Through the Doors of Oblivion

by Michael G. Williams

  For all that, however, in purely practical and physical terms, it was almost refuse. The canvas was literally a scrap when the flag was painted nearly seven decades before. The cracked and flaking paint was the muddy brown daub randomly available in the heat of that moment when Americans drove out the remaining Spaniards and occupied their fort. The bear on it didn’t even look much like a bear to Norton’s eye. It had been mocked, he remembered, as the flag of some other nation founded, perhaps, in honor of a deformed pig. Regardless, there was no mistaking it. Norton had seen it many times, carried by the Pioneers in the city’s annual parade.

  Norton was tantalizingly close to the very thing he was sent to retrieve.

  He merely could not reach it.

  “And why exactly d’you need this?” Biggy stood next to him, looking up at it.

  “It would take rather too long to explain,” Norton said to his former pursuer, “But trust me, you will be doing the city good by aiding me.”

  Biggy scratched at his mustache and made a harumph, gazing down at Norton with wary and narrowed eyes. “To be frank, and pardon my saying it, but this is starting to sound a bit mad for this policeman’s mind.” He cleared his throat. “Sir.” It could have been ironic, but Norton also saw a small smile under that mustache.

  “What’s your name, officer?” Norton found himself sounding a little more his old self as he demanded this information. It might be all this is good for me in its own way, he thought. Energizing. What is that term again? Invigorating? To be filled with life force? Well, if all is to be believed, this is certainly the most life I’ve had in some century and more.

  “Biggy,” the man said. “And yours, sir?” The cordiality of their tone was itself an act of defiance against each other and that wall of fire they both knew was slowly striding this direction from some number of blocks away. Slowly but surely the ambient light got brighter. They needed the flashlight less every second.

  Norton scoffed at the question. “Don’t be daft,” he said, uncharacteristically brusque. “As I’ve said too many times already, I am Norton I,” and here he pronounced the monarchical ordinal as he would the name for the ocular organ, “Emperor of the United States of America and Protector of Mexico. And I must admit, with no offense intended, that I am rather disappointed the city’s police no longer obey the general order to salute me when we meet. I try to reassure myself it is a different time, but the sting is still there if you will permit me that small bit of pity.”

  That gave the officer some pause, mouth halfway to open, about to offer some retort that got stuck on its way out. He drew another breath. “The city police do not expect to salute anyone dead over a quarter-century, sir, and as you say, no offense intended.”

  Emperor Norton stroked his beard and waved a hand as if to sweep away his own objection. “A fair response, sir. But does the order still stand? You are aware of the order’s existence?”

  Biggy chewed air for a moment. “Aye, sir.” His tone was the most serious yet. “It’s a thing I’ve heard some of the old-timers - older old-timers than I, I reckon - talk about from early days. It’s, well, a quaint anachronism if you’ll pardon the insult. I don’t mean to imply you’re gone and forgotten, but of course,” and Biggy couldn’t help sound like someone humoring the mad, “You must admit you are gone.”

  “Breath of God,” Norton swore. “Gone a mere six and twenty years and I’m talked of like an artifact of the Revolution, or of ancient Rome? I might as well be the one hanging from this wall instead of that flag if that’s all the regard I get.” Norton shook his head. “Those witches have done me a service indeed, and I don’t hesitate to say it. This could all be a good opportunity to remind the city - the nation - of my importance.” Norton caught himself and took on the air of a superior offering the greatest possible magnanimity. “I do not wish to sound puffed up on my own smoke, officer, but I do feel that, historically speaking, emperors in general and particularly first emperors ought to be the sort of thing people remember and respect. Do you not agree?”

  Biggy looked down at Norton and blinked. “And this mission you’re on, then?”

