City of Ports

by Jeff Deck

  I’m relieved to see that, unlike their boss, neither Agent McGuinness nor Agent Barnes has been tempted to go through the burning hole and create evil copies of themselves. Progress!

  “Jesus, I hope you guys are ready to close that thing,” Agent Barnes says by way of greeting. “I keep finding myself staring at it—into it—kind of mesmerizing. One time McGuinness called out to me, and I realized I was taking very slow steps toward it.”

  “So just to be clear, nobody has gone into it?” Jeong says.

  “Correct, Ethan,” says McGuinness. “We’ve kept both the police and lookie-loos away.”

  “Great, good work,” Jeong says.

  “You mind telling us who this is?” Barnes says, indicating Sol, who is agog at the sight of the burning hole. The young man tilts his head, trying to look at it from a different angle, just like the rest of us have all done. Unlike the rest of us, though, Sol doesn’t seem scared by the Port in the slightest. In fact, he walks right over to it.

  “Hey, Sol!” I say sharply. “Watch it around the interdimensional thingies, will you?”

  “This is—spectacular,” he says. “I mean, all the rumors I was hearing about the Tenacious Trainers . . . I thought they were just your run-of-the-mill Satan worshippers. But this is the real deal. If I’d known, I would’ve . . . um, I ever tell you about my dabbling in psychogeography, Divya?”

  I shake my head, bewildered. “Psycho-what?”

  “Psychogeography,” Sol repeats patiently. His eyes reflect the flicker of the ghostly flames. “The mapping of the mind of a place. You take a place like Portsmouth—you bet your ass it’s got its own mind. Its own soul, even. And I don’t mean in, like, a metaphorical sense. All of us, through the centuries, we build the mind of a place. Through what we bring to it, and what we leave behind. It gets to thinking on its own. And you can communicate with that mind if you walk through the place in the right way. Without purpose, without direction. Let yourself walk through Portsmouth with no destination, and you’ll start to hear the voice of the city itself.”

  “I see why you never told me about this hobby,” I say.

  “I know, sounds fucking crazy, right? And, okay, my most perceptive walks all happened to involve a large dose of fentanyl. But still. I heard things that only the city could tell me. Secrets. As far as I’m concerned, this gateway represents a conversation that Portsmouth is having with another place. Maybe cities get lonely if there’s no one there to understand them.”

  Sol’s ranting is unnerving me. “That may be the case,” I say, “but it’s time for this conversation to end.”

  “Wait.” Sol interposes himself between me and the Port. “Are you sure you have to make this thing go away forever? Right now? Someone should be studying this. Just think of the possibilities if we could actually control gates like this. What if we could go wherever we wanted to in the universe?”

  McGuinness barks at him to back off, and Sol listens to McGuinness, at least.

  The agent adds, “You’re thinking along dangerous lines, son. Not that I have any doubt that our top brass in the agency would be thinking the same way, but—that’s what led the boss astray. We could destroy our own world trying to reach other worlds. Officer Allard is closing this Port, right now.”

  I hesitate. McGuinness is right about the potential for abuse of power—Marsters is Exhibit A, B, and C—but Sol’s plea for someone to study this Port phenomenon is not entirely off base. A qualified scientist, perhaps one of the FBI’s “specialists” Jeong referred to, could learn a lot from this gate. The quest for knowledge and the quest for power may intersect at certain points, but that doesn’t mean they’re the same thing.

  Still—fuck this Port. It’s done.

  A trickle of sweat runs down my temple as I open the bag of coal. I’m supposed to throw pieces of this stuff through the Port while chanting the words described in Graham’s sketchbook, pronouncing them with those horrible growly-clicky sounds we practiced with Neria, and walking backwards in the path of a triangle.

  At this point, it’s really late at night. I’m bone-tired. I’m having vivid fantasies of my bed back in my apartment on Pleasant Street. The last thing I want to do is perform a stupid and complicated arcane ritual, in front of an audience, no less. But it’s time to bring this nonsense to an end.

  “Just, I better not hear any ridicule from any of you guys while I’m doing this,” I say. “Can’t have anything throw off my game. You need to absolutely shut the fuck up. Agreed?”

