The room was extremely dark. Pitch black, in fact. Or perhaps it
only seemed that way to Jack Martin because of the black silk blindfold he
was wearing. All around him he could hear a low humming, a single syllable
of chanting that sounded for all the world like the purring of some
enormous jungle cat.
"Candidate Martin, you have shown yourself so far to be a worthy
pledge to the Society of Double Tiger." The voice was deep, and seemed to
come from a spot somewhere above him.
The rest of the room responded with a low, eerie, "Tiger, Tiger",
which they repeated and slowly faded.
"But the challenges you have faced, many though they have been,
have not shown us the true face of your character, the true seat of your
soul. But that is the real test of a candidate's readiness to join our
circle, the test of his soul. Are you ready to take that test, Jack Martin?"
Jack spoke up in a strong, unhesitant voice. "I am."
It had been a long road to get to this moment, Jack thought, in a
brief yet bountiful flash of memory. His years in the Animal Rights'
movement, his participation in and initiation of direct and often
controversial actions. His extra-curricular, extra-legal solo actions. All
for the animals.
And one day he was approached. Simple, like in an adventure story.
Someone sidled up to him in a crowded subway. " Don't say anything" ,
passing him a slip of paper. A card. "Tiger, Tiger" all it said, and a time
and an address. His heart was beating.
First a small squad checked him out. Long interviews. They had him
under surveillance, too. Probably even before they tapped him, but he
didn't notice, then. And one day, today, they had blindfolded him and
brought him on a long ride (west, he thought...) which had ended in this
building, one of Tiger, Tiger's many lairs. Where did they get their money?
The blindfold had been off several times since then, enough for
Jack to see that he was in an abandoned building of some sort, probably a
warehouse. He was ushered into a series of chambers, each one containing
some test or other. Most of these just required him to make a vow of fealty
to Tiger, Tiger. Some involved questions. One involved a lie detector. He
knew all about lie detectors. How they worked. How to fool them.
The chambers were decked out in a kind of gothic/art deco wanna-be
Golden Dawn occultism that wouldn't have passed muster at any Masonic
picnic... nonetheless, the effect was suitably eerie. All the Tiger, Tiger
members wore hooded cloaks which concealed their faces; the color of robe
determined one's rank, he surmised. Most of the rank and file wore black,
the inquisitors blue or green. He thought there were about a dozen of
them... but who could tell when they were all dressed the same?
He had a suspicion that not all of the initiation rites would be so
tame. Every time the blindfold came off he expected to be face to face with
some grim horror, a teeterboard over a pit or alligators, maybe. No, not
alligators, they were endangered.
He felt hands move to the back of his head, felt them undoing the
blindfold. He felt a source of heat in the room in front of him. A stove?
They never trained him for this at Quantico.
The blindfold came off. Jack Martin blinked to clear his vision.
After a moment, Jack's eyes cleared sufficiently for him to get a
good, clear look at his surroundings. He was in a large room, decked out as
a sort of amphitheater. The ceiling of the room was two stories above him,
and a skylight showed the full moon high in the sky, directly overhead.
Much of the light that was in the room came from that ghost-white body.
There was a sort of balcony or gallery which ran the entire
perimeter of the room, almost a story and a half above the spot where Jack
stood. From it were hung a myriad of colorful animal tapestries, done in a
quasi-medieval style. Lions, horses, stags. Though the gallery itself was
darkened, Jack got the impression that there were many robed figures above
him, looking down at him from all angles. Watching him, the way the ancient
Romans may have looked down on the gladiators. Or the martyrs.
What he could see was a larger balcony, directly across the room
from him. On this stood a half-dozen of what Jack had come to believe were
the higher-ranking members of Tiger, Tiger; they wore robes of deep blue,
or purple-black, or darkest green. He believed that at least three of them
were women; and guessed as well that the membership of the organization
followed roughly the same ratio. They were lit from behind by a row of
large ceremonial candles on ornate wooden candle-stands; this was, he
thought, right in keeping with the overall decor, right out of a horror
movie set .
And at the front of the balcony stood Karloff.
He was much younger than Karloff had been in his prime, of course;
the great film bogeyman was already in his forties when he shot to fame in
the 1930s and the man before and above him didn't seem much older than
thirty. Yet he carried that same aura of brooding menace in his eyes, that
same granite surety that his insanity was genius that Boris had been able
to project so well.
When Jack Martin had studied criminal psychology at the FBI
academy, he had been struck by the dissimilarity between the popular
conceptions about what human evil looked like and the real faces that were
so often attached to it. Serial killers were mostly a banal lot, mass
murderers more often nerdy than diabolical, spree killers not so much
terrifying as pathetic. But this face, the face looking down on him from
that occult balcony, the face with the flickering light from the candles
behind it dancing grimly across the surface of its deep crimson cowl, with
that light and the glow from the floor one and a half story beneath casting
his face in demonic shades of red, that face was the face of evil. Pure,
red, frightening comic-book evil.
Evil was stroking the fur of a small purring kitten which he held
cradled in his left arm.
