4
“What is that?”Hank said.
Drexler had led them to a closet in a small room off the main basement space, and pulled up a trapdoor in the floor. He’d explained that all the Order’s lodges were built with subcellars and escape routes. “Just in case.”
Down a wrought-iron spiral staircase to a dark, dank space that echoed like a cave. Then Drexler hit a switch somewhere and the place lit up.
Yeah, kind of cavernous, with a domed ceiling strung with hanging lights. Then Hank saw it. How could he miss it?
A big, oblong thing, like a huge, blunt-ended football that needed some air, lay on its side at the far end of the space. He guesstimated its size at maybe ten feet long and four feet high. Light from the overhead incandescent bulbs reflected dully from its surface.
“Yeah,” said Darryl at his side. “What is it, man? Looks like a giant booger.”
Hank had to smile. Darryl had pretty much nailed it—like a transparent football filled with snot.
“How quintessentially you,” Drexler said.
Darryl shrugged. “How’d you get it in here without any of us noticing?”
“You never noticed because we moved it in long before a single Kicker set foot in the building.”
Hank didn’t see any door big enough to fit it through. “What you do—bring it in in pieces?”
“No, that would have been quite impossible. The task required a bit of demolition and subsequent reconstruction, but we succeeded.”
Hank had noticed signs of repair on the rear wall of the Lodge, and now could see signs of the same in the roof of the chamber.
“You must have wanted it in here really bad.”
“Oh, we did, Mister Thompson. We did.”
“Back to my original question: What is the damn thing?”
“We call it the ‘Orsa.’ ”
“Orca?” Darryl said. “You mean like a whale? Don’t look like no whale I ever seen.”
“No,” Drexler said with a definite edge to his voice. “Orsa. It’s Latin. It means ‘first.’ ”
Hank stared at it. “What’s it supposed to do?”
“Change the world, Mister Thompson. And I believe you know the change I’m talking about.”
Hank nodded slowly. He did. His daddy had talked about that change. He’d called it the Plan and it involved beings, the Others, locked out from the world, waiting for ages to return, and a way to help them back in.
But the Plan was all about a bloodline, Hank’s bloodline, leading to a very special baby, a baby now living in a teenager’s belly, a pure-blooded child who would unlock the gates that prevented the Others from returning to the Earth and reclaiming it.
When they returned they’d reward those who’d unlocked the gates. Or so he’d been told.
“Yeah, I know. But the way to make it happen didn’t involve anything like this.”
“There is more than one route to that end, Mister Thompson, and all are being pursued. Opus Omega is stalled, at least in this country, due to some unfortunate scandals involving the Dormentalists.”
Darryl snickered. “ ‘Unfortunate,’ all right.”
Drexler looked like he’d just sucked a rotten egg. “Must he be here?”
“Cool it, Darryl.”
Hank stepped closer for a better look. He could see pretty much all the way through it—like looking through churned-up water, only nothing was moving inside. It sat about chest high and he realized it wasn’t entirely empty. Through the ground-glass transparency he saw a thick, four-foot-long streak of chunky, brownish powder—looked like dirt—floating near the right end.
Darryl came up and bent at the waist for a closer look at the deposit, so close his nose almost brushed the Orsa. He put his hand out to lean against it but snatched it away and leaped back as soon as he made contact.
“Jesus!”
Wondering what was the matter, Hank touched it himself. It felt soft, rubbery, almost like—
A tremor rippled over its surface and he too snatched his hand back.
“You feel that, Hank?” Darryl said in a hushed tone. “The freakin thing’s alive!”