11.4. Denton Wyle

In my being, I represent the essence of opposites. I have striven for perfect balance and nearly achieved it. I have seen the greatest mysteries imaginable and wept for them. Now I struggle against a desire to pick up Hate like a cloak and put it on, sinking down into the depths of darkness like a stone. I could take up Hate like a harlot, brought home to shame my parents. I could wed Hate like a bridegroom. I could wrap my hand around it like a bottle of poison and drink it out of sheer perversity. Oh, Life, you are my enemy now. You have taken the heart from me and stomped it into the ground, and for this, I abandon you!

The Schwartz manuscript. Denton sat in the living room of his condo, the binder in his lap, trying to digest what he’d just read. It was at once wonderful and horrible and disappointing.

There were thirty-two pages of Kobinski material that Denton had never seen, and that was wonderful. There were several long entries going into detail about Kobinski’s theory of “balance”—religious stuff. And there were new entries, quite shattering ones, about the camps and Kobinski’s son, Isaac. Denton knew these had been written later than any entries he’d yet seen. They seemed to represent a rock-bottom point for Kobinski, a giving up or giving in. Denton got the feeling Kobinski had planned the escape attempt for Isaac’s sake, but apparently it hadn’t happened fast enough to save the boy. The kabbalist had written very little at the end.

It was exciting to read the new pages for the first time. But now the excitement faded and Denton was stuck facing the sum total of the manuscript as it now stood.

And he was disappointed. The new entries had a lot of emotional impact, but they did nothing for his whole kabbalah magic angle. Not one darn thing. There was nothing more about gateways or black holes or other universes, nothing about the last days of Kobinki’s life or his disappearance, nothing that would give him the explanations he had been looking for this entire freaking time. How had Kobinski vanished? Where was the charm, the incantation, or at least a detailed scientific explanation? And where did he think he would go? An alternate universe? Heaven? William Shatner Land? Where, for god’s sake?

All of that was echoingly absent. And Denton had to admit, now, that it had probably never been written and he would never find it. He wanted to sob, scream, run with scissors. How could Kobinski lead him on like this?

The worst part, though, the down-deep unsettling part, was that Schwartz’s version of the manuscript was not the complete, cohesive package he’d envisioned. It didn’t even include the pages from the Kroll manuscript, the pages stolen from Denton by that old man. What was in Schwartz’s version, between the Xeroxed pages of originals, was commentary, Schwartz’s own commentary—that’s what had made the binder so thick. There was lots of thoughtfully scribbled commentary, most of it tediously Orthodox and self-referentially Jewish and—snooze—totally unmagical and completely and utterly and spectacularly without interest to Denton Wyle or the readers of Mysterious World. Or, for that matter, anyone who might give him a movie deal or a book contract.

And that scared him. Because reading Schwartz’s commentary made him suspect… It made him suspect that maybe Schwartz wasn’t a Jewish Aleister Crowley after all. Maybe he was just an old fart conservative religious guy—not grand master of a cult, not a devious kabbalist magician, not any of those things he’d imagined.

It was even probable that Schwartz hadn’t been behind the guy who stole the Kroll manuscript. Or even, and this was grim, behind the thugs who’d practically kidnapped him from the Kroll farmyard. Maybe Denton had let his imagination run a little too far ahead. Like Siberia.

Which was bad. Because if Schwartz was not the Evil Empire, that meant he, Denton Wyle, was not Luke Skywalker—just a thief.

You’ll find a way to get what you want, Dent. You always do.

The phone rang, some woman probably. The machine picked it up. It was a woman—some friend of a friend he’d slept with last week. Nice hair. Big thighs. He didn’t answer.

It all sank in, deeper and deeper, taking his spirits lower and lower. One by one, his illusions burst under the weight. There wasn’t going to be a book or a movie. This was just like all those other stupid cases he’d worked on, cases where no one ever actually proved there was a Loch Ness monster or UFOs or ESP.

And lower. He was never going to prove that people really did vanish in flashes of light. He was never going to prove that could have happened to Molly Brad. He was never going to know what had happened to her. His mother was never going to know. She was never going to believe him.

There was a knock on the door.

For once Denton was not in the mood for company. Then it occurred to him that company might help him forget, forget about Kobinski and Schwartz and his mother and all the rest of it. At the mere idea, in fact, he could already feel the faintest hint of a gust of wind, preparing to lift him off to some other mood, some other obsession, leaving all this angst and disappointment blessedly behind. When the going got tough, bunnies hopped elsewhere.

He opened the door, a smile on his face. A hand clamped over his mouth and he was pushed inside. The door thudded shut. Two men immediately began pillaging the living room. The charts and books, all of the stuff Loretta had sent him, got shoved into piles. His papers, his Kobinski work, including Schwartz’s manuscript, were grabbed and stacked by the door.

He watched this, wide-eyed. It took him a moment to register the fact that he was observing this over someone’s hand, the hand that was covering the lower half of his face, and the someone who stood behind him gripping his shoulder tightly with the digits not currently sealing his lips.

Denton rolled his eyes up and back to look at his captor. It was Mr. Edwards, the one from the Kroll incident. Edwards smiled hello and released him.

Denton was too indignant to be afraid. His mouth twisted in outrage. “You bastard! Who do you think you are?”

Edwards drew back a fist and sent it smashing into Denton’s face.

The next few minutes were surreal. In his entire life, Denton had never been struck. Not once. Ever. It was so beyond his experience, so unfathomable, that his mind could not keep up with the program. It could only jolt from sensation to sensation: the surprising weight of a blow, the immensity of the pain, the meaty thud of fists against his flesh, the jar of impact through his neck and body, the relentlessness of it, going on and on, the mechanical absence of pity. Mentally, he simply gasped from second to second, shocked into stupefaction.

He had probably only been hit six or seven times, but by the time he realized he was on the floor and that the blows had stopped coming it felt like he’d been beaten for hours. He felt very, very far away.

“Help me,” someone said gruffly, and Denton was pulled to his feet. They propped him up on one of the chairs in the dining room, leaning him into the shiny mahogany table. Why, he could probably see his own reflection if he looked down. He didn’t. He didn’t want to see.

He could feel the pain all over now. It was bad. And it was sharper in his ribs when they moved him, like maybe something was broken. His right cheek stung like a sonofabitch. His nose was throbbing. He tried to sniff in, felt a blockage. Blood ran down the back of his throat. He started to cry.

Mr. Edwards sat companionably across from him. “Very good, then, Mr. Wyle. I’ll keep this brief. We are taking all your Kobinski material. You will not get it back. You will tell us how you learned of Kobinski and what your interest in him is.”