EVERYTHING WAS PINK, the whole of the world a warm, golden-tinged pink. Consciousness itself was pink. It had to be, for that was all Henry could perceive for what seemed an eternity, a pink the shifted from light to dark as he tried to move his head, or drag his limbs, which mysteriously had been transformed to lead in some perverse alchemy, across the bed.
Bed? Yes, a bed. Henry was lying on a bed. The sudden realization filled him with unexpected relief, and he tried to let the pink and gold world go and slip back into the slumber from which he surely had prematurely awaken. But now there were voices in the pink, and dark, indistinct shapes passed through the golden light, which Henry now saw as a lamp. He tried to lift his head but nothing happened.
A blurry face blotted out the pink, hovering over his eyes. The face said something in a language Henry didn't understand, but he felt as if he knew. Then the face receded, and Henry tried to sink down away from the pink when something lifted his head up. Something cold pressed against his lips, and he found himself swallowing. He tried to say something but he only heard a low sound come out of his throat, and he laid his head back, wanting only for the fuzzy pinkness of reality to let go of him, let him go down into darkness.
Then the face from before peered down at him again, and this time he saw two dark eyes, malevolent as thunderheads on the horizon, and a name formed in his mind that shattered the glowing thickness of his senses.
Mangopoulos.
Everything came into horrifying focus. The numbness drained away from his limbs and head, and he realized that whatever he drank had restored him to his faculties. And then he saw his friend Napoleon Hendryx, his bloody body lying in a dumpster.
"Oh, Nap," Henry moaned, thickly. My fault, he
thought.
Something between a sigh and a laugh came from Mangopoulos
as his face receded. Henry tried to sit up, but he was still
disoriented. He managed to roll over, and that's when he
realized why the world was pink.
He was in an elaborately decorated bedroom where every single furnishing, from the Rococo nightstand to the velvet patterned wallpaper was in varying shades of pink. Pink drapes framed the window, trailing along the expensive pink Berber carpet on the floor. The golden glow came from a huge gilded lamp by the bed. Henry took all this in as he saw Mangopoulos turn and stride out of the room through two light pink French doors. There were other people, many in fact, outside the room, but Henry sensed this more than he saw. His vision was slowly coming into focus, and he heard martial voices, shouting, barking orders of some kind.
The room was familiar, terribly familiar. Henry at last managed to sit up, swinging his legs down to the floor like two heavy pendulums. He blinked, rubbing his temple and his eye (which he realized was once again twitching) and stared out the window. There was something weird about the light outside. Henry rubbed his eyes, and looked again and at last it hit him: the sky was fluorescent.
He was in the Underground House.
"Up? Good! No one does potions like my little Lethe!" A voice like gravel poured over cello strings came from behind him. Henry slowly turned, and had to blink and rub his eyes again.
The man couldn't be more than four feet tall, but he was built like a rhino: barrel-chested, stocky and thick-armed, as if Popeye had fallen into a trash compactor. He was completely bald, his head scarred and pitted, as was his face, at least the part of it that could be seen behind his thick, gray beard. One of his eyes was a milky white but the other was as blue as the Mediterranean Sea. He was wearing a thick black leather apron over some kind of uniform, and as he walked over to Henry, staring agape at him, he moved with the swiftness and ease of an antelope.
He took Henry's face into his hands, gently but firmly, his good eye appraising it as if Henry was a bill of goods. The man nodded, and smiled. "Yes. Good. No permanent damage. Not that it would have mattered! Except to an old man who likes a good conversation!" He laughed, and Henry felt as if it was the most menacing thing he had ever heard.
Over the man's shoulder, Henry was dimly aware that a great number of people were rushing about, in hurry but disciplined. Like troops, thought Henry wildly. He was still not sure what was happening. The transition from pink to awareness had been so quick that he felt like he was in shock.
"What.. what…" he struggled to say.
"Shhhh," said the man. "Soon enough, the talk. Good talk! But first, you come with me." The man lifted him off the bed like a child, directing him down the hall and into the grand, main living room of the secret home that Ronald R. Armstrong had created thirty years ago.
Of all the shocks now registering in Henry's addled brain, the most bewildering one was how he had passed out—drugged, he realized—at Atomic Liquors downtown and came to again 25 feet below the surface of southeast Las Vegas. For that is where he was: inside the house that Armstrong, a rich aviation pioneer who gave Howard Hughes a run for his money in the eccentricity department, had carved out of the ground, creating a 6000 square foot house surrounded by astroturf, steel trees and elaborate murals of distant vistas, a fluorescent sky that went from day to night, and a ceiling where the roof of the ranch-style abode would be.
