“I hate him almost as much as I hate myself,” the invalid said. Her voice was now as bitter as bile. For a moment the ghost of beauty past was no longer visible in her withered face. She was sheer ugliness, a grotesque hag. “Will you kill him?”
Harry was not sure what to say.
Bryan Drackman’s mother was at no such loss for words: “I’d kill him myself, kill him… but I’m so weak… so weak. Will you kill him?”
“Yes,” Harry said.
“It won’t be easy,” she warned.
“No, it won’t be easy,” he agreed. He glanced at his watch again. “And we don’t have much time.”
4
Bryan Drackman slept.
His was a deep, satisfying sleep. Replenishing.
He dreamed of power. He was a conduit for lightning. Though it was daylight in the dream, the heavens were almost night-dark, churning with the black clouds of Final Judgment. From that storm to end all storms, great surging rivers of electric current flowed into him, and from his hands, when he willed them, flashed lances and balls of lightning. He was Becoming. When that process was someday concluded, he would
5
Through the eyeless night came blind hands of fog, seeking. White vaporous fingers pressed inquisitively against the windows of Jennifer Drackman’s room.
Lamplight glimmered in the cold beads of sweat on the water carafe, and burnished the stainless steel.
Connie stood with Harry at the side of the bed. Janet sat in the nurse’s chair, holding her sleeping boy on her lap, the dog lying at her feet with its head upon its paws. Sammy stood in the corner, wrapped in shadows, silent and solemn, perhaps recognizing a few elements of his own story in the one to which they listened.
The withered woman in the bed appeared to shrivel further while she spoke, as though she needed to burn her very substance for the requisite energy to share her dark memories.
Harry had the feeling that she’d held fast to life all these years only for this moment, for an audience that would not merely listen patronizingly but would believe.
In that voice of dust and corrosion, she said, “He’s only twenty years old. I was twenty-two when I became pregnant with him… but I should begin… a few years before his… conception.”
Simple calculation revealed she was now only forty-two or forty-three. Harry heard small startled sounds and nervous fidgeting from Connie and the others as the awareness of Jennifer’s relative youth swept through them. She looked more than merely old. Ancient. Not prematurely aged by ten or even twenty years, but by
As thickening cataracts of fog formed over the night windows, the mother of Ticktock spoke of running away from home when she was sixteen, sick to death of school, childishly eager for excitement and experience, physically mature beyond her years since she’d been thirteen but, as she would later realize, emotionally underdeveloped and not half as smart as she thought she was.
In Los Angeles and later in San Francisco, during the height of the free-love culture of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, a beautiful girl had a choice of like-minded young men with whom to crash and an almost infinite variety of mind-altering chemicals with which to experiment. After several jobs in head shops, selling psychedelic posters and Lava lamps and drug paraphernalia, she went for the main chance and started selling drugs themselves. As a dealer and a woman who was romanced by suppliers for both her sales ability and her good looks, she had the opportunity to sample a lot of exotic substances that were never widely distributed on the street.
“Hallucinogens were my main thing,” said the lost girl still wandering somewhere within the ancient woman on the bed. “Dehydrated mushrooms from Tibetan caves, luminescent fungus from remote valleys of Peru, liquids distilled from cactus flowers and strange roots, the powdered skin of exotic African lizards, eye of newt, and anything that clever chemists could concoct in laboratories. I wanted to try it all, much of it over and over, anything that would take me places I’d never been, show me things that no one else might ever see.”
In spite of the depths of despair into which that life had led her, a frigorific wistfulness informed Jennifer Drackman’s voice, an eerie longing.
Harry sensed that a part of Jennifer would want to make all the same choices if given a chance to live those years again.
He had never entirely rid himself of the chill that had seeped into him during the Pause, and now coldness spread deeper into the marrow of his bones.
He checked his watch. 2:12.
She continued, speaking more quickly, as if aware of his impatience. “In nineteen-seventy-two, I got myself knocked up…”
Not sure which of three men might be the father, nevertheless she had at first been delighted by the prospect of a baby. Although she could not coherently have defined what the relentless ingestion of so many mind- altering chemicals had taught her, she felt that she had a great store of wisdom to impart to her offspring. It was then one small step of illogic to decide that continued — even increased — use of hallucinogens during pregnancy would result in the birth of a child of heightened consciousness. Those were strange days when many believed that the meaning of life was to be found in peyote and that a tab of LSD could provide access to the throne room of Heaven and a glimpse of the face of God.
For the first two to three months of her term, Jennifer had been aglow with the prospect of nurturing the perfect child. Perhaps he would be another Dylan, Lennon, or Lenin, a genius and peacemaker, but more advanced than any of them because his enlightenment had begun in the womb, thanks to the foresight and daring of his mother.
Then everything had changed with one bad trip. She could not recall all of the ingredients of the chemical cocktail that marked the beginning of the end of her life, but she knew that among other things it had contained LSD and the powdered carapace of a rare Asian beetle. In what she had believed to be the highest state of consciousness that she had ever achieved, a series of luminous and uplifting hallucinations had suddenly turned terrifying, filling her with a nameless but crippling dread.
Even when the bad trip ended and the hallucinations of death and genetic horrors had passed, the dread remained with her — and grew day by day. She did not at first understand the source of her fear, but gradually she focused on the child within and came to understand that in her altered state of mind she had been sent a warning: her baby was no Dylan, but a monster, not a light unto the world but a bringer of darkness.
Whether that perception was in fact correct or merely drug-induced madness, whether the child inside her was already a mutant or still a perfectly normal fetus, she would never know, for as a result of her overwhelming fear, she set out upon a course of action that in itself might have introduced the final mutagenic factor which, enhanced by her pharmacopeia of drugs, made Bryan what he was. She sought an abortion, but not from the usual sources, for she was afraid of midwives with their coat hangers and of back-alley doctors whose alcoholism had driven them to operate beyond the law. Instead, she resorted to strikingly untraditional and, in the end, riskier methods.
“That was in ‘seventy-two.” She clutched the bed rail and squirmed under the sheets to pull her half- paralyzed and wasted body into a more comfortable position. Her white hair was wire-stiff.
The light caught her face from a slightly new angle, revealing to Harry that the milk-white skin over her empty eye sockets was embroidered with a network of thread-fine blue veins.