  They all nod. Sol looks a little intimidated. Maybe he’s flashing back to Evil Allard smashing Kuhn’s head into the whale statue over and over again.

  And speaking of Benazir, she looks a little wistful at the Port. I guess I might be too if I were about to see my birthplace disintegrated.

  “Okay, here goes,” I mutter. I position myself just a few feet in front of the Port and begin my awkward backward walk. I hear that alien wind whistling again, just like last time. Don’t look too closely in there. Don’t think too closely about what you saw in there.

  I start in with that guttural inhuman string of brittle consonants, adhering closely to Graham’s notes. “Kuhhharkkhack Kaahhuhhrk — Uhhrraggh — Kahhahrakur . . .”

  Now the tricky part. I have to keep up those sounds, and I have to keep backward-walking, while I fling some coal briquettes into the hole. God, am I still remembering to make the reverse-reptile sounds? Kuhharakk Kahhrraahhkuh Uahahhrraghh Kahhhahurkk Kuhkuharrhhh . . .

  Nobody’s laughing at me. Each briquette dissolves as soon as it makes contact with the Port. I have the uncanny impression that the Port is eating the coal. And the false fire starts to flicker. The Port gets smaller.

  I hear a roar from the other side, followed by a terrifically vibrating sound, like an avalanche rumbling down a mountain. I realize that it’s not snow and ice tumbling down, but the basalt bricks of the temple. Grey stones and dust rain through the small field of vision that the Port affords me. Through the chaos, I think I see the obsidian statue of that giant slug rocking on its pedestal.

  They smell me. Even through the Port, they smell me.

  “Shit!” Jeong says. “Hurry up!”

  And that doesn’t help. But you know Divya Allard is a stone-cold trouper, so I keep making the growling, crackling sounds even under pressure, even as I feel ready to piss my pants at the sight of the twinned silhouettes snaking through the ruin. Two pairs of gigantic, yellowed eyes make a direct course for the shrinking Port. The wind over there is so loud with the sheltering temple walls now fallen.

  No, you bastards. No—

  An enormous, scaled, dark-brown snout thrusts through the Port. Its nostrils exhale steamy clouds. I scream and jump backwards, stumbling. Everyone else is shouting too. The beast’s mouth struggles to open, but the confines of the Port won’t let it.

  However: I’ve stopped my recitation. I’m no longer walking the backwards triangle walk. And to my horror, I see the Port slowly begin to enlarge once more. Soon that scaly mouth will have enough space to open, and we’re all pressed against the warehouse walls, knocking framed paintings to the floor. We’ll have nowhere to go but outside, and that’d be giving up—

  A shot rings out, earsplitting in the confined space. Agent Barnes’s bullet deflects off the hard scales of the snout and buries itself in the wall just above my left shoulder.

  “Divya, finish this!” Sol shrieks.

  I steel myself. I check Graham’s notebook, still clutched in my sweaty hand, one more time, and then I resume the incantation in that horrible alien language. I don’t have enough room to walk the reverse triangle anymore, but I pelt the snout with coal briquettes.

  The Port closes tightly around the snout—quickly, as if it’d been impatient for me to get back to the ritual. And then the beast lets out a terrible close-mouthed squeal as the Port continues to diminish, cutting through its scales and the flesh and bone underneath as easily as, well, slicing through peanut-butter pancakes a
t the Friendly Toast. (My stomach churns.) The snout blackens at the area of contact with the closing gate.

  And then, with a distinct lack of ceremony, the Port collapses into nothing and the heavy, severed snout thuds to the warehouse floor.

  We’re all silent. Finally McGuinness says, “I’m not cleaning that up.”

  I slump to the ground, suddenly feeling exhausted. Barnes goes to my side. “You okay, kid?”

  “Yeah . . .” I mutter out of a voice far too croaky and dry to be my own. Barnes lets me have a few swigs from her water bottle. She’s a nice lady, for a professional liar and sneak.

  Sol joins me on the floor. He’s shaking all over, but his eyes are bright with excitement. “That was just—I—wow. Man, this is all just like something my great-uncle would write about . . . That place on the other side sure looked cyclopean . . .”

