Greg Smith: Immortal Coils-ch1

Barak Connelly stood in the darkness for almost twenty minutes before he stepped closer to the mansion. He told himself for the hundredth time to just walk away, to forget that he'd ever been here, but his feet led him reluctantly toward the dark windows of the place.

Barak tried to tell himself that he was here for one simple reason, but an inner voice reminded him that his motives were far darker and more complicated than that.

Contending emotions clashed on the bloody battlefield of his conscience. He didn't want to be here. It was foolish. Maybe it was insane.

Yet, as much as he wished to turn away from here and return to the safety of his own home, he knew he would go through with this. He always did. He denied that knowledge with a well-practiced facility, but he was addicted to the spiky rush of adrenaline that now raced through his blood the same way other men were addicted to drugs, or to sex, or to power. Barak needed to feel the thrill of these fear-attenuated moments as much as he needed to feel the hot white lights of the stage. It was a need that had seeped into his bones, year by successful year. It was a part of him now.

No one knew of this addiction. Sometimes Barak wished he would be caught and forced to suffer the consequences; those indignities would surely lead him to an ultimate release from the cruel but intoxicating grip that even now tightened around his chest.

But Barak had never been caught. The uncanny combination of luck and instinct that always followed him through his nocturnal adventures served him well---too well---and these clandestine activities remained an exquisite and inviolable secret.

Adrenaline hummed through his veins as he approached the big paneled door. He paused while a shiver coursed through him. A smile stretched the fabric of the black hood he wore---an admittedly over-dramatic effect that appealed to his primarily television-educated, working-class mentality---and he moved toward the house, alert for any movement.

He knew there would be internal security systems; the owner of a big Colonial in Grosse Pointe Farms, behind a six-foot fence and an electric gate, wouldn't stop there. This peaceful community was too close to downtown Detroit to ignore the crime ravaging that city.

But those security systems would be designed to thwart the common criminal---the dope addict out to feed a back-breaking monkey, or the desperate obsessive gambler with potentially fatal debts to pay---not a calculating, determined man like Barak Connelly.

There were contact wires on the big bay window. Barak looked up and smiled as he traced a route up to the second story. The columned house-front afforded little purchase, but the massive oak tree on the west side of the place would give him access to the ledge of the upstairs window.

Angelica believed he was downtown tonight, working on a hot bright stage, fighting for laughs, battling wits with hecklers, and struggling to keep the crowd with him, line by line.

Angel never went to see him perform these days. It wasn't that she didn't like to watch him perform; she's simply heard all of his routines too many times to find them amusing anymore. Barak hadn't broken in any new material since last summer. It really didn't matter, given the few widely scattered gigs he'd managed to get lately. But he and Angel were both aware that over-exposure led to complacency, a danger that Barak had fought too hard for too long to keep from his marraige to let it creep in now under the guise of dutiful companionship.

Angel was as sensitive to complacency as she was to pollen. She had tactfully allowed Barak to go his own way, as far as his after-hours career was concerned.

Some nights Barak forgot that he was up there to inspire the crowd to laugh. He saw the choppy sea of faces before him as adversaries. And he fought them for their laughter. He could be brutal to hecklers, an occupational hazard that he saw as his own Sword of Damocles. He knew damn well that, if he stood under that attitude long enough, it would surely strike him dead.

Barak wondered if he shouldn't have stayed in business school, made his wife and her father both happy, and avoided the single-handed journey he'd chosen toward hard-won laughter and fame. (Fame? No. Not even his dreams had ever gone that far.)

Barak took a closer look at the door. The lock would be no problem, but the telltale plates of two dead-bolt locks loomed above the polished brass lever of the door-latch. He didn't want to take the time to slip them, so he moved toward the oak tree, his sight darting between the house and the quiet residential street beyond the black wrought iron gate.

With leather gloves and Nikes, he scurried up the tree easily. His heart raced when he saw the clear glass, unmarked by any sign of an alarm. He ascended the ledge. This was going to be too easy. Barak shinnied along a branch of the sprawling oak, dropped to a crouch on the narrow window ledge, and peered between his cupped hands through the corner of the window.

