The boy could have told him, but the boy was dead. Fortunato went to the door, put his hand on the knob. He closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the cold metal. Think, he told himself.
He wiped his fingerprints off the pistol and threw it next to the body. Let the cops draw their own conclusions. The Polaroids should give them plenty to think about.
He turned to go again, and again he couldn't leave the room.
You have the power, he told himself. Can you walk away from here, knowing you have the power, refusing to use it? Sweat ran down his face and arms.
The power was in the yod, the rasa, the sperm. Incredible power, more than he knew how to control yet. Enough to bring the dead back to life.
No, he thought. I can't do it. Not just because the thought made him sick to his stomach, but because he knew it would change him. It would be the point of no return, the point where he gave up being completely human.
But the power had already changed him. He had already seen things that those without it would never understand. Power corrupts, he'd been told, but now he saw how naive that was. Power enlightens. Power transforms.
He unfastened the dead boy's belt, unzipped the bellbottomed jeans, and pulled them of. The boy had craped and pissed in them when he died, and the smell made Fortunato wince. He threw the jeans in a corner and rolled the dead boy onto his stomach.
I can't do this, Fortunato thought. But he was already hard, and the tears rolled down his face as he knelt between the dead boy's legs.
He came almost immediately. It left him weak, weaker than he'd thought possible. He crawled away, pulling his pants back up, sick and disgusted and exhausted.
The dead boy began to twitch.
Fortunato got to the wall, pulled himself onto his feet. He was dizzy and his head throbbed with pain. He saw something on the floor, something that had fallen out of the dead boy's pants. It was a coin, an eighteenth-century penny, so fresh that it looked reddish in the harsh light of the loft. He put the penny in his pocket in case it meant something later.
"Look at me," he said to the dead boy.
The dead boy's hands clawed at the floor, gouging out bloody splinters. Slowly he pulled himself onto his hands and knees, and then lurched clumsily onto his feet. He turned and looked at Fortunato with empty eyes.
The eyes were horrible. They said that death was nothingness, that even a few seconds of it had been too much. "Talk to me," Fortunato said. Not anger anymore, but the memory of anger, kept him going. "Goddamn your white ass, talk to me. Tell me what this means. Tell me why."
The dead boy stared at Fortunato. For an instant something flickered there, and the dead boy said, "TIAMAT " The word was whispered, but perfectly clear. Then the dead boy smiled. With both hands he reached up to his own throat and ripped it bloodily out through the skin of his neck and then, while Fortunato watched, tore it in half.
Lenore was asleep. Fortunato threw his clothes into the garbage and stood in the shower for thirty minutes, until the hot water ran out. Then he sat by candlelight in Lenore's living room and read.
He found the name TIAMAT in a text on the Sumerian elements of Crowley's magick. The serpent, Leviathan, KUTULU. Monstrous, evil.
He knew beyond question that he had found only a single tentacle of something that defied his comprehension. Eventually he slept.
He woke up to the sound of Lenore closing the latches on her suitcase.
"Don't you see?" she tried to explain. "I'm just like a-a wall outlet that you come home to plug into to recharge. How can I live like that? You got what I always wanted, real power to do real magick. And you lucked into it, without even wanting it. And all the study and practice and work I did all my life doesn't mean shit because I didn't catch some fucking alien virus."
"I love you," Fortunato said. "Don't go."
She told him to keep the books, to keep the apartment too if he wanted. She told him she would write, but he didn't need magick to know she was lying.
And then she was gone.
He slept for two days, and on the third Miranda found him and they made love until he was strong enough to tell her what happened.
"As long as he's dead," Miranda said. "The rest I don't care about."
When she left him that night for her client, he sat in the living room for over an hour, unable to move. Soon, he knew, he would have to start looking for the other being whose traces he'd seen in the dead boy's loft. Even the thought of it paralyzed him with loathing.
Finally he reached for Crowley's Magick and opened it to Chapter V "Sooner or later," Crowley said, "the gentle, natural growth is succeeded by depression-the Dark Night of the Soul, an infinite weariness and detestation of the work."
But eventually would come a "new and superior condition, a condition only rendered possible by the process of death." Fortunato closed the book. Crowley knew, but Crowley was dead. He felt like the last human on a barren rock of a planet.
But he wasn't the last human. He was one of the first of something new, something that had the potential to be better than human.
That woman at the demonstration, C.C. She'd said you should take care of your own. What would it cost him to save hundreds of jokers from dying in the heat and rotting dampness of Vietnam? Not very much. Not very much at all.
He found the flyer in the pocket of his jacket. Slowly, with growing conviction, he dialed the numbers.
TRANSFIGURATIONS
by Victor Milan
November night wind whipped his trousers, stinging skinny legs like triffid tendrils as he shoehorned himself into a small club not far from campus. The murk throbbed like a wound, pulsing red and blue and noise. He stopped, hovering there in the door with the lumpy orange-and-green plaid coat in which his mother had packed him off to MIT three years before hanging on his narrow shoulders like a dead dwarf. Don't be such a coward, Mark, he told himself. This is for science.
The band lunged at "Crown of Creation" and wrestled it to the floor as he instinctively sought the darkest corner, teacup in hand-he'd learned how unhip it was to order Coke or coffee, at least.
Other than that he'd learned none of the moves in weeks of research. The way he was dressed, in his high-water pants and pastel polyester shirt of the sort that always pouched out at the sides like a sail in the wind, he might've been in danger of being taken for a narc-this was the fall that followed Woodstock, the year Gordon Liddy invented the DEA to give Nixon an issue to distract attention from the war-but Berkeley and San Francisco were hip towns, university towns; they knew a science student when they saw one.
The Glass Onion had no dance floor as such; bodies swayed in crepuscular crimson and indigo glow between tables or crowded into a clear space before the tiny stage, with a whisper of beads and buckskin fringe and the occasional dull glint of Indian jewelry. He kept as far from the action's center as he could, but being Mark he inevitably bumped into everyone he passed, leaving a wake of glares and thin embarrassed "excuse me's" behind him. His prominent ears burning, he had almost reached his goal, the little rickety table made out of a Ma Bell cable spool with a single dented green auditorium chair beside it and an unlit candle in an empty peanut butter jar plunked down on it, when he ran smack into somebody.
The first thing that happened was that his massive hornrim glasses slid down the ramp of his nose and disappeared in the dark. Next he grabbed the person he'd bumped with both hands as his balance went. The teacup hit the floor with a crash and a clatter. "Oh, dear, oh, please excuse me, I'm sorry…" tumbled from his mouth like gumballs from a broken machine.
He realized there was a certain softness of the person his skinny hands were clinging to so fervently, and a smell of musk and patchouli detached itself from the general miasma and drilled its way right up into his sensorium. He cursed himself: You had to go and run over a beautiful woman. At least she smelled beautiful.