  “Okay, okay,” I croak. “Sol, I’m still waiting for that ‘vital stuff’ you had to tell me. I don’t want to hear any more theories about emotional shadow planes and chitchat from the secret mind of cities. I need concrete information about the Ten—”

  “Hold on,” Sol says. He looks at the three FBI agents. “Not here. Somewhere more private, if’n you don’t mind. No offense, esteemed federal enforcers of the law.”

  I shrug. “Agent Jeong, would you mind bundling Benazir into your car and bringing her back to the McIntyre Building?” I see their confusion at the name, so I hurriedly amend myself: “My clone, I mean. Sol and I will meet you there. Should only take us a few minutes to walk.”

  Now it’s Jeong’s turn to hesitate. He must hate the thought of missing out on inside information—no matter what it’s about. Hazards of the trade. But then he sighs and says, “Fine. Get some fresh air. Just don’t collapse on the way, Allard—you’re looking pretty hollowed out.”

  If I stumble, I’ll always have Sol to pick me up again. That’s what friends are for.

  The severed snout has begun to stink: eau de carcass left on the grill too long. Barnes says to McGuinness, nodding at the dead meat, “We’ll flip for it. Winner goes with Ethan, loser coordinates the cleanup and coverup.”

  “Fine, but my coin this time,” McGuinness grumbles. He pulls a quarter from his pocket and calls heads in the air. Then, scowling at the results, he says, “C&C of this is a two-man job. You better hurry back, Lena.”

  Benazir nods at Jeong and Barnes, indicating that they won’t have to manhandle her, but they do anyway. We exit the Sheafe Warehouse with them and they take off at a jog through the park, Barnes clearly eager to get moving after her long guard duty. Sol and I walk in a different direction. Once Sol and I are alone—with nothing resembling a Port in sight—I breathe out my relief.

  Now that we’ve parted from all traces of supernatural interference, I have a momentary fantasy about just heading to the Press Room and drinking away the memories of this night.

  But I did make a promise to Benazir, and I intend to keep my word. Guess I’m funny like that. I want to know what exactly they plan to do with the creepy little psycho—and I’m going to have a say in the matter.

  I offer my arm to Sol. He accepts it. We’re just two friends out for an evening walk in the park.

  “Sorry for the detour,” says Sol. “For my friends’ sake, I’d rather not share any more information with the Feds than I have to. I don’t trust them, and neither should you.”

  “Those Feds have given me a ton of help tonight,” I say. “Ethan in particular is far braver than his job description requires. But let’s have our chat. How much do you know about the Tenacious Trainers?”

  “Beyond the gym itself?”

  “Yes. Obviously.”

  Sol Shrive leans in close. “A little. I mean, that—Port back there took me by surprise. Like I said, I thought their little cult was just a bunch of overgrowth Goth kids. I didn’t know they were doing anything real. So when they invited me to join, I respectfully declined.”

  “They asked you to join?!” I say, taken off guard. “You could’ve mentioned that—So you know who they are, then? The people who are in the group?”

  The night seems to be closing in on us. We’re already to the construction site at the end of State and Daniel Streets, where they’ve been working on the new Memorial Bridge that will reconnect Portsmouth to Kittery, Maine. We’ll be at the McIntyre Building in no time. I slow my pace and Sol is forced to as well.

  “I mean, yeah, some of them,” Sol says. “If you go to the gym itself, you can see who’s working out there, though obviously not everyone who goes there to exercise is a member of the cult. It’s a subset. The ones with the wrist gadgets.”

  “You keep calling them a cult,” I observe. “Why? Graham doesn’t seem like he was a particularly religious person.” And neither were you, Hannah, with all your talk of “false gods”—though maybe you were looking for a real one?

  “There are all types of religions, Divya. Me, I worshiped at the altar of chemically induced good times. You’re an acolyte of the truth. And these people . . . they sure talked like cult members. All this stuff about ‘finding nirvana’ and ‘opening the doors of the universe.’ At the time, I didn’t know they meant it literally. So . . .”

  “So if Graham Tsoukalas was fixated on opening a Port,” I say, “maybe the other Tenacious Trainers cultists were trying to do the same thing.”