Armstrong and his wife Betty—whose ultra-pink bedroom Henry had awoken in—lived in the house for the last two decades of their lives, and now the property belonged to a trust that occasionally rented it out or gave tours. Which brought Henry to his next thought: what were Mangopoulos and his Greek thugs doing here?
"Many questions, eh my friend?" said the man, smiling peculiarly as he led Henry through the living room, unchanged since the Sixties, its white shag carpet groaning under neoclassical kitsch sofas and Chinese cabinets. "Hah! We will see if we cannot answer them over Turkish coffee! Strong coffee for strong men!" The man laughed his horrible laugh again, and Henry recoiled as if a pit bull had thrust its face at him.
But he followed the man into the kitchen, and sat at the long table when the man motioned him to do so. Figures in dark clothes suddenly trotted by the windows, shadows against the mock vistas of oceans and mountains that Armstrong had had painted, so that every window in the house was a "room with a view." The figures passed out of earshot, and soon the sounds of activity at the far end of the house-where the elevator to the desert landscaped "roof" was-faded into silence. Henry realized, shuddering, that he and the man were alone.
"It is good to be down here where it is quiet, yes? A good place to go unseen in a place with so much sun, sun, sun!" said the man over his shoulder. "So simple, the matter of obtaining it. What money does to you Americans! And a little persuasion. Hah!"
It was a struggle to put his thoughts into order. He kept seeing Nap's bloodstained face, his own hands covered in his friend's blood. Mangopoulos… Mangopoulos had killed him. But where was Mangopoulos going with so many men? Henry stared at this strange old brute's back as the man busied himself, methodically, with a coffee press.
"Who… are you?" Henry said at last. It was an effort to get this out; his throat felt raw.
"Hah! A good question, one with many answers, yes?" The man spoke to Henry in a booming voice, without turning around. "Who are you, Henry Bethel? Art critic? Professor? Sinatraist? Dupe?" He laughed. "I have just as many names. But you may call me Gus, my friend. Gus will do for you!" He laughed after each exclamation, and each time he did it Henry's blood chilled.
"Yes, so many names. We change them, try them on like hats. Still the same heads underneath hats! Hah! We do not change. No one escapes the mirror. Not even the witches!"
"The… witches?" Henry looked around the room. He was starting to feel fully normal again. He knew what the man meant: Maude S— and her assistants. He spied a block filled with carving knives on the counter to his left.
"Hah!" barked Gus. He still had his back to Henry as he prepared the grounds. "Of course. You think you know what you are about, Henry Bethel, but you know nothing. Like all critics! You look at a statue, you say this and that, thinking you have described its truth, when in fact you are a million miles away from the hand that sculpted it, its real meaning! You are just hot air against that statue, like a summer wind blowing over rocks. Hah! Summer Wind!" Here, Gus laughed even harder, and began to sing "Summer Wind" in a voice like roadkill, his accented English growing thick.
Henry softly stood, his hand reaching out for the knives, very slowly. If he could just arm himself, make it to the elevator…
Gus broke off in mid-bar, paused and said in a different, gentle tone: "Do not think you can stab me, Henry Bethel. I will kill you before the knife leaves its sheath."
Henry's eyes widened and he sat back down like a man in a daze. Gus had not turned around to see what he was doing.
"You'll… forgive me," said Henry, his composure rising. "Having seen what you did to my friend, and finding myself kidnapped, I just now feared for my life, you understand."
"Friend?" said Gus, still with his back to Henry. "Ah yes. The detective! A, how do you say, has-been? Well, not so much of a has-been. He found out some things about Don Ix, and some things he was not looking for. Hah! He killed himself, I think. Had he done as was instructed—which was simply to call you, my friend, and tell you to meet him about an urgency, so that we could have our coffee this evening, as we are doing now—he would be alive to fill his bar stool. But he decided on heroics, yes? So, he is dead, and below us, with the shades. And we are still having our coffee!"
Gus turned around and brought two small, steaming cups of coffee to the table, placing one in front of Henry. "Strong as love, black as death! Hah!" Gus sat down opposite of him, and fixed his blue eye on him, Henry felt, like a laser sight from a high-powered rifle. They were silent for a long minute.
"So," Henry said. "You've killed my friend so that we could talk." Henry stared at him. "So talk. Tell me precisely what this is about while I figure out how to make sure you and Mangopoulos and whoever it is you work for pay for it." Henry wanted to sound determined, but his voice came out trembling. Nap, I'm so sorry, he thought to himself, a little knife already in his heart.
"Hah! Yes, talk is good. It fills the silence so thought cannot prey upon us. The thoughts that solitude gives us, not so good. Thoughts, they lead to trouble!" Gus grinned, a weirdly hideous sight, and sipped his still scalding hot coffee. Henry saw a large lapis ring embedded into the swollen flesh of his finger: an elaborate design of a peacock, green and blue glinting beneath the kitchen light.
