TheBeastWithin Read online

  Matt stared at him. Then at Roma.

  “My brother Arkady,” she said, rolling her eyes, “is bigtime juggalo. You know, fan of ICP? The musical band—”

  “Insane Clown Posse,” Matt finished. “Yeah. I know about ’em.” Thinking, Jesus Christ, what next?

  As it turned out, what was next was a brief tour of the lodge. Roma told Matt that her husband was always in his study before dinner and that she’d introduce him. So Matt followed as she led him through the entryway, past what would have originally been a visiting area with a large fireplace, then up a large staircase and down a hallway to the turreted study.

  Everywhere he looked, Matt felt the carpenter in him cringe. The crown molding that had lined the entryway had been ripped off so that thick twists of electrical cord and cable could be stapled into the walls. They roped through the visiting area and wove between the maple banisters of the stairway like black snakes. The visiting area had been converted from a cozy common room to a makeshift armory. A display cabinet with mullioned windows was loaded with boxes of ammo. A row of tenpenny nails had been pounded into one wall, and from each one hung a semiautomatic rifle. Two large wooden crates lay on the floor, overflowing with pink packing foam. On the lids, in red block letters, were the words “WARNING: EXPLOSIVES: HANDLE WITH CARE.” From a hat rack hung three black, rubber-snouted gas masks, looking for all the word like S and M gear for pigs. Leaning in a corner were two completely illegal pump-action sawed-off shotguns. And lying in a long inset in the far wall—which had probably been built to hold a row of crystal or china— was what appeared to be a bazooka.

  From one end of it, hanging by a nylon strap, was a Dora the Explorer car seat.

  My God, Matt thought. Where am I?

  As they crossed the parlor, Matt asked Roma if he’d entered into a war zone without knowing it. She didn’t turn, just smiled tightly. Of course, she may not have heard him, what with the whine of a Skilsaw coming from the kitchen, and Arkady following close on his heels, rapping the lyrics to ICP’s “Santa’s a Fat Bitch.”

  Walking up the stairs, Matt stumbled. Each step was littered with brass ammo casings, shotgun shells, pacifiers, and a squeaky rubber teething giraffe.

  At the top of the steps, they turned down a hallway and were passed by two young guys with crew cuts. Both wore black cargo pants with Glocks strapped to their waists. Both had shield-shaped badges on their chests embroidered with a white fist; both had black armbands split with the insignia of a red lightning bolt.

  And yet, they were still practically kids: had acne and nervous eyes. One had a faux-hawk and was attempting to grow a mustache. The other was bare armed under his bulletproof vest. Tattooed along his big triceps in two-inch letters was the word “RAHOWA.”

  Both said hi to Roma as they approached, but when they saw Matt their eyes widened and they grew silent.

  Roma stopped at a door at the end of the hall. She rapped on it lightly.

  “Yes?” came the muffled voice.

  She turned to Matt shyly and whispered, “Wait here, Matthew.” She stepped inside and shut the door behind her.

  Matt heard low voices, but he couldn’t make out what was being said. He looked back down the hall and saw that the two guys they’d passed were still watching him. Faux-Hawk acknowledged him with the slightest upward tilt of his chin. The other guy had folded his tattooed guns across his chest and was openly glaring at Matt.

  Have to remember to give him a low score on the hospitality survey, Matt thought. Then the door creaked open, and Roma gestured for Matt to follow her.

  He did.

  The turret room had clearly been intended to be an office, and it still was. Its rounded walls were lined with built-in shelves. A dark cherry wood desk was in front of the window, and a lean old man stood behind it, extending his gnarled fingers in Matt’s direction.

  “Young man, allow me to shake your hand. Roma told me of the service you performed today, and I am honored—honored!—to make your acquaintance. I am Charles Kingman.”

  “Matt Cahill.”

  As Matt shook Kingman’s hand, he got a closeup look at the guy he’d traveled three thousand miles to meet.

  He wasn’t exactly impressed.

