Through the Doors of Oblivion

by Michael G. Williams

  Those last four syllables rang like a church bell right there in the room with them. Mammon could see some of them wince in physical pain at the sound of his voice being that sharp, and that loud.

  Mammon smiled again. “I’ll take that as a no on the questio-” The demon’s voice faltered for a second, a flutter in the middle of the syllable, almost a squeak.

  “Are you alright?” One of the silhouettes of the Board of Directors asked it, but Mammon wasn’t sure which.

  “Something is happening,” Mammon said. None of the Board of Directors spoke because none of them understood. Mammon could feel it, though. “Something is happening,” he said again, and then he sniffed the air in a way the others found profoundly and uncomfortably canine. “And I have felt it before.”

  “You need to get into Pioneer Hall,” Iria said to Norton as Madge walked with them down Market Street. The street still throbbed with life, but the crowds were starting to wind down just a little. Madge kept an eye out for anyone staring too long or glancing too often while Iria briefed Norton on his mission.

  “Montgomery and Gold are a fair walk from here.” Norton nodded north and gesturing that way with his cane. “I know the area well. It isn’t far from the Eureka, where I lodged.”

  “Not that one,” Iria corrected him. “That’s the first Pioneer Hall. You need the second one, which was on 4th Street between Market and Mission.” They nodded up ahead. “Just a block from here.”

  The corners of Norton’s mouth turned down. “Too good for the center of the city, I suppose? Too many of their lovely things to stay in their old digs?” He made a little noise of disgust with his mouth. “I confess I do not mind trespassing on their abode. I would dare to guess their second Pioneer Hall was rather more ornate.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Iria confessed. “Now look, we’re sending you back to a time that was chaotic. You’ll be in the middle of the aftermath of a massive natural disaster, one of the worst ever seen in the United States. You need to be careful, and you need to hurry.”

  “The two are often mutually exclusive, my good witch.” Norton’s beard twitched, and his tone was dry. “More gold falls from the bag of the prospector who runs down the mountain than from that of the one who walks, as they say.”

  “Did they really say that?” Madge wrinkled up her whole face. “That’s so unwieldy.”

  Norton shrugged. “Perhaps I have misremembered.”

  “Perhaps you made it up,” Madge muttered, but with better humor than even she expected. Despite all her earlier misgivings, and having to chase him with a stitch in her side, Madge found herself rather fond of Norton – or of whatever this being was who resembled their idea of him.

  Iria turned a corner, Norton following them, with Madge bringing up the rear. The trio ducked into an alley alongside a tall, narrow building. Norton inspected it as they stalked past.

  “Has a flophouse been erected where the Pioneers once met?” Norton chuckled deep in his belly and clapped his hands once. “Ha! This era’s changes suit me just as often as not, I must say.” He was all smiles, the overwrought dignity Madge observed him working hard to present earlier all but forgotten for one moment of delight.

  Iria grinned down at him. “Now hold still.” They dropped their backpack and pulled out a long dagger, a small flashlight, a couple of vials of powder - one white, one brown - and an old scrap of newspaper. They shoved the newspaper into Norton’s hands, then began walking around Norton as they poured the powders simultaneously to create concentric circles. The fragrance of incense wafted up from the ground and Madge noted Norton sniff the air with curiosity as he examined what Iria gave him..

  “What is this, a nightstick? A billy club? I am a pacifist, I should have you know.” Norton studied the flashlight in his hands, turning it this way and that.

  “It’s a… think of it as a lantern.” Madge sighed a little. “Press the button on top to turn it on, and it casts a light. You’ll probably need it, and it should be safe to use.”

  “Safe? What danger will be present?” Norton frowned at her with concern.

  Madge busied herself helping Iria prepare for the ritual and didn’t respond.

  Norton flicked the button a couple of times and made a startled sound at the bright beam in the darkness. It was, Madge realized, the very first bit of modernity that seemed to frighten him.

  Iria threw their head back abruptly and shouted some words few in the modern world would recognize. They sounded old, as though they had not been spoken in quite a long time and needed the dust knocked off them with a kick. The words stabbed short and harsh, full of consonants crowded together with too little room, sandwiched between throaty huh and shuh syllables.

  Madge’s eyes widened as Iria spoke. The ancient tongue of the Hittites sounded almost alien coming out of a modern mouth with the force of magic behind them. Iria paused, turned their face to the south, and switched to ancient Egyptian for the next incantation: the wind, the earth, the fire, the Nile, time, one concept after another, chanted in a specific order. Iria’s words were one-half incantation and one-half instruction set, and Madge felt that electric buzz of magic rising around them.

  At the right moment, Madge struck a match and threw it onto the inner ring of the powder circles around Norton. The incense caught, going up in a great puff of smoke, as Iria chanted the last words again: the Nile, time, the Nile, time, the Nile, time. The blade of the athame in Iria’s hand flashed as they drew an archway in the air. Light erupted from the seam they sliced in the universe, and Iria and Madge could see a different San Francisco through the portal Iria created: older, dirtier, with a strong smell of fire and old ash on the air that gusted through.

