We skip forward to November and change locations to Los Angeles and check in on Collin who has apparently spent eight months trying to locate Anansi, the demon who pilots C-47s. We get an update on how he has been spending his time and follow him through a day in his life.
Smith stayed in Africa to liaison with Hasha who gets periodic impressions from the mind of the demon, like that he's in a wooden structure, that could potentially lead to its location. Amazingly, these "hints" haven't been very helpful. Smith sends coded messages to keep Collin up to date. ""Van Helsing" was Smith's highly literary code name for Collin, Van Helsing being the name of the vampire hunter in Bram Stoker's Dracula." Yeah, only high literary types know the characters from Dracula. Why, you'd have to be the sort to read Plutarch's Lives to get the comparison!
Collin has been living under the pretense that he's researching a "major investigative report on the phenomenon of missing persons in America" to explain his activities to his family and friends. He's spent all his money, sold his possessions, and borrowed huge sums to fund his search. He's put off his fiancée, Sandra, even. (My prediction: She'll either never be brought up again or will be killed to create angst.) Hasha believes that some of the info from the demon is from the mind of a member of the Lord Sedgewick party so Collin has had PIs checking their personal lives. In fact, he has an entire obsessed investigator home office going with the map full of colored pins, files of reports and even that corkboard with the articles grouped together. He doesn't mention string going from lead to lead but you know it's there.
As soon as he gets up he checks his window and the string tied around the doorknob. We find out he's terrified of being tracked down by...the demon? I don't know. He's carrying guns everywhere but it doesn't look like anyone has even remotely threatened him in the last eight months so, boy be a bit crazy.
Then he drinks a smoothie. "The liquid was a homemade diet supplement, a mixture of brewer's yeast, eggs, lecithin, salad oil, bone meal, and bananas, along with a few additional unlikely ingredients. He had gotten the recipe from an Adele Davis nutrition book, and drank a glass of the stuff every morning in place of a normal breakfast in order to assure that he was properly nourished for the day regardless of whether he was able to get balanced meals." p.118 Sweetie, no. That's not how nutrition works. One, it's a smoothie, it'll go right through you and you'll be hungry again in no time. I tried the smoothie thing after a 22 mile bike ride and it is NOT good enough. Two, that can't possibly contain all the calories you are going to need for the day you intend to have. Three, I had to look up Adele Davis and seeing as how a lot of her work was discredited I'm not sure you should be following her advice. at least put some chocolate in there good lord
Collin heads out to a seedy neighborhood populated by stereotypical Mexican thugs to partake in Karate training from "Sinsi" Mishiori. We then get three pages of description of a two-hour practice that involves several hundred kicks, a reminder that power comes from the stomach, that Collin still can't maintain a basic stance correctly, and an hour of just staring at each other. On the way out he catches the Mexican street thugs trying to jack his car and punches them into unconsciousness. But you see what I mean about a smoothie just not cutting it?
He finds his way to Swenson's gun shop where he picks up his specially kitted .45s and this leads to a page of gun talk with phrases like, "The trigger guard had been squared off and the front of it, as well as the front strap, had been checkered with twenty lines to the inch." p.137 There's more but the upshot is he has two "fully accurate" guns and we find out he's been participating in combat pistol shoots. Man's been busy.
Next up is a group at a lab in the Neuropsychology building at UCLA where "people attended in order to improve their personal extrasensory perception." This group is led by two psychics named Jerry and Larry who regularly lend their abilities to law enforcement which begs the question of why we don't just solve crimes this way all the time.
Collin has discovered that his mental abilities tend toward being able to sense a person's "mind" or "soul". Apparently sessions where people try to sense another person's thoughts about some other person can be very accurate although of course, this science is still in its infancy.
This night Jerry has something new in mind. That European and American hunting party that disappeared in Africa? Lord Percy Sedgewick's mum wants this random group of psychic wannabees to help locate it by holding his shoes. Poor Collin is extremely nervous because of course he knows what happened and he doesn't think this is a great idea but instead of faking a seizure or taking a bathroom break and pulling the fire alarm he feels there's no way to stop it. So everyone holds hands while passing around the objects and calling out extremely accurate impressions from poor Percy's last thoughts. It's actually a pretty well-written scene. Unfortunately it also ends with Jerry's eyes being burned out.
When Collin gets home he checks his mail again and finds that one of his PIs has dug up the fact that a member of Percy's party spent a summer in 1961 with his grandparents in Melville, Montana. He has newspaper clippings "written in the rather unsophisticated style of country journalism typical of small midwestern communities." A bus load of people vanished during a thunderstorm in that same town several months ago. There's also a hotel there where guests have mysteriously vanished. Ah ha! A wooden structure!
Suddenly, a knock at the door! He immediately goes for his guns. Dr. Mason William Raymond is at the door. Remember him? I forgot to mention he had several pages in the second chapter showing him continuing research into the legends and myths of the Anthracidies from the dig in the prologue. He's the director of the London Archaeological Society and he has a research assistant named Samantha. I have no idea if she'll be important later but right now here's Raymond.
Raymond says he's been following Collin's work because he is also looking into missing persons in America with backing from the Congressional Subcommittee on Crime and Violence. He has written previously to offer collaboration and never received word back and being in LA decided to peek in because Collin's obsession with secrecy doesn't tally with his ability to be secret. Anyway, Raymond wanders around looking at Collin's files and fixes on his pin-heavy map while Collin decides shooting him would probably bring negative attention. And he's trying to avoid attention. Raymond says "mmmmm" a lot and fixes Collin with his "piercing orbs" and then moseys off after giving him a business card with an 800 number on it which is not weird at all.
Collin packs for Montana.
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