by John Shirley
I held it up to the fading light, and saw that the dripping black-and-green muck was marbled with silvery lines reminding me of the “snail’s tracks” we’d seen on Harris’s remains.
There was no soul spark in the animal shape, though it might well have had one once.
I looked toward the village. Garden Rest wasn’t far off, but there was a thick screen of trees between this spot, in the marsh, and the village.
Carrying the animal-shaped armature of wires, I turned and sloshed back toward Doyle, who waited on the path. I struggled along, enjoying the resistance of the world to my passage. I felt more alive, that way. I would have to find some mountains and climb them, sometime.
I reached the path and set the wiry shape down at Doyle’s feet. “I feel like a hunting dog laying a dead animal at your feet. You only need the shotgun.”
Doyle chuckled. “I simply don’t want to annoy my housemate with muddy boots. You have no wife to infuriate. Not yet. Now then . . .” He went down on one knee beside the animal shape. “No spark. But here are wisps of the ‘snail track’ again. How much of the remains was exposed, under the water?”
“About half. A little more.”
“This water does have its slow currents, and then there’s the wind. Sediment is deposited. I’d say this was there for some time. Two months or more, judging by local sedimentation. We’d never have seen it had we not passed when the light was striking the water at just the proper angle. It’s as if the sun wanted us to see it.”
“Two months. You think there are more of these out there?”
“I shouldn’t be at all astonished if there were. I shall take it back and show it to Brummigen. If you would be so good as to carry it the rest of the way . . . I am sorry about your boots.”
“It’s not important.” I took off my boots and rinsed the bottoms of them in the water by the path. “What’s shoe leather made of here? I mean, for when I need new boots . . .”
“A tree bark that merely resembles animal leather. Do you have a theory about this find, Fogg?”
I could tell by his tone that he had his own theory. “Just wondering”—I pulled on my boots and stood up—“if what happened to this critter could be something natural. I mean—what happens when someone is struck by lightning here?”
“Living bodies seem to deflect lightning away, here, before it quite strikes. I’m not sure why. But you are suggesting some natural force that destroyed the bodily forms of both Harris and this creature?”
“Maybe,” I said, picking up the animal shape. “There’s almost as much as people don’t know about this world as they do.
“That is true enough.” He started off; I squished along after him, my wet socks chafing in my boots, and Doyle went on: “Nothing is completely destroyed—just deconstructed. Even a house burned in a fire is merely reduced to components which are then blown about—not lost, but redistributed.” He looked at the wiry animal shape I carried. “I suspect a willful act against this creature, myself. This—so I hypothesize—was an early experiment. Our killer captured an animal, and reduced it to this state, as part of a learning process. So that method could later be applied to people.”
“Psycho killers, back on Earth, usually started out torturing animals before they got to people.”
“It could be such a person. As I said, the severely mentally ill are sorted out before they get here—but someone with a powerful enough psychological momentum could penetrate to this plane.”
“So you think it’s an afterlife psycho killer?”
“I do not exclude the possibility. But I do not incline that way. Ah, I hear music . . .”
I heard it, too. It was something folksy, on acoustic instruments, with a touch of New Orleans. “Good to hear. Rather hear that than angels playing harps.”
“Ha ha, yes. It’s probably Bertram and a few other fellows in the town square. They like to have little, what do they call them, marmalade sessions?” He grinned. “Oh, I know, it’s called jam sessions. I just think jam is an unpleasant word.”
We walked down a side street, approaching Doyle’s house. I listened to the softly echoing music from the town square.
“Will you not see if Brummigen would care to take a look at the remains of that sad creature?”
“Sure I will.”
“And you will come to breakfast tomorrow?”
“Any time you say.”
“You’ll know when. And . . .” He paused at the gate, lowered his voice, glancing at the house. “I feel that I burdened you with my concerns, and with the dark corners of my life—but in my selfishness I didn’t ask about you. Of course, some things I knew. “
“Yeah? Like what?
