But he could not catch up to her, only follow, glimpses of her disappearing around each corner he turned.
Alex ducked through a narrow doorway and felt his boot catch something on the flagstone, some patch of moss or fungus or slick film on the wet, smoothed stone, and he crashed upon his back, a graceless mess in a slippery, dark corner. He scrambled to his feet, more angry than hurt, and scanned about for the little girl.
And that was how Alex learned of things more horrific than Confessor’s Row.
Before him stood a great, multi-tiered wall a mile long and a dozen stories high, filthy ceramic tile gritted with neglect and filth and grime, post-industrial soot and cinders turning its once-white surface a slippery mildew color and making each webbed and fractured tile stand out in sharp, brittle relief. Each tier comprised a narrow walkway of segmented alcoves like phone booths or urinal stalls, steep stairs climbing from one tier to the next. And in each partition on every tier as far as he could see was a person visible from the waist down, the upper part of their body interred inside the wall, locked in a stanchion like an animal and bricked in place. The crude muslin shifts suggested that these were the unrepentant, the ones that Janus could not reclaim back into the fold, the ones denied the mercy of Confessor’s Row.
For one brief moment of self-delusion, Alex thought some master artisan of New Age macabre had settled mannequins torsos into the alcoves along the wall as a piece of vast sculpture meant to illustrate the dehumanization of the human soul, the colossal inhumanity of indifference and abject dispassion that was so evident in Janus.
Then the moment passed; he saw them moving, feet shuffling. Not mannequins or statues. Alive! They’re alive!
A part of him wanted to turn away—horrified, ashamed, enraged—but he could not. He simply stared in awe, hoping that if he looked hard enough, he would understand, and all of this—the monstrous city, its soulless inhabitants, its dead martyrs and its living victims—would somehow make sense.
But it did not. There were no answers, just questions screaming endlessly without succor.
Shaded like a dark secret, he could see people moving along the narrow walkways, men in black, judges or priests or pilgrim re-enactors in some colonial New England tourist-trap. They skulked in solitude along the shadowy tiers, searching for something. One turned into a shallow stall, one hand grasping the hip of the faceless woman imprisoned there, the other fumbling with his pants before …
Alex doubled over and threw up.
On hands and knees, spine arched until he thought it would crack, he felt the agony pour through him, wave upon wave, muscles locked, face bulging as he tried to turn his stomach inside-out. Each new breath caught some nuance of this pocket in hell: ammoniated urine, runny excrement molding on cold porcelain, the stink of careless jism, the reek of sweat distinct with terror; endless, insurmountable fear that lived forever and without end in the cracks and dark places behind the city’s mask of white walls. This was the belly of Janus. He’d traveled past its teeth and through its veins until he had found himself here where Janus digested those souls that it sucked into its hungry jaws of iron and concrete, hapless sacrifices offered up from its walking-dead inhabitants, mendicants to its inhumanity.
Finally he collapsed, senseless and exhausted, feeling like he could have thrown up more; thrown up until he died, his brain exploding with blood, his heart bursting. There were things no person was meant to witness: things that could drive you mad for considering them, blind for seeing them, kill you for allowing them to go on unabated.
Maybe a month ago, maybe a year—another life to be sure—he had been painting the side of a house with a man named Raymond Gugliano. Everyone just called him Rigo; Alex never asked why. No one ever volunteered to work with Rigo; they thought he was weird. Alex found him perversely amusing.
‘Check it out, man,’ Rigo said from the other end of the scaffold. ‘I was at the library yesterday, ya know?’
Rigo’s favorite hangout was the campus library. Alex was not sure why someone who read as much as Rigo did, and actually retained as much information as he had, was still painting houses like a college student on summer break. He suspected Rigo never really read the things that would get him out of this job.
‘So I was readin’ this history book about witchcraft, and they’re talkin’ about the witch trials. You know the ones I mean, right? Back in New England and that when America was still a bunch of tight-assed, religious types making colonies for England and shit. There were these two women who were convicted of witchcraft because they were found to have a witch mark on ‘em. Bet ya can’t guess what it was?’
Alex found conversations with Rigo oddly intriguing and tedious. ‘I don’t know, a birthmark or something?’
‘Way better ‘an that. “The inner lips of their nether parts were judged to be too long and ill-shaped,” ’ Rigo said, pretending to paraphrase from some higher source.
Alex stopped painting and looked at him. ‘What?’
Rigo’s smile widened. ‘Check it out; this is so cool. These women were held down and stripped completely naked, then searched by a bunch of dowdy hausfraus who were probably secretly getting off on it. Is that some shit or what? And these old biddies decide these two women are witches ‘cause their labia—the lips inside their cunts, ya know—are too long to be normal. Can you fuckin’ believe that?’
Alex understood why Rigo was still painting houses. ‘So what happened to ‘em?’
‘Hanged ‘em. Man, an you thought the eighties were sexually repressed. Whoa!’ Rigo chortled to himself then said, ‘Oh hey, I’m going to the Slice o’ Heaven tonight. You in?’
Slice o’ Heaven was a strip bar half a mile off the highway near the county line. Alex, still unable to purge the image of Rigo’s tale from his mind, said no. ‘I’m gonna work on fixin’ up my old man’s place.’
‘The crab shack?’ Rigo shook his head. ‘Forget it. That place’ll never get off the ground.’
“—get off the ground.”
Face pressed against the wet stone, Alex turned his gaze to the opposite wall of the street and the simple, unadorned brick—brick and Lindsay’s bare feet standing only a yard away.
“She needs your help, Alex.”
“Tell me she’s not in there, Lindsay. Please!” His eyes welled with a blur of tears that he squeezed out with the heel of his hand, trying to focus.
“You know where she is,” the little girl said plainly.
He knew. God help him, he knew.
“She’s where we all are: where we’re not supposed to be. A little ahead, a little behind; a little to the left, a little to the right. But none of us are centered. When all else falls away, the center will hold. It’s where we’re supposed to be.”
He watched the little girl turn away suddenly, running down the water-slicked streets to disappear. Not into the distance, but like a ghost, its life upon earth resolved that it might shed its non-living existence. Lindsay simply vanished, only the faint echo of footsteps marking her passage.
“Alex, are you all right?” Brother Bartholomew asked, coming to help him up.
Alex rolled to his back, guns drawn and leveled on the friar before he even realized what he was doing. “Get away from me!”
He could no longer endure the touch of anything that was Janus. He understood now why he was here, why he had come. His was not the role the friar imagined, not the role foretold in sacred texts; in that regard, not he or any living creature with a soul worth saving belonged in Janus. Its breath reeked of pestilence, its touch death. Janus was anathema to anything that came unwelcome into its midst, and Alex knew down to his bones that he was not welcome in the Guardian City. Now more than ever, he was not welcome because he knew,
(understood)
and for that, the city reviled him; feared him.
“I don’t understand, Alex,” Bartholomew implored, hands raised in surrender. “What’s wrong?”
“That you even need to ask,” he s
aid, rising and holstering his guns. He quickly shifted the weapons, letting them rest more evenly across his back, over his hips, around his waist. So many weapons. “All of this is what’s wrong.” His hand swept across the Wall of Penitence, the scattering of denizens upon its many tiers come to defile and punish the imprisoned, his arm encompassing its horrible length, its connection to Confessor’s Row, its subtle inlets fed by every byway and artery that coursed throughout the city. “There can be nothing right about what you’re doing. Nothing!”
“You’re just confused.”
“Actually, I’m feeling very lucid at the moment,” he replied.
“You’re tired, hungry—”
“Fasting brings wisdom.”
“You don’t understand evil!” Bartholomew shrieked. “Yours was a sheltered life of isolation. You don’t understand. When the signs began, crops withered, livestock died. Starvation and disease led to death and killing. God challenged the Guardian City. Here is where it would begin, so here is where it could be stopped. Everything that you’ve seen, everything that was done here was done to save Janus, and in doing so, save the future and the world! The end justifies the means.”
“Nothing justifies this. No measure of apocalypse or its prevention can justify anything I’ve seen. Those who confess are hanged outright; those who don’t are imprisoned where they will die from neglect, or worse, torture at the hands of perverts masquerading as the righteous.”
“The people in the Wall turned their backs upon God and their fellow man. Their punishment is exclusion from God and His love. They chose their path.”
“I can see people of this city on the wall raping prisoners!” Alex said, barely able to control his revulsion, his hatred. “Are those goodly citizens more worthy of God’s love than the helpless women they’re—”
“They’re witches!” the friar protested, genuinely perplexed by Alex’s reaction. “They refused God and are attempting to bring down creation—”
“So let them,” Alex interrupted icily.
Bartholomew stared, his face drained a doughy white, mouth gaping like a fish plucked from the safety of the sea and cast upon the dry, choking earth.
“Let it die,” Alex pressed. “Let it be buried and forgotten.” He stood up before the friar, his stance a challenge. “For what it’s done, your world deserves to die. And for its savage disregard of life, it deserves to be damned.”
“Blasphemy!”
“God will not save Janus!” Alex shouted back, “Because there is nothing here worth saving. Your fear and stupidity have turned you into what God despises most. At least, my God despises this. If your God does not then he isn’t worthy of my shit.”
“Blasphemy!” Bartholomew shrieked again. “How can such atrocities spill from the lips of a gray warrior? The Wasteland was to have purified you, protected you from sin