The moonlit room made him think of a museum. Grotesque masks stared from two adjacent walls. A shadowed figure that looked like a mummified human stood in an open sarcophagus that was propped up in the far left corner of the room.

The opposite wall was lined with books. A large roll-top desk sat before a high-backed chair that was turned to face the bookshelves.

A low round wooden table to the right of the window supported a foot-high green jade idol. It balanced on one foot upon a many-petaled pedestal, its multiple pairs of arms poised in graceful symmetry.

Barak exhaled a slow breath and reminded himself that he still had time to talk himself out of this. Something he couldn't identify bothered him about that room. It was more than all the spooky stuff in there. There was something else in there, too. Something very dangerous. That vague feeling dragged him by the neck toward fear, but he shrugged the clammy clutch of it away. He knelt on the ledge, looking toward the street, as he slowly unzipped the nylon pouch strapped to his waist.

He removed the plastic-handled suction cup and pressed it to the glass near the window ledge. With practiced precision, he cut a perfect circle in the glass around the cup, took another look around, and snapped the circle free with a tap of his fingers on the handle of the suction cup. Then he carefully pulled it away from the window and placed it at his feet.

He reached inside and grinned when the window latch opened smoothly. After another glance to the quiet road, Barak lifted the window by the latch, ready to jump to the ground at the slightest hint of an alarm.

When the window was open far enough, he snaked his hand from the hole, reached under the frame, and pulled it up the rest of the way. Barak ducked inside the window frame and crawled through it onto the carpeted floor. He grabbed his penlight from the pack and checked the window frame more closely, wondering if even now a silent alarm were leading a patrol car to him.

Barak carefully avoided the gauzy rhombus of moonlight that fell on the far wall as he moved the beam of his penlight over the walls and the corners in search of motion detectors or infrared cameras. Anything. He couldn't believe there were no security systems here. Not with all the ancient-looking stuff in this place. The insurance company would demand it.

The mystery of it thrilled him. His lungs trapped a breath as his bloodstream was hit with another spike of adrenaline.

Barak spared another moment to study the groupings of ceremonial tribal masks on the walls. His brow lowered. They were nasty looking things, all of them. Some with hair of dried grass. African? Others looked Asian. A few of them he couldn't begin to identify. But they were all menacing, grimacing, staring fiercely at him, as if they were commanding him to leave this place before it was too late.

A green-shaded lamp on the desk clicked. In the sudden light, the green leather chair finished swiveling silently to reveal a man sitting in it.

Barak obeyed, his brain fire, his limbs stone. His burning brain screamed at him to run---but the sight of the small gray snub-nosed revolver in the man's hands blasted the idea from Barak's mind.

Barak carefully reached up and lifted the hood from his face. He couldn't take his eyes off the gun for more than a split-second, but he kept glancing to the man's steel-gray eyes to see if his death were within them.

Barak was unarmed, as always. Not even a knife. Grand larceny was one thing, but he would never risk an armed robbery charge. That was pushing things too far.

He dropped his hood on the desk and swept strands of straight blond hair from his fear-filled blue eyes. Then he put his hands up, silently praying for the barrel of the gun to move away from his chest.

The man sighed a sound of mildly impatient amusement. Barak wondered if this guy had been waiting here, knowing he would catch a thief. The question chilled him; he looked for an answer in the man's level stare. There was a cold hard knowledge there, and something else that Barak couldn't look at for more than an instant. Something deadly.

Wasn't this guy just a little bit pissed off? After all, he had just caught someone breaking into his house, and he sounded like he was offering a seat to an invited guest, rather than ordering an intruder at gunpoint.

"Now, I would ask what you're doing here, if it weren't so blatantly obvious. You have a flair for the dramatic, don't you?"

The look in the man's eyes intensified. There were cold, deadly thoughts behind them now, and Barak didn't know where they had come from. "You heard me. Who sent you here?"