Doyle shrugged. “Your interest in American western folk music—this I could ascertain from your clothing. You seemed quite comfortable in the bar—pubs have been an important part of your life. Brummigen mentioned your past as a detective. And you have a detective’s slight detachment . . .”
“I was a pitiful excuse for a detective, to be straight up about it,” I said. “Anything else?”
He smiled mysteriously. “Your accent places you west of the Rockies. I suspect Nevada. You are not over-nice with your appearance but you have a good deal of aplomb, and a wry point of view. Your body brought its scars along—because they’re important to you. They include the distinctive mark of broken bottle glass, with just the proper curve to it, on your right hand—the residue of a bar fight, or an investigation in a bar that went awry.”
He had me there. Went awry is one way to put it.
Doyle looked at my face, and read something in it. “You see the irony in things. But you have an instinct to take part in the protection of the community. You dismiss your own abilities—the former I have witnessed, the latter I see flickering in your face as I mention your protective instinct. You slept in your clothing, and rather restlessly, at Ruby’s place—the clothing itself reports this to me. You reclined mostly on your right side, judging by the rumples. The quality of your restlessness and your argot—I have learned a good deal of the generations that followed my own—suggests you did not pass on in your dotage. You were relatively young when you passed on. You do not have the distinctive traces of anger in your face that typically suggest your passing from the Before was the result of murder. I suspect death by misadventure. Given your generation and the places you liked to spend time, perhaps you died in a drunken car accident—or mixing drugs with drink. A polypharmic reaction?”
I nodded. “Not bad at all. Fairly Holmesian.”
“My observation technique derives from my old professor, Dr. Bell, not from my imaginary detective.” He clapped me once on the shoulder. “I’m not trying to impress you, Fogg, I merely wished you to know I’m not insensible to you as a fellow traveler—I was paying attention! And I hope you will reveal a bit more to us, by your own account, in the morning? Touie, for all her . . .” He glanced at the house again. “Well. She is a sympathetic person. I’m sure she’d like to hear as much of your story as you care to reveal to her. And you may be even more frank with me.”
“You dealt your cards straight to me, when you told me what was happening in your life,” I said. “I won’t deal off the bottom of the deck.”
“Good! That will place you above Bertram. Until tomorrow . . . Oh, by the way—those books . . . I think I’ll arrange to have the relevant volumes at my house. Tomorrow, then.”
“Sure.”
He went through the gate, and I continued on by myself, heading over to Brummigen’s bar.
The sun was going down beyond the hills when I got to the village square, and the lights glimmered on, around Garden Rest. The Lamplighter had lit one, and that caused all the streetlamps to light, as if by chain reaction. The music rose to greet me as I walked up.
Brummigen, in his ap
ron, was standing in the open door of his establishment, leaning on the frame, arms folded on his chest, the faintest smile permitted on his face as he listened to the musicians gathered a few paces away. They sat in a circle of wooden chairs, in the square near the bar, mugs of beer on the street beside them; Bertram, his shirtsleeves rolled up, jacket over the back of his chair but wearing his speckled bow tie, was playing an acoustic guitar. He winked at me when he saw me. Brennan was there, thumping something like an African hand drum. A long-haired, bearded man in small rose-colored glasses was playing a wooden harmonica. A sad-eyed man with a Swedish look played a wooden flute; Ruby was there, playing something like a harpsichord that she seemed to have transported to the square for this purpose. The current tune seemed a bit Dixieland to me.
I carried the animal-shaped cage of wire over to Brummigen. He pursed his lips, seeing it, and said, “Stick it behind the bar, will you? We can look it over in a few minutes. Doyle venture an opinion?”
“He thinks it might be an early experiment by the same guy who killed Morgan Harris. But he isn’t sure. Has that silvery stuff on it.”
“Looks like what’s left of a ringtail sloth. We don’t get animal bones in the afterworld. Doyle might be right.”