  “I think it a divine mission, frankly,” Norton said with no hesitation and with utter sincerity. “I suspect the ones who summoned me from the dead think their mission to be divine, anyway. And I further acknowledge there are those who would probably regard them as infernal rather than godly, but I have never been one to limit my beliefs or justifications to one or another specific school of thought. It seems to me, after all, that while belief and intent are obviously important in their own right, so, too, do works matter. For in the end, a body can be as pious as they wish but if they do nothing to make the world a better place, nothing to help their fellow humans, nothing to lift up the downtrodden or put food on the tables of the poor or confer dignity on the labors of all persons with an honest trade, or comfort those who suffer, or give voice to the voiceless –“

  Norton had worked himself into something of a froth, but caught himself before he sputtered out. He looked at Biggy again. “Well, if none of those result from it, that piety seems to add up to zero.” Norton shrugged lightly. “Further, the force I was brought back to oppose is obviously inherently wicked, and so even if the wicked are the ones to oppose it they are, logically, doing the work of the divine despite their character.”

  Biggy’s eyes were practically swimming. Ask this little man any simple yes or no question and get a paragraph of philosophy in answer, without so much as one fact to pan from it. And all the while, he knew, that fire kept walking this way. “Right.” Biggy cleared his throat, “So anyway, this flag. To be honest, er, Norton, the closer I get to it the less inclined I am to throw law and order to the wind.” Biggy hemmed and hawed. “You are asking a policeman to assist you in an act of thievery, no matter how noble you might think it.”

  Norton turned, then, and looked Biggy directly in the eye. Before Biggy could stop him, Norton went further than that, too, and reached out and took hold of Biggy’s right shoulder and gripped it with a hand like a small, pale vice. “Now you listen to me, young man,” Norton said, his voice low and urgent, pressing Biggy to acquiesce with as much urgency as could be presented by a man a third Biggy’s size. Norton’s tone was neither intimidating nor pleading, merely very confident of the sincerity of his need. It was the timbre of command.

  “Listen. A monster threatens this city. I do not mean the fire outside, or the shifting earth beneath us. I mean a monster from beyond the realm of the merely tragic. It hails all the way from Hell, or from some other realm beyond mortal understanding. It has designs on this city. It drives the city toward avarice to the city’s own detriment. This evil force makes miners drag so much earth out of the ground that they shift the ground itself decades later. It makes coppers go bad. It makes men and woman, once boys and girls with promising tomorrows, into whores and thieves. It makes the contented into those who long for more, and the discontented into the desperate.”

  Norton’s gaze bore into Biggy’s, and the policeman thought for a moment that Norton might be taller than he first seemed because it felt like they were speaking eye to eye, on equal footing with one another, from an inch apart.

  “The witches who drew me back from the great beyond know of it, know the signs of its influence, and can point at the long history of San Francisco and say here are its fingerprints, there are its tracks. I do not have that knowing myself, but what I have seen has led me to believe them. I am here to tell you, Biggy, I can feel it in this time and place. I can feel it in their own time to which they first summoned me. If I look back on my life. I can see its influence in my own time, and even in my own life. It is greed incarnate, man. It is a being that thrives on the anguish others create when they give up joy for the hope of money. And Officer Biggy, if you search your heart, if you sift the loose sand of all the evils you have seen man or woman do in your time in service to the city, I suspect you will see enough in common among enough of those crimes
to realize how such an entity might explain a good bit of what you’ve seen, too. All I ask to help us stop it is this flag. The fire is coming. This building will burn. It and everything in it will be consumed in that fire. This flag is the one thing we can save. I cannot save your San Francisco, and I cannot save my San Francisco, but the witches who have set me on this sacred quest believe that I - and you - can save their San Francisco. So please, officer, I beg you, look me in the eye, weigh my words, and then tell me you will help me save this painted canvas rag, just as surely as you would the life of a babe left at a stranger’s door by a desperate mother.”

  Biggy stared back into Norton’s gaze, unwavering, unflinching, and after a moment let out a held breath. “Fine. If there’s hell to pay later, well, Hell already knows me.” Biggy smiled a little. “Shall we begin?”