"Mister Martin, Mister Jack Martin," he said, slowly, with all the
cultured cadence of New England gentry, "You are undoubtedly familiar with
the ritual significance of fire. Purifications, initiations, celebrations,
conflagrations; fire has been the symbol of rebirth since the red clay
tribal beginnings of our human race. We love it, we fear it, we hold it
sacred. It fascinates us. It liberates us. Its lure is hypnotic,
passionate, sexual. Small wonder the organized religions of deadened
mankind have stamped it out, drowned it from its rightful place in the
pantheon of ceremonial elements; the baptism by fire has been chastitized
into the christening by water. But we are Tiger, Tiger! We are fire, we
burn bright! Look now, Jack Martin, look into the fire!"
Jack looked as he was told, into the shallow pit in the floor some
thirty feet in front of him, almost directly beneath the balcony where Evil
stood stroking a kitten. The pit filled to overflow with burning, glowing,
seething coals. The pit that held his future.
"Look into the coals, Jack Martin," the dark man, who Jack presumed
was the mysterious leader of Tiger, Tiger, said, in his spectral voice.
"What do you see? What do the coals represent?"
Jack thought quickly, trying to guess what sort of metaphoric
message could be implied. "The coals," he started, "Are the pressed bodies
of long-dead animals and plants, representing the hidden fire at the heart
of Nature." He looked up, hopefully.
There was a ghost of a smile at the edge of the dark one's mouth.
"Well spoken. I'll bet you did well on essay tests.
"But this fire represents consumption! Feel its heat, its hunger to
burn, to break down, to destroy. Yes, coal is Nature; and for Man's needs,
Man's vain desires, Nature is consumed, destroyed, rendered into ash and
scattered!"
"Dark are the ways of Man," the cowled assemblage chanted.
The shrouded leader smiled. The kitten nestled in his arm mewled,
and he tickled it beneath its chin. "But as fire consumes, surely it can
also purify? When the forest burns, is it not true that a fresh world
erupts anew from its ashes? What does this mean, Jack Martin?"
Even though Jack could see no one's eyes beneath those overhanging
cowls, he could still feel the cold pressure of those eyes bearing down
upon him. But he knew that to show weakness (as in any group of animals)
was to risk everything. He spoke up, as confidently as he could muster.
"This means that destruction, to nature, can be good - when it has the
objective of purifying a corrupted soil." No one threw a knife at him, so
he continued. "So it is that the corruption in man's soul, his blind hatred
of nature, can be purified through the action of nature... or it's agents."
The dark one looked on, inscrutably. "Continue."
Jack felt his confidence growing. He was on the right track. "It is
the moral duty of Good Men to act as nature's agents, to take on the role
of Nature's purifying fire. To sweep down on all that is corrupt and leave
it ashen in our tracks!" God, he was slinging it now! He almost believed
himself.
"And are you one of Nature's agents?"
"Yes! Yes, I am!"
"Are you Nature's pure fire?"
"Yes, I am!"
"Do you burn?"
"Yes!"
"I said, do you burn?"
Jack was by now sweating profusely. He felt the fever swirling
through his body. At that moment, he truly did believe everything he was
saying. It was seductive.
"Yes," Jack cried, "Yes I do!"
"Let us see for sure." With that softly spoken phrase, the leader
held the kitten out at arm's length.
Then released him.
Terror-stricken, the kitten plunged toward the flaming coals.
Instinct took over. Jack Martin's mind became clear of conscious,
active thought; instead, he found himself in a world of snapshot memories,
small ephemeral flashes and blinks from his past, playing out in a chaotic
display against the inner display screen of his mind. His friends, his
family, his childhood; these all zipped by him like leaves in a strong
wind. Some scenes stuck for moments; some even felt as though he was
re-living them in real time...
"Martin," the assistant bureau chief said, "Are you sure you're
ready for this?"
"Yes, " he had said. "I'm ready."
He had been, too, that was the hell of it. He'd just broken up with
Sheila after a painful five year relationship (well, truthfully, only the
last year had been painful - but funny how the last days color your
memories of an entire experience) that had lasted the whole way through the
Academy. A flash of a fight -
"They aren't playing fair," she'd scream.
"It's just the way things are done," he'd reply. "We do whatever it
takes to put the bad guys behind bars."
"It's one thing to infiltrate and observe," she'd say, "Another to
participate. But to instigate! That's not just. That's not fair."
She'd been referring, in this instance, to the assignment he'd just
finished. He'd infiltrated a gang of dope dealers. They'd been
small-timers, selling pot they grew themselves to college kids, until he'd
convinced them to go for a big score - a half-ton shipment that "some
friends of his" were bringing across the border. Of course, the "friends"
were FBI, and as soon as the deal went down the badges came out. Suddenly
these small-timers were "a major narcotics ring" (or so his boss had told
the press) and their sentences grew accordingly. But it had been a Good
Bust, right according to the rules.
Then why had he felt she was right?
That's why, after everything fell apart, he had taken this
assignment. "Infiltrate Tiger, Tiger. Gather evidence. Bring us their
leader." Here was one case where he could clearly feel he was in the right.
Judas on the side of the Angels.
Two years it had taken him to get to this point. Two long years of
living another life. Of befriending his enemies.
He felt himself moving across the room...
He had broken the law to get here. He had lied, misled, sworn false
oaths, betrayed friends, stolen, and sinned in a thousand small ways to get
to this point.
He was flying, diving through the air...
Was he doing the right thing? Was he on the side of the Angels?
Would his sins be wiped away when the final accounting came in?
Was Judas a Hero?
When his head cleared Jack Martin was on the floor. The coals were
behind him. The kitten was safe, cradled in his cupped hands.
And Jack Martin was on fire.