  Charles Kingman looked like a de-shelled turtle. He was scrawny and bald, with a beak-like nose and thin lips. Between them was a small, gray postage-stamp mustache that had gone out of style around 1939. He was about thirty years older than his beautiful wife, and a wattle of loose skin hung beneath his chin. He wore a faded corduroy jacket with suede on the elbows, which was probably supposed to make him look professorial. His eyes were gray and sharp and searching behind thin, wire-rim glasses. Matt couldn’t shake the sense that Kingman bore a strong resemblance to someone he’d seen recently.

  The old guy was still pumping his hand. “Clearly, Mr. Cahill, I owe you more than I can ever repay! Apparently, Roma’s escorts abandoned her when she needed them most. If not for your timely intervention…”

  “No problem,” Matt said, wondering when he’d get his hand back. “I just did what anyone would have done.”

  “Not so, not so!” Kingman’s grip was like iron for a guy his age. “True valor is a rare commodity these days, very rare! Though not surprising in your case, considering your, ah, features…” He finally released Matt’s hand. But now his eyes were flicking compulsively from Matt’s forehead to his ears and chin and back again.

  “My…?”

  “Features, yes, yes, yes.” He spun around, picked something off his table that looked like a medieval torture device. It consisted of a metal hoop about nine inches across. Attached to the hoop by big bolts were four connected metal bands, which crossed each other in a dome shape above the hoop. Kingman carried it around the desk, toward Matt. “Surely you won’t mind if I…”

  “Uh, what’s that?” Matt asked, taking a step backward.

  “Won’t take a second.” And before Matt could register what had just happened, Kingman had slipped the device over his head. The metal hoop was cool against Matt’s brow. Biting his tongue in concentration, the old man turned the bolts until it was snug.

  “Aha…yes, of course…” While Kingman’s left hand held the caliper in place, his right stroked the top of Matt’s head.

  Matt pulled back immediately, freaked out by the device, the stroking. But Kingman didn’t seem to notice. The old man was beaming. “All twenty-seven brain organs in fine fettle, and my caliper registers a brow-to-nose ratio of one to one-point-seven percent!”

  “What a relief,” Matt said, barely able to contain his irritation.

  “Isn’t it?” Smiling, Kingman set the device back on his desk. “I’m sure you were confident in your phrenology, but the fact is, you never know. I had a fellow worked for me for years, always claiming that he came from one hundred percent Austrian stock. I finally took his measurements, and what do you know? His brow-to-nose ratio was one-point-eight to point-nine. And this is someone that I had entrusted with the keys to my heavy equipment!”

  “You don’t say.”

  Kingman’s wattle swayed as he shook his head in amazement. “One just never knows, until scientific principles are applied.” His gray eyes flicked brightly back to Matt’s. “But never fear: your measurements are well within the acceptable margins: clearly, you have nothing to worry about.”

  “Clearly. Thanks for the, uh…”—Matt barely avoided saying load of horseshit—”…for the analysis, Mr. Kingman. But, now, if you’ll give me a few minutes of your time, I’ve got some questions for you. You see, I’m familiar with your work.”

  “Oh, really?” Kingman was clearly delighted. He gestured for Matt to sit in a worn leather chair, and he returned to his seat on the other side of the desk, giving Roma a quick look as he did. “Some tea, my dear?”

  “Of course.”

  Matt sat, watching Roma sway out the door. She had a feline grace that was mesmerizing.

  “Lovely woman, your wife,” he said quietly.<
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  “She should be. She has cost me much, yes, much.”

  Matt looked back to Kingman, confused by the strange response.

  But he had moved on. “So tell me—to what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “Oh, right.” Matt pressed the palms of his hands together. This was going to take some explaining. “It started, I guess, when I read your book.”

  “Aha!” Kingman crowed, clapping his hands and settling back in his seat. “Of course! Nine hundred forty-seven copies sold since the first printing, as of January of this year! Not bad, eh?”

  “Uh…no,” Matt said, resisting the urge to point out that the book’s cover page had showed the first printing to be in the mid-eighties. “Anyway, a month ago I came across a reference to your book. Once I found a copy and read it, there was one chapter in particular that I couldn’t put down. It— it really intrigued me, you see, this one chapter, intrigued me so much that I knew a letter wouldn’t do it. I knew I’d have to come out here in person and ask you to explain—”

  “Stop.”