  Norton wasted no time making a show of relief. There was work to do. The little man clapped his hands. “Yes! I had an eye to moving one of the half-height pedestals holding a granite bust so that I might stand on it and reach the corners where the flag has been attached to the wall.” He gestured at one of the flattering granite likenesses of the shoulders, neck, and head of some well-heeled patron. The bust was perched on an Ionic column about four feet in height.

  The plaster surface atop the column was about a square foot in total area. Biggy looked at the column, then at Norton’s squat, round frame, then at the column again. “You’re mad,” Biggy said. “You’ll fall right off.”

  “If you have a better recommendation, I welcome it.”

  “We drag over one of those display cases.” Biggy pointed his elbow at one of the tables topped in thick glass. Inside it were documents of some sort - maps, someone’s handwritten correspondences, whatever it was the Pioneers wanted to protect and show off at the same time. Biggy recognized the value of history, but at the moment most of the city was being turned into history.

  “Either of us would step right through the glass if we tried to stand on it,” Norton said.

  “You yourself said whatever’s inside is going to burn either way,” Biggy replied.

  Norton’s features settled into unhappy consideration, then he nodded. “Right, let’s be about it, then.”

  Ten minutes - and some shattered display case glass later - Biggy found himself helping Norton down from the top of the table. Norton carried the flag with utmost care, lifting it gently from the wall at each corner and then gathering those corners in one hand with painstaking slowness so he might use the other to grasp Biggy’s shoulder as Norton descended onto a chair, then to the floor.

  Norton let out a great sigh when he was standing on the floor. He held the flag open, his arm span not wide enough to stretch it taut, but enough to take a long look at it. In the dark room, with only the flashlight Biggy now held and the glow of the fires in the distance by which to make anything out, Biggy realized the flag almost sparkled in Norton’s hands. Before, it was just a flag. Now, in Norton’s hands, it snapped into sharper focus, becoming more real, more defined, than before.

  Biggy’s belief in this little man grew, but in fits and starts, one stage at a time. A murderer had once told Biggy, upon arrest, that he found himself surprised at every stage of the act: from its consideration, to drawing the dagger, to plunging it in, to running away, to hoping no one would know. The man chose to see it through at every moment of that surprise and yet such moments kept happening. Biggy never imagined he would experience the same thing but, in his heart, know he was doing good.

  “I…” Norton began to speak but paused, his voice drenched with emotion. The man had gone from the embodiment of calm to almost whimpering with sentiment. He choked on his feelings for a long second, a sharp sound that affected even Biggy, and then cleared his throat and tried again. “I believe we are engaged in something momentous.” Norton glanced at Biggy, then back at the flag as he started - very carefully - to fold it. “Thank you.”

  “And now you’ve got it, I think it’s time I heard the whole story,” Biggy said.

  Norton nodded, opened his mouth to speak, and then gulped air. “As I say, the witches who sent me here live a century from now. My mission overall is to -”

  The man from before, dressed in a different green and gold sport jacket, with a platinum tie-clip and black slacks, emerged from the shadows at the top of the stairs and interrupted. “Your mission is to recover four keys to San Francisco.” The demon finished Norton’s sentence for him. His voice rang different than before: deeper, coarser: not the lulling, almost soothing voice Biggy heard earlier, but something much more dangerous. This voice menaced like two stones rolling downhill; like the metal screech of the horse-cart when its brakes fail; like the farmer’s file against the sharp edge he will use to slaughter hogs.

  The entity’s face was as a man’s, average in every way, almost without identity in its utterly unremarkable features. The thing hadn’t stepped entirely into the light, so mostly his face was covered in shadow anyway. But his eyes, his damnable eyes glittered, making Biggy’s skin crawl all over as they glided over him to focus on Norton. The smile which followed never in its entire existence made the journey from lips to eyes. “And I’m here to talk you out of helping.”

  Norton looked at the man - the creature, the demon - and knew instantly that face would be at home in any place, at any time, across the whole history of anywhere people have invented money. It would fit right in, look entirely recognizable, because it was the literal embodiment of one of civilization’s basest, most endemic, most common impulses: acquisition and control over what one has already acquired. The demon’s face was banal in the same way greed itself is banal, malignant in both the moral and the medical senses: it was evil, and it was something that would spread itself to many of its victims through contact with other victims. “Mammon,” he said aloud.