Barak shook his head. His hair fell back into his eyes, and he was afraid to move his hands, so he blew the hair away with a loud breath.

The man studied Barak's face, which shouldn't have been too hard to read. Barak could feel the man's cold gray eyes boring into him, searching for the truth. Barak held that truth out to him with his own wide eyes, hoping the man would see it.

The barrel of the gun looked as big as a shotgun barrel; it grew bigger every time Barak glanced down. Barak hoped the man would believe him.

The man laughed a dry mirthless laugh. Cynical. Disbelieving. Mildly annoyed at an attempt to misdirect him concerning something he knew to be true.

"Nobody sent me. I just picked this place. At random. You know. I was only looking for stuff---you know---stuff I could fence. For money. That's all. Just a little bit of---"

The man silenced Barak with a look and an impatient gesture with the gun. The gun's barrel was bigger and blacker now, and Barak could feel his soul straining against the pull of that blackness. He wondered if his whole life would flash before him, like it always did in the movies. Yet nothing flashed before him but fear, and he felt cheated of that last brief luxury.

Barak didn't answer that. This man was playing with him; he was going to shoot him. The cops and the courts wouldn't blink an eye. It was a clear-cut case---one that held no repercussions for this cold-eyed man.

Barak opened his mouth to lie. He wasn't stupid enough to carry ID at a time like this; he could tell this man anything. But a warning stare stopped the lie in his lungs. He let the breath out silently, wondering why he had never before fully appreciated a wonderful thing like breathing. When he opened his mouth again, he said, "My name is Barak. Barak Jaimus Connelly."

His name was taken from his maternal grandfather. Translated from the original Hebrew, it meant "lightning flash." But nobody knew that. That this man did know it frightened Barak all the more. Barak had always been frightened of clever people. They always seemed to be able to see through his false bravado and his manufactured self-esteem to find the insecure, frightened little dreamer who lived silently beneath them.

A clever man with a gun trained on his heart compounded that equation to a level Barak had never known. Barak thought his heart might explode if it didn't slow down soon; he had never known fear like this.

Barak swallowed. Sniffed. His arms weighed fifty pounds apiece, and they were gaining weight by the moment. His fear charged itself for a rush to the window, but his better judgment let that charge dissipate in a defeated sigh. If he moved a muscle, this man would drop him like a rock.

Now the gun was an anti-aircraft cannon; Barak couldn't stand to look at the eternal blackness that was staring back at him from the center of the barrel.

He was taller than Barak would have guessed. His spare but muscular frame filled his black smoking jacket in a way that made Barak think of a former college athlete, still conscientious enough to maintain the body he once honed to its peak of performance.

But how long ago would college have been for this man? Twenty years ago? Forty? Barak couldn't tell. Though the man appeared to be in early middle age, his eyes were much older---too full of the wisdom of long life to match the physical evidence of his age.

The man leaned against the edge of the desk. His angular features drew down around a scowl of deep thought. Barak didn't dare speak, didn't dare plead for his life. Whatever this man decided would be done, and no appeal held any power over him. Barak could see it in his eyes.

Barak nodded. A shred of hope held him from falling into a pit of panic. He would agree to anything, if it meant he would live.

The man walked to the nearest wall and stared at the groupings of tribal masks as if they were whispering advice to him, telling him strategies that only he could hear.

Barak didn't see the need for this. He'd just been caught, hadn't he? But the man seemed to be waiting for something. "Sure," Barak said in a hesitant way, thinking that was what the man wanted to hear. "Sure, I guess."

A soft laugh. "Until now." He acknowledged his victory over Barak without interest. "But you have been successful before this unfortunate evening, have you not?"

Barak gently reached out with a shaking hand and touched the jade figurine on the table next to the chair. His pulse pounded faster; this man was stacking the deck against him. To kill him, maybe, and be assured that the police wouldn't be any trouble. Barak moved his hand back, watching it tremble. He sat quietly and waited.

