Danny nodded. "Thanks," he said. "Here's the story…"
"Wait." Mama Sutra frowned. "I think I am picking up something already. Yes. District Attorney Wade. Clark. The ship is sinking. 2422. If I can't live as please, let me die when I choose. Does any of that mean anything to you?"
"Only the first part," Danny said, perplexed. "I suspect that the matter I'm investigating goes back at least as far as the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The man who handled the original investigation of that killing, in Dallas, was District Attorney Henry Wade. The rest of it doesn't help at all, though. Where did you get it from?"
"There are… vibrations… and I register them." Mama Sutra smiled again. "That's the best explanation I can offer. It just happens, and I've learned how to use it. Somewhat. I hope someday before I die a psychologist will go far enough out in his investigations to find something that will explain to me what I do. The sinking ship is meaningless? How about the date, June 15, 1904? That seems to be on the same wave."
Pricefixer shook his head. "No help, as they say in poker."
"Wait," Mama Sutra said. "It means something to me. There was an Irish writer, James Joyce, who studied the theosophy of Blavatski and the mysticism of the Golden Dawn Society. He wrote a novel in which all the action takes place on June 16, 1904. The novel is called Ulysses, and is impregnated on every page with coded mystical revelations. And, yes, now I remember, there is a shipwreck mentioned in it. Joyce made all the background details historically accurate, so he included what was actually in the Dublin papers that day- the book takes place in Dublin, you see- and one of the stories concerned the sinking of the ship, General Slocum, in New York Harbor the day before, June 15."
"Did you say Golden Dawn?" Pricefixer demanded excitedly.
"Yes. Does that help?"
"It just adds to the confusion, but at least it shows you're on the right track. The case I'm working on seems to be connected with the disappearance of a professor from a university in Massachusetts several years ago, and he left behind some notes that mentioned the Golden Dawn Society and… let's see… some of its members. Aleister Crowley is one name I remember."
"To Mega Theiron," Mama Sutra said slowly, beginning to pale slightly. "Young man, what you are involved in is very serious. Much more than an ordinary police officer could understand. But you are not an ordinary police officer or you wouldn't have come to me in the first place. Let me tell you flatly, then, that what you have stumbled upon is something that could very easily involve both James Joyce's mysticism and the assassination of President John Kennedy. But to understand it you will have to stretch your mind to the breaking point. Let me suggest that you wait while I have my receptionist make you a rather stiff drink."
"Can't drink on duty, ma'am," Danny said sadly. Mama Sutra took a deep breath. "Very well. You'll have to take it cold and struggle with it as best you can."
"Does it involve the lloigor?" Danny asked hesitantly.
"Yes. You already have a large part of the puzzle if you know that much."
"Ma'am," Danny said, "I think I'll have that drink. Bourbon, if you have it."
2422, he thought while Mama Sutra spoke to the receptionist, that's even crazier than the rest of this. 2 plus 4 plus 2 plus 2. Adds up to 10. The base of the decimal system. What the hell does that mean? Or 24 plus 22 adds up to 46. That's two times 23, the number missing in between 24 and 22. Another enigma. And 2 times 4 times 2 times 2 is, let's see, 32. Law of falling bodies. High school physics class. 32 feet per second per second. And 32 is 23 backwards. Nuts.
Miss Mao entered with a tray. "Your drink, sir," she said softly. Danny took the glass and watched her gracefully walk back toward the door. Mao is Chinese for cat, he remembered from his years in Army Intelligence, and she certainly moved like a cat. Mao: onomatopoeia they call that. Like kids calling a dog "woof-woof." Come to think of it, that's how we got the word "wolf." Funny, I never thought of that before. Oh, the pentagram outside, and the pentagram in those old Lon Chaney Wolf Man movies. Malik's mystery mutts. Enough of that.
He took a stiff wallop of the bourbon and said, "Go ahead. Start. I'll take some more of the medicine when my mind starts crumbling."
"I'll give it to you raw," Mama Sutra said quietly. "The earth has already been invaded from outer space. It is not some threat in the future, for writers to play with. It happened, a long time ago. Fifty million years ago, to be exact."
Danny took another belt of his drink. "The lloigor," he said.
"That was their generic name for themselves. There were several races of them. Shoggoths and Tcho-Tchos and Dholes and Tikis and Wendigos, for instance. They were not entirely composed of matter as we understand it, and they do not occupy space and time in the concrete way that furniture does. They are not sound waves or radio waves or anything like that either, but think of them that way for a while. It's better than not having any mental picture of them at all. Did you take any physics in high school?"
"Nothing like relativity," Danny said, realizing that he was believing all this.
"Sound and light?" she asked.
"A little."
"Then you probably know two elementary experiments. Project a white light through a prism and a spectrum appears on the screen behind the prism. You've seen that?"
"Yes."
"And the experiment with a glass tube that has a thin layer of colored powder on the bottom, when you send a sound wave through it?"
"Yeah. And the wave leaves little marks at each of its valleys and you can see them in the powder." The track of the invisible wave in a visible medium.
"Very well. Now you can picture, perhaps, how the lloigor, although not made of matter as we understand it, can manifest themselves in matter, leaving traces that show, let us say, a cross section of what they really are."
Danny nodded, totally absorbed.
"From our point of view," Mama Sutra went on, "they are intolerably hideous in these manifestations. There is a reason for that. They were the source of the worst terrors experienced by the first humans. Our DNA code still carries an aversion and terror toward them, and this activates a part of our minds which the psychologist Jung called the Collective Unconscious. That is where all myth and art come from. Everything frightening, loathsome and terrible-in the folklore, in the paintings and statues, in the legends and epics of every people on earth-contains a partial image of a manifestation of the lloigor. 'As a foulness shall ye know Them,' a great Arab poet wrote."
"And they've been at war with us through all history?" Danny asked unhappily.
"Not at all. Are the stockyards at war with the cattle? It's nothing like war at all," Mama Sutra said sinply. "It's just that they own us."
"I see," Danny said. "Yes, of course. I see." He looked into his empty glass dismally. "Could I have another?" he murmured.
After Miss Mao had brought him another bourbon, he took a huge swallow and slouched forward in his chair. "There's nothing we can do about it?" he asked.
"There is one group that has been trying to liberate humanity," Mama Sutra said. "But lloigor have great powers to warp and distort minds. This group is the most maligned, slandered and hated people on earth. All the evil they seek to prevent has been attributed to them. They operate in secret because otherwise they would be destroyed. Even now, the John Birch Society and various other fanatics- including an evil genius named Hagbard Celine- struggle ceaselessly to combat the group of whom I speak. They have many names, the Great White Brotherhood, the Brethren of the Rosy Cross, the Golden Dawn… usually, though they are known as the Illuminati."