I rubbed my temples and said, “They’re talking to me. Inside my head. Do you think they know what I’m thinking?”
“I don’t know, Alfred.”
“Because if they do, they know what the plan is and there’s no hope.”
He echoed me, nodding. “No hope.”
“Well, at least this way I’ll never be lonely,” I said, trying to make a joke, but he didn’t laugh.
“I hear them too, Alfred,” he said quietly. “But I do not think we are possessed in the layman’s sense of the word. I believe what we are hearing are our own doubts and fears, amplified tenfold.”
“What the heck does that mean?”
“What we fear,” he said. “Our own voice of despair. The secret gnawing doubts we all have. They turn them upon us.”
Stupid, pathetic, disgusting loser! Dost thou believe we can be overcome by the likes of thee? Before Time was, we have been and shall always be! Who art thou disgusting mound of rotting flesh to challenge our dominion!
The fog was thicker than ever. With no points of reference, it didn’t seem as if we were moving at all.
“We’re not going to make it in time,” I said. “So let’s just pull to the side of the road and wait for the end.”
“Alfred,” he started, and then stopped. Something up ahead had caught his attention.
A hole had appeared in the fog, its sides perfectly smooth and round, the opening about twice the width of the car. It looked like the mouth of a tunnel.
Come to us now, carcass. Bring us the Seal.
“They’ve decided to help us,” I said.
He grunted and didn’t say anything. He had put back on the old Op Nine expressionless mask.
“Hit it,” I said, and Op Nine floored the gas.
We hit the tunnel at 230 mph and the fog in the “walls” spun and twisted with our passing. I looked behind us and saw the tunnel collapsing, closing us off.
“This isn’t going to work,” I said after a hundred miles had slid by and the words on the page had become black blobs swimming before my eyes.
“You should try to sleep,” he said.
I shook my head. “What I’d really like to do is brush my teeth. I can’t remember the last time I brushed them. You know, they’re the one thing about my personal appearance I actually took pride in.” I ran my tongue over the front ones and my left incisor jiggled. Knowing what was going to happen didn’t calm me any as I reached into my mouth and gave the tooth a gentle push. It broke off in my mouth. I spat the tooth into my palm.
“What is it?” Op Nine asked.
The coppery taste of blood in my mouth. The broken tooth in my hand. The weeping sores all over my body.
“Alfred?”
I flung the tooth to the floorboards and, knowing I shouldn’t, reached back into my mouth and tugged at one of my molars. I heard a squishing sound as it pulled free from the gum.
“Jerks,” I breathed. “Those dirty, demonic jerks!”
I hurled the molar against the windshield. Op Nine whipped his head in my direction as I began to stamp my foot as hard as I could, throwing such a fit he must have thought this time I had really lost it. He took his foot off the accelerator and I screamed at him to speed up.
My hissy fit didn’t last long; hissy fits take energy, and I didn’t have much left. In fact, I didn’t have much of anything left: I ran my hands through my hair and huge wads of it came away in my fists. By this point the fact that my hair was falling out left me numb.
Bit by bit since that night in the Sahara, they had been chipping away at me and I thought I would be just a nub of myself by the time we reached the devil’s door. Nub-o’-Kropp. The skin felt loose on my body and I wondered if it might start sloughing off like a snake’s, leaving my muscles and tendons exposed like those 3-D models they use in science class to teach human anatomy.
I sat back in the seat, gasping and snuffling, and Op Nine didn’t say anything but kept his hands tight on the wheel and his eyes fixed on the tiny black hole straight ahead, and after a while I noticed the tunnel’s walls had changed color from cotton white to deep yellow. After a few more miles the yellow had darkened to a dusky orange.
“What’s going on?” I asked. Op Nine didn’t answer. I said, “You talked more before you knew who you were. What is it— too dangerous to talk? Something classified might slip out?”
“My memory returned at the cabin. I was in the back when I heard the fight by the front door. I followed the sound and saw you and Mike rolling down the hill. At that moment it all came back to me.”
“When it came back to me, it hit like a freight train.”
“Yes. My experience was similar.”
I flipped the book back open to the incantations, and tore the page containing the Words of Constraint from the binding. He winced at the sound. Then I folded the page into quarters and jammed it into the front pocket of my Dockers.
“You realize there will be very little oxygen,” he said. “There is a strong likelihood you will pass out.”
I thought about telling him there was a strong likelihood I would take the heavy book in my lap and smack him over the head with it, but I didn’t say anything.
“Or freeze to death.”
“Okay . . .”
“And your entire plan hinges on the assumption of anthropomorphism.”
“Yeah, I was worried about that,” I said. “The anthropomorphism.” “They do not think as we do, Alfred. Paimon may decide to find another way to the Seal.”
“Then why send me to find it in the first place? They had the chance to kill me in that house in Evanston. Why didn’t they?”
He pursed his lips, his eyes glued to the road.
“You know why, don’t you?” I asked.
“I have a theory.”
“I’d love to hear it.”
“I don’t know if that would be wise.”
“Right. Not wise. Like taking my blood from me was.”
“You know why we didn’t tell you.”
“The First Protocol?”
He nodded. I said, “But you can supersede the First Protocol, right? You’re the SPA; you can ignore all of them if you want. Anyway, it makes sense now, why you kept me so close afterward. Had to protect your source of the active agent, didn’t you?”
My teeth jiggled in their sockets as I talked, so I tried to move my tongue as little as possible, which slurred my words and made me sound like a dental patient, my mouth stuffed with cotton.