"I'm going to let you go, Mr. Connelly---" Barak was confused, exhilarated, suspicious. "---if you agree to two simple conditions." The Man with the Gun waited for Barak to collect himself and pay attention. "I want you to steal something for me."

Barak's body chemistry shifted toward normal. The man's proposal, though strange, made a certain kind of sense---enough sense that Barak could believe it. He was going to live.

The Man with the Gun studied him for a moment. The gun didn't move. "I do believe you will." He was pleased with himself. He walked back to his chair and sat. The gun remained aimed at the center of Barak's chest for another moment, then he set it carefully on the desk and retracted the wooden slats of the desktop.

The man pulled a sheaf of papers from the desk and began to go through them, seeming to ignore Barak. But Barak could see a glimmer in his eyes that said Barak would be shot if he moved, bargain or no bargain.

"Ah, here it is." The man picked up the gun again, stood from the chair, and walked the few steps necessary to come within reach of Barak. He handed him a pad of paper and an antique gold fountain pen. "Write down this address," he said, holding a newspaper clipping where Barak could see it and pointing with the barrel of the gun to a circled address. The tone of his voice assured Barak that he intended to be obeyed.

Barak copied the address the best he could, though his hands were shaking so badly he could hardly hold the pen at all.

The man held a photograph in front of Barak's face. The gun remained aimed steadily at his heart. "Look at this. Take a good look." He moved the photo out of reach when Barak extended his hand. "Don't touch it. Just look at it."

The photograph showed a necklace. It was strange. It looked old. And it looked like it might be worth a small fortune. Barak had nightmare visions of laser security systems and intrusion alarms. He swallowed dry air.

The necklace was an oval of polished black stone. Onyx, maybe. The smooth surface of it had been meticulously etched with the figure of a dragon, its jaws wide, its snaky body wound around the figure of a human that seemed to be inside the black stone, carved to look like a hologram. It was attached to the silver chain by a silver claw, and the whole thing looked ominous and ancient, like all the other weird stuff in this room.

The man nodded. "You find that address. You get in. The gentleman who lives there always wears this black stone around his neck. Always. You take it from him---I don't care how---and then you bring me proof that you have it."

"No!" The gun wavered. Barak winced, wishing the man wouldn't grip the trigger so tightly. "Don't bring it here. Don't bring it anywhere near here." He took a breath. "I only need proof that you possess it."

"I don't care what you do with it. Throw it away. Give it to your mother. Fence it. I don't care. But you must never bring it here."

Barak didn't need to hear any more. He was convinced. Those eyes, as cold and as gray as the gun in his hands, were every bit as capable of murder. Barak believed it was a miracle he had survived thus far, and he knew better than to do anything to push his luck.

"I'll give you a week. If I don't have what I want by then, I'll call the police. I'll trump up charges against you until even your own lawyer will want to kill you. You'll never get out from under it all. Now get out. Back out the window, the same way you came in."

Barak stood. He waited for his legs to agree to hold him up, and then he walked to the window in slow, frightened steps. As much as Barak hated looking at the gun, now not looking at it, while he knew it was still in the man's hand, was even worse. He imagined the flash and the crack of the bullet with every step he took.

His arms ached. His bladder ached. His heart ached. He bent down, crawled through the open window without looking up and retraced his steps through the grounds of the house, leaving his mask and his gloves behind.

Morton Grimshaw watched the thief leave the property. A thin smile shaped his lips when the fool broke the beam of the alarm again on his way back over the fence. For the second time tonight, Morton was glad that the system wasn't wired directly to the alarm company's or the police precinct's networks. A simple arrest would have gained him nothing compared to this. The thin smile grew as he turned from the window and returned to his bedroom.

He took off his clothes, pulled down the bedcovers, sighed contentedly, and slipped between the cool sheets. As he stared at the ceiling, he contemplated the chain of events that had begun.

His hand found the black stone amulet that hung around his neck, and he gently stroked the side of his thumb over the cold coils of the dragon that circled the human figure upon it.