Shadowfires

great as orgasm. Before his death, he had been an obsessive achiever,
a builder of empires, a compulsive acquirer of wealth, but following
his death he had become an engine of destruction, as fully compelled
to smash property as he had once been compelled to acquire it.
    The cabin was decorated in ultramodern with accents of art deco-
like the ruined floor lamp-not a style particularly well suited to a
five-room mountain cabin but one which satisfied Eric's need for a sense of newness and modernity in all things. In a frenzy, he began to reduce the trendy decor to piles of bright rubble. He picked up the armchair as if it weighed only a pound or two and heaved it at the three-panel mirror on the wall behind the bed. The tripartite mirror exploded, and the armchair fell onto the bed in a rain of silvered glass. Breathing hard, Eric seized the damaged floor lamp, held it by the pole, swung it at a piece of bronze sculpture that stood on the dresser, using the heavy base of the lamp as a huge hammer- bang! -knocking the sculpture to the floor, swung the lamp-hammer twice at the dresser mirror- bang, bang! -smashing, smashing, swung it at a painting hanging on the wall near the door to the bathroom, brought the picture down, hammered the artwork where it lay on the floor. He felt good, so good, never better, alive. As he gave himself entirely and joyfully to his berserker rage, he snarled with animal ferocity or shrieked wordlessly, though he was able/to form one special word with unmistakable clarity, “Rachael,” spoke it with unadulterated hatred, spittle spraying, “Rachael, Rachael.” He pounded the makeshift hammer into a white-lacquered occasional table that had stood beside the armchair, pounded and pounded until the table was reduced to splinters-"Rachael, Rachael"-struck the smaller lamp on the nightstand and knocked it to the floor. Bang! Arteries pounding furiously in his neck and temples, blood singing in his ears, he hammered the nightstand itself until he had broken the handles off the drawers, hammered the wall, “Rachael,” hammered until the pole lamp was too bent to be of any further use, angrily tossed it aside, grabbed the drapes and ripped them from their rods, tore another painting from the wall and put his foot through the canvas, “Rachael, Rachael, Rachael.” He staggered wildly now and flailed at the air with his big arms and turned in circles, a crazed bull, and he abruptly found it hard to breathe, felt the insane strength drain out of him, felt the mad destructive urge flowing away, away, and he dropped to the floor, onto his knees, stretched flat out on his chest, head turned to one side, face in the deep-pile carpet, gasping. His confused thoughts were even muddier than the strange and clouded eyes that he could not bear to look at in a mirror, but though he no longer possessed demonic energy, he had the strength to mutter that special name again and again while he lay on the floor: “Rachael… Rachael… Rachael…”

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PART
TWO DARKER
    Night has patterns that can be read
    less by the living than by the dead.
    -T he Book of Counted Sorrows

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17 PEOPLE ON
THE MOVE
    Choppering in from Palm Springs, Anson Sharp
had arrived before dawn at
Geneplan's bacteriologically secure underground research laboratories near Riverside, where he had been greeted by a contingent of six Defense Security Agency operatives, four U.S. marshals, and eight of the marshals'
deputies, who had arrived minutes before him. Under the pretense of a
national defense emergency, fully supported by valid court orders and
search warrants, they identified themselves to Geneplan's night security guards, entered the premises, applied seals to all research files and computers, and established an operations headquarters in the rather sumptuously appointed offices belonging to Dr. Vincent Baresco, chief of the research staff.
    As dawn dispelled the night and as day took possession of the
world above the subterranean laboratories, Anson Sharp slumped in
Baresco's enormous leather chair, sipped black coffee, and received reports, by phone, from subordinates throughout southern California, to the effect that Eric Leben's
coconspirators in the Wildcard Project were all under house arrest.
In Orange County, Dr. Morgan Eugene Lewis, research coordinator of
Wildcard, was being detained with his wife at his home in North
Tustin. Dr. J. Felix Geffels was being held at his house right there
in Riverside. Dr.