Through the Doors of Oblivion

by Michael G. Williams

  “That price is robbery!” An old woman hobbling past stopped to take in his wares. She spat at Mammon’s feet, squinted at him, and spat again. “People like you, you’re what’s wrong with the world. Takin’ ‘vantage of folks who just lost everything? The army ought to come arrest you as sure as they’re arrestin’ looters in the city.” She gestured behind her, at the rest of San Francisco, with one thumb. “S’what they oughta do.” The old woman had a deep Southern drawl, her words tumbling together.

  Mammon doffed his hat at her with a very sweet smile. “My dear woman,” he said, his tone as smooth as silk and thick as good custard, “the army is shooting looters in the city.”

  “Even better!” She clapped her hands together and spat at Mammon’s feet again.

  “If it brings you comfort, madam, absolutely no one has bought a tent at this price.” Mammon continued to address her as though she’d never spat at all.

  “Best news I’ve heard all mornin’.” Her voice was a growl as she hobbled away.

  Mammon smiled as she departed. He had told her the truth: no one bought his tents that morning. No one would buy them for the entire day. The outrageous price he posted made the other slightly lower prices around him seem just a little less outrageous. Money changed hands more and faster than ever before. When gold flooded into the city decades earlier, Mammon came with it. Now, the span of a man’s life later, more money circulated than ever did in those heady times and it caused zero mirth. The earthquake, in Mammon’s opinion, was the best thing that could have happened. The city was more his than ever.

  He started to call out again, to continue normalizing the advantage-taking going on nearby, when his voice caught. Mammon sniffed the air, his nose high and quivering, like a hound picking up a foreign scent.

  Something is happening, he thought. Something is happening to change my city.

  Norton chugged along the back of the building. After interminable seconds, the dark oval of what he hoped was a portal revealed three small stairs up and a set of double doors. Small, wooden, painted green, they met in the middle. The doors were closed, but they did not perfectly fit the entire doorway. Norton could see a gap between them and, in that gap, the slim metal sheen of a latch that did not entirely close.

  Emperor Norton hesitated, looked behind him, knew he would see that policeman come around the corner at any moment, and decided the dignity of his Imperial personage could withstand one small affront. Shoulder down, he ran up the steps and slammed into the door with all his weight.

  The door burst inward, and Norton tumbled through. Leaping to his feet, he slammed it shut again behind him.

  Modern Day

  Mammon smiled at the Board of Directors. Hardly anyone could have detected any uncertainty in his tone. “Pardon me.” Mammon set down the pointer. “I’ll return momentarily.”

  Rumbles and mumbles rose here and there, silhouettes shifting in their seats. This was highly unusual. The CEO does not walk out on the board. The CEO does not begin muttering about ‘something happening’ and wander off. Such behavior is not the sort of thing to inspire confidence in shareholders.

  Of course, they each individually thought as Mammon walked out the door, they could never be the one to speak up against him. Each of them owed Mammon too much. A chorus of such reflections, each of them unheard by any other, sang variations on the same theme: after all, he owns me.

  Mint-India green walls and silver carpet soft as snow framed the hallway outside. Mammon checked to make sure he was alone, then waved his hands in an arcane way. Anyone watching would have seen what appeared to be a man miming some sort of delicate handwork: stitching, or perhaps needlepoint, fingers moving in subtle, rhythmic, extremely specific ways.

  From Mammon’s perspective, the green wallpaper peeled back. Under it was blank drywall, which in turn peeled away to reveal a brick firewall. That, too, peeled back so that all there was around him was a steel superstructure. Mammon boarded an elevator slowly unmaking itself and hit the button for the lobby. By the time he stepped out of the elevator, the building he was in no longer existed. Now he crossed the lobby of the old warehouse-turned-print-shop that stood where Cuckoo’s offices were until sometime in the 1980’s.

  The walls and the furniture and time itself peeled away until the warehouse was empty, and then filled with old goods - which turned newer and newer as he walked, until finally they were gone again - and when he emerged from the building onto the street he was stepping out of an empty lot with a FOR SALE sign.