  He stopped. Kingman’s eyes had closed, and he smilingly held up an open palm toward Matt. “Stop, stop, stop. Say no more. I know exactly the chapter you’re talking about, and I have no problem what so ever justifying my conclusions. It’s the most controversial one in the book: Chapter Eleven: The Jewish Conspiracy Unveiled.”

  “That’s actually not—”

  “True, the Rothschilds are no longer the force they were, but—”

  “That’s not—”

  “But the very idea that the International Money Fund is not a cat’s-paw for a global consortium of Semitic bankers…”

  And he was off. Matt looked away, biting his tongue hard to keep from telling Kingman to shut the fuck up, that he was an idiot, that Matt hadn’t come three thousand miles to hear him spew racist bullshit.

  Not that he hadn’t expected it. Kingman’s book, The Aryan’s Lament, was a crazy quilt of contradictory conspiracy theories about how various non-Aryan racial groups had orchestrated just about every war, recession, depression, assassination, and natural disaster on record. It also included a supposed history of the Aryan race, which gave serious consideration to the Nazi theory that Aryans alone were not descended from apes, but had fallen, fully formed, into ancient Norway, frozen like TV dinners in the heart of an icy meteor. And of course there had been a thick, thick chapter on phrenology, with lots of comparisons of brow ridges and nose/chin ratios, accompanied by many a helpful diagram.

  In short, it was full of shit.

  And not new shit, either. Growing up, Matt had been exposed to plenty of prejudices and petty hatreds. When two Vietnamese boys started attending his junior high, there had been a lot of kids who’d called them gooks behind their backs and said that they should get the hell beat out of them “for what they did to our guys in ‘Nam.”

  Matt hadn’t really known what to think. They did look different from anyone else in the school. But as for these two teens being responsible for fifty thousand American dead, the idea didn’t really resonate. Not to mention that the only vet he knew personally was his buddy’s uncle Dwayne, a grizzled, tobacco-spitting jackass who had lost both legs in ‘Nam while trying to take a drunken crap down his own mortar tube. It was hard to see how Nguyen and Tran were responsible for that.

  Still, Matt had been tempted to side with his friends just to fit in, and might have done so, when by total chance, his dad—to console him for failing to get tickets to the sold-out opening night of Jurassic Park—had spent seventy-five cents to buy him a secondhand copy of Mack Bolan: Executioner #38 at a newsstand.

  At the time, Matt thought this was a pretty sorry consolation prize, but he’d taken it home anyway, gone to his room, flopped onto his bed, opened the front cover—and fell into a world he never knew existed.

  To a twelve-year-old, Mack Bolan was the consummate badass. He had done it all. A sniper with ninetyseven confirmed kills in various Vietnam battle theaters? Check. Master sergeant with lethal proficiency with a .460 Weatherby? Check. Scourge of Mafiosi who had killed his dad and whoreified his sister? Double check.

  Matt began hunting down other Executioner books and discovered that Mack Bolan had another side, too. He liked kids. He even liked Vietnamese kids, and in one issue, he took a couple of them under his wing and treated them kindly—when he wasn’t ventilating the baddies. He didn’t call them gook, chink, or slant—and he had fought in ‘Nam! So why should Matt not give Tran and Nguyen the benefit of the doubt? He couldn’t think of one good reason. So he decided that, given a choice between siding with the Dwaynes of the world or the Mack Bolans, he’d choose the Executioner.

  Eighteen years had passed since then, and he still felt the same way—in fact, he still had his well-thumbed copy of The Executioner #38 tucked away in his rucksack—one of the very few personal items he’d allowed himself when he packed. It meant something to him, that book…It reminded him of his dad, for one. And just holding it brought him back to spending rainy Sunday afternoons reading in his tree house and living on a strict diet of BBQ potato chips while he washed down each page with a swallow of Schweppes ginger ale. Bliss.

