by John Shirley
Thirteen children going to the basement of the school, to play with matches.
She could feel them moving about up there, like rats in an attic, above her.
Once, Madelaine had asked Tooley, “What does He want the children for? He doesn’t seem to use them in the upper city; they don’t perform the rituals.” And Tooley had replied, “He loves children. They are close at heart to Him, by nature. He plays with them, He enjoys their games. He finds that he can cultivate them easily, once they are below, and once they have played with Him. He loves children. He is really just a playful child Himself.”
She didn’t ask Tooley anything, now, because at the rite he had dropped his semblance, and she had seen his face in its actuality. Now, whenever she looked at him, she seemed to see that face mingled with the face they called “Tooley.”
She didn’t ask questions of anyone. She didn’t speak. She felt what she had to, but beyond that tried to feel as little extra as she could, to maintain a layer of insulation.
She simply sat in the mouth of the cave, below the rooms where the group rites were held. She sat there, hugging her knees, her eyes half open, refusing food, refusing water, refusing wine, waiting for the rite. She wore only the black silk kimono, tied at the waist with a strip of red; no underwear, no shoes.
The cave had a low ceiling; when Minder and Tooley entered, to find her in the shadows just inside the mouth of the cave, they had to stoop low. Minder swore when he bumped his head. He crouched beside her. “Madelaine—” He took her hand. It lay limply in his large, meaty, damp paw. “Madelaine, I’ve brought you some fruit juice. It’s cranberry juice. I remember you said you liked cranberry juice. Drink a little for me, okay?”
She said nothing. She stared straight ahead. She blinked, once, her eyes dimly visible in the indirect light coming from the sub-basement room outside the cave.
The cave was artificial; it had been chipped here, half a century before, by immigrant workers using steam-driven diggers. They had stopped their digging when they’d come upon the hidden lake. Now, the way to the hidden lake was blocked by a heavy stainless-steel door, in the unlit tunnel to Madelaine’s left.
Minder squeezed her hand. No response. He let it fall. A shudder went through him and, momentarily enraged, he smashed the bottle of juice on the rough stone floor. The red juice spread, amoebalike, from the jagged star of broken glass, reaching one tentative tendril to her bare foot; the juice was cold, but she didn’t curl her toes away from it. She monitored the sensation and ignored it. Just as she ignored the sharper sensation when Tooley slapped her across the face. “Come out of it, woman! Stop playing games!”
Minder reached out and clamped his fingers around Tooley’s wrist, preventing the smaller man from giving her a second, more powerful blow.
The two men exchanged glowers. Tooley’s eyes smoldered; his pupils could be seen clearly, despite the dimness, as if, like the thick smoked-glass windows in a furnace gate, they held back an inner fulmination.
“I didn’t tell you to hit her, Tooley.”
“She’s hiding from us. And from Him.”
“From Him? Here at His very gate?” Minder shook his head. “I think she’s communing with Him somehow.” They both knew it wasn’t so. “You said yourself you couldn’t get through to her. You don’t know what she’s thinking. She might be in transformation, in some way. Just don’t you touch her without my permission, little fella, understand?”
“I do His work. I do what I feel is—”
“You heard me. I gave, and I gave to Him. He gave you to me. You are my servant. You were told to do as I say. That is all you need to know. If I am out of line, then He will punish me. Leave her alone, until I tell you different.”
Tooley looked away, and shrugged. “For now, I am your servant.”
She heard Minder thinking: What does he mean by that? But then, I won’t be in this world after the rite. Once I’ve transcended, he’ll be in charge here. He can have the whole fucking scene.
“It’s getting hotter in here. They’re noticing it up above, again,” Minder muttered. “They’re calling it freak weather. They’re blaming microwaves.” He seemed exhausted. “I feel like I’m in a microwave oven here. Feel like I’m getting cooked. I’m going upstairs. I don’t like to leave her here—she could become dehydrated—but I’m afraid to tamper with her. Did you ask Him about her?”
