Avenging Fury
PRAISE FOR JOHN FARRIS
“Few writers have Farris’s talent for masterfully devious plotting, the shatteringly effective use of violence, in-depth characterization, and scenes of gibbering horror.”
—The New York Times
“The godfather of thriller writers.”
—F. Paul Wilson, New York Times
bestselling author of the Repairman Jack series
“Farris remains one of the most effectively surprising horror writers of his generation.”
—Publishers Weekly on Phantom Nights
“Perhaps Farris’s best yet . . . Strong suspense with an occult overwash.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
on Phantom Nights
“Farris is a real master . . . a giant of contemporary psychological horror.”
—Peter Straub, New York Times
bestselling author of In the Night Room
“A legendary writer.”
—Fangoria
BY JOHN FARRIS
FROM TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES
All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By
Avenging Fury
The Axeman Cometh
The Captors
Catacombs
Dragonfly
Fiends
The Fury
The Fury and the Power
The Fury and the Terror
High Bloods
King Windom
Minotaur
Nightfall
Phantom Nights
Sacrifice
Scare Tactics
Sharp Practice
Shatter
Solar Eclipse
Son of the Endless Night
Soon She Will Be Gone
The Uninvited
When Michael Calls
Wildwood
You Don’t Scare Me
AVENGING
FURY
JOHN FARRIS
A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK
NEW YORK
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
AVENGING FURY
Copyright © 2008 by Penny Dreadful Ltd.
All rights reserved.
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
ISBN 978-0-8125-7864-5
First Edition: May 2008
First Mass Market Edition: October 2009
Printed in the United States of America
0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
AUTHOR’S NOTES
On page 48, The Actor is quoting John Keats.
Part of Flicka’s lament on page 180 is adapted from remarks attributed to the songbird Mariah Carey.
The trailer-hitch line on page 184 is courtesy of Willie Nelson (who ad-libbed it in the movie Electric Horseman).
Because this is, after all, a novel, I’ve made a few changes in the landscape of Las Vegas. The megaresort Bahìa I’ve placed where the MGM Grand usually is. “Concordia Hospital” doesn’t exist. Neither do Virgie Lovechild’s digs. I’ve poked fun at a few actual entertainers and Vegas icons, who are probably used to it. Others named in the book are merely figments. Show business “celebrities” come in two distinct categories: the synthetic and ephemeral, who are easily mocked. And the true originals, who can never be replaced. Like Willie.
The description of a time machine as “a great cellophane butterfly” is taken from Ray Bradbury’s fine story the “F. Scott/Tolstoy/Ahab Accumulator”; additional embellishments are mine.
The lyrics for “Jesus Hot-Wired My Heart,” the chain gang’s lament on the Dumas line, and “Rat Alley Moan” are by the author, a long-neglected songwriter.
Finally: there are three or four fragments of W. Shakespeare within Delilah’s many discourses; everything else she has to say is my invention.
ONE
. . . BUILT IN TH’ ECLIPSE,
AND RIGGED WITH CURSES DARK . . .
—JOHN MILTON, LYCIDAS
(The crazed, the futile, the damned. Hardbodies of both sexes. The cheesy egos. Those who lack pity, tolerance, or shame. Castouts and castaways. The carelessly spawned and heartless young. Those with visions to pursue or sell. Those who maim their spirits skipping out on life. The self-indulgently cruel. Those who know the lingo but lack the moves. Those with perpetual night in their eyes. Those who just want the money. Caged birds with no voices. Amateurs at everything. Las Vegas can wake up the harlot in a spinster church organist. It isn’t sensible to set foot in a place that’s out to rob you, but there it is, that irresistible siren song of commerce and show business. Twenty-four hours a day, every minute of it game time for the true predators.
Where there are predators, there also are skilled hunters, a very few to be sure. But always the best at what they do.)
OCTOBER 26 • 11:55 P.M.
. . . The strong winds that afflicted the Las Vegas area and caused some temporary power outages had abated and the clouds were breaking up as the cold front passed through, affording glimpses of a waning moon above the summit of Spring Mountain.
The hunter wouldn’t be needing the moon tonight. At four thousand feet Tom Sherard had settled into his hide overlooking the Lincoln Grayle Theatre, approximately one-quarter mile away at two o’clock and seven hundred feet below his rocky perch. He sat cross-legged in spite of the painful stress on his bad knee, the stock of the .476 Holland & Holland rifle against his shoulder as he calibrated the scope.
Southeast lay a golden field of shimmering lights sown like the wages of sin across the high-desert floor. A toy version of King Arthur’s castle and a Sphinx-guarded pyramid at one end of the Vegas strip; a red ribbon of roller coaster around the tip of the Stratosphere Tower at the other end.
