What then? What did that leave? What would somebody really smart do next, somebody like who I had once been, or even somebody like that all-time champion of bright guys, King Solomon?
A small beeping sound began to chirp in the back of my brain, and I listened to it for a moment before I answered it. Yes, that’s right, I said King Solomon. The guy from the Bible with an inner king. What? Oh, really? A connection, you say? You think so?
A long shot, but easy enough to check, and I did. Solomon would have spoken ancient Hebrew, of course, which was simple to find on the Web. And it looked very little like the characters I had found. So that was that, and there was no connection: ipso facto, or some other equally compelling Latin saying.
But hold on: Didn’t I remember that the original language of the Bible was not Hebrew but something else? I beat my gray cells brutally, and they finally came out with it. Yes, it had been something I remembered from that unimpeachable scholarly source, Raiders of the Lost Ark. And the language I was looking for was Aramaic.
Once again, it was easy to find a Web site eager to teach us all to write Aramaic. And as I looked at it, I became eager to learn, because there was no doubt about it—the three letters were an exact match. And they were, in fact, the Aramaic counterparts of mlk, just the way they looked.
I read on. Aramaic, like Hebrew, did not use vowels. Instead, you had to supply them yourself. Very tricky, really, because you had to know what the word was before you could read it. Therefore, mlk could be milk or milik or malik or any other combination, and none of them made sense. At least not to me, which seemed like the important thing. But I doodled anyway, trying to make sense of the letters. Milok. Molak. Molek—
Once again something flickered in the back of my brain and I 148
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grabbed at it, pulled it forward into the light, and looked it over. It was King Solomon again. Just before the part where he killed his brother for having wickedness inside, he had built a temple to Moloch. And of course, the preferred alternative spelling for Moloch was Molek, known as the detestable god of the Ammonites.
This time I searched “Moloch worship,” scanning through a dozen irrelevant Web sites before hitting a few that told me the same things: the worship was characterized by an ecstatic loss of control and ended with a human sacrifice. Apparently the people were whipped into a frenzy until they didn’t realize that little Jimmy had somehow been killed and cooked, not necessarily in that order.
Well, I don’t really understand ecstatic loss of control, even though I have been to football games at the Orange Bowl. So I admit I was curious: How did they work that trick? I read a little closer, and found that apparently there was music involved, music so compelling that the frenzy was almost automatic. How this happened was a little ambiguous—the clearest reading I found, from an Aramaic text translated with lots of footnotes, was that “Moloch sent music unto them.” I supposed that meant a band of his priests would march through the streets with drums and trumpets . . .
Why drums and trumpets, Dexter?
Because that was what I was hearing in my sleep. Drums and trumpets rising into a glad chorus of singing and the feeling that pure eternal joy was right outside the door.
Which seemed like a pretty good working definition of ecstatic loss of control, didn’t it?
All right, I reasoned: just for the sake of argument, let’s say Moloch has returned. Or maybe he never went away. So a three-thousand-year-old detestable god from the Bible was sending music in order to, um—what, exactly? Steal my Dark Passenger? Kill young women in Miami, the modern Gomorrah? I even dragged in my earlier insight from the museum and tried to fit it into the puzzle: so Solomon had the original Dark Passenger, which had now come to Miami, and, like a male lion taking over a pride, was therefore trying to kill the Passengers already here, because, um . . . Why exactly?
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Or was I really supposed to believe that an Old Testament bad guy was coming out of time to get me? Wouldn’t it make more sense simply to reserve myself a rubber room right now?
I pushed at it from every side and still came up with nothing.
Possibly my brain was starting to fall apart, too, along with the rest of my life. Maybe I was just tired. Whatever the case, none of it made sense. I needed to know more about Moloch. And because I was sitting in front of the computer, I wondered if Moloch had his own Web site.
It took only a moment to find out, so I typed it in, went down the list of self-important self-pitying blogs, online fantasy games, and arcane paranoid fantasies until I found one that looked likely.
When I clicked on the link, a picture began to form very slowly, and as it did—
The deep, powerful beat of the drum, insistent horns rising behind the pulsing rhythm to a point that swells until it can no longer hold back the voices which break out in anticipation of a gladness beyond knowing—it was the music I had heard in my sleep.
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Then the slow blossom of a smoldering bull’s head, there in the middle of the page, with two upraised hands beside it and the same three Aramaic letters above.
And I sat and stared and blinked with the cursor, still feeling the music crash through me and lift me toward the hot glorious heights of an unknown ecstasy that promised me all the blinding delight ever possible in a world of hidden joy. For the first time in my memory, as these passionate strange sensations washed over and through me and finally out and away—for the first time ever I felt something new, different, and unwelcome.
I was afraid.
I could not say why, or of what, which made it much worse, a lonely unknown fear that roiled through me and echoed off the empty places and drove away everything but the picture of that bull’s head and the fear.
This is nothing, Dexter, I told myself. An animal picture and some random notes of not terribly good music. And I agreed with myself completely—but I could not make my hands listen to reason and move off my lap. Something about this crossover between the 150
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