“He is silent, when I ask.” Tooley left the cave. Minder, dripping sweat and huffing, followed him out.
She was glad they were gone. But she wasn’t alone; She was never alone; she could never be alone again, as long as she lived. The Voices rose and fell in volume, but they were always there, mixed up and clamoring, or whispering earnestly to her; and she could not help monitoring the pictures. Nothing kept it away now. Not Minder’s touch, not Tooley. It was always there. Watch, and don’t feel: That is survival. So she watched and felt nothing when the children burnt the infant they’d stolen, in the school basement.
She no longer tried to interfere; she warned no one. Not even Carl. She watched and felt nothing when she saw Carl Lanyard climbing the stairs of his apartment building; Carl Lanyard didn’t know about the one who waited in his apartment for him.
THE VOICES, ALMOST inaudible, and the eel shapes in the air, returned as Lanyard reached the third-floor landing of his apartment building and turned to climb to the fourth. It was almost as if in reaching the third floor he triggered something; as if the last step before the landing contained a hidden lever. It struck him all at once, and he reeled, for a moment clawing at the air, to keep the eel shapes from darting at his eyes.
Ignore it, he thought. It’ll go away.
Lanyard, the Voices whispered. Ahead is behind, attack is retreat…
He walked on through the crowded air; the elongated black squirmings parting for him, never touching him; and probably he’d have been unable to feel them, if they had touched him, unless they concentrated themselves.
He shivered, suspecting that he was beginning to understand them. He knew that he was seeing something that was always there, but usually invisible. He sensed intuitively that the slithering black strokes could be read, as tea leaves allegedly were read. He could see for himself that the squirming lines moved into coherent patterns, like iron filings on a magnet. And now, as he reached the fifth floor, he saw them arrayed around his door, nosing in toward it. As if it attracted them. For a moment he felt he was underwater again, in murky waters, drawn on a current that plunged through the spillway that was his door; the squirming lines were like free-floating strips of seaweed sucked on the current to his apartment; they passed through the door as if it were not there.
Lanyard stood staring at the door. He was afraid to go in.
He listened to the Voices, trying to glean a warning. There were only whispered fragments. “Mother?” he asked, tentatively. No reply. Had he really heard his mother’s voice, in the room where Jesus Merino had died?
He was sure he had. He tottered; the impact of what had happened was only now making itself felt in him. His whole world-view had changed—overnight—literally. The earth was shifting its axis for him.
He was still blurry from the drug they’d given him at the hospital. Blurred, too, by anger. The nurse at the front desk had shrugged when he told her how he’d been treated by the emergency room personnel.
Minder had threatened him. And Madelaine was lost to him.
The anger propelled him forward. He turned the knob, not surprised to find the door unlocked. He pushed it inward with his left hand, his right closing on the pistol, still unused, in his jacket pocket.
Dirty dishes in the sink. The window was wide open; an unseasonably warm and sticky breeze blew the dirty beige curtains.
He tried to picture a burglar, perhaps with a long knife in his hand, waiting flattened against the wall to the right of the entrance into the living room. He didn’t believe it. The black currents writhed in their ropy course, wending into the next ro
om, something there attracting them. Nothing as pedestrian as a burglar.
Hand tightening on the pistol, he stepped into the living room.
The airy eel shapes, quivering, flowed to converge on a single figure seated on the couch directly across from him, so thickly they almost hid her. And then they drew back from her, fading a little, like a dark curtain opening to show her on stage.
Her. He tingled, gazing at her. A lanky blonde, racy with angles, holding a mirror on her lap, a small black velvet rectangular box on the mirror, her long white hands, immaculately manicured, nails pearly-pink, folded on the box.
Her eyebrows were sharp brown arches, almost elfin, plucked and penciled without seeming plucked and penciled. Her mouth was thin and sulky, given succulence by peach-blush lipstick; her hair cascaded in golden waves over her creamy bare shoulders. She wore a tight strapless black gown, exposing skin stretched translucently taut over her delicate collarbone. Her legs were demurely crossed, but the skirt was slit to the thigh; she wore black stockings and red garters. Tight red garters. One of her high heels was dangling from the toe of the overcrossed leg; the other nestled like a feeding infant in the mink wrap coiled suggestively beside her on the cushion.