"You had much too much solitude, Henry Bethel? Much better, all those nights of talk with the Witch. Hah! What things were said! But—how is it that Nietzsche said—you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you? Hah! Yes, my friend, you sitting there, blinded by the Witch's mask, walking a tightrope over a chasm like a sleepwalker! Mooning over a monster! Hah!" Gus slurped his coffee and grinned again, his yellow teeth giving off a fetid, diseased smell. "You have been—how do you say—a fool for love?" He fixed Henry not with his blue eye but with the clouded one, as if he could see right through him.
Henry stared at him evenly, even as his cheeks flushed. How could they know so much? How could this strange dwarf see into him as if he was glass? Focus, Henry, he thought, anger rising, coalescing within him.
"The only monsters I've seen are the ones who stabbed a man to death tonight, the ones who have persecuted a woman for reasons that are inexplicable." He leaned forward, trying to stare down that unnerving white eye. "So why don't you explain to me precisely who you people are and precisely why Maude S— is a 'witch.'"
Gus smiled, and shook his head. "Hah! Some perception, some art critic! You spend nights with this… thing, you see her unholy handiwork, and yet you see nothing!" Gus sipped his coffee again, and his smile faded. "Your friend died at the hands of soldiers, of warriors in a just cause, Henry Bethel." He leaned forward and said in a searing growl, "Untold thousands have died at the hands of your… artist." He spat the word out as if a bug had crawled into his mouth.
Gus leaned back and laughed. "But that will end, at long last, this glorious night, my friend! Patience and fools like you have brought us far, and this time the Witch shall not escape!"
Henry stared at him, hard. "What do you mean?" he said, but the sinking in his stomach told him. He knew where Mangopoulos and all the others had gone.
"Everything has come together. Such careful planning! You were the only, how do you say, wildcard? Important, not for you to be involved when the authorities investigate. Too many questions that might lead somewhere—might even lead our misguided friend Don Ix to us. So, our coffee!" Gus smiled, almost in rapture. "Now, nothing to obstruct us! At last, we complete our sacred mission!"
Maude, thought Henry. I have to get to Maude, and now.
"I presume you are to prevent me from… leaving your hospitality?"
Gus laughed, long and horribly. "Ah, such the gentleman! A gentleman who loves a monster!" Gus smiled, downed the rest of his coffee and slammed the drained cup against the table. "Yes, my friend. You and I will drink coffee until our general and soldiers return, victorious. If you try to leave, I will indeed kill you. If you keep me company, and we have much good talk, then our general will show you what you have kept company with, and you may yet live to be a fool for love again! Hah!"
Henry stared for a moment, then smiled a very weak smile. Small as Gus was, Henry sensed he was immensely strong—not to mention the fact he seemed to have eyes in the back of his head. "Well. I guess that's that then. I don't suppose we could enjoy our coffee in the comfort of the living room."
Gus roared. "Ah, so civilized! Where would we be without you civilized critics to tell us who we are! Come, we shall sit amidst the sea of white, here in our palace of a cave." He stood, poured out more coffee, and took Henry by the elbow, guiding him back into the living room.
"Well," said Henry, "since you have mocked me to my core, I feel I shouldn't let you down. Perhaps you'd like to know some of my ridiculous opinions about the art." Armstrong had indeed filled his hideaway with tons of art, most of it 19th and 18th century Chinese. Henry stood, coffee in hand, next to a large decorative mask of a dragon, its fierce mouth open, its blank eyes staring down into the mismatched eyes of Gus.
"Hah! Yes, that is good talk! Perhaps you are not so much the fool… or at least, not so much the hero!" Gus leered and chuckled happily to himself. "So tell me about this dragon!"
Now it was Henry's turn to smile, a smile that hardened as he spoke. "Of course, there's something very special about this piece. But before I tell you, there are two things you should know."
"Yes, my friend?" said Gus, sardonically amused, holding his coffee in his thick, scaly, and deadly hands as daintily as a society matron.
"First, there's another part to that famed quote by Nietzsche: 'If you do battle with monsters, be careful not to become a monster yourself.'"
"Hah!" said Gus. His eye fixed upon Henry's eyes.
"Secondly," said Henry, his hand reaching out toward the dragon as if to point out some feature of it, "the only fools are those who have never loved at all: not a woman, not an artwork… not even a monster."
And as Gus' smile instinctively vanished, Henry's hand slipped deep into the dragon's mouth and touched something that plunged Ronald R. Armstrong's Underground House into absolute darkness.