Mavis was there again. "Do you understand, George? Do you understand why you never saw all of us together at once? Do you understand why, all the time you wanted to fuck me, that when you were fucking Stella you were fucking me? And do you understand that I am not one woman or three women but an infinite number of women?" Before his eyes she turned red, yellow, black, brown, young, middle-aged, a child, an old woman, a Norwegian blonde, a Sicilian brunette, a wild-eyed Greek woman, a tall Ashanti, a slant-eyed Masai, a Japanese, a Chinese, a Vietnamese, and on and on and on.
The paleface kept turning colors, the way people do when you're on peyote. Now he looked almost like an Indian. That made it easier to talk to him. Why shouldn't people turn colors? All the trouble in the world came from the fact that they usually stayed the same color. James nodded profoundly. As usual, peyote had brought him a big Truth. If whites and blacks and Indians were turning colors all the time, there wouldn't be any hate in the world, because nobody would know which people to hate.
Who the hell's mind was that? George wondered. The tent was dark. He looked around for the woman. He rushed out of the tent. No one was looking at him. They were all, Hagbard and the rest of them, staring in awe at a colossal figure that grew ever taller as it strode away from them. It was a golden woman in golden robes with wild gold, red, black hair flowing free. She stepped over the fence that guarded the festival grounds as casually as if it were the threshold of a door. She towered over the Bavarian pines. In her left hand she carried an enormous golden orb..
Hagbard put his hand on George's shoulder. "It is possible," he said, "to achieve transcendental illumination though a multiplicity of orgasms as well as through a multiplicity of deaths."
There were lights advancing down the road. The woman, now ninety-three feet tall, strode toward those lights. She laughed, and the laughter echoed across Lake Totenkopf.
"Great Gruad! What's that?" cried Werner.
"It's the Old Woman!" shouted Wolfgang, his lips falling away from his teeth in a snarl.
The sudden cry "Kallisti!" reverberated through the Bavarian hills louder than the music of the Ingolstadt festival had been. Trailing a cometlike cloud of sparks, the golden apple fell into the center of the advancing army.
The Supernazis might have been the living dead, but they were still human. What each man saw in the apple was his heart's desire. Private Heinrich Krause saw the family he had left behind thirty years ago- not knowing that his living grandchildren were at this moment on the pontoon bridge across Lake Totenkopf, fleeing his advance. Corporal Gottfried Kuntz saw his mistress (who in reality had been raped and then disemboweled by Russian soldiers when Berlin fell in 1945). Oberlieutenant Sigmund Voegel saw a ticket to the Wagner festival at Bayreuth. Colonel-SS Konrad Schein saw a hundred Jews lined up before a machine gun that awaited his hand on the trigger. Obergruppenfuehrer Ernst Bickler saw a blue china soup tureen standing in an empty fireplace at his grandmother's house in Kassel. It was brimful of steaming brown dogshit into which was plunged a silver spoon. General Hanfgeist saw Adolf Hitler, his face blackened, his eyes and tongue bulging out, his neck broken, spinning at the end of a hangman's rope.
All of the men who saw the apple, in whatever form, began to fight and kill one another for possession. Tanks smashed into one another head-on. Artillerymen lowered the barrels of their guns and fired point-blank into the center of the melee.
"What is it, Wolfgang?" said Winifred imploringly, her arms thrown in panic around his waist.
"Look into the center of the battle," said Wolfgang grimly. "What do you see?"
"I see the throne of the world. One single chair twenty-three feet off the ground, studded with seventeen rubies, and brooding over it the serpent swallowing its tail, the Rosy Cross, and the Eye. I see that throne and know that I alone am to ascend it and occupy it forever. What do you see?"
"I see Hagbard Celine's teufelschelss head on a silver platter," Wolfgang snarled, thrusting her from him with trembling hands. "Eris has thrown the Apple of Discord, and our Supernazis will fight and kill each other until we destroy it."
"Where did she go?" asked Werner.
"She's lurking about somewhere in some other form, no doubt," said Wolfgang. "As a toadstool or an owl or some such thing, cackling over the chaos she's caused."
Suddenly Wilhelm stood up, his fingers clawing at empty air. In a frightfully clumsy fashion, as if he were deaf, dumb, and blind, he clawed and clamored his way over the side of the Mercedes that had belonged to von Rundstedt. Once out of the car, he took a position about ten feet away from his brothers and sister, turned, and faced them. His eyes stared- every muscle in his body was rigid- the crotch of his trousers bulged.
The voice that came out of his mouth was deep, rich, oleaginous, and horrid: "There are long accounts to settle, children of Gruad."
Wolfgang forgot the sounds of battle that raged around him. "You! Here! How did you escape?"
The voice was like crude petroleum seeping through gravel, and, like petroleum, it was a fossil thing, the voice of a creature that had arisen on the planet when the South Pole was in the Sahara and the great cephalopods were the highest form of life.
"I took no notice. The geometries ceased to bind me. I came forth. I ate souls. Fresh souls, not the miserable plasma you have fed me all these years."
"Great Gruad! Is that your gratitude?" Wolfgang stormed. In a lower voice he said to Werner, "Find the talisman. I think it's in the black case sealed with the Seal of Solomon and the Eye of Newt." To the being that occupied Wilhelm's body he said, "You come at an opportune time. There will be much killing here, and many souls to eat."
"These around us have no souls. They have only pseudo-life. It sickens me to sense them."
Wolfgang laughed. "Even the lloigor can feel disgust, then."
"I have been sick for many hundreds of years, while you kept me sealed in one pentagon after another, feeding me not fresh souls but those wretched stored essences."
"We gave you much!" cried Werner. "Every year, just for you, thirty thousand- forty thousand- fifty thousand deaths in traffic accidents alone."
"But not fresh: Not fresh! Perhaps, though, you can settle your debt to me tonight. I sense many lives nearby- Lives you have somehow lured here. They can be mine."
Werner handed Wolfgang a stick with a silver pentagon at the tip. Wolfgang pointed it at the possessed Wilhelm, who shrieked and fell to his knees. For a moment there was silence, broken only by the sound of Winifred's terrified sobbing and the crack of rifles and the chatter of machine guns in the background.
"You shall not have those lives, Yog Sorhoth. They are for the transcendental illumination of our servants. Wait, though, and there shall be lives in plenty for all of us."
Werner said, "While we parley our army is destroying itself, and there will be no lives for anyone."
"Really?" said the thick voice. "How has your plan gone astray? Let me read you and learn." Wolfgang felt goose pimples break out all over his body. He shuddered as coarse, boneless fingers dripping with slime turned the pages of his mind.
"Mmm- I see. She is here, then. My ancient enemy. It would be good to meet her in battle once again."
"Are your powers equal to hers?" said Wolfgang eagerly.
"I yield to none," came the proud reply.
"Ask him why he's always getting trapped in pentagons, then," said Werner in a low voice.
"Shut up!" Wolfgang whispered savagely. To the lloigor he said, "Destroy her golden apple and release my army to move ahead, and I will withhold the power of this pentagon and give you all the lives you seek."