Chapter Twenty-one

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elentless, and cruel. But this time the Inquisition is not successful. A tall young man, a man Jonathan admires, grabs the priest and forces him into a car. Next memory: the priest is naked, chained to the wall of a cellar. Questions are coming, one after another: Who is your Inquisitor-General? How did you find us? On and on, while the tall man removes strips of skin from the naked priest's body. Jonathan is hiding in a corner, behind some shelves full of empty Petri dishes. From the priest's mouth a ceaseless prayer: Jesus, thou art with me, Jesus, thou art with me, Jesus, thou art with me. Help the priest! I side with the priest! At last the torture stops. The torturer goes upstairs for a Coke. Jonathan is left alone, astonished, horrified that his friend, his hero, could do such things to another human being. The priest, his eyes watery and bloodshot, must know that his end will not be long in coming. He fixes his gaze on the boy who has crept forward, his own eyes tearing with pity. Words pour in a torrent from the priest's parched mouth. "Young man, they're going to destroy humanity for your sake, yours and the girl's. Turn against them! Accept Christ! Please, listen to me. Your friend Jerry is evil, your uncle is evil, they are creating... death ... they are Satan's . . . oh ... Satan's friends." Then the eyes roll and the head sinks forward, the chin touching the oozing, flayed chest. No, that isn't a memory. You're imagining, spinning tales around the biology experiments that shouldn't be here. You're hysterical. With an effort Jonathan pushed the mad imaginings out of his mind. Again he regarded his sophisticated instruments, the ones that were familiar. They could sense and record brain waves; that's what they were all about. If he could find out where a thought like the one he had just had was physically coming from in his brain he could easily tell whether it was a memory or not. Jonathan went over to the cubicle, took the complex, wire-covered sensor helmet in his hands. How was he going to work the controls while wearing this thing? Its cable wasn't long enough. Jonathan cursed silently. Without an assistant there was no way he could use the equipment. And the alternative was not at all desirable. At CalTech they were experimenting with a certain drug. It could be inhaled like cocaine, but it had no euphoric effect. On the contrary, it stimulated the brain's deepest memory centers and caused an almost incredible flow of vivid recollections. This was N, alpha doporinol 6-6-6, a complex triumph of the biochemist's craft. It was synthesized from naturally occurring brain chemicals. So far the cost was eight thousand dollars an ounce. There were a few grams of it in the refrigerator. Jonathan had been asked to duplicate some of CalTech's experimental results but he had shut the lab for the summer before carrying out the work. He went to the refrigerator. It was not your ordinary Frigidaire. This refrigerator was bolted to the floor and had a combination lock. Some of the drugs kept there, tranquilizers and such, were much in demand on college campuses. Others, like 6-6-6, were valuable. Back behind the bottles of Valium and Quaaludes were foil packets with hand-lettered labels. Jonathan took out the packet of 6-6-6. The crystals inside crunched like sugar when he opened the foil. Ideally, the drug should be suspended in a saline solution and introduced to the nasal membrane via an aspirator. But Jonathan did not have time for that. He measured out a moderate dose, four grains, on the sensitive laboratory scale. Then he ground it fine with pestle and mortar. He poured it from the mortar to the flat of a spatula and raised it to his nose. He inhaled. There was a gentle, pleasant aroma. Jonathan felt no change. He went into one of the subject cubicles and lay down on the couchette. Still nothing. Why do there have to be bars on my window, Mother? The boy's voice was so clear and real that Jonathan jumped up. That had been him, Jonathan Titus Banion, as a child. Bars? Had there been bars on the windows of their old apartment? He didn't remember it that way . . . and yet he did. We've got to keep them out, to keep them away from you. The bars are against them. This was uncanny. It had been her voice, but she wasn't here. He could see the walls of the bedroom in which she had said those words. But he didn't recall wallpaper like that, with moons and planets and rockets on it.