“It was on the edge of the swamp. Doyle thinks it was there for months.” We were quiet for a few moments, listening to the music. Then I asked, “You guys have concerts like this, a lot?”
“We do. String quartet the other day. But this one is what you might call a send-off because Sven there, the blond fellow, is leaving the village. He’s got the Summons.”
I was feeling awkward, holding the wire shape of the sloth creature. But I had to ask, “The Summons?”
“It’s . . . a feeling, even a voice, that . . . I don’t know how else to say it . . . it calls you from inside. It calls you to go look for something, somewhere else in the afterworld. Every so often someone gets the Summons. It’s thought to be a good thing, in some way. Some wait and wait for it and it doesn’t come. Doyle hasn’t felt it and I know he’s disappointed. He thinks it’s to do with moving on to a higher level. Diogenes hints at something like that. But I don’t know. No one has come back. Though we have had word from a few. Butterfly messages. Cryptic words . . .”
Butterfly messages? I’d ask about that later.
“We also have theater,” Brummigen added. “Sometimes amateur productions of Shakespeare, what have you—but more often its life theater.”
“Which is?”
“People find some incident they want to dramatize from their lives . . . they enlist other people, act it out in theater. Very entertaining, really. You might want to give that a try. Good for the soul.”
“Not likely. That’s the last thing I’d do. So to speak. Say, uh, Major –I worked up a powerful thirst wandering around out there with Doyle. Only wet I got was on my pants.”
Brummigen hooked a thumb toward the bar. “Help yourself to a drink . . . I’ll be there in a minute or two. But don’t sit on my stools in those wet pants.”
It might’ve been the Garden Rest equivalent of 10 P.M. when I lay down naked, my clothes drying nearby, in my room at the Ossuary. I was enjoying the coolness on my skin, but thinking about those metal spikes that’d come jabbing up from the ground at me and Doyle . . .
Thinking I could’ve had a much worse day, if we’d been in more of a hurry to get to that front door. Could have been skewered. Pain was definitely a part of the afterworld.
For the first time since leaving the beach, I felt dreamlike. Maybe this was like Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, but instead of falling to snap my neck in a noose, I was actually dying on the floor of my shitty room in Vegas. Maybe seconds had become days as I lay dying, imagining all that had happened . . .
But deep down, I knew I would come to myself, soon enough . . . and I’d be right here in the afterworld.
Lying on my back, an arm thrown over my eyes, listening to the muffled twanging thump of the musicians, I drifted into the light trance that passes for sleep here.
And I dreamed. Dreams in the afterworld are usually about the Before. Unlike dreams in real life, they’re often genuine memories played out on the screen of the mind . . .
Las Vegas. A year before I died.
The Strip. Just around midnight. A cool night, though I wasn’t quite outside. Pedestrians strolling on Fremont Street were outside and weren’t, at once. I was hurrying along under the digitalized ceiling of the “Fremont Street Experience,” a curving roof, over the street itself, the underside turned into a gigantic electronic sign. They call it a barrel-vault canopy. They converted Glitter Gulch into a roofed pedestrian mall over something like ten years. Now the ceiling shows constantly changing digital imagery—more than 10 million LEDs, showing moving images, accompanied by booming, acoustically murky music. Images go crawling by overhead in bright colors. Right now, there was an image of fireworks to a shot of Vegas from the tip of the Stratosphere Hotel’s rooftop roller coaster; the roller coaster was replaced by a beautiful dancing girl. Her bare, perfectly proportioned legs were scissoring metrically overhead. Giant legs, really; she was as big as an image on a drive-in theater screen. Why weren’t there any more drive-in theaters, instead of all this?
The giant digital girl tried hard, but she couldn’t keep my attention. I was scanning the street, focused on finding Marissa. She was supposedly somewhere on Fremont. Strange place to hide, under a ceiling blazing with the glamoring, the clamoring of the collective unconscious. But then again, maybe that was protective coloration for Marissa.
I’d already checked her apartment. She’d moved out, left no forwarding.
