. Some would undoubtedly bubble out with the foam when they popped the cork, perhaps quite a lot. Then there was the possibility that not everyone would drink, or drink only a small amount.
In the end he figured he had better be safe than sorry. He loaded the syringe with a full gram dissolved in distilled water, the equivalent of about five thousand hits of LSD, and about three thousand times the maximum amount Mikala had taken at one time.
After they had all drunk, the bottle was still half-full and heavy in his hand, but everyone was reeling from the effects.
Everyone except Mikala. He should have accounted for her tolerance. A sudden dose would not put her down like the others; God had already burned into her brain, rewired it for His presence.
She stalked toward him, and he backed away. “Mikala, what’s going on? What’s happening? I feel so strange. We’ve got to call an ambulance.”
“You will be judged for this,” she said.
She went to Lyda and crouched by her side. Her wife was thrashing and babbling, speaking in tongues. “Don’t be afraid,” she said, and placed a hand on her forehead. “I’m here to help you through this.” With her other hand she flicked on her phone, and tapped the digits with her thumb.
“Hello? Yes. My name is Mikala Lamonier. I’m in Lake Point Tower. There’s been an—”
He didn’t know what she was going to say next. An accident? An attack? He struck her across the temple with the bottle, and she slumped onto the floor next to Lyda. He was surprised that the bottle had not broken.
He kneeled down and clicked off the phone. Mikala was still breathing, but shallowly. The blow had reshaped her face into something strange and leering.
He forced himself to do nothing for a full minute, until he knew exactly what to do. Then he went into the kitchen and retrieved a large, hefty knife. He would have to make this look like a crime of passion, a crazy, unthinking attack. But what about the blood splatters? He removed Lyda’s short jacket, slipped it over one arm, and set to work on Mikala’s body. When he was done he wiped the knife handle with the sleeve of the jacket and placed the weapon in her hand. Then he took the smallest of sips from what remained in the champagne bottle and set it on its side between Lyda and Mikala.
Last, he lay down to wait for the police. Would they believe that Lyda had murdered her wife? Had he left behind some obvious bit of evidence that could implicate him? The minutes dragged on. He kept his eyes open to slits, watching the others moan and thrash, until finally they subsided. The room became quiet.
Gradually Rovil became aware of another presence in the room, standing just to the edge of his peripheral vision. He thought at first that it was a waiter, because he was dressed in bright red pants and vest. But then the figure turned, and he could see that the man’s head was huge, and his nose was absurdly long. An elephant’s trunk! He almost laughed. Ganesh was here. Deva of intellect. Remover of Obstacles.
Across the room, Gilbert pushed his fat body up. He looked around at the room, blinking in surprise. Then he saw Mikala, and the knife in Lyda’s hand. He knelt down beside them, and began to weep, great aching sobs like a schoolboy who’d lost his dog. It was ridiculous, Rovil thought. The apartment intercom began to chime. Gilbert pushed himself up and waddled toward the door, out of Rovil’s line of sight. The desk clerk on the other end of the intercom sounded quite worried. Gilbert answered his questions in a low voice, and then said, “Please come up. Someone’s been murdered.”
Gilbert walked back into the living room. Then something amazing happened. Later (when the drug wore off, and he “came to his senses”), Rovil would change his mind about this, but at the moment, in the sway of the drug, he was sure that Ganesh had made this happen. The god had removed the final obstacle to Rovil’s plan.
Gilbert took the knife from Lyda’s hand. He wrapped his hand around it, then pressed it into Mikala’s bloody chest. Blood smeared Gilbert’s sleeve. Then he stood, the knife still in his hand, and waited for the police to arrive.
Rovil, the shy young man who’d sacrificed so many animals, could not understand why this fat man would offer himself in place of Lyda. It was the most selfless act he’d ever seen, and the most senseless.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“For years I could not understand why he did that,” Rovil told Ollie. “I thought the drug had made him crazy.” His voice was raspy. He’d been lying on the basement floor, talking and weeping for hours. “Why would Gilbert do that? He wasn’t the father of the child. What did he care?”
“Why does anyone get up on a cross?” Ollie said.
“Yes,” Rovil said. “I understand that now. Finally.” He began to cry again. He’d been crying a great deal since Ollie had administered the dosage. After the convulsions and glossolalia, after the wailing and laughing and calling out to unseen powers, Rovil had finally remembered where he was, and what he had done. The avalanche of remorse nearly buried him.
Ollie was getting tired of it. She tried to get him to focus, to answer her questions. At first he only wanted to tell her the Good News that had been revealed to him by Numinous: They were loved; every human was connected to everyone and everything else; they were all part of one organism; and on and on.
“Okay, I got it,” she said. “But you have to tell me what you’ve done.”
“Confess my sins,” he said. He sat slumped in the loveseat, still tied at the wrists and ankles. His clothes were plastered to him with sweat. “There are just … so many.”
He began to speak. He told her not only about Mikala’s murder, and the poisoning of everyone at Little Sprout, but all the transgressions he had committed before—and so many after. Over a decade at Landon-Rousse he had crafted a trail of evidence that allowed him to pass off NME 110 as his own work. It wouldn’t stand up under investigation, but no one at the company was motivated to look their gift horse in its molecular structure.
“Then Lyda called,” he said.
Somehow, impossibly, the drug was on the street. The lab analysis of the Logos sheet had removed all doubt. He suspected a leak inside Landon-Rousse. He’d made enemies within the company, he told her. The old Rovil of course suspected that his coworkers would steal from him.
“That’s when you hired the cowboy?” Ollie asked.
“Oh no,” he said. “I’d hired him long before that, for other work at LR. This was just the latest assignment.”
“What the fuck do you do for Landon-Rousse?”
He blinked at her through his tears. “Terrible things.”
“Jesus Christ,” she said. “You’ve out-conspiracy’d my own brain.”
Rovil’s theory about a leak at LR disappeared, he said, when Lyda told him about the church. No one with access to ready-made pills would do something so indirect as try to form a church and build printers. Lyda was right—it had to be Edo. But Rovil, even with his resources, could not get close to the man.
“I had no choice but to follow where you two led,” Rovil said. “I needed to shut down the church, shut down Edo. No one could know the drug came from Little Sprout. It would ruin me.” He winced and smiled. “I didn’t care about the company, you see, just my position. My power.”
He shook his head. “I don’t even understand that person now. There was something wrong with me. I couldn’t see it before, but now—now I’m a new person. I feel reborn.” He took a breath. “I’m ready to make amends.”