Lanyard’s pulse raced. His blurriness began to melt away.
Christ, her eyes were blue. The hint of a dimple under her high cheekbones…the diamond-stud earrings…the look on her face, as if she’d been dating him for ages, and she was awaiting him in a suite they’d booked together.
For a moment the black squirmings in the air radiated from her in a halo of restlessly alive exclamation points. A radiance of negative divinity.
“This is just the beginning,” she said, spoiling the effect. She was a bad actress. Her voice carried no conviction. But he wanted to believe in her and in the promise that was tacitly suggested by her presence, her pose.
The Voices had gone silent, as if hushed in awe.
“You—you look familiar,” he murmured. He’d seen her in a magazine ad. “You’re a model.”
Her smile was also unconvincing. There was something dead about her eyes.
But Carl Lanyard wanted this woman. All the loneliness, all the backed-up skin hunger and sexual frustration and sense of betrayal (hadn’t Madelaine betrayed him by submitting to Minder?) came together.
The gown was tight at the bodice, and sheer; she wore no brassiere, and her nipples were clearly outlined in the clinging silk. As he gazed at her, the air’s black squirmings, the power currents, began to fade. In a moment, they were gone: hidden.
“Sit down, Carl. I have gifts for you.” She smiled, and the smile was no more than a sophisticated variation of a whore’s leer. That’s what Lanyard liked about it.
But he made himself say, “I don’t feel so good today. Joey Minder sent you. Minder can fuck himself. What do you want? Tell me and then get out of here.”
“You don’t feel good?” False sympathy. “Come and sit down.” When she patted the couch beside her—close beside her—he noticed the diamond-crusted gold ring on the slender index finger of her left hand. She returned the hand to the black box. “Why are you so hostile? We’re not enemies. We’re allies. You’ve got the talent. That means, really, that you’re one of us.”
“You,” he said with conviction, “are a murderer. Or at least you are in complicity with murderers. With butchers. You’re one of the people who specialize in taking away the humanity of other people so that they become sacrificial pigs. You are a pig yourself.” He felt a peculiar thrill, talking to her so abusively. He knew the thrill was perverse. In his jacket, his hand reaffirmed its grip on the pistol, and he slid the index finger in his right hand into the trigger guard; with the thumb of that hand he switched off the safety. He decided his chances of killing her with one shot were good—he was only six feet from her.
She seemed faintly amused by his diatribe. “Come off it, Carl. Everyone is capable of anything, under the right circumstances. ‘Nothing is true, everything is permitted.’ Come and sit down.”
“Who are you?” he asked, struggling with himself. He wanted to come and sit down. But…
“My name’s Lily Chancery. That’s my real name. You see, I’m candid with you. I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Anything at all. It won’t seem so awful when it’s all out in the open. You’ll see how routine it is.”
“You’ll tell me anything?”
“Sure. You are going to ask me the location of our temple? Only a few know the exact location. The rest of us are taken there in the special train. We can’t see where it’s going. I can take you there, any time you like. I’ll tell you anything I know. Because you won’t talk to anyone about it. If you try, we’ll kill you—or people you care about depending on the method He decides on. So we’re not afraid. Ask and—” She uncrossed her legs—she was wearing no underwear; her genitals were pink as rabbit’s eyes, and clean-shaven, not a trace of stubble; the dampness gleamed faintly under the black silk. “Ask and you shall receive,” she finished softly.
He wrenched his eyes from the pink cleft between the red garters…
“So tell me…where’s Madelaine? She’s at the temple?”
“You just answered your own question, clever fellow.” She had kicked off the other black spike-heeled shoe. Her feet were planted well apart on the floor. The scene might have been set up by Helmut Newton; the incongruity of an urbane lady of fashion posing with pornographic availability. “I’ll take you to Madelaine. She’s a little…out of touch lately. You might be just what she needs. Next question?”
