An Affair Of Sorcerers

who, with Garth, had kept me whole during the nightmare years of my childhood and adolescence.

Still waiting; still locked in combat with my fear. At the moment, that battle was a standoff. I kept waiting for something to happen.

Once I must have fallen asleep, because I found myself slipping like a slab of molten plastic over the edge of the hole; the hole was closing over my head, and I struggled desperately to pry open its jaws and climb out. The sides of the hole were dotted with faces; lips curled menacingly, baring long fangs and froth-specked teeth; there were large red holes where the eyes should be; hands studded with thousands of snakelike fingers curled around my throat and tore at my eyes.

Madness. I wondered how many seconds, minutes, hours, days had gone by since I'd been hit on the head. Perhaps rabies was percolating in my brain tissue, carrying me along its foaming crest into the terrible dark hole. I could stay in a coma indefinitely, until my brain became totally infected and I died screaming-to myself.

Suddenly my mind blinked again and I found myself out of the hole, my mind cast adrift on a vast, eerie sea of quivering rubber. I wept again; not as a man weeps, but as a child caught in the grip of nameless, nighttime terror.

My mind was closing in on me, eating itself; there were other things in my mind with me, and they were alien. The whisper of snakes that poison and crush; a world of giants that laughed and mocked; things that would hurt a dwarf and not even notice.

It suddenly occurred to me that the fears were somehow familiar, like a scarred rocking horse uncovered in the corner of some dusty attic of the mind. In this case the terrors were old, half-forgotten memories from the storage bin of my childhood. My mind had turned cannibal and was gnawing through the protective membrane of the subconscious.

'Hello, Bob.'

The voice was soft, and seemed to originate from some alternative universe inside my head. It came from everywhere and nowhere, starting from somewhere behind where I thought my eyes should be, then undulating out to fill my skull. I waited desperately for something else to be said, but there was only the terrible silence-now even more maddening. After a while I decided I'd only imagined the voice.

'Hello, Bob. This is a friend.'

The voice was definitely real. For one long, terrifying moment I was afraid it would go away, as it had before. But the voice came again-very soft and soothing, with a slight accent. I couldn't place the voice, but its owner had made a mistake-perhaps spoken too soon, or for too long a time. My mind paused in its self-destructive feast, looked around, and growled with anger as it struggled desperately to make connections.

'You have been with us. . some time now. I am going to help you. I know how lonely you are. I know you are sick and need medicine. I know. . you need love. I can give you all these things, but first you must be alone a while longer so that you can think. You will learn to love my voice. Then you will learn to love me.'

There was a prolonged, aching silence. Then:

'Goodbye for now, Bob.'

Suddenly I knew where I was, and who had put me there. In that moment my breathing stopped as countless pieces of thought and memory fused together to form a conscious idea that burned somewhere behind my eyes with white-hot, searing certainty.

I was being subjected to sensory deprivation.

It meant my old friend Vincent Smathers and his buddy Kee were charter members of Esobus' coven. They'd arranged a special demonstration of their work just for me. After my initial reaction of mindless shock, I felt almost relieved; the realization of what was happening to me gave me a frame of reference, eliminating the horrible fear that I was in a coma and paralyzed, buried alive inside my own mind.

All that was left was the equally horrible reality. I was a helpless captive of the scientists, who, for their own arcane reasons, were keeping me alive simply so that they could drive me crazy. The irony was that, without my daily shots, the strain of rabies in me would be bubbling away, cooking me toward madness and death. Smathers and Kee were competing for my mind against the disease in my body; it was a race I couldn't win, and perhaps had already lost. I had no idea how many shots I'd missed or, if I'd missed a lot, what was keeping me alive. It was all enough to depress me.

I tried to keep my terror at bay by concentrating on what I'd read about sensory deprivation. I thought I could visualize my surroundings; I'd be floating in a large, water-filled tank. The saline solution would be warmed to body temperature; my arms and legs would be restrained by straps, loose enough to allow for circulation but sufficiently tight to restrict any kind of movement. I imagined my head was encased in some kind of hood which was wired for sound and into which oxygen was pumped. There were probably tubes stuck into my body through which I was being fed intravenously. I didn't feel any pain in my thumb or stomach-indeed, I had no physical sensations whatsoever. It could have been the cumulative effect of the womblike environment, or they might have given me just enough of a paralyzing drug, like curare, to damp down my nervous system.

The next thought that occurred to me was that I'd be in the tank until I died, living like a mental mole in absolute darkness. Smathers and Kee would never take me out, even after they'd squashed my will and mind; the tank was my stakes in the ground, Kee's voice my ceremonial sword.

I was only a floor above dozens of people who knew and cared about me, yet they had no way of knowing where I was, or what was being done to me. My captors would one day grow tired of the madman they'd created; the ritual would be completed, and they would go away and lock the steel doors of the laboratory behind them. I would be left suspended in the water-floating forever until I died and rotted and my bones sank to the bottom of the tank.

That image unleashed my panic; it pounced on me like a huge, shapeless beast. I shrieked soundlessly under its weight and gnashing teeth. I kept shrieking until I passed out, or slept, or simply short-circuited.

'Hello, Bob. This is your friend again. I know how you've missed me; I know how terribly lonely you are, and how badly you need to hear a human voice. But you must be left alone still a while longer to think things out. There has been a great misunderstanding on your part. You hate Esobus and his servants. You have spoken to people and said incorrect things. You have done me a great disservice. But you will become a servant of Esobus, and you will do his will. You will love me and want to undo the damage you have done. Listen to my voice, and you will understand. I will leave you alone now, Bob. You should give a great deal of thought to what I have said. I am Esobus, and you will learn to love me as you love the sound of my voice.'

I seriously doubted that, but I waited for more anyway. There was only silence. For the first time, I tried to speak out loud. I cursed slowly, methodically-or imagined that I did. It seemed to me that my voice came back to me muffled, as from a great distance.

Through the timeless silence I clung to my rational thoughts like a finely spun life raft; they were all I had. I'd accepted the fact that my situation was hopeless, and an unexpected benefit was the temporary suspension of my terror and frustration. Now I was involved in a ritual of my own. The idea of a bunch of witches killing me when cholera, a psychotic Russian and the Iranian SAVAK had failed made me angry enough to want to hold out as long as possible. It had become a matter of pride.

I tried to fight off the oppressive loneliness by finely focusing my thoughts. For a while I concentrated on April, but that was too painful and only made matters worse. I shifted my concentration to Esobus and the coven, mulling over everything that had happened, everyone I'd talked to, all I knew or could reasonably conjecture: