The Arena Man

By Steve Englehart

Legendary comics writer Steve Englehart returns to the adventures of Max August in The Arena Man, the fourth novel in his fantasy thriller series.

Max August was once a regular guy, before he learned the ways of magick and immortality and became a staunch crusader against the supernatural forces of evil. Though immune to the effects of time, Max is not indestructible, and now he must face the vast, worldwide conspiracy known as the Necklace.

Max has only a few allies in this fight among them: Pam, an apprentice in the alchemical arts, and Vee, a chanteuse with an uncanny knack for all things magick. But the Necklace is plotting a massive catastrophe fueled by the magical power of a demonic entity; using Black Ops helicopters to massacre tens of thousands of spectators in a domed stadium, re-awakening terrorist fears and destabilizing the U.S. government. Max will need all his magick, and all the help he can get, for him to have any chance to thwart the attack and survive to fight another day.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Feb 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781429946209

Steve Englehart

Steve Englehart is best known for writing for such comics series as Spider-Man, Captain America, Superman, The Fantastic Four, and Batman for DC and Marvel Comics, and for his novels The Point Man, The Long Man and The Plain Man. He has been named Favorite Writer at the Eagle Awards, and has also won an Inkpot Award for his comics work. He lives in the San Francisco Bay area, where he is currently working on a new Max August novel.

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SUNDAY, MARCH 20, 2011 • 5:21 P.M. MOUNTAIN DAYLIGHT TIME

12 Flint Knife (Fulfilling Magick)

Spring 2011 came to Libby, Montana, at 5:21 P.M. Mountain Daylight Time, with the pale sun framed by ominous, roiling clouds. As three black helicopters knifed over the hills above the Kootenai River, the slanting rays caught the blades with giddy intensity, but the black of the choppers was a dead black, with no reflection whatsoever. They looked like three holes in the sky as they dropped to hover two feet off the ground. Thirty men, dressed in similar nonreflective black, poured out and encircled the ranch house at the end of a long snowy road. Each one was carrying a Special Ops Combat Assault Rifle, Mk 17.

Jim Lasher was a Montana rancher. He swung his front door open but stayed partially out of sight, his hunting rifle at the ready. Whatever you guys are doin’, you’re in the wrong place! he shouted. Get off my property!

Thirty SCARs opened up on the house and killed Jim, his wife, his three children, and his invalid mother. It took no more than a minute.

Then the thirty men jogged with military precision back to the copters and clambered inside. The machines took off and swung south, over the central part of Libby, where they were seen for a fleeting moment.

At which point, in midair, the Black Helicopters vanished.

SUNDAY, MARCH 20, 2011 • 6:21 P.M. CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME

12 Flint Knife (Fulfilling Magick)

Spring 2011 came to Duluth, Minnesota, at 6:21 P.M. Central Daylight Time, exactly one hour before sunset. Peter Quince, the Wizardry link in the nine-member cabal called the Necklace, was in the cellar of the ancient house always occupied by the Necklace’s magician, situated on the shores of Lake Superior. Spring marked the return of the Sun to the northern hemisphere, beginning a new round of life, but this far north, it was cold and gray, just above freezing, with a hard rain on the endless expanse of black water and forest. In the cellar, there was no light from the sun, and no life any sun would recognize.

The wizards had lived in the Issac Vernon Hill house with its wide lawn running down to the water and the Minnesota woodland out the back door since Fergus Skøord, the wizard of that time, had it built in 1898. But the wizards had lived in Duluth since Duluth was proclaimed to exist in 1854, so Skøord had the combined wisdom of his predecessors to draw on in designing a permanent residence for the Necklace’s Wizard. There was a sanctum sanctorum in the cupola, a living room, bedroom, kitchen with a hidden chamber … and there was a dungeon. Officially a cellar.

It was wide and deep underground, painted a dreadful muddy blue, and today, with Peter Quince in residence, filled with comatose women. There were twenty-seven of them, laid out on parallel slabs of Oneota dolomite, a local stone much like marble, very solid, highly polished. The woman at the center was Rita Diamante, once the fearsome head of a Miami drug cartel, once a determined aspirant to the Necklace, once Peter Quince’s lover—and now officially dead for nearly a year and a half. But Rita was not dead. Her color was pale and gray, marked with green and purple blotches, yet her chest was rising and falling with regularity. Like the others, all Latinas because Rita had been so. They were kept alive the way zombis are kept alive, but wizards had no need for lumbering bodies. They made up a sort of battery, their combined life essence funneling continually into Peter Quince.

On the slab to the left of Rita was the newest woman, Elena, fresh and brown and fighting her bonds. Standing over her was Quince, holding a knife. On the floor by his feet, so she wouldn’t kick it away, was a kitchen clock with large numbers.

Sixteen seconds, Quince said, looking at the floor.

Fourteen seconds, Quince said, looking at Elena.

This clock is precise, Master, Quince said, looking above his head.

"But Spring is an aspect of this world, Master. The ritual, with all respect—" Quince said, before suddenly dropping the knife to clutch at his chest, and fall forward, torso crashing onto Elena’s stomach, driving the wind from her. Her struggles lessened as she fought to breathe.

Then all at once, he got control of himself, and pushed himself away from the dolomite. Yes, Master, he mumbled hurriedly, head down. I’m sorry. I’ll do it now. He picked up the knife, threw back his head to roar in a strangled voice—Now!—and drove the knife through Elena’s heart.

SUNDAY, MARCH 20, 2011 • 6:21 P.M. CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME

12 Flint Knife (Fulfilling Magick)

Spring 2011 came to Chicago, Illinois, at 6:21 P.M. Central Daylight Time, half an hour before sunset. Diana Herring, the Media link in the Necklace, was a gray figure in the light of the gray rain clouds clustered over Lake Michigan. She was calm and her eyes were clear—the Remeron had been carefully prescribed by a doctor whose son would have gone to prison for life if Di hadn’t buried the evidence for just such an emergency as she’d found herself in after the summer of 2009. It was then that Max August, the alchemist with a gun determined to bring down the Necklace, had compromised her, forced her to become a double agent—and that was not the worst of it. He’d also told her that another member in the close-knit group of nine, the magickal link, Peter Quince, had been possessed by a demon.

So for a year and nine months, Di had helped to run the world, handling almost all the media, living always on the edge of the now that was cable news, knowing one of her allies was a creature from hell and the others would willingly kill her if they knew of her betrayal. It was no surprise that she’d found the best drugs to make her her best self, because there was not the slightest margin for error. All the terrifying what-ifs, all the threats to her very survival, they all stayed outside her daily zone. And Di, to her credit, could deliver breaking news in the midst of an air raid, with no second takes. Her training, her temperament, they were well suited for the life she had to live now.

Here she was, a year and a half later, standing in her high-rise on East Goethe and Lake Shore Drive. Here she was, trusted to run American media.

Max had promised that she would walk free when he took the Necklace down. Before the drugs, she’d had an ever-present lust to turn triple agent and feed him to her bosses, but Max could and would take her with him if he fell. He had the goods on her, and he’d demonstrated, more than once now, that he had power the Necklace couldn’t counter. Assassinating him had been their top security priority since 2007, but they hadn’t done it. So Max had the whip-hand in this story.

All she had to do to save herself was slip him advance information on Necklace moves. The two times he had interfered with those moves, he had been very good about leaving trails for them to find, showing he came at the threats from some different direction, a direction in no way connected to Di. But she hadn’t given him everything. She couldn’t, without revealing that the Necklace had a leak, and he was smart enough to know that. So she was the one who decided which things would hurt the Necklace, but not hurt them so often they’d start to wonder why.

In the gray light, she made her latest decision.

SUNDAY, MARCH 20, 2011 • 7:21 P.M. EASTERN DAYLIGHT TIME

12 Flint Knife (Fulfilling Magick)

Spring 2011 came to Fort Wayne, Indiana, at 7:21 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, a quarter of an hour before sunset. Ruth Glendenning, the Ops link in the Necklace, crouched over the master plan for the coming week, resting on her palms. It was going on T minus five days, and she had marked the remaining details on onionskin paper in the precise, almost architectural letters she had learned filling out forms in the District of Columbia police force. Eventually, she had risen to commander of the Special Ops Division there, the one that handled broken laws best left unseen. There was a lot of that in the District and she’d been very good at it—good enough to be tapped to leave the force and join the Necklace. In so doing, she became the only black on the council. She professed to be indifferent to such things and probably was. Her only criterion, for the agents she ran and for herself, was the ability to get the job done.

Ruth’s normal bailiwick was Carlisle, Pennsylvania, but she and her men had relocated to Fort Wayne for this operation because it was tied so closely to the ordinance they’d be using. She’d done this a number of times before, so Franny Rupp had left a floor of her factory’s newest brick building permanently at her disposal.

Now, as the clouds outside grumbled toward an approaching thunderstorm, Ruth added the onionskin to the low fire in her hearth. Within seconds, all written records of the plot were gone, and all that remained resided in her mind.

The objectives had come from Lawrence Breckenridge and Dick Hanrahan, the Gemstone and the Intel link in the Necklace, but the logistics were hers. There were two more flights in the run-up. Ordinarily, her men wouldn’t need any extra drill, but with a wizard involved …

Ruth sucked air between her teeth: that was the part that always bothered her, and always would. She didn’t understand what the wizard’s doodad did. She had to build it into her calculations based on Quince’s description—and he gave a good description of his toys, not a lot of gobbledygook—but until she heard back from the helicopters, she was flying as blind as they were. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, she alone in all the world got to plan ops with elder doorways in them. That’s what had brought her to the Necklace.

Her radio squawked. Mission accomplished.

SUNDAY, MARCH 20, 2011 • 7:21 P.M. EASTERN DAYLIGHT TIME

12 Flint Knife (Fulfilling Magick)

Spring 2011 came to Fort Wayne, Indiana, at 7:21 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, a quarter of an hour before sunset. Franny Rupp, the Ordnance link in the Necklace, was watching Purdue vs. VCU on TBS-HD with pre-storm lightning flashing outside her office window. March Madness was in full swing, and Franny, like a lot of Hoosiers but also like a lot of people in general come March, was glued to the games and the point spreads. Her family had always been into basketball, their loyalty on the IU/Purdue split given to Purdue since it was northern Indiana like Fort Wayne. She’d followed the Boilermakers since she was four, but the love of her basketball life these days was the incredible Butler Bulldogs, who went to the finals last year and had won their first two games this year by a combined total of three points. They played again on Thursday, against Wisconsin. And thank God it’s Thursday, she told herself, laughing at her own joke. Why not? She was on her second Bud since tip-off and she was feelin’ fine, even if Purdue was getting its ass handed to it.

She had spent all day and half of last night making sure her birds were ready to fly through that elder doorway and fly back out again in one piece. Now she just had to wait to hear how they’d done, and so, Purdue. She liked doing things that any other inhabitant of Fort Wayne could be doing, because she was an inhabitant of Fort Wayne, not appointed to her city like the other eight links. And she was proud of it.

Franny’s great-great-grandfather, Johannes Rupp, had been the Ordnance link in the cabal in 1854, when it decided to establish a geographical choke hold around the throat of the United States and call itself the Necklace. Johannes moved his Rupp Works from Detroit to Fort Wayne as part of the plan, and because the Necklace had never once had occasion to complain about his quality of workmanship, Johannes’s son John Thomas had succeeded, and then J.T.’s son George, and George’s son Randolph, and finally Randy’s daughter Frances. No other link could claim any genealogy whatsoever, but Ordnance was always in the hands of the Rupps of Fort Wayne. Always had been, and always …

Cutting through the beer and b-ball, Franny remembered she was forty-four, with no heir in sight. Fortunately, her radio squawked and broke that up.

SUNDAY, MARCH 20, 2011 • 7:21 P.M. EASTERN DAYLIGHT TIME

12 Flint Knife (Fulfilling Magick)

Spring 2011 came to Wheeling, West Virginia, at 7:21 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, just at sunset. Dick Hanrahan, the Intelligence link in the Necklace, reviewed the operation from his bunker deep inside his mansion. He had turned eighty-two in February, but he showed no signs of slackening the pace that had kept him the best-informed man in America since the Korean War. He had joined the Federal Response Council in 1953, straight off running COMINT, and moved up to the Necklace in 1968 when his predecessor, Nelson, had gone gaga—probably Alzheimer’s, but Hanrahan’s first act was to order second opinions and thoroughly investigate the original doctors. Turned out everything was above board, but it was pure Hanrahan: no stone unturned.

He shifted his butt in his padded chair, trying to find relief from his sciatica. He’d had his own doctors under surveillance for more than twenty years; he knew they were giving him every benefit they could. They were younger, but they were all growing older together so they knew what they would lose if they ever betrayed Hanrahan. His body was strong but it had its flaws now. His mind had none, as it summarized the first quarter of 2011, just ended, with solid satisfaction.

Nineteen years ago, in 1992, Renzo Breckenridge, the Gemstone of the Necklace, made like Kennedy saying America’d go to the moon. Renzo said that in twenty years, we’d hold all the cards, and he was right. A year and nine months from now, December 21, 2012, the day that all the nuts think the world will end … it will. For them.

This is mop-up time. The presidency belongs to us, all the Republicans and half the Democrats in Congress belong to us, the Supreme Court belongs to us, most of the governors belong to us, the media belongs to us. We’re just tightening the screws. You gotta tip your hat to Renzo: he got it done.

No matter where a simple citizen turns, he finds us. Want to get what you vote for? Want to get paid? Want progress on anything that matters to you? Not unless we say so.

People feel it, but they’re running out of places to go without it. Every bit of truth they personally know about ends up altered if it hits the media—made shallow and boring, or shallow and fearsome, and either way shallow, so none of it really matters. Soon they’ll all be completely alone, and we’ll have the corporation we’ve fought so long to attain.

Corporation America.

The old man with the young brain shifted his aching hip again, so he could lean back in his chair.

The only serious resistance left is Max August, and Pamela Blackwell. But they won’t last.

You set the course and you brought the ship home, Renzo. Come the end of next year, the ship will dock, the mission accomplished.

But you won’t be Gemstone then.

I will. Because you’ll be dead. Like Kennedy.

SUNDAY, MARCH 20, 2011 • 7:21 P.M. EASTERN DAYLIGHT TIME

12 Flint Knife (Fulfilling Magick)

Spring 2011 came to New York, New York, at 7:21 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, a quarter of an hour after sunset. Lawrence Breckenridge, the Gemstone in the Necklace, the boss of all bosses, was naked on the king-sized bed in his East Thirty-fifth Street brownstone, sliding his palm along the warm red back of his diabola. She was naked as well, and made of soft flesh, or something very like it. After many years, he could tell the difference, as subtle as her lover’s scent. There was a velvety smoothness to it. He knew she wasn’t human. He didn’t care.

He had come up at the Politics link, recommended by his oldest friend, Dick Hanrahan. It was just under twenty years ago when Aleksandra appeared to him for the first time, and promised that they would rule the world in twenty years if he killed the existing Gemstone, who had not lived up to her expectations. He did, became Gemstone, and everything since then had unfolded as she’d seen it. He had contributed greatly, with his inner knowledge of politics and power, but she was the boss. He didn’t care.

Anything he wanted he could have, but there was nothing he wanted more than Aleksandra. On a daily basis, he ran the world, and on many nights, he fucked the most beautiful woman imaginable. He grabbed her shoulder now and squeezed it as hard as he could, fingers pressing deep into perfect scarlet flesh, and she gurgled her delight.

He loved it all.

—0—

Spring 2011 came to New York, New York, on a wave of fresh power as the Sun’s reign began. Aleksandra Korelatovna, diabola, was naked on the king-sized bed in Renzo’s East Thirty-fifth Street brownstone, letting her lover overpower her and feeling the power of springtime surge through them both. In fact, she was neither naked nor there. Once upon a time she’d been human, but she’d fought her way to the top rank of humanity and then gone higher, to where humanity was just an illusion, a video game she could play quite well after living it for thirty-six years. Somewhere far away from Earth, she had created the perfect female form for the man who ran the Necklace.

She’d read about the Necklace in Academgorodok’s long, cool libraries as early as 1959—but throughout her ascent, her people, the Russians, had seemed destined to rule the world. It was only after she’d become a diabola in 1988 that she saw the Russians crumbling and she turned her attention to the Necklace. She offered their Gemstone a private collaboration, just the two of them, to run the enterprise from a higher perspective, and they did well enough to push George Bush the First through. But in 1991, she could see Bill Clinton coming on and knew the cabal would have to work in new ways. Tom Jeckyl wasn’t given to new ways. So she looked at his people, the eight others in the cabal, and chose Renzo. She could see the two of them having complete control of America in twenty years. He killed Tom for her, ran the world for her, and she gave him long life and unimaginable sex.

She felt the flow of the Solar System, the magnetosphere, the solar wind, and the interstitial gravity. She felt the Earth balance perfectly with the Sun at the moment of spring. She felt it all and focused it all through her power on Renzo.

She loved him in her way.

SUNDAY, MARCH 20, 2011 • 11:21 P.M. GREENWICH MEAN TIME

12 Flint Knife (Fulfilling Magick)

Spring came to London, England, at 11:21 P.M. Greenwich Mean Time, well into the cold, cloudy night. The nineteen-year-old girl now calling herself Vee knew nothing of the clandestine cabal called the Necklace, nor would she have been much interested if she had. Her focus for nearly two years had been the relationship between herself, a nineteen-year-old girl named Vee, and a leather-bound book.

Henry Cornelius Agrippa—His Fifth Book of Occult Philosophy

In 1519, the legendary Cornelius Agrippa had ensorcelled that magickal package and set it out for people like her to find—people who had been disciples of his, the book said. She could not have been the disciple of a sixteenth-century man—she was not from the sixteenth century; she knew that—but somehow, she knew she had been his disciple. Probably through other books, other packages left for the cognoscenti to find. And then she had somehow lost her way. She didn’t know how. But Agrippa had written this book because he knew his disciples faced such dangers—though even he probably didn’t think it would still be offering the way home in the twenty-first century.

She had been drawn to it and she had understood, deep in her soul, how to use it—as if he had taught her. She had read the book a dozen times now, cover to cover, but that was not how she used it. She talked to it, and it responded by opening an appropriate part of itself, revealing a passage highlighted in pale witchfire. It was a book—it could only reveal what Agrippa had thought important in 1519—but he had thought of many things by then. He was the premier wizard in an age of wizardry. His book had simple consciousness, like a computer running Magick as the OS.

Vee used English when she spoke to it, and the book appeared to her in English, though it must have been written in Latin. But Vee was far removed from 1519; Vee was all about 2011, because she was a fully functioning member of society, here and now. Until two years ago, she had been a schizophrenic named Eva Delia Kerr. She had lived drug-dozy days with two voices in her head. But whenever the drugs wore off, one of the voices told her she had to be more. The other voice told the first voice she had no idea what more was. The girl could not resolve them and so spent sixteen years in institutions.

But she ran away to London, and she came upon the book. She just liked it; she didn’t know why. Then a demon tried to destroy her, but only succeeded in destroying her other identities, leaving just one at long last. That one called herself the Voice at first, then just Vee, though Vee loved to use her voice and did, singing in the clubs of Camden Town. Vee was functional. Eva Delia Kerr had completely ceased to exist.

Vee lived in a flat at 47 Hartland Road. It was not a large flat, but Hartland Road was the prettiest street in town, with every flat on its long, straight block painted a different pastel. There was something in Vee that loved those colors and she’d saved every pound she could until she could rent one of those flats. She’d moved in last November, to a flat with a canary yellow façade. Her neighbors sometimes laughed about Hartland Road looking like Carnaby Street, or San Francisco in the ’70s, but that was just fine with Vee. She took that vibe and ran it through 2011 and turned it into something all her own. Something that got her onstage two nights a week at Eddie’s Club, with a good chance for more. But two nights was fine just now, because the other nights, she was here, in her flat, learning from her book.

Two years in, Vee was functional in society and functional in wizardry. It wasn’t as if she had to learn the magick from scratch; it was coming back to her, though from where she still didn’t know. So tonight she stood naked in the center of her ten-foot-square living room, in the center of a series of concentric painted circles. This was the sixteenth-century way, with names of angels at the corners to fight off evil spirits while the magus and the universe found common ground. The book rested before her, on a table a foot bigger around than it was. There were candles in the half-foot above, below, to the right, and to the left of the book. She’d laid bouquets of gorse between the candles. As Spring came to London, she chanted, musically, her focus for tonight: The lore of Spring!

The book’s pages flipped themselves with a quick intelligence, then settled slowly with the correct pages reached. Words on the upper half of the right-hand page were marked with a nonconsuming witchfire, so she read them.

The god of Spring is the young horned god—Pan, Dionysus, Proteus, Priapus, Pallas, the Green Man, Mars. He has so many forms because he is in all life, Male and Female. Pan is Greek for All.

At Spring, the Sun is exalted in Aries the Ram, and Mars rules.

I feel the Sun, and Mars, Vee responded, talking directly to the pages. And I also feel Uranus, which happens to be conjunct the Sun this year. It makes everything extra crispy. But you, dear Cornelius, don’t know about Uranus, since it wasn’t found till you’d been dead two hundred years. There I’m on my own, following my own path. She pronounced it Cor-nay-lee-oos, the way he, as a German, would have pronounced it.

The pages flipped to a very familiar page. You are not me, nor should you be.

Also this year, spring begins on a Sunday, the Day of the Sun.

Flip. The Day of the Sun is concerned with the communion with one’s realm. It is good for leadership, vitality, creativity, and honors.

This year it’s in the Hour of the Moon, so that tempers it a bit.

Flip. The Hour of the Moon is concerned with confidence and stimulation—the hallmarks of life. It is good for divination of cyclical events. It is good for the house and the home.

Then the pages flipped again. The god of Spring is in All. Soon enough it will divide, and this is a great mystery. The wise know of two secret sabbats at this time—the sabbat of women on March 25, which the Church calls Lady Day, and the sabbat of men on April 1, which the fools call April Fools’ Day.

I certainly liked Lady Day last year—my first year. And I was a real April Fool.

Flip. Thus ends the lesson.

The book closed itself with a thump.

So Vee, left to her own devices, took her knowledge of Spring’s power and her feel for it and made it more than the sum of its parts. In her small living room at 47 Hartland Road, in the center of the universe, Vee sang the power all night long, in a voice both strong and beautiful.

Vee was more than functional. Vee was vital.

SUNDAY, MARCH 20, 2011 • 11:21 P.M. GREENWICH MEAN TIME

12 Flint Knife (Fulfilling Magick)

Spring 2011 came to London, England, at 11:21 P.M. Greenwich Mean Time, well into the cold, cloudy night. Max August and Pam Blackwell, free alchemists opposed to everything the clandestine cabal called the Necklace stood for, were using Spring’s power to seek Eva Delia Kerr. They were getting nowhere, as they had for the past two years, when the door to their hotel room flew open.

Two hooded figures stepped in decisively. As one, they threw back their cowls to reveal stunningly handsome beings, a man and a woman. He was majestic, well-proportioned, strong, with wavy black hair, piercing black eyes, and a commanding mouth. She was compact and voluptuous, curly black hair, piercing green eyes, bee-stung red lips.

Max locked on her. Her pink tongue peeked out, pointed; it flicked across her lips. He found himself watching her tongue intensely. Her eyes glowed emerald and he was transfixed, the light from them filling his eyes. In a smoldering voice, she said, Maxxx. It was a triple-X voice. It was more than that. Max had to have her.

Pam could not believe how good the man’s voice felt in her ear. His soft breath puffing her warm, soft ear.… She raised her head and kissed him hard!

Max’s tongue speared the lips of the woman.

The man’s hands stroked Pam’s hair, her quirky blonde hair, over her ears, out along her shoulders, down her toned arms … over her breasts. She arched her back, offering herself.

Max had his hands up under the woman’s hoodie, and he took it off her. Her body was naked beneath a soft red mid-mesh netting, more annoying than concealing, the kind you want to rip off with your teeth! Max did, in a