Part 17: Stab Your Demoniac Smile to My Brain!

I awoke with a start. The room was dark. Apparently I had turned off the TV and bedside lamp and fallen asleep.

Then I heard it again. A noise in the hall. I reached out to the bedside table and closed my fingers around the handle of the chef’s knife. Someone walking down the hall.

I went to the door cautiously, quietly braced my foot against the bottom edge, and looked through the keyhole. Someone was disappearing around the corner. I couldn’t tell whether the figure was male or female.

I’m a sitting duck, I thought. Staying here in a public place, the Pasadena Hilton, checked-in with a credit card. Anyone could locate me. I ought to get moving. Disappear somewhere randomly. Now.

I had left an imprint of my credit card with the desk downstairs, so all I would have to do would be to leave my key in the little executive check-out folder in the room, and depart.

I turned on the bedside lamp and looked at the knife in my hand. I didn’t really need it on the way to the car, I decided. So I wrapped it in a bag and laid it aside to pack with the rest of my things. I hastily threw everything into the travel bag, zipped up all compartments, and slipped the carry strap over my shoulder.

I picked up the baseball bat and looked through the keyhole again. There was no one in the hall. I let the door click shut behind me, walked to the elevator, and hit the button for the first floor. I encountered no one on the way out to the garage.

I put the travel bag in the trunk with the ax. After looking around, I put the baseball bat in the trunk also. I started the car and headed for the nearest freeway. I would drive and think for a while, and then decide where to go.

As I drove, I thought about the two ghouls. The two men-in-black. The large pasty-faced one and the short fat one. I had met one of them at the Palladium just after talking to David Wilson. It was from his flier that I had learned about the Jack Parsons Memorial Society. Now I had come out here to California, and run into Renny of the same group.

Helpful, likeable Renny? It didn’t seem possible he would be involved in something like this. Attempted murder. Or David Wilson either, for that matter.

But maybe it was naive thinking like this that had nearly gotten me killed.

Jack Parsons had been killed also. Then it hit me. Who was it that had been harassing Parsons when he died? The U.S. government. At the time he died, the U.S. government had just taken away his security clearance, for the second time. Why? Because he had "classified" documents—mostly ones he had written himself years earlier. So it had to be simple intimidation. And why the persecution? Because Parsons wasn’t controllable. Because Parsons was going to break the monopoly. He wanted to build a jet propulsion lab for Israel. It was probable that he was motivated by necessity, at least in part. Cut out of the center of things in the U.S., and ostracized professionally, he would naturally seek to use his talents elsewhere, where he could profit from them. A JPL for Israel, an explosives factory for Mexico (the latter was the purpose of his trip, Parsons had told von Karman). Who knows what else. Parsons was escaping the control of the U.S. government.

No, the U.S. wanted its jet propulsion monopoly to continue—the monopoly on missiles and certain types of explosives. Here at home all the profits were to be funneled to defense giants like General Tire and Rubber. There was no room for individualists like Parsons. So when he had tried to sell his talents elsewhere, they had killed him. As simple as that. The Army ordinance experts had arrived and cleaned up after the "two" explosions. This was followed by a blizzard of contradictory cover stories—a different one for each person’s taste. Parsons was sloppy. No, Parsons was a careful researcher, but he was a devil worshipper and got what he deserved. No, Parsons was a genius, but there was a mysterious "death angel." Everyone was allowed (even supplied with) his own pet theory—but all of the stories were bullshit because the U.S. government had killed Parsons.

So who was trying to kill me? The government? No, that didn’t make any sense. Even if there were iron-clad proof of what had happened 35 years earlier, who would care? "Yeah, we killed him. So what?" No. What was happening to me was related to something I couldn’t fathom.

I drove at random from freeway to freeway. It seemed like hours, but it was still dark out, so it couldn’t have been that long. Eventually I found myself headed out into the desert. Mountains closed in around the sides of the pavement. The cliffs looked like the Cyclopean ruins of ancient fortifications.

After a while I realized I had seen no other cars for some time. I looked in the rearview mirror. There were no headlights from on-coming traffic behind me. I slowed down. Maybe I should turn around somewhere and head back into the city. Then I saw the desert sand was covering the highway in front of me. I came to a stop. I left the headlights on and stepped out to look at the road.

I stepped out of the car into a thin layer of sand. I scrapped a small furrow with my shoe. It was just sand, but seemed to have a hard undersurface. Sand on the pavement. I looked at the road behind me. More sand. The highway had disappeared.

This is ridiculous, I thought. I’ll wait until daylight to move the car. But what should I do until then? I didn’t want to sleep in the car. The very idea gave me that sitting-duck feeling again. I opened the trunk and took out the baseball bat. Then I turned off the car lights and locked the doors. It was pitch black. I looked up at the cliffs. They were faintly silhouetted against the sky. I began to walk in the direction of one of them.