Below Sherard, the terrace of the theatre looked like the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, with huge concrete planters for trees and three fountains, not operating at this hour. The superstructure of the theatre, five stories of beehive glass cut like a diamond into thousands of facets, filled the front of a cavern that had been blasted out of the mountain to accommodate the theatre and kitchens where assembly-line meals were prepared for sixteen hundred guests on show nights.
The hunter couldn’t see past the facade from where he was, but he knew from the Magician’s Web site what the semicircular lobby inside looked like: gold-veined travertine floors and eight chandeliers resembling stalactite sculptures in an ice cave, each weighing a quarter of a ton.
A pair of night watchmen in a golf cart were moving slowly around the terrace. He sighted in on one of them, crosshairs just below a jowly neckline, feeling now the familiar slow-boiling anticipation of a blood stalk at the root of his throat,
in the pulses of his temples.
The watchmen concluded their circuit of the terrace. A door opened in a wall bearing a fifty-foot-high mosaic of Lincoln Grayle. The golf cart disappeared into the lower depths of the theatre complex.
Sherard moved the stock of the custom-made rifle from the padded shoulder of his hunting jacket. He closed his eyes, clearing his mind of the shot he was going to make, and waited.
Eden Waring ran through the levels of the darkened theatre and crossed the lobby, emerging into the brilliance of ten-k floodlights aimed at the theatre’s facade. The temperature behind the cold front had dropped to the midthirties at this elevation. She was still perspiring from the heat of the menagerie tunnel and began to shudder as she turned and backed away from the entrance doors, circling a fountain, keeping it between her and the were-beast she was certain would be coming after her.
As she moved she had a look around the empty terraces, glanced at the stars appearing now in the sky. One hand against her breasts, cupped over the talisman that His Holiness had provided for her. She was bleakly aware that whatever papal blessings accompanied it would be of only limited value. Bertie Nkambe had believed in her own talisman—and look what it had gotten her. None of her powers had been adequate to anticipate and deflect an assassin’s bullets.
Now that she was out in the open, fear evaporated from Eden’s skin. Bertie lay gravely wounded in Concordia Hospital, but Eden felt satisfaction in remembering what the Magician’s face had looked like after she’d smashed most of it to a pulp. The sharp neck of the wine bottle was still in her left hand. Probably futile as a weapon, given the power coming her way, the retaliation she had provoked.
She let go of the ugly little talisman and wiped the hollows of her eyes. The drops of Grayle’s blood and her perspiration that she flung from her fingertips appeared to hover in the floodlit night a few feet from her, taking on some of the fire that seemed also to grow within the crystal chandeliers visible inside the theatre. Light of her Light; a subconscious recognition, a gift of apprehension as, there on the terrace (where it seemed to Eden she had been waiting until half past Eternity instead of less than a minute), something was happening.
The most wonderful something she had known in her life. Nothing compared with the sight of an ordinary golf cart coasting out of a doorway in a wall near the left foot of another huge version of Lincoln Grayle, this one composed of many thousands of black and white tiles. You couldn’t look anywhere in or outside his theatre without encountering the likeness Eden had done a brutal job of deconstructing only minutes ago.
Eden wasn’t thinking about that right now. She could only smile incredulously at the sight of Bertie Nkambe behind the wheel of the cart as it crossed the terrace on a diagonal, coming straight for her. Bertie looking in the pink instead of unconscious beneath a ventilator mask in the hospital Eden had left a little less than three hours ago. Bertie, giving her a familiar blithe wave along with a big white dimpled smile.
Incredible to see her, but wonderful: of course she knew about Bertie’s considerable healing powers. . . . Eden could not control her tears.
“Bertie!”
“Hi.”
“But you—”
“C’mon, we’ll take a ride. Tell you about it.”
“No! Bertie—Grayle—he—we’ve got to—”
“Hey, nothing to worry about! I saw him. He’s down and out. You clocked him good.”
“Saw—?”
Bertie braked the golf cart a few feet from Eden and beckoned, still smiling, a hand jauntily on one hip. Didn’t appear that a single hair on her head had been disturbed by the Magician’s hired assassin. To Eden’s weary eyes Bertie looked as if she’d spent hours getting made up for a cover shoot.
“Time for us to skedaddle outta here, Eden. Saddle up and let’s ride, partner.”
Still Eden hung back, light-headed from confusion, the conflict of her senses.
“Bertie, where’s T-Tom?”
“Tom?” Her smile changed, just a little, as if she’d heard something obscene.
“Didn’t he come with you? He’s—” Eden took a couple of steps toward the golf cart, shielding her eyes from the hot glare of a nearby floodlight. She failed to notice the crimson drops of moisture she’d discarded into the air rearranging to spell out a warning:
BEWARE
“—Supposed to be here,” Eden concluded weakly. “I left him a note?”
