A grand staircase spiraled down into gothic gloom. Marble raptors guarded the way. I ripped the dress to upper thigh, removed my heels, and transformed into a new creature; slippery and dangerous.
I hustled through the door and past a phalanx of artificial eggs arranged on the front lawn. Almost did a doubletake. The eggs were outsized and exaggerated, Andy Warhol style; waist-tall, maybe three feet in circumference, cast from milky-lucent porcelain that glowed in the porchlight. The one nearest my left was bisected at its apex, like a hollow rocket missing its conical nose. An egg and a coffin are antipodes of a closed circuit. Made it halfway across the yard before Averna’s evil sidekick, Manson, shot me in the ass with a dart from a rifle. She waved when I glanced back. I flipped her the bird (ironic to the bitter end). Strength drained from me like blood from a tapped artery. Five more steps and I sprawled.
Averna rolled me onto my side. She moved her lips against mine in a not-quite kiss. Would’ve punched her in the throat except whatever Manson had loaded the dart with froze every muscle in my body. I tabled the impulse. She licked the salt of my tears and leaned back to regard me from the shadows. Eyes without a face. Yellow eyes with strange-as-shit pupils. Hawk pupils. I wanted to ask how she’d known. Maybe she didn’t; and if she didn’t, despite her rhetoric, I might escape with my skin.
This feeble hope persisted for less than five seconds.
“The doctors asked you to acquire a certain document, yes? They promised some grand reward for your service; appealed to your sense of honor. Couldn’t you detect the evil in their black little hearts? Did you not whiff the deception?”
Had I been capable of speech, I’d have said nobody’s perfect, and spat a gob in her eye.
She smiled. “I delivered the formula to them months ago. Payment for your sweet self. I got the best of Campbell and Ryoko, as usual. The formula is worthless, lacking a specific strain of Jurassic protozoa, which, let us pray, no one ever resurrects. Blink if you can hear me.”
I’m stubborn, so I glared, bug-eyed defiant. Impossible to tell if she was lying, and if so, how much. My “power” to behold the evil in the human heart doesn’t work on women half as well as it does on men, and if she was telling the truth, it didn’t work half so well on men as I’d thought.
A sociopath will say anything to make her victims squirm, which meant I dared not believe a word from her lips. Yet, and yet… I tried to speak; to scream, actually. Had my preparation and training been a ruse? Had those kindly eggheads really double-crossed me? Had their man-at-arms (and my lover) Beasley, participated in the con? Et tu, Beasley? Et tu, you handsome sonofabitch?
Averna said, “None of this is an accident. The doctors do not trade in coincidence and neither do I. We’ve observed you for many years. Something happened to your mother as a young woman. She met a friend of mine, a foreigner, you might say, who contracted with the CIA to enhance various programs. Lucius was part of an experiment, alongside many of her friends. She and the other surviving test subjects have been remotely monitored since the latter 1970s, as are their offspring. The… conditions that altered Lucius skipped her firstborn, Elwood, and bloomed within you. Curses can be finicky.
“Did those old goats suggest they knew Lucius’s fate? Spoiler alert: mother dearest isn’t living in a trailer in Tennessee with a failed country singer. She didn’t drink herself to death or get eaten by a bear. I am not privy to the machinations of Campbell and Ryoko. I do have my own brand of intuition. My intuition says they murdered Lucius Lochinvar Mace. Did her in in the name of science.” She rose and gestured to Manson who lurked nearby.
Manson hoisted me with her arms extended as if I were a crash test dummy. My field of view revolved off its y axis. I went bye-bye into the hollow belly of night.
Backtrack, backtrack. Maybe you’re wondering how a nice girl like me ended up in a place like this…
A pair of infamous scientists figured I might be game to solve a mystery and save the world. Unlikely, yet no less so than the rest of the improbable bullshit that increasingly defines my existence. My current boyfriend, the aforementioned Beasley, happened to serve as bodyguard, valet, and moral compass to the renegade doctors. He introduced us. This set the ball rolling. Happy (unhappy) coincidence? As I’ve come to mutter on a routine basis, there are no accidents.
Most people born prior to 1980 have at least heard of the inseparable duo, Toshi Ryoko and Howard Campbell (erstwhile academic favorites of every male-oriented pop magazine in existence). Renowned for death-defying expeditions, gauche stunts, and outré theories in their heyday; less celebrated of late. The naturalists retired (voluntarily mothballed, as Beasley put it) to a quaintly decrepit New England farm. Ryoko in his wheelchair, Campbell stooped to push. The inseparable duo as drawn by some virtuoso graphic artist; say Mike Mignola or Patch Zircher.
Prior to our first meeting, I did my homework and read the news stories (which traced back into the early ’80s), watched myriad videos, and listened to radio programs devoted to their exploits (the public exploits; turns out the pair really and truly deserved the “mad scientist” appellation). Iconoclasts and apostates to the hilt. Neither man would go quietly to a nursing home. These two were fated for an exotic demise: they’d vanish in the Bermuda Triangle, or into the Amazon rainforest and leave behind a ravaged campsite, cryptic research notes scattered, a cursed Neolithic medallion dangling from a bush; or, an unmarked government van would whisk them to a black site for a final debriefing.
We got along swimmingly. Didn’t mean I’d be a cheerful pawn in their schemes.
“The Shadow of Death slides across the floor,” Dr. Campbell said, and nodded at his shoe in a sliver of sunlight.
“The Shadow of Death!” Dr. Ryoko struggled to light a cigarette. His palsy tremors came and went.
“Soon it will crawl onto us and dig in the spurs. Time yet…”
“…a few years yet. We can do some good.”
“You can do some good, Jessica. Help us hold back the darkness.”
What they wanted wasn’t difficult. Hazardous to my health, yes, but not difficult. Some rich lady possessed a formula; a cure for a deadly strain of avian flu, or a recipe to weaponize the virus, nobody could be sure which. Campbell handed me an envelope full of notes and photographs and that’s how I came to acquaint myself with the legend of Averna Spencer—AKA the Bird Lady of the Adirondacks, AKA (my addition) the Cuckoo Killer. She’d briefly made a public splash on nightly news programs when they profiled her participation in the emergent wingsuit craze during the late 1990s. As one of the few women rich enough and ballsy enough to leap off cliffs and sail like a flying squirrel, she’d represented a curiosity.
Averna kicked it old school, pre-Information Age—nothing left to chance in a computer database, otherwise Ryoko and Campbell would’ve enlisted a hacker and done the job by remote. She kept the formula locked in a safe at her residence; a cliff-side mansion-slash-fortified stronghold amid thousands of acres of wilderness. The aforementioned master villain’s lair. Called it the Aerie.