I walked carefully but the sand was firm. I gradually got over the feeling I might be walking on quicksand. I finally reached a slope and made my way up the steep incline and onto a large slab of rock. I could now see somewhat better in the darkness, but looking back down the way I had come there was only blackness. Further away in the distance, on the other side of the road, was another line of cliffs, and I could see the whole craggy outline against a background of bright stars.

This was a good spot to camp I decided. I’ll wait for daylight here. I looked around me for a place to put the baseball bat, and somewhere to rest my back. There was a smaller rock nearby and I propped the bat against that, and then I sat down, feeling for a niche in the cliff face. I kept looking behind me and that’s when I saw the faint glow of blue light.

It seemed to be coming from a spot slightly above. I worked my way up a couple of yards higher. It was a small cave. The cave tunnel sloped steeply downward and the blue light seemed to be arising from below. The light beckoned.

It would be a close fit, but I could worm my way in head first. No telling what was in the tunnel. Snakes, probably. Maybe bats or other animals. I retrieved the baseball bat to push along in front of me. But when I started to rest it on the tunnel floor in front of my head, it almost leaped into my face.

Gravity was pulling the bat down toward me. I pushed myself partly into the hole and I could feel gravity’s force pushing me back. It was as though I were crawling upward in the tunnel, instead of downward. I slipped back out to get the feel of the ground around me. Yes, I was standing vertically, more or less. Gravity was down. I looked in the tunnel toward the light again. It also was clearly down. But as I crawled into the tunnel, gravity tugged at me to come back out.

Gravity was reversed in the tunnel. Shit, I thought. Now I have to see what’s in there. I put the bat aside, out of my way, and began to pull myself downward through the cave, bracing my feet against the sides. I could hear faint music—the voice of a choir.

For some reason, a phrase kept popping into my head. "Stab your demoniac smile to my brain!" I tried to recall where I had heard it. It seemed distinctly familiar—something hovering on the borders of my mind, but keeping just out of sight around the corner.

The cave opened into a small room. I could sit up and look around. There was a faint bluish light lightly illuminating everything, but I couldn’t detect its source.

Maybe I’m being fried by radiation, I thought. Then I heard a voice. "Not radiation. Radiance."

It was Trisha. Sitting motionless, smiling, perhaps laughing at me.

"What are you doing…" I started. Then I realized I sounded ridiculous, even to myself. What are you doing in a cave? I had started to say. Jesus. What am I doing in a cave? So I said:

"What are you doing in Southern California?"

"What are you doing in Southern California?" she said. Just like Jesus in the New Testament. Answering a question with a question. Clearly two couldn’t play this game.

"I’m looking for Jack Parsons’ killer," I said. I didn’t expect her to have a clue what I was talking about. Unless Sheri had said something. Sheri. Sheri might have told her I was here. Not that that helped explain much. The two of us in a cave. Nothing made any sense.

"So am I," Trisha smiled. "So, who do you think it was? Larry Meier or Oral Jerry Swagger?"

I realize then that I was insane. I had driven randomly from Pasadena and I had ended up in a cave. With my secretary’s roommate—one of the most gorgeous women, if not the most gorgeous woman, in history—and she had used a name that I had only thought about in my private thoughts. Oral Jerry Swagger. The other name I didn’t know. I hadn’t a clue who this "Larry Meier" was.

If I am insane, I thought, I might as well play this out. If I am insane, aren’t I supposed to already know what she is going to say next, since I’m making it all up? If so, I am still going to have to wait for her to say it. Because I haven’t a clue. Right brain, talk to my left brain. Whatever.

Then I realized it was my turn to answer. So I told her my theory it was the U.S. government that had killed Parsons.

Trisha nodded thoughtfully. Then we sat there for a time. Neither of us felt a need to speak.

Finally she stood up. "I have to go," she said. "Be safe. Are you going back the way you came in?" She pointed to the cave tunnel. I looked at it, angling upward above me. There was daylight at the top of the tunnel.

"Yes, I guess." I didn’t want her to leave. "How are you going?"

"Here," she said. She smiled. There was a copper door in the wall, and she opened it. Copper—the metal of Aphrodite, of Venus, I thought irrelevantly. She stood there looking at me. She didn’t invite me to follow her.

"Wait," I said. "When I was coming down here, I kept hearing the line of a poem, ‘Stab your demoniac smile to my brain!’ It was that night. You were there. The Mauvaise Arts Ball. Something happening that night. Something… in Jerusalem." Then I remembered. The Temple of Aphrodite.

"Oh, that," she smiled. "It was just something that happened to two people."

"Who? Who were those two people?"

I wanted her to stay. I wanted her so much. I thought I would burst into flame, like a spontaneous combustion victim.

She smiled even brighter. A face that would launch a thousand aircraft carriers, I thought.

"Maybe it was my mother and Jack Parsons," she said.

Then her face became totally expressionless.

"Or maybe it was you and me. Or maybe some of all of the above."

The copper door slammed behind her and I was alone.