  Biggy shined Norton’s flashlight into the demon’s face. Where a human might have put up a hand to shield their eyes, or flinched away, Mammon showed no reaction at all. He smiled broadly. “There’s something interesting about the concept of four keys.” Mammon took an easy step forward, sliding a little salesmanship into his voice. “Are you aware of the occult theory being applied here?”

  “Did you say Mammon?” Biggy asked it of Norton, his eyes still on the demon.

  “Yes,” Norton murmured.

  “I seem to recall a bit about him from St. Augustine.” Biggy had the voice of someone digging around at the back of the bottom drawer of memory. “Catholic school ’n all.”

  “Officer, your religious upbringing has done you quite well then,” Norton said. “For before us stands a creature of tremendous evil and a threat to the entire city.”

  Mammon’s eyes opened a little wider, and his smile gaped. “Ah, I’m so glad I don’t have to explain myself.” Mammon chuckled and slicked back his hair. “That gets so tiresome. But as I was saying, do you understand why you’ve been sent to find four items in specific? Or did they not explain the theory to you?”

  Norton finished folding the flag and held it to his chest with one hand. It glowed even more brightly now, perhaps because of the exquisite care Norton showed for it, perhaps because the enemy against whom it was to be used was now in its presence. Norton didn’t know. He knew only he felt a reflexive revulsion to Mammon: a desire to fight him, to flee from him, to spit on his grave, to save the world by seeing to it the demon was vanquished.

  “Such reticence,” Mammon growled, but he was still smiling. “They’re no doubt keeping you in the dark, so I’ll tell you: they need three keys to get rid of me. That part’s predictable and easy. Magic happens in threes. They probably had to get you to agree to this three times, did they not?”

  Norton’s thoughts raced: when they chased him down at the Palace Hotel and got him to say yes, was it the third time? Had that been when he completed the sequence to lock himself into their service?

  “So, likewise, they need three keys to drive me out. You find threes all over the place when
it comes to magic: three witnesses to a rite, three phases of the moon - waxing, full, and waning - three bells being the witching hour, three items to attract, three items to destroy, three witches in a coven - maiden, mother, and crone - and of course multiples of three, too. You can’t swing a stick in the occult world without knocking over rows of sixes and nines and dozens and dozens of dozens.” Mammon was slowly moving closer, just casually, very easily, like any teacher or instructor at the front of a class “But they told you to get four keys, not three. And why would that be? Because they need two sets of keys, not one. The first set of keys they will use to bind me in some way: limit my power, drive me out, make me serve them, whatever they have in mind. The second set of keys will use two of the keys they need for me, plus the fourth key you obtain for them, to make a set of three keys that work on you, Norton. With two overlapping keys, they will work some sort of magic to drive me out and some sort of adjacent or simultaneous magic to keep you bound. Having obtained a useful slave, and having convinced you to exhibit a level of enthusiasm well beyond mere acquiescence, they will not give you up.” Mammon’s smile was the curved lip of an iceberg at the surface of the water, waiting to tear out the guts of a ship. “They’ve probably made some offer of a way to buy your way out of servitude. That will be a trick, mark my words. Whatever is the mechanism they’ve described, following that path will at best give them some different form of control over you, like swapping the yoke of a wagon for the yoke of a plow.”

  Norton thought of the treasury notes Iria and Madge promised as payment: there were a dozen of them. And they were how he was to buy his freedom, by “earning” them and then paying them back.

  Biggy swore aloud, then: “You really are Emperor Norton. All this is real, isn’t it?” It came out of nowhere, like he’d been turning it over and over in his mind the whole time and, at long last, the ticker tape of his thoughts printed out on his words. Biggy looked from Mammon to Norton and back again, awash in another moment of being surprised to find himself here, doing this, believing in it.