  Iria said the final word - return – and shoved Norton roughly in the middle of his chest. He staggered back, arms flailing, but rather than stepping out of the circle of ash he tumbled through a doorway in time.

  That door slammed shut.

  Madge and Iria blinked at each other.

  “Wow,” Madge said.

  “Yeah,” Iria replied. Then they grinned ear to ear. “WOW!”

  1906

  Norton pinwheeled his arms, and the city shifted all around him, like stepping from a room painted bright colors into another painted gray and brown.

  It was San Francisco, yes, but it was different. It still wasn’t his San Francisco, but it was a lot closer than theirs.

  Soot and smoke in the air struck Norton like a big man’s fist. Something was ablaze - something big - and death’s scent prowled in that fire. It stank like nothing else in his whole life. Choking, gagging, Norton turned first this way and that. He could see Market Street, but the buildings were piles of rubble. In the other direction, Mission fared worse. The buildings around him stood, more or less, though the spire emerging from the roof of the five-story Beaux-Arts edifice across the street was terribly damaged and sat at an angle he didn’t expect was safe for anyone to be in or near. Its facade featured several stories of arched windows in long rows, each couched in baroque embellishments, topped off with an indulgent flourish of a bell tower now standing at an angle defying architectural expectation.

  The sign over the building’s street-level entrance - PIONEER HALL - caused Norton to gasp with surprise. The witches, mad though they may be, had done as they said they would. He glanced at the thin sheet of crumbling newsprint in his hands and saw the date in the top corner: it was the day after the earthquake. The headline proclaimed, “EARTHQUAKE AND FIRE: SAN FRANCISCO IN RUINS.” Below it, in smaller print at the bottom of the page, another headline: “NO HOPE LEFT FOR SAFETY OF ANY BUILDINGS.”

  Norton inspected his surroundings: one building after another shaken apart and turned into piles of bricks or splintered wood. No hope left, indeed. He thanked his stars he wouldn’t have to traverse the city to get where he needed to go.

  “You there! Mister!” A man’s voice called from down the block, the accent thick, lower class, and disrespectful. Norton flushed as
he turned to face the man and was surprised to see a soldier of the United States Army working alongside a San Francisco city firefighter. They gaped at him from their post, the former angry, the latter surprised.

  “Get out of the damned block!” The soldier waved a hand to order him away as he shouted. “We’re about to dynamite that building right behind you!”

  Norton gasped back. “Dynamite? You’re going to dynamite Pioneer Hall?” Norton pointed at it with his cane. “Are you mad?”

  “No,” the fireman yelled, “The one behind you. Got to make some fire breaks to try to stop the flames coming this way. Get out of the street, you old fool!”

  Norton turned his eyes up as he swung around. Above him, a brick façade only barely clung to the wood edifice to which it was attached. Norton smelled more fire and smoke on the wind. What he assumed at first to be clouds overhead, he realized, were billowing towers of smoke from a fire not terribly far away.

  Norton yelped in a remarkably undignified fashion - in some remote corner of his mind he scolded himself for it - and began to half-hop and half-run.

  The dynamite in the building behind him exploded, the earth shaking in distress. Stones and bricks and timbers sent up an awful racket as they clattered and smashed against one another in the building’s howling implosion. Norton shouted, unable to contain it, dignity thrown to the wind, and without so much as a thought for appearances or propriety he darted up the front steps of Pioneer Hall as the building behind him completed its surrender to oblivion.

  “Not that way, you blinkered old fool!” The soldier, Norton thought, did not sound concerned. He sounded annoyed, the way one feels towards an obstinate child. Norton did not like that at all. “Head for Market Street and turn toward the Bay! Hell and damn!”

  Norton shouted a rebuke even as he complied with the order. “That is absolutely no way,” he yelled at the top of his lungs, “to address nobility!”

  Another blast sounded. A waterfall of bricks and stone and dust obscured the middle of the block between them so that Norton couldn’t make out the soldier’s reply. Norton turned the corner onto Market and right there, in the street, was a carriage in the Brougham style, quite new, very lush, but turned onto its side. One of its axles was broken in two, and the reins snapped off halfway to the bits.

  Not far away was a dead horse, and the rider it crushed when the earthquake struck.

  Norton stopped running, taking it in. His eyes roamed up and down the wide street.

  San Francisco lay silent and smoking. Norton beheld desolation in every direction. His city was not a ruin. It was its own mass grave.

  When he looked southwest toward the hills of the Twin Peaks - he could not bring himself to use the vulgar name given them by the Spanish - he gasped. Almost none of the buildings stood that would once have blocked his view. The cityscape resembled a field cleared for planting, naught but the shorn stalks of former structures jutting out of the earth here and there.

  Norton’s view extended so far, in fact, he could clearly make out the fire meandering up the street at the pace of a man’s leisurely walk.

  Norton knew his time here was probably limited by the patience or lack thereof of Iria and Madge, but now he found himself even more constrained by the ongoing and active destruction around him. They hadn’t sent him to the aftermath, they sent him to the during. Norton supposed there was no other option since destruction by fire hovered in Pioneer Hall’s immediate future. He had to be here while the city was still seized by its own anguished and agonizing death, else he would be too late to steal the flag. Nevertheless, Norton found himself inadequately prepared for the circumstances. To read of a quarter-million without homes was one thing. To feel the grit of San Francisco grind under his heel as he walked was altogether another.

