“It’s as unsettling as it is mindboggling,” said Saar Slootjes, the Lodge’s loremaster for the past ten years. Red haired and red bearded, he pursued a van Gogh look. His previous assignment had been at the Amsterdam lodge. His Dutch accent remained thick.
Ernst had summoned Kushner to his office with instructions to bring his client along. The client however was going to be delayed. Just as well. It gave them a chance to discuss the matter without him.
As a senior actuator, one of the long arms of the Order’s Council of Seven, Ernst Drexler II had his own office here in the Septimus downtown Lodge.
Slootjes turned to Kushner. “You did well by alerting us to your client’s books. I find them very upsetting.”
“Well, I couldn’t miss the obvious parallels to the Order in his new novel. He’s tried to disguise it as the ‘Octogon’—I don’t know if the misspelling was intentional or not—by using an eight-pointed sigil instead of the seven points of ours. A clumsy attempt. But as soon as I saw it I knew I had to take action.”
Although he’d been a member since his teens when his father introduced him to the Berlin Lodge as an acolyte, Ernst remained wonderstruck at how deeply the Order had penetrated the workaday world. Members everywhere, even among literary agents. When Kushner had become alarmed by his client’s latest book, he’d alerted the loremaster and emailed him a copy.
“Yes,” Slootjes said. “That novel…it’s…well, it’s deeply disturbing.”
The loremaster seemed genuinely upset. Ernst could see why. Kushner’s client, Winslow by name, had penned an apocalyptic novel that closed with the end of human civilization, with the survivors serving as prey for the otherworldly beings that had reshaped reality to their own liking. The whole scenario was overseen by a former human transformed into a being better suited to this horrific new world. All the other humans in the ancient brotherhood—the “Octogon,” as he called it—who had helped him realize this state of affairs, were abandoned to become prey as well.
The novel had parallels to the Change the Septimus Order was engineering, and Winslow depicted them as dupes who engineered their own demise.
Yes…” Slootjes said, nodding slowly. “P. Frank Winslow…who is he and how does he know what he knows—or what he thinks he knows?
Kushner shifted in his seat. “When he arrives, we can ask him. But while we’re waiting I can tell you that he’s a hack writer who—”
Ernst bit back a laugh. “I’m surprised to hear an agent admit his client is a hack.”
“Well, that’s strictly entre nous. But the truth is, I don’t consider ‘hack’ a pejorative term, and I’m not saying he’s a bad writer. He’s decent enough. What I mean is that he has no aspirations to art. He simply has this seemingly bottomless well of story ideas he draws on to keep cranking out one novel after another. He finished four in various genres last year, which I sold under his own name and two pseudonyms. He’s never had a bestseller and probably never will. He’s what we call a midlist writer. He earns enough to live in a one-bedroom walk-up in Alphabet City. His biggest success—if you can call a series of paperback originals a success—is his continuing character named Jake Fixx, which he’s milking for all it’s worth.”
“Did you ask him where he got all his information for his book?”
“Of course. He said from the same place he gets the ideas for all his books: from dreams.”
Ernst tapped the manuscript again. “He dreamed this?”
“That’s what he said.” Kushner gave an elaborate shrug. “What can I tell you beyond that?”
“Well, if that’s true,” Slootjes said, his tone vehement, “then his dreams are being generated by the Enemy! Consider the takeaway from his story: That our Order—the ‘Octogon’ in his story—has been lied to for millennia, that they’ve been fooled into believing they will be put in charge when the Change comes. But they wind up as just another set of victims because the Changed world is viciously hostile to all human life. The Enemy’s minions have been selling that line forever. We cannot allow this book to be published!”
“Let’s not get too worked up here,” Ernst said. “It’s not as if this was written by some bestselling author like…like…” He snapped his fingers, blanking on the name.
“Stephen King?” Kushner offered.
“Yes, fine, Stephen King. It sounds like this Winslow has no readership worth mentioning.”
“But his novel,” Slootjes said, “it presents a sequence of events not unlike what we’re expecting: a radical Change in the world, but with an outcome just the opposite of what we’ve been promised.”
Clearly Slootjes was not worried about Winslow’s readership. He was concerned about his own hide.
The novel’s scenario had awakened one of Ernst’s unspoken and long-suppressed fears: That the One and the Otherness he served had been lying to the Order all along, using its members to further its cause here in this corner of reality with no intention of delivering on the rewards so long promised.
A little late for second thoughts now, especially with the Change so close at hand.
At least according to the signals.
Their frequencies were moving toward synchronization. Not for the first time, however. They’d started progressing that way in the past only to grind to a halt.
Just then an acolyte stuck his head into the room. “There’s a Mister Winslow here who says he has an appointment?”
“Show him in,” Ernst said.
Slootjes’s head bobbed as he muttered, “Now we’ll get to the bottom of this.”
Ernst sensed Slootjes’s anger, but realized he was deeply afraid, and angry because of that fear.
P. Frank Winslow entered a moment later and was hardly a prepossessing figure: a slightly built man pushing forty with unruly blond hair and hazel eyes.
He came to a sudden stop when he saw the three of them.
“What’s this? Feels like an ambush.”
Kushner jumped up and led him to the third chair before Ernst’s desk.
“No way,