Marissa Fetzer was the one who’d stolen Lenny Wong’s client list; she was the prostitute who wanted to be a madam, and she’d recruited four girls to leave Lenny and work for her. Potentially, she’d cut a big slice out of his business. She’d supposedly stolen about ten grand from his office safe, too. Some women get sick of the “escort” business’s creep factor—of being stuck between two kinds of creep. The sick and tired escort can just leave town, accept being a topless waitress in some franchised dive in some other burg—or she can steal money and the client list.
More than the money, what pissed Lenny off was the client list and the four girls. It was one of his girls suddenly becoming competition. That’s showing no respect. Lenny figures you just can’t let a bitch do that.
I knew Lenny from all the way back to high school. Half-Chinese guy, mostly a suburban stoner looking for the easy way. His older brother got twelve years for dealing drugs, so after working for a shady used-car lot, Lenny went into running a string of girls instead. I run into him the morning after he finds she absconded with his cash and his client list. “You’re a detective?” he says. “I was just shopping for a fucking detective. You always was a trustworthy fucker. I gave you money to get me weed, you got me the weed. You want the gig?”
Man, I sure needed a gig. I was living in a dump, a crappy apartment building where gambling addicts were forever hiding from the landlord. The blinking casino sign was perpetually flashing from next door, always strobe-flashing in my window:
THE PAY BIGGER CASINO
Owners had no clue about the irony in that sign.
Barely a casino, the Pay Bigger: just a musty two-story bar with tired waitresses in sexy outfits, a lot of chattering slot machines, a few meth dealers doing their own chattering, and a handful of shabby card tables.
You gambled one more time, and you lost—
There he was, Bull Moore. He was coming out of the Golden Nugget casino, with that hollow, lost look in his eyes that gamblers had after a bad run. Moore might have something for me. He kept his paranoid ears open . . .
“Hey Bull,” I said, strolling up to him. “What’s up? You look like you’re thinking of going back to pro wrestling.”
Mo
ore glared at me and stuck his hands in his coat pockets. “I have a radio show, Fogg. No time for wrestling. You should know that. You’re a professional snoop working for whoever pays you. Might be anyone, too. You could be working for the feds.”
“I’d love to get a job from the feds. I hear they pay good money. Recommend me to them sometime.” But I wanted him to help me so I said, “You know what, I caught your last podcast. Good stuff. I was just thinking you might need a stake.” His radio show was just a podcast thing and it made no money. He self-published conspiracy books and they made no money. I cocked my head, narrowed my eyes, pretending to look him over. “You look like a guy who wants a re-buy in a poker tournament.”
Moore frowned. “A stake? How much and for what?”
“Um . . . sixty bucks, Bull. If you have some good solid idea about how I might locate Marissa Fetzer.” Wong had given me three hundred bucks in advance for expenses. I was to get two thousand for finding Marissa. Whom I’d met more than once . . . Both times I’d paid, but we’d only had sex one of the times. Second time she blew the mood by starting to talk about her kid, so I paid her and said we’d just pretend we did it.
Moore glanced nervously around. “I think I know where she is. She was talking to . . .” He looked coldly at me. “ . . . to someone. About referrals to her business. I tried to warn her not to talk to him. He could be a federal agent. She don’t listen to me.”
“Who could be a federal agent?”
Moore shook his head. “Two hundred dollars.”
I shook mine back at him. “Eighty.”
“One eighty.”
“One . . . twenty. Last offer. But it better be solid.”
“One hundred twenty?” He chewed his lower lip, thinking about how he’d win back his money in the casino.
Only, he would probably lose the hundred twenty. But I didn’t point that out.
He nodded and stuck out his hand. I led him into the doorway of a closed Vegas souvenir shop, and gave him half the money. “Now tell me who she was talking to, and where, and you get the other half. And if it’s not solid, you get nothing more from me ever and I’ll slam your online radio show to anyone who’ll listen.”