  And then to come here to steal, like a common graverobber - his cheeks flushed at the shame of it. In his lowest moments, he never became a thief.

  Rescue, Norton told himself. It’s more of a rescue than a robbery. I do not steal, but I have aided people whenever needed and to save this flag is no less necessary.

  Norton began running again, his boots clattering on the concrete of the sidewalk. He dodged around another dead horse, feeling tremendous sorrow for the animal as he did so. It died with its eyes wide in terror. It knew something awful was happening, and it was never able to understand. He would have dearly loved to go back just two more days and pat its neck, perhaps feed it a carrot or an apple, and know for his own sake that it received affection and respect before disaster struck it down.

  A part of Norton worried such sentimentality might be an unnecessary distraction, but then, who could call it living if their life had no time in it for kindness? There can be no dignity without compassion, no humanity without sympathy for the plight of others. Wishing for the betterment of the circumstances of another cost him nothing and carried him through some of his most difficult times in life. Surely it would be just as necessary in – well, whatever this was, be it the afterlife, or a new and second life, or something between.

  Norton almost let himself wonder how often he had been viewed the same way – a pitiful creature, struck by tragedy and incapable of understanding the what or the why of it – but he didn’t. He couldn’t. Such thoughts did not befit the Imperial personage. Leadership required reflection, yes, but more often it required confidence and action. He managed to shove aside the idea of such thoughts without letting in the thoughts themselves.

  Norton’s grip on the neck of his cane tightened, and he scrambled over a few cobblestones that had shaken themselves out of the street nearby, then around a fallen section of wall, then under a dangerously angled street lamp. At the end of the block, he turned the corner onto 3rd Street. Pioneer Hall did not cut all the way through, but there would be an alley there, he was sure of it. He could feel it in his bones – and that did give him pause. There was a way he felt connected to this city far beyond mere sentiment for a place one calls home. He wasn’t in the place he lived, or even in the place he loved. He was in his place, one part of the larger whole but aware of the machine in its entirety. There was no question in his mind the witches had done this to him: given him some innate sense of the city itself, made him a part of its nervous system rather than one of the many red blood cells coursing through its veins.

  Norton immediately spotted the entrance to the alley, dashed toward it, and found himself yelping with surprise again when he crashed into a policeman standing in its mouth. They slammed into one another at full speed, and as they tumbled apart and splayed on the ground, the policeman swore an oath Norton considered both highly impolitic and, in these flammable conditions, dangerously apt to spark a flame with its sheer force. “My apologies, my good man,” Norton panted as he rolled over and pushed himself to his feet. “My apologies.” Norton didn’t even scold the officer for failing to salute as they had done in Norton’s day. It was, after all, a different age.

  “Just where do you think you’re going?” The cop, too, jumped to his feet.

  “Pioneer Hall,” Norton blurted out, unable to think of a lie and not in the habit of doing so anyway. “Now excuse me, I have business vital to the safety of the city.” Norton shot down the alleyway much faster than his size and shape suggested was possible, and the police officer found himself standing there dusting himself off and staring after him.

  “Wait a bloody minute,” the officer yelled. “I said wait!”

  Norton ran faster.

  The police officer held up his nightstick and gave chase. “Stop in the name of the law!”

  Norton called over his shoulder, one hand holding his hat on his head, the other waving his cane as wildly as a child waves a toy while it runs, “On suspicion of what crimes?”

  “Impersonatin’ a dead man, s’what!” The cop’s voice boomed. The man was tall, Caucasian, with a thick and highly-styled mustache. “You’re gettin’ around tryin’a look like that old Emperor Norton!”

  “And doing
a fine job of it, I should hope!” Emperor Norton crushed the hat to his forehead as he took a turn down a T intersection and disappeared behind the back of Pioneer Hall. Please, please, please, he thought, Let there be a door in the back.

  One half dozen blocks away, a man in a long, bright yellow coat stood at the back of a wagon by the docks. Boats all around them offered paid passage to the other side of the Bay for those fleeing to Oakland and its shores. Tent cities already sprang up there to house the refugees from San Francisco. Passage across on the boat was expensive. Ferry captains gouged passengers for inflated fares and dangerously overloaded their craft on every voyage. Even the largest steamboat, one end open like a mouth, the lurid tongue of its permanent gangplank extended, overflowed with people of every age and station. The crowd of passengers literally bulged over the railing on each trip across the Bay. No ship could hold everyone lined up to board it, and every captain charged outrageous prices.

  Mammon wore his bright yellow coat over a richly embroidered vest of hunter green. His thick black hair, meticulously oiled and coiffed, was slicked back from his brow to show a widow’s peak as sharp as an eagle’s talon. Mammon gestured with his cane at a pile of canvas bundles in the back of his wagon. “Tents! Tents for those who need a dry place to rest their heads!” He sounded like a carnival barker, and the sign he’d made of a sheet of scrap canvas and a bit of paint earned him nothing but dirty looks.