“Groovy,” Jerry said.
Mushroom Daddy slammed the side door shut and slung back into the driver’s seat.
Jerry smiled at Angel. “Get in,” he said. “I’ll close the gate.”
She went around to the passenger’s side and gingerly got into the van. Mushroom Daddy started it up again. With much tender encouragement and delicate manipulation of the gas pedal, the engine finally caught. Jerry closed the gate and climbed into the front seat after the van inched forward, exchanging smiles with Daddy over a stiff-featured Angel as they chugged up Snake Hill, a Canned Heat tape playing softly on the eight-track.
Jokertown: The Jokertown Clinic
Fortunato woke to darkness and pain. It was odd because he hurt so badly yet he couldn’t feel his body. He tried to lift his right arm and hold his hand in front of his eyes, but couldn’t manage it. He didn’t know if he was lying on a bed or perhaps the floor of the abandoned building, sitting in a chair or floating in a pool of water. Though he didn’t feel wet. All he felt was pain.
Then he thought of opening his eyes. He blinked at what he saw. It was himself. He was lying in a bed, and it didn’t look good. The white sheet hid most of his body, but it was clear that he’d been hurt very badly. His left arm, visible over the sheet, was bandaged from palm to biceps. A drip line ran up from his elbow to a bag of clear fluid hanging from a hook over his head. His nose was bandaged as if it’d been broken. His eyes were swollen nearly shut and horridly blackened. His entire face, in fact, was as bruised and battered as if he’d been in a fight, and lost.
Suddenly he remembered that he had. He remembered the confrontation with the Jokka Bruddas. They’d overwhelmed him almost immediately. He remembered getting a few good licks in, but it seemed pretty clear from his current state that he’d lost the fight. He looked awful.
Suddenly he wondered how he could see his entire body, head to toe, including his face, and the bed he was laying on. He wondered dully if he were dead. Killed, and maybe eaten by a bunch of under-age street punks. That would mark a glorious end to his career. The man Tachyon had once called the most powerful ace on Earth beaten to death by juvenile delinquents.
But he wasn’t dead. He certainly hadn’t been devoured. He was either asleep or unconscious, but he could see his chest rise and fall. The squiggles on the heart monitor over his bed seemed to be spiking in a nicely regular rhythm. He suddenly realized what was going on. He was projecting his astral form, hovering over what clearly was a hospital bed. Somehow his powers—or at least one of them—had come back to him, without the need for the Tantric magick that he’d once practiced to charge his batteries. Tachyon had told him that the rituals were simply a crutch for his conscious mind, but he’d never believed him.
Maybe the space wimp had been right all along.
He couldn’t tell for certain what had done it. Maybe the anger. The sheer impotence of being Fortunato and yet being unable to defend himself from some pissant street thugs, when once he’d defeated the Astronomer over the skies of New York. Maybe it had been the fear he’d felt when he’d realized that he could indeed be beaten to death by those children. Maybe it had been the realization that if that happened he couldn’t help his son.
He looked down at his body. He realized that although it might be dangerous, he had to stay out of it. His body wouldn’t last for long without his spirit to guide and animate it, but he had to take the chance that it would hang on at least for awhile. It was likely that the liberation of his astral form had been the work of his unconscious mind. If he returned to his body, there was no guarantee that he’d be able to leave it again. And his body wasn’t going anywhere for awhile. It looked too broken up.
His astral form was free to travel. To prove it to himself he floated out of his private hospital room and found himself in a familiar corridor. He realized that he was back in the Jokertown Clinic. He sped along the corridor, unseen and untouched by the nurses and patients he passed, though one joker perhaps blessed with a touch of second sight seemed to watch him as he floated by. But the joker said nothing and Fortunato slipped into another of the clinic’s private rooms, and found himself in Peregrine’s presence again.
She was sleeping. Josh McCoy was dozing in the chair by her bedside. Both looked tired and worn, Peregrine more so. Fortunato’s astral body hovered above her. He felt an overwhelming desire to hold her again, but he realized that he’d forfeited that right a long time ago. He reached out and touched her cheek, his incorporeal fingers slipping through skin and the flesh beneath.
He had to find his son, but he had nothing to go on. No clue as to where the boy might be. But Peregrine... she probably knew the latest news of his whereabouts.
He reached out with his mind, then hesitated. Suddenly he couldn’t bear the though of going into her consciousness and discovering her most intimate, most true thoughts. He looked at the sleeping figure of Josh McCoy. He wasn’t wild about this idea either. But he needed the information.
He entered McCoy’s mind. It was as easy as it had always been. He had lost nothing of his power. Nothing of his control. He touched lightly, looking only for information relevant to the search for his son. He didn’t want to pry deeply into McCoy’s private life, either.
Surprising, the first thing he discovered was about himself. About how he had sent out a psychic distress call when he’d been attacked by the Jokka Bruddas. How it’d taken Father Squid and his search team hours to discover his torn and battered body in the rubble of the abandoned building. How they’d found the dismembered corpses of the Bruddas among the wreckage of their headquarters.
Fortunato had no memory of killing them. It must have been his subconscious that had lashed out with the deadliness of a cornered lion turning on a pack of emboldened jackals, teaching them who was still king of beasts.
So be it, Fortunato thought. He took no pleasure in the killing, but neither did it bother him. He killed to live. That was the way.
He delved further into McCoy’s sleeping mind, seeking out information of his son.
The first that came up was his image. It startled him. The boy didn’t look exactly like him, but the resemblance was there, in the eyes, around the mouth. It was startling to see, and breathtaking in an odd, somehow exhilarating way. It was a bit of himself. There was no denying it. He stored the image in his own mind, and went on, finally uncovering McCoy’s memory of a phone call they’d gotten from a detective agency whose job it was to protect the boy.
He was safe, for now, at a camp in upstate New York at a place called New Hampton. His bodyguard was with him. They were sending along reinforcements just in case of another attempt to kidnap him.
He slipped out of McCoy’s mind and looked down at the sleeping Peregrine. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll find him. I’ll protect him. I promise.”
She stirred and sighed. He wondered if somehow she’d heard his unhearable words.
He suddenly felt younger than he’d felt for years. He felt as if the world about him was conquerable again. Like a wraith he rose in the air, through the room’s ceiling, up a floor and through Finn’s office where the young doctor was laying on his specially-constructed bed in a corner of the room, trying to snatch a few hours of rest, and then finally up through the clinic’s roof and into the open sky above.
The sun was still in the morning quarter. From the movement of nearby tree branches he could tell that it was fairly windy, but his astral form could not feel the wind itself. It was peculiar not to feel warm or cold, tired or, rested. To just be. It was, in a way, the perfect Zen state, but Fortunato couldn’t waste time meditating on it. He looked around for some landmarks to orient himself. He found the way north, and headed out over the city.