Conspircaies

Then he notices that his right palm is full of thick red liquid…trickling from his index and middle fingertips— the ones that touched Melanie Ehler's painting earlier. Squeezing the fingers to stanch the flow, he hurries to the bathroom, but stops halfway when he spots the easel and canvas set up in the center of his front room.

He stares in cold shock. Where the hell did that come from? This is his home, his fortress. Who could have —?

As Jack steps warily into the front room, he recognizes the painting. He saw it earlier at Lew Ehler's house, the disturbing one in Melanie's study, only now the glistening impasto swirls are alive on the canvas, twisting and contorting into Gordian tangles of black and purple pigment, and from deep within the kinetic madness of those tortured coils, meteoric crescents of yellow glare briefly, then disappear.

Jack rotates slowly, searching for the intruder, and when he completes the turn, he sees that the canvas has changed—no, is changing as he watches. The color is leaking away, draining like a tainted transfusion from a befouled IV bottle into a pool on the rug before the easel. The stain spreads quickly, too quickly for Jack to step back and avoid it. But instead of feeling pigment ooze against his bare toes, he feels nothing— nothing against his skin, nothing but air beneath his soles.

Jack windmills his arms wildly, reaching for something, anything to stop his fall. Somehow the paint has eaten through his floor and he's plunging into the apartment below. He twists, clutches at the edge of the hole, but his fingers slip on the slick pigment and he plummets into the waiting darkness.

He lands catlike, in a crouch, and knows immediately that he's not in the second floor apartment. Neil the anarchist may not be a personal hygiene poster boy, but he's never smelled this bad. Jeez, what is it? Choice strips of three-day-old roadkill folded into rotten eggs and left out in the sun to warm might come close.

And worse…Jack recognizes it.

But it can't be.

And then he realizes that he's not crouching on wood flooring or carpet, but metal grating—cold, and slick with a sheen of engine oil. Some sort of catwalk. He looks up—a tangle of ducts and wiring, but no sign of the hole that dropped him here. And from far below…light—faint, flickering off the steel plates of the inner walls of a ship's hull…

'Shit!' Jack whispers.

He knows where he is—the Ajit-Ruprobati. But it can't be. Not possible. He sank this rustbucket and everyone aboard it—human and non-human— last summer. This old freighter rests and rusts now in the silt of lower New York Harbor. No way he can be aboard it…

Which means this must be a dream. But it sure as hell doesn't feel like one. He had nightmares about this place and the creatures it harbored for months after he damn near died sinking it, but never this real.

The creatures…the rakoshi…Jack feels every muscle in his body recoil at the thought of them. If the ship is back and awash with their stink, then they too must have returned from the Land of the Dead.

Movement below catches his eye. Jack freezes as a massively muscled, shark-snouted creature glides along another catwalk directly below his. It stands six or seven feet tall and the flickering light plays over its glistening cobalt skin as it moves with sinuous grace.

A rakosh.

Jack wants to scream. This isn't happening. He killed these creatures, incinerated every damn one of them in this very hold last summer. But Jack doesn't dare even to breathe. Hold statue-still until it passes, then find a way out—fast.

But as the creature moves beneath him, it slows, then stops. In a strobe-flash of motion it whirls into a hissing crouch, its head darting back and forth as it sniffs the fetid air.

Does it sense me? Jack wonders as his heart races even faster. Or does it simply sense something different?

The rakosh tips back its shark-like head and looks up. As Jack gazes into the glowing yellow slits of its eyes, he fights a primal urge to jump up and run screaming from this abomination.

I'm in the dark up here, he tells himself, forcing calm. I'm on the far side of this steel mesh. If I don't breathe, don't blink, it won't see me. It'll move on.

Finally, it happens, just as he hoped. The creature lowers its head and looks around, indecisive. It turns, but as it starts to move away, Jack sees something falling through the mesh of his perch. Something small…globular… red.

A drop of his blood.

He watches in horror as the ruby bead drifts like a snowflake toward the rakosh's head, splatters against its snout. He cannot move as a dark tongue snakes from a lipless mouth and licks the smear, leaving no trace.

What happens next is blurred: a hiss, the flash of bared teeth, a three-taloned hand thrusting up, bursting through the steel mesh as if it were window screen, grabbing Jack's bloody hand and yanking it down through the opening. Jack cries out in terror and pain as his right shoulder slams against the mesh. He tries to wrench his hand free but the rakosh's grip is like a steel band.

And then he feels something writhe against his hand, something cool and wet, with the texture of raw liver.

Jack looks down and sees the rakosh licking the blood off his hand. Flooded with revulsion, he tries to grab the slimy tongue, to rip the damn thing out of the creature's head, but it's too slippery.

And then he sees other forms emerging from the shadows, converging from both ends of the catwalk below. More rakoshi. They begin to fight over his hand, baring their fangs and snapping at each other. The tugging on his arm grows increasingly fierce until Jack begins to fear they'll rip his arm out of its socket.

Then one of the creatures rears up and bites into Jack's forearm. He screams with the blinding agony of razor teeth slicing through skin and muscle, crunching through bone, and then it's gone—the lower half of his forearm, his hand, his wrist, all gone—and the rakoshi are lifting their heads and opening their cavernous maws to lap the crimson rain spewing from the stump.

Helpless, his consciousness fading, Jack watches his life draining away…

No!'

Jack sat up in bed, gripping his right arm. He fumbled for the switch on the bedside lamp and turned it. Relief washed through him as he checked his hand—still there, with all five fingers.

And the fingertips—no bleeding. Same with the sheets—no bloodstains.

He flopped back, gasping. God, what a nightmare. So real. He hadn't dreamed about those demons since… must have been sometime late last year that he'd stopped having rakoshi-mares. What had brought one on tonight? Melanie's painting had been in the dream. Had that triggered it? Why? How? He didn't remember seeing anything in it to remind him of those creatures.

He rolled out of bed and padded to the front room. Everything was as he'd left it. He took some comfort from the familiarity of the crowded shelves, but he knew he wasn't going to have an easy time getting back to sleep.

He held up his hand and wiggled the fingers, just to be sure. He could almost feel a phantom ache in the bones above the wrist where they'd been bitten off in the dream. That shouldn't be. And then he remembered other mangled limbs, plastic limbs—the left arms of little Melanie's Ehler's dolls. Had seeing them been the trigger for losing his hand in the dream?

Sure. Jack could buy that. But why the rakoshi? Why should they return to haunt him now?

He headed for the kitchen. He needed a beer.

WEDNESDAY

1

Still frazzled from last night's dream and his fragmented sleep, Jack struggled out of bed late and checked his voice mail while he nuked a pint of water for coffee. He found two messages waiting: the first was from his father. He groaned when he heard it:

'Jack? Jack? Are you there? You're never home. This is Dad. Please give me a call back. I want