Bertie’s good humor vanished. Her back hunched like that of a sullen cat. She looked around the terrace swiftly, then in a moment of apprehension raised her eyes to the cliffs flanking and rising above the Lincoln Grayle Theatre to the darkness of the sky.
Bertie’s sharp eyes seemed to elongate as she took in the silent seated form of Tom Sherard, a distant wink of light off the lens of his rifle scope. Her recognition of danger was swift but not as swift as the bullet Tom sent her way. The .476 slug took out two ribs and splashed most of one lung, knocking her flat and hard beside the golf cart.
A human being and most animals would have died instantly from hydrostatic shock. But this Bertie wasn’t human, only a cunning copy. A copy struggling to assume yet another form on the deck as the big bellowing echo from the Holland & Holland reached Eden’s ears. Sure as hell wasn’t Bertie getting up quickly on all fours, claws grating stone, blood billows issuing like condensed red breath from its mouth and coal-black nostrils.
Eden recoiled from the scorch of a hot floodlight. The were-beast making a howling effort to achieve its full shape from the abandoned form of Bertie Nkambe—the Magician’s last great illusion—wasn’t having an easy time coordinating the shift. Mindful of the sharpshooter on high, it turned and loped awkwardly toward the safety of the theatre. Still incomplete and lopsided from the drag of a Bertie-leg, knee to foot, that remained unassimilated, a sight that wrenched Eden’s violently beating heart.
Then Tom fired again, hitting and disabling a shoulder of the beast.
The were-beast plunged through a glass door and skidded ten feet on slick travertine, then collapsed out of rifle range in a spill of coughed blood.
There was another message in the air for Eden made of her sweat and tears, a message from the center of her being:
DESTROY
Eden looked up to where she thought Tom must be, but she couldn’t locate him. She walked deliberately across the terrace as the were-beast crawled along the floor inside the theatre, howling miserably. It left a blood swath beneath great blazing chandeliers that were as white as ice sculpture.
(Ice, glass—what did it matter? What mattered was to focus properly, channel the Dark Energy that Eden felt as a hot-wire tingle across her scalp, causing the hair on her head to stand and strain at the roots.)
A smoke-tinged rosette opened in one of the facets on the hivelike facade. And she hadn’t even been trying, just gave it the merest glance, the cosmic heat converging from both eyes as another blister formed on her lower lip.
The talisman smoked between her breasts. Her nipples were electric. Eden was on fire, but it was a fire she could bend outward and direct according to her will—it meant her no harm. She looked up again, past a few clouds to a starfield across the heavens. Those stars assumed, from a cataclysm of seething light and energy, a familiar form: her own. Recognition gave her cheer and a confidence that was beyond godlike.
(Better not to leave any part of it standing. Not a single magical door or tunnel through with the Magician might make his escape.)
Eden stood ten feet from the facade of the Lincoln Grayle Theatre, perhaps twice that distance from where the deformed Magician was making an effort to put his final act together—
—And dropped a quarter ton of melting chandelier on top of him.
The feline shape was indistinct within the crude drop of molten glass. Only the grotesque hyena head and strong shoulders of the tiger were still visible. Its screams were difficult to bear. Eden added another slow-moving mass of molten glass to what was already on the floor
, continuing to pile it on until all the chandeliers were melted and down. They composed an ingot like a softly pulsating, liquid star eight feet deep on the travertine floor.
The glass would, perhaps, take a week to cool and harden completely.
Eden backed away from the theatre until she came to the outer edge of the terrace. Her celestial simulacrum lay cozily on the brow of the mountain, immensely radiant. Stars in her eyes, stars in her hair. All of them spinning in concert with her earthly mind waves. She looked down and saw that she had risen a couple of feet above the terrace floor. She felt a curious lack of childlike wonder. Still she enjoyed her casual buoyancy, a bodiless sort of freedom, along with the light show playing in her brain as she initiated the meltdown of the theatre’s facade, more slumping tons of sizzle glass.
But the added weight was too much for the terrace supports and the whole thing collapsed suddenly. Eden thoughtfully watched it go, great smoking globs of glass and slabs of concrete tumbling down the mountain, setting trees aflame, filling a third of the parking lot and blocking the four-lane parkway, the only road from the valley floor to the theatre.
The floodlights were out. The Magician’s show had gone permanently dark.
Beginning to feel depleted, Eden let herself drift a few hundred feet through the dark rising cloud of smoke and dust until there was solid ground beneath her feet again.
In his hide from where he had shot the were-beast, Tom Sherard packed up his rifle and scope. Then he took out his cell phone and dialed a number in Rome, a number so private that fewer than ten people in the world had it.