  The cars around him were the rounded behemoths of the 1940’s. As Mammon proceeded down the sidewalk the automobiles morphed and folded and drifted backward through the 1930’s, and then the 1920’s. And by the time he reached Market Street and cast his eyes toward the Twin Peaks and the intersection with 4th street, the city was filled with rubble and the smell of smoke and the glow of flames.

  Ah, San Francisco, he thought as he took a deep breath of the aroma, Truly you are more my home than anywhere on Earth.

  He had traveled back through time, and now it was time to travel through space. He could hear shouting in the distance and knew that was where he wanted to intervene. With a snap of his fingers and one more step, he emerged in an alleyway two blocks away with a smile on his face.

  1906

  Officer William J. Biggy of the San Francisco Police watched the little man dressed like Emperor Norton go around the corner and gave chase. The man was spry, Biggy gave him that, but his little legs were nothing compared to Biggy’s height and athleticism. Biggy was a tall, muscular man, and though he hadn’t been an officer on patrol in quite some time, the current exceptional circumstances had everyone with a badge on the streets of the city. Biggy kept himself in shape no matter how many days he spent behind a desk. Catching one small man out to do some looting in a clever disguise would be nothing.

  Mammon - in his modern sportscoat of green and gold and silver, a long black necktie, and black flat-front slacks, stepped out of a space where nothing and no one stood the moment before, blocking Biggy’s path. “Excuse me,” Mammon raised a hand to stop Biggy. “But I wonder if you have a moment to discuss a job I’d like to offer you?”

  Biggy’s eyes went wide, and his grip tightened on the nightstick. “Who in the bloody hell are you?”

  Mammon’s smile was wide, friendly, and utterly genuine. “Actually, yes,” he said. “‘Bloody hell.’ Exactly.”

  Biggy stammered for a moment. “What? I’m… Stop delaying me in the apprehension of a thief, you, or I’ll take you in as an accomplice!”

  Mammon laughed, and it echoed strangely, filling the alleyway from one end to another and up toward the sky. “Oh, my goodness. Me? A thief? Now that would be ironic. I’d like to hire you to catch someone.” Mammon gestured down the alley in the direction Norton ran. “I want you to capture that man and then bring him to me rather than… well, whatever you’re doing with prisoners now. It’s been so long I’ve forgotten. Anyway, I want him for myself.”

  “The business of the police,” Biggy said, his chest puffing up with anger as he spoke, “is hardly to aid in the delivery of vigilante justice. If he stole something of yours you can file a complaint like any other citizen but I am not going to deliver him to anyone, especially not for money.”

  Mammon blinked, confused. “What? But… you are a police officer, yes?” He gestured around them at the world in general. “It is 1906, yes? The police of the city are famously corrupt in this time. I’m sort of counting on that, frankly. I promise I will make it worth your while, just name your price, and you’ll have it. No need to be coy, my dear fellow. If this protest of being the last honest cop in San Francisco is some sort of performance to attain a premium, believe me, you can drop the halo-polishing and we can get down to making a deal.” Mammon snapped his fingers then, and chuckled. “Oh, that’s right, you’re shooting looters now. I, of course, would hate to deprive you of some sport. I’ll double whatever is your usual fee for, ah, how shall
I say it? Expedited justice?” Mammon grinned. “Do we have a deal?” He spat in the palm of his hand and held it out.

  In the distance, they both heard a muffled whoompf and a slamming door. “That’s my suspect,” Biggy shouted in Mammon’s face. “Now stand aside while I do my job, and if you’re still here when I get back, I’ll be only too happy to tell you where you can put that job offer, only I’ll be telling you through the bars of a cell.”

  Mammon raised an eyebrow but said nothing. He was accustomed to approbation, that was certainly nothing new, but money always got things done in this town.

  Biggy pushed past, gave Mammon one more backward glance, and shot down the alley and around the corner out of sight.

