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be . . .corrected, if you will. Turn here, Jim," he pointed
to a break in the highway—barely a road at all.
"It'll be muddy," Jim said. "We'll get stuck."
"Less than a quarter mile of it's dirt; the rest is
gravel," Robert said, and then closed his eyes. "Are
you hungry, Jim?"
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"I could use some breakfast. I'm sure there's a
McDonald's opening up in this town within an hour
or two."
"No, you don't want fast food, Jimmy. My mother's
an excellent cook. Real down-home cooking. You'll
like her; she'll take to you, too. Now, see, up ahead,
there's Empire," and Jim looked beyond the trees and
the tangling, unkempt vines, the stink of overripe
grapes and rotting fruit on the wet morning air, and
he felt Stewart's hand on his right shoulder, and
heard a gasp from the doctor, like the sound of a man
who's finally been let out of prison.
"Been a long time since you've been back, sir?"
"Oh," Stewart said, "a very, very long time. And yet,
what is it with some places? You feel that you've never
left them, that they've always been with you. How old
are you, Jimmy?"
Jim beamed with pride, "Just twenty-one, sir."
"So young. Where do you hail from, boy?"
"Virginia, sir."
"A southern gentleman. Do you realize that the
year you were born was the last time I was here, phys-
ically, in this town?"
"Don't believe in visiting family much, then?"
"Only when it's the right time, Jim, only when it's
the right time. And this is it. This is the right time. My
research has kept me very busy."
"I guess." Jim felt he could breathe easier here, let
down his guard a little. He wasn't sure what Task
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Force 050 was about, other than that it had to do with
some kind of animal experiments, and he was aware
that the people who were against that sort of thing
were dangerous — thus, the secrecy of the experiment
in 050.
"Jim," Robert Stewart sighed, "Jim, oh, Jim. Empire
hasn't changed. I used to play here, among the rows of
vines. I had a dog, a Doberman, and we'd run all over
—and my brothers, and my sister. All out here."
Jim slowed the car. To his left was a white mission
house; up above it was a town that was right out of a
movie about small-town America, complete with roos-
ter weather vanes and white church steeples. Trees were
woven into the fabric of the streets, and behind it all,
the low oil pumps that gave any rural area of California
an industrialized look, as if the surface of Empire might
appear quaint and serene, but underground there was
constant pumping and drilling, and destruction. "It
looks like a nice place," Jim said, not really liking the
look of it at all. What the hell was Projects up to here?
He continued up the road until he came to the
Empire Road; Stewart told him to take a right, and
then an immediate left into the potholed driveway of
a small farmhouse with a barn behind it. It smelled
like chickenshit and horseshit.
"This is it," Stewart said.
Jim glanced in the mirror again, and saw some-
thing that made the hair on the back of his neck
stand on end.
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dark of the eye
And yet Dr. Stewart hadn't changed. Not really. He
had the same look of composure and calm; his hair
was neatly combed to one side, and he didn't even
appear to have any stubble.
Jim's wife, Hilary, enjoyed reading vampire novels,
and so Jim had, when he was bored, read a few of
them. And that was just what Stewart looked like to
him just then, in the draining shadows of morning, a
vampire, his face white, his eyes piercing and hyp-
notic, and something wild there, beneath the skin.
For a second Jim saw something else, too, something
less lunatic, less imaginative.
He saw a torturer.
"Something the matter, Jimmy?"
"You were going to tell me about Task Force Oh-
five-oh, sir?"
Dr. Stewart shrugged, screwing his face up as if this
were an absurd subject to go into so early in the
morning. "Jimmy. Private Jim. Later. Couldn't you use
some coffee? Some fresh eggs, scrambled to perfec-
tion, fresh hot homemade bread, and pork chops?"
A large, although not particularly overweight
woman with a gray beehive hairdo and thick specta-
cles propped up on her nose was coming toward the
Cadillac, and although she smiled, Jim Park was
scared shitless, because in her left hand was a
chicken, its neck freshly wrung, its skinny legs still
twitching.
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chapter 50
5:36 A.M.
Monkey Lovett slept fitfully, still dreaming of the
imperfect girl who was supposed to be the one who
would make them all gods. He awoke, as he had sev-
eral times in the night, feeling that someone was star-
ing down at him. Next to him, his brother Harlan. He
whispered, "You scared, Harly?"
Inside his skin, Harlan replied. Nothing to be scared
of, Monkeyman.
Monkey nuzzled closer to his brother's chest. The
dead smell rising from the cavity on Harlan's left side
had worsened. Monkey didn't like bad smells so
much, but he was more scared of the imperfect girl
than he was of Harlan. "You promise you won't ever
leave me?"
Birdy replied, We made the oath, Monkey, remember?
We cut into you and bound all three of us together in blood.
Remember?
Monkey closed his eyes, feeling comforted. He
didn't like the imperfect girl much, just as he hadn't
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dark of the eye
like the imperfect boy. The boy scared him, too, and
he had spent most of his life avoiding him whenever
possible. But the boy left Monkey alone; the girl was
different. Monkey had looked into her, past her skin
and her blood, into the marrow of her being, and
had seen her missing eye, within her. The darkest eye
he had ever seen.
Inside her.
He shivered and clutched Harlan's arm, pulling it
around his neck. Good to be back with family.
Harlan had been dead for years, and still Monkey
felt the warmth of life in the skin, and the blood that
settled along the side of his lower back. Harly was
shriveled, a little, sort of like a dried-apple-headed
doll, but he looked the same. Still some wisps of red-
blond hair around his dried-apricot ears. Still the look
in his eyes, even though the eyes were marble now.
"Gonna play soon," Monkey told Harly.
Harly didn't reply. He was usually quiet.
Birdy said, You can play with the girl once it's started.
Once it's started, she's yours.
But Monkey was silent. He wasn't sure if he wanted
to play with this girl at all.
That inner eye scared him.
The darkest eye.
And then he slept well, with his dead brother's
arm around him and the smell of death like a mem-
ory of comfort and security. Sleeping with the dead
was part of what the cult had taught him.
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"No separation," the GoodMama had said. "What is
dead and what is alive, all the same. What inhabits the body
in life still inhabits it in death. But the body becomes a
prison. We must seek to liberate the dead from their prison.
We must seek to make the body continue even when the heart
has stopped its beating. This is the purpose of Cthonos. This
is the joy of Cthonos. We are the chosen who will destroy the
barriers between the living and the dead."
But he smelled something in the dark passage
where he slept — not death but the other.
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