  “…wealth that the Jews had amassed from stealing the mighty treasure of the Knights Templar!”

  Matt blinked, returning to Earth. He’d forgotten that Kingman was still raving.

  “This theory—though widely accepted now, of course— was met with disbelief when I first published it in Aryan’s Lament. My critics claimed that—”

  “Actually,” Matt interjected quickly, “that’s not the chapter I meant.”

  Kingman paused. “It isn’t?” He seemed bewildered. “Well, it…it can’t have been the phrenology chapter: those standards are long established…”

  Among dipshits worldwide, Matt thought. But he didn’t say it. What he said was, “No, it wasn’t that one, either. It was actually the epilogue that I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Ah, yes. The epilogue.” Kingman drummed his fingers on the desk. His face had gone neutral, but his eyes burned with a crafty light. “That epilogue doesn’t appear in any edition but the first, you know.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Matt said.

  “Yes. It was excised in the second and third editions, at my editor’s request. Just didn’t seem…ah…of a piece with the rest of the book.”

  “Well, it does sort of—stand out,” Matt said, choosing his words carefully.

  “In what way?” The tone of the interview had changed. Kingman was no longer blathering joyfully about eight-hundred-year-old conspiracies. Now he was watchful, alert. Matt could feel Kingman’s sharp gray eyes burrowing into his own, and for the first time he realized how much he’d put himself in this nut job’s power: surrounded by his blackclad crew, his electric fence. Bazookas on shelves and all that. He might be in great danger, Matt realized. But he had come all this way. He couldn’t back down.

  “If I can explain, Mr. Kingman?” He settled back into his chair, pressed the palms of his hands together. “The way I read your epilogue in Aryan’s Lament is that it’s a—well, like a parable of sorts.”

  Kingman stroked his bristly gray postage stamp. “Proceed.”

  “Well, as you know, in this epilogue, this parable, a young guy—you call him Charles—is buried alive in a crypt. The black kids in his high school don’t appreciate his…his original ideas, and so they find a way to lock him in a crypt on Halloween.”

  “Yes.”

  “And he eventually escapes the following morning, but after he’s been buried, he can see things that no one else sees: he sees scabs and boils on the faces of those who want to hurt him. He smells rot on those who are plotting against him.”

  “That’s right.”

  “In fact, Charles realizes that ever since he left the tomb, he’s had a second shadow following him wherever he goes, only it doesn’t always do what he does. He names it Shadewell, and after a while, he starts to talk to it.”

  �
�Yes.”

  “And then, after a while, it starts to talk back.”

  Kingman was nodding, his arms crossed, his gray eyes bright and watchful.

  “Shadewell tells him to do all kinds of terrible things… to start rumors that destroy people’s reputations, to steal from those who trust him, things like that. And he does these things. But then…at the end of the parable, Shadewell whispers to him that he should kill his girlfriend, that he should burn her alive. And all of a sudden, Charles realizes that it’s gone too far, that he has to get rid of the shadow. And he does. But there’s no description of how he does it in the parable. All it says is something like, ‘Making use of a dark rite found in an ancient book, Charles gained control over the malicious spirit that had sought to control him.’ But in the book, you never describe the rite he uses!” Matt settled back, put his hands flat on his thighs. “Mr. Kingman, I’ve wanted to know for a long time now what that rite was. I was hoping you could tell me.”

  Finished, he looked at Kingman expectantly.

  “Well, well.” The old turtle settled back in his seat, closed his eyes, and picked at a melanoma forming on his mottled scalp. “Of all the reasons that people have sought me out, this is the first time it’s been for literary criticism.” The eyes opened, locked on Matt. Kingman’s thin lips hinged upward at the ends in an enigmatic smile.

  “I’m not criticizing the story you wrote,” Matt said quickly. “I’m just…” He paused. “I’m just curious about the rite.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  Matt sighed. Kingman was cornering him. He was going to have to take a chance with him and tell the truth. “I had this idea that the parable maybe wasn’t entirely fictional. That maybe it—or something like it—had actually happened.”

  “Aha.” The gray postage stamp twitched. “And what would lead you to that conclusion?”