“What does Minder hope to gain from all this? Sheer power, more money? What?”
She grinned and tilted her head to the right. “He wants to kill Death.”
“What? He wants immortality?”
“No. Even while you’re alive, you’re always dying. You get tired. You get a high—but then you come down. You’re still alive but you feel beat, right? You fall in love, but love fades. You live for years—but you grow old, your vision fades. You get an erection, you have an orgasm, you slump—and that’s all. Then you feel ennui. Nothing good lasts. And all the down stuff that comes after the good stuff, the low point of the cycle—that’s an increment of Death.” She chuckled. “He loves to lecture about it. He says death is like Creeping Socialism. Sneaks in bit by bit…nothing pleasurable lasts. The pleasure fades and dies. And then, if you had a lot of pleasure, you go to hell for a while: hangover, cocaine burnout, postcoital ennui, what have you. So, Joey reasons, jolly old Joey, he figures: Maybe you could freeze Time Itself in one of the moments of pleasure—like say in a combination of drug and sexual ecstasy, when you’ve had plenty to eat and you’re comfortable, and everything feels good. Before it has a chance to go away, you freeze it, or at least you stretch out that one moment so that you experience it for an eternity. And since your thinking is all stretched out with it, you don’t get bored. He claims that’s what heaven is: eternal pleasure with no morning-after, no downer, no crash. But to obtain that, you have to transcend to a place outside of Time. Or—it’s a sort of paradox I don’t understand too well—where one segment of time never comes to an end. It’s just stretched out and out forever.”
“Locked into one blissful moment….And how is butchering children going to get him this?”
She ignored his acid tone. “The sacrifices bring power, and Joey gives that power to Him. The Head Underneath. The one who lives in the secret lake. And He…” Her eyes had glazed, she was talking as if tranced, as if chanting a holy litany. “He will reach out and change Time, to make it possible for Joey to transcend, so that what Joey is experiencing at the moment of transcendence he will experience forever, without it going away in the least. Enough of this dry stuff…okay?” Inept sexy wheedling.
“So—Joey gives the…the Head Underneath the—what? The life force of the people he sacrifices? Their souls?”
“Sure. Souls, so-called, are just energy fields. Energy is power. We send it to the Head. He get
s stronger, and reaches out with His power currents, and changes things for us. He got me my career back. He can tilt things, so good luck slides right into your lap. You name it, He can get it for you, Carl.”
She looked him in the eye. He began to breathe heavily. “Carl…come here. Look what I’ve got for you.”
She opened the black box on the eight-inch-square silverframed mirror. Fitting perfectly into black-velvet insets were a long glass bottle of white powder, probably cocaine; a pair of capped syringes, side by side; a surgeon’s scalpel; a small vial of water; an ornate silver spoon. She took the spoon out first, laid it on the mirror, carefully filled it with water from the vial, capped and replaced the vial, extracted the syringes, sucked the spoon’s water into one of the syringes, extracted the coke container, unscrewed its cap and tipped a generous amount into the spoon, set the container, open, on the mirror, squirted the syringe’s water into the spoon, dissolved the cocaine, drew the cocaine solution into the syringe, flexed the muscle of her right arm, expertly found the vein with the needle and—
Lanyard looked away. “I haven’t shot up in a while,” she said, “because the track marks show. This oughta be good—ooh…it’s good…yeah it’s good…” Her hands shaking, she set the empty syringe aside and looked up at Lanyard, flushed and transformed. Her pupils dilated and shrank, dilated and shrank, as wave on wave of pure pleasure coursed through her.
“It’s like nothing you ever experienced,” she said, rocking and writhing, speaking through chattering teeth. “It—Carl—try it. It’s not like snorting coke. It’s a whole different thing. It’s a five-minute orgasm and—more. It’s indescribable. And it removes all—all inhib—bi—all inhibitions, Carl, all—” She had spread her legs wide, was toying languidly with her clitoris…an invitation of flesh.