  Mammon reached into a pocket of his sportscoat to withdraw a phone. There was no signal in the San Francisco of 1906, of course, and Mammon groaned aloud. “Barbarians,” he muttered to himself, and he started walking back the way he came, the future rushing back into place with every step. Biggy. Mammon turned the name over in his head. Biggy. That name on the policeman’s coat rang a bell. Mammon had some research to do.

  Norton ran down a hall and at the end slammed face-first into a wall. There were no lights, no lanterns. There was, however, again the faint smell of gas. The building probably had gas service, and an earthquake would fracture the lines. It wasn’t the earthquake, Norton remembered about what destroyed this version of Pioneer Hall, it was the fire.

  Emperor Norton hoped Madge was correct about the flashlight being safe to use. He fished the little thing out of the inner breast pocket of his battered old US Army jacket and flicked the button. Light flooded the hallway ahead of him - bright, white light, like no light he had ever seen before, brighter even than the lights on the front of the engineless trains coursing up and down the bright red lanes of Market Street in his witch-captors’ time. Norton couldn’t help but gasp again. This wasn’t technology, it was a miracle.

  The interior of Pioneer Hall mimicked the very best museums. The hallway he was in, with offices along either side, very quickly opened up into the first floor of the main exhibition area. Given this was a society of gentlemen, he assumed private areas existed, probably on the higher floors, where members retired to access the archives, conduct business, or otherwise enjoy the benefits of their membership.

  Here, though, where the average member of the public would enter the building from the front and first behold the interior of Pioneer Hall, the first through third floors had been constructed as a vast trophy room. The first floor was home to huge tables covered in thick glass, with small signs indicating what they held: dioramas and landscapes sculpted in miniature to show the topology of San Francisco in 1848, then in 1849, then in 1850. Each iteration of the city was more chaotic, both more disorganized and more organized: a cluster of tents and shacks, and the rare attempt at a sturdy building of brick or stone.

  Norton let himself linger for a moment, impressed with the accuracy with which early San Francisco was depicted. Market was shown as a wide lane of sand and mud. The head of a cow emerged from a puddle with a cluster of men around it. The tiny crisis made Norton laugh at any number of memories. The city’s streets were so full of sinkholes for the first five or so years after the gold rush that people routinely died from drowning while simply walking down the street. They would fall into a hole with no way out and that, as they say, was that. It had been impossible for even a sober pedestrian to tell a puddle from a ten-foot pit, and sobriety was rather scarce.

  Contrasting the chaos on each table, the walls of Pioneer Hall’s interior were lined with portraits of the self-declared “great men” of that age: the original American settlers who claimed membership in the very first roster of the Society of California Pioneers. Their stern visages glared back at him wherever he pointed the flashlight. It was unnerving, this sudden tet-a-tet with men who rubbed elbows with Norton at the Pacific Club when he was as rich or richer than any one of them. The same men forever shunned him as an “import” for the crime of arriving here a year later than they did.

  Norton made a mental note to ask Iria and Madge upon his return if America had become more generous toward immigrants to its fair shores. Norton had not been born here, no more than Madge’s Chinese ancestors. If Americans of the 21st century treated her as one of their own, things must surely have gotten better in his… absence. Hadn’t they?

  Around the room were columns, pedestals holding the busts of men from the past of California, vases bought from Chinatown, potted plants native to the region, and any other number of items worthy of exhibition. Norton shined the light up and saw a network of balconies and open hallways crisscrossing the floor above him and, perpendicular to each below it, the floor above that. The center core of the building was entirely exhibition space, designed to impress. Norton would have some climbing to do if he were to inspect the whole.

  Norton dashed up the grand staircase on one wall, the light bouncing in his hand, his cane in the other, driven to hurry by the sound of that back door crashing inward a second time. The policeman was still on the case.