But where, then, did this memory come from? The old man from the hallway came around the end of a lab bench. His emerald eyes flashed. Beneath the fluorescent lights his skin was powder-gray. He looked dead. Hallucinatory phenomenon, of course. Jonathan blinked his eyes, but he could not make the illusion disappear. The old man spoke. "You must not try the door to the past, Jonathan. It's dangerous for you. Terribly dangerous." "Who in hell are you? How dare you come into my lab!" The man shifted and wavered, half mirage and half real. Jonathan blinked but the image remained vague. In an odd way the old man seemed to fit among these recollections. "Danger," the old man said, "danger in these memories!" Then he was swinging a red lantern and Jonathan knew that this time he was an hallucination. NYU maintenance personnel didn't carry such lights. The real watchman was probably off sleeping under the stairs. The false one symbolized a powerful barrier in Jonathan's mind against the very act of remembering. But how? A barrier like this didn't just come out of nowhere. It had to be created. As wild as it sounded, almost the only explanation was that a highly sophisticated hypnotist had been at work on him. Then what of those other imaginings a moment ago—the Inquisition, the tortured priest? "They're going to destroy humanity for your sake, yours and the girl's." Hadn't the priest said something like that? But there isn't any reason to destroy anything for us. He sat up on the edge of the couchette and rubbed his sweaty face. Bits and pieces of memory were still breaking through the hypnotic wall, induced by the powerful action of the drug to move toward a surface they could not quite reach. Like a crust formed on lava, his mind shifted and cracked, and where it cracked the searing ugliness beneath drove him buck. This was not his doing. He was not amnesiac; somebody had intentionally set out to conceal his past from him. And this somebody had a great deal of skill. Hypnotism was a gross craft. To practice it with such delicacy was right at the limits of modern technique, perhaps even a little beyond. He could feel a titanic struggle building in him between the drug and the barrier. Frantic, sweating, dizzy, he lurched out of the cubicle. There was no antidote to 6-6-6; he should never have taken it without controlled supervision. The room was hot, terribly hot. He had to have water. But the least movement sent him slumping and reeling with dizziness. His head pounded, waves of nausea staggered him. So you want to know why we protect you? Look, then, my boy, look at the work of the Inquisition that seeks you! He was surrounded by a rising wall of flames. He was being touched by them, and their touch was hideously painful. He was attached to the stake by an iron collar. His hands were free; he tore at the iron. He kicked the logs until sparks flew up around him. Outside of the flames he could see a great and gaudy crowd, men and women and children. Along the edges of his pyre little boys roasted potatoes to sell to the mob. And the mob chanted: "Evil, evil, evil! Satan's child, save yourself!" But I'm not Satan's child! I'm—I'm . . . something else. He looked up into the royal enclosure, to one pale female face, her skin like milk, her eyes crystal-green, her hair as blond as a sunlit cloud. From her eyes there flowed cooling love. She was composed, but he knew how deeply tragic she felt. As the flames rose around him and he died in torment he fixed on those eyes, and saw in them the triumphant secret: Our nights were not in vain, my senor, for I am with child. There will be another generation. Jonathan lurched against a bench, knocked a computer to the floor with a crash and a cascade of shattered electronic chips. As he collected himself he realized that the fire wasn't a dream any more than the tortured priest was a dream. They were both memories. But what kind of memories? And what sort of a monster would have them? The priest was recent, but that fire had burned a long time ago. In the fire there is exaltation; the pain is your triumph. How dare you preach to me, Lucinda, when I have to endure the stake! Martyred husband. O Lucinda Pantera, you are the image of my dreams, the woman who has always been beside me. Angel Lucinda. Angel Patricia. You are also Patricia, and all other women I and my ancestors have loved.
Page 2 and 3: PRAY FOR HER. PRAY FOR HER UNBORN B
Page 4 and 5: shoulder, then slipped around the s
Page 6 and 7: a new life, with new hopes and new
Page 8 and 9: name. As gingerly as a frightened l
Page 10 and 11: had to start somewhere. Although sh
Page 12 and 13: professor of psychology at NYU, but
Page 14 and 15: So she had met Mr. Apple. Now she s
Page 16 and 17: sweet-smelling cloth was pressed ag
Page 18 and 19: Harry's familiar morning exhaustion
Page 20 and 21: "Anoint?" The kid had assumed he wa
Page 22 and 23: "Well, yes, that's right, Mike." "S
Page 24 and 25: "Hell, I'd know in a second you did
Page 26 and 27: going through a file cabinet. "Out,
Page 28 and 29: awful sense of evil within, was sti
Page 30 and 31: MOST PRIVATE To: The Prefect of the
Page 32 and 33: Terry's tone made Mike want to slug
Page 34 and 35: above all, the dark gargoyled uglin
Page 38 and 39: Seeking the edge of the future, we
Page 40 and 41: A species apart. .. It came as a su
Page 42 and 43: There was the slightest incline of
Page 44 and 45: Jonathan was touched. In all his li
Page 46 and 47: critical families themselves be inc
Page 48 and 49: Sure. Look at this bunch, scrubbed
Page 50 and 51: Faces began to look expectantly at
Page 52 and 53: available to him he cleared his thr
Page 54 and 55: Only Jonathan knew how to comfort h
Page 56 and 57: eporter and the reporter disappeare
Page 58 and 59: Father took the Host and ate it. Pa
Page 60 and 61: ed. Anyway, your machine's irrele
Page 62 and 63: Superhuman violence. Tommy himself
Page 64 and 65: practicing on the way to work," she
Page 66 and 67: JONATHAN HAD HOPED that their journ
Page 68 and 69: first. No information about this in
Page 70 and 71: "He doesn't like the hotel," Mary s
Page 72 and 73: When Gottlieb told me that her para
Page 74 and 75: and blazing cascades. Enormous cu
Page 76 and 77: Was that funny, sad, or both? Oh, h
Page 78 and 79: "Oh, my darling." In his voice was
Page 80 and 81: Destination: Paolo Cardinal Impelli
Page 82 and 83: drink before he could speak. "You w
Page 84 and 85: She closed her eyes, nodded her hea
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from her head she didn't change. Sh
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the graph paper, ripped it off the
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Strange mementoes themselves were o
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Mike read: "He will bear the appear
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honey, I'd like to get you in my ar
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of thing, it was a raging, furious
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"Leave us alone, Mary. Don't you da
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it happen. It was late afternoon be
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espect for the Night Church. Best t
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"Relax, Mike, she's as committed as
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The van slowed, turned another corn
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He was a dried-up, incredibly ancie
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creating a teaching machine for you
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Chapter Twenty-one PATRICIA LAY IN
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We may be mutated in a thousand dif
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He wasn't here for evidence. There
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the hell down here! Come on, Harry,
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had been waved and shouted, "Rememb
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whether or not I love Christ enough
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words as truly as a tonic in his bl
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lessed Michael the Archangel, to bl
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This had never been intended as a w
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father and mother and cleave unto a
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penetrated deep into Jonathan's sku
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"He didn't" hurt me. He wanted to b
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Chapter Twenty-one

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