"What are you talking about, Smitty?" Remo said.
The smoke in the room was heavy and its sheer thereness crawled with subtle menace. He felt as if there were just enough good oxygen in the room to keep him alive. No more.
"After the girl spoke, you seemed to fade off. The smoke you see was produced somehow by your own body during that interval. Perhaps you absorbed it through your skin at the Truth Church ranch."
Remo began to protest. The words died in his throat.
Both men watched in wonder as the faint yellow haze began to pulsate with the regularity of a steady beating heart. The room gradually brightened as the incandescent fog grew with each passing second.
Remo felt the sensitive hairs on his arm lift and tingle. The strange force within his mind stirred, stretching as one awakened from an ancient slumber.
The yellow smoke rose slowly toward the center of the ceiling as if it were being drawn into a black hole. Smith's blinking gaze followed it. In a matter of seconds, it had formed an odious, swirling mass that completely obscured the dingy acoustical tiles above.
The glowing cloud throbbed with a regularity that was at once familiar and frightening to Remo, for he knew that the pulsing of the living cloud matched the beating of his own heart.
It hovered there, like an octopus of mist drawing its tentacles tightly about it.
Without warning, the swirling cloud gushed down
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from the ceiling. The thick mass of smoke surged into the gently rising chest of Allison Forrester.
At its touch the girl twisted unnaturally. Her head arched back into the hospital pillow, and her mouth shot open, her cracked and swollen tongue darting forward in pain. The force within the yellow cloud passed through her thin hospital nightgown to vanish within the girl's straining bosom.
Mouth agape, Smith looked from the girl to Remo and back to the girl again, trying to comprehend what had just transpired.
Allison Forrester sat bolt upright in bed. She turned to look at Remo. But the eyes that gazed upon him were not the eyes of Allison Forrester. They were as black as beads of liquid tar.
"Why do you resist?" The voice was old and very reasonable. The eyes remained malevolent, and Remo knew that they belonged to the demon force within his mind. "You have only to ask the one you call 'father,' and all will be made clear to you. East has met West, young Sinanju. It is no use resisting. The sun god will have what is his."
The girl's hand snaked out, gripping Remo's forearm. He felt the yellow smoke pass back through his skin like a slow jolt of electricity. Remo broke free.
The girl dropped lifelessly back to the bed. The violence of the motion tore the intravenous tube from her arm, and the end slapped hollowly against the metal support pipe. A small puff of yellow mist curled from her nostrils to vanish in the fetid air.
Remo stepped back, horror distorting his features. The presence had reasserted itself within his mind,
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stronger than before. He could feel the power of the Delphic oracle swelling like a tumor within him.
Smith was shaking his head in disbelief. "What does all this mean?" he asked breathlessly, unable to reconcile all he had just witnessed with anything he knew to be real.
"I don't know," Remo said tensely. "But I think I know who will."
Like a man under sentence of death, he trudged resolutely to the door.
Chapter Nineteen
The Master of Sinanju sat morosely in his Folcroft quarters, the skirts of his white mourning robes pulled tightly around his bony knees and tucked neatly away beneath his sandaled feet.
Chiun had not stirred from his simple reed mat for hours. A great sadness filled his heart as he awaited Remo's dreaded return.
Around the room the light from more than two dozen squat white beeswax tapers played among the dusty pleats of the heavy woolen drapes.
The Master of Sinanju had prayed to the souls of his ancestors for guidance in this terrible time, but no inspiration touched his receptive essence. The thoughts crowding his mind were too deep and troubling.
He didn't know if he could face what had once been Remo.
Chiun had spent this final hour of solitude berating himself for this, his ultimate failure. He had failed himself and his son, along with the tiny fishing village that relied on them both.
Chiun was to blame for not forcing Remo to listen to reason. If he had related the legend of Tang, Remo might have saved himself. Remo would have
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understood. Then they could have shaken the dust of this barbarian nation from their sandals, and gone off to ply their trade in other, more fortunate lands.
But the curse of Tang prevented all of that. The inevitability of what had been foretold, at a time when this so-called Western civilization was in its infancy, had overtaken all.
East had met West.
And another, darker part of his soul knew that if Remo had now become as he suspected him to be, then the Master of Sinanju could not allow his adopted son to live. It was, above all, this knowledge that weighed so heavily on Chiun's frail shoulders.
A shallow copper bowl of incense sat on the floor before him, and when the Master of Sinanju heard the unmistakable sound of Remo's feet gliding up the hallway, he spun a long taper between his fingers and touched the burning wick to the incense. The contents of the bowl flashed to life.
Chiun pressed his fingers together at the taper's tip, extinguishing the yellowish flame. Thus prepared, he stared stonily at the heavy metal door. And waited. For all had been foretold.
Remo tapped lightly.
"Little Father?" he called softly.
"Come in, my son," Chiun said, voice as thin as a reed.
Remo pushed the door into the room. The flickering candlelight on his bony face gave him the gaunt aspect of a houseless specter.
Chiun beckoned with a skeletal finger. "Seat yourself before me, my son."
A second mat had been spread out on the carpet
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before the Master of Sinanju. Remo sank weightlessly to the floor.
Remo raised his nose at the smell of the incense. "Sheesh, what are you doing—burning alley cats?"
Chiun ignored the remark. "You are not well," he observed.