  Officer Biggy rounded the corner of a first-floor hallway. He could just barely see by the glow of the fires a few blocks away as projected through the huge windows on the front of Pioneer Hall. The flames hungrily jumped another ravaged street, and Biggy felt sure it would only be a few minutes before they reached 4th Street. He considered the direction of the wind and the lay of the land and could imagine the fire spreading up Market Street, feeding on the very buildings being blown apart to try and stop its advance. After all, what is a wooden structure, after being dynamited, but a giant pile of kindling? The frantic efforts of the army and the fire department were the accepted methods of professionals, but Biggy feared they were only making things worse.

  Biggy stopped in the middle of the first floor, amidst the displays of the terrain of San Francisco as it first grew into a city. If one old man wished to die in the fire, was it Biggy’s place to stop him? There was no shortage of need in the city. He could put his efforts into a hundred other situations just as dire. Biggy scanned the dim room, then lifted his eyes and shouted at the weirdly shaped light, more a beam than a glow, he saw play back and forth on the third floor. “You there! Thief! Gods damn you, man, don’t you smell the gas? Snuff that bloody lantern!”

  Norton leaned over the rail, the flashlight in his hands. “I do believe it is electric, officer,” Norton called back down to him. “And I am certainly no common thief. Now quickly, sir, get up here and help me. The future of the city depends on it!”

  “A likely story,” Biggy shouted back up. “The fire is coming, you damned fool. Get down here and get out before we’re both burned alive!” Biggy paused before going on, knowing his heart wasn’t in what he said next. “If I don’t hear shoe leather slappin’ those stairs inside ten seconds, I’ll leave you to your fate, I swear it!”

  “Sir!” But Norton’s tone was steady and reasoned as he leaned over the railing to address Biggy. “I assure you, and I hope you can hear the honesty in my tone, my intentions are naught but noble. You said that I am dressed as Emperor Norton. And I feel there is little to lose, in the present madness, by telling you directly that I am none other than Norton I himself, the Imperial personage, returned to flesh by supernatural means that I might act to save my city from a terrible fate. But I require your assistance - and specifically your greater height and strength - to do so.”

  Biggy had been a policeman for a long time, and the man in the green coat in the alley was quite correct: corruption ran rampant in the city and its government. The Barbary Coast - the city’s vast red-light district - was lawless beyond description. People said the Wild West was dead, but Biggy could drop the toughest thug from the rest of the city, perhaps the nation, in the middle of any bar in the Barbary Coast and come back in two hours to find him dead, drunk, or both, in the middle of the street, in the middle of the day, on the day of the Lord. The Barbary Coast’s many depredations went on un
interrupted because almost every official organ of the city was getting their palm greased – and the police department more so than any other. Every whorehouse and casino in the Barbary Coast had half a dozen officers on their payroll. Biggy had learned to spot a lie in the voices of others through the difficult and defeating practice of hearing them every day from his colleagues on the force.

  Those long years drenched in the falsehoods of others made the honesty in Norton’s voice shine like a beacon. Biggy stood silent, shaken to the core by the simple dignity of a man telling him the truth for once. “Saints,” Biggy finally said. “Saints. You believe what you just said, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do.” Norton spoke with the easy confidence of the certain. “It is, after all, the truth. Now please, officer, I ask again, please come up and help me. I am unarmed and mean you no ill will, and you are quite right, the fire moves this way. I have a mission to complete before it gets here and, as I say, I require your height to complete it.”

  Biggy squinted. “My height?”

  Norton sounded exasperated. “Or I shall have to take the time to find a chair. The flag is hung rather higher than I had hoped.”

  “The flag?” Biggy sounded annoyed, but he was already on his way up the stairs.

  The original Bear Flag had pride of place amongst the vast collection of memorabilia and historical gewgaws amassed by the Society of California Pioneers: third floor, center of the back wall, hanging so it overlooked the whole catwalk-crisscrossed atrium. Had Norton walked in during the day, or when the lamps were lighted, he imagined he would find his eyes drawn up through the vast, crisscrossed open hall to the far wall and the flag at its peak, like the aura atop a depiction of a saint or the stars framing a particularly lovely mountain in the night.