  And maybe they succeeded. It’s the larger implication that my mind hasn’t wanted to face tonight. Somewhere in this city, there might be other gates to that nightmare world, or even to other places, irresponsibly thrown open by a dozen other young fools just like poor Graham.

  “Right,” says Sol in excitement. Unseemly excitement, in my opinion. His voice grows louder. “It’s clear to me now! They know exactly what they’re doing. Maybe they have secret meetings in the back room of the gym, sharing information about how to open Ports.” He looks wistful now. “And I turned ’em down. I could’ve been an interdimensional adventurer all this time . . .”

  I glance around. It’s the middle of the night and nobody’s around, but Sol’s making me seriously paranoid. He’s not exactly being discreet with all this stuff, and we’re practically right outside the federal building. “Don’t shout,” I hiss.

  “Sorry,” Sol says.

  “Someone told me tonight that the Tenacious Trainers were the ones who killed Hannah,” I say. “Which would certainly be odd, because I’m 99% sure they’re the ones who put me on Graham’s case in the first place. But you’re the one who’s met them. You say they seemed fanatical. Are they capable of murder?”

  His eyes widen. He hesitates to speak, and I grab his arm. “Be straight up with me, Sol,” I say.

  “N-no,” he stammers. “Listen, Divya. I only met two of them. A girl around my age, and a guy somewhat younger. They seemed kooky, sure, but killers? No. I don’t think so.”

  “Their names,” I command him. The blood is rising in my cheeks.

  He stares at me. Courageously, he doesn’t break eye contact. I see a guarded aspect hood his gaze. “Divya,” he says. “I can’t do that. You’re just going to give their info to your FBI friends, and you have no evidence they’ve done anything wrong.”

  I let go of him. I know he’s right. Marsters’s word alone is too thin to go on. And yet I would happily see the lives of strangers turned upside down by federal agents if there were even a tiny chance of finding justice for you. My days as a former paragon of law and order have never seemed more distant.

  I take a few deep breaths to calm myself, and then an idea strikes me. “Sol,” I say. “Can you do me a favor? Well, two favors.”

  He looks at me cautiously. “I owe you all the favors in the world, but—”

  “First,” I say, and I take the DVD out of my jacket pocket and hand it to him. “Hide this somewhere safe. Don’t watch it. Just hide it.”

  He nods, confused. “And second?”

  “Tell those cult recruiters you’ve reconsidered,” I say. “Tell them yo
u’re ready to find nirvana.”

  16

  What I’ve been able to dodge so far, mentally, is a simple corollary: if the Tenacious Trainers are a cult, then you were a cultist too.

  But that’s impossible. It has to be. You would never hide something from me that huge.

  Would you?

  I always knew you kept parts of your life hidden from me. Whole swaths of your past, for example. I got the feeling demons had taken up permanent residence in the Ryder household, and so I didn’t pry. I also didn’t ask about where you’d been during those nights when you would disappear for long stretches of time. I didn’t want to be The Jealous Woman, and besides, my own job often meant crazy hours and added stress for you as well as me.

  I wanted to cut you some slack. My free-spirited girl. If you didn’t stay at least a little mysterious, I wouldn’t have as much fun with our relationship, would I? Maybe I liked the manic pixie dreaminess of your tendency to come and go.

  But . . . if this was what you’d been up to—not just innocently, intensely working out, but also meeting with loons and crackpots about how to open gateways to other universes …

  And you felt you couldn’t share this with me? Not even just a little? Not even the tiniest goddamn clue about the deepest desires of adventure in your heart of hearts?

  If you’d ended up going through a Port—would you even want to take me with you? Or would you have just disappeared?

  I may never know what ends you pursued. But with Sol infiltrating this, ahem, cult, I can at least find out if your pursuit ended you.

  The door to the McIntyre Building is unlocked. I enter, alone. As I’m about to head up the stairs, two FBI agents I’ve never seen before (I’m assuming they’re FBI agents) come down hustling SSA Kat Marsters along with them. She’s in handcuffs and looks pissed, especially because she’s hobbling. At least someone treated her wounded ankle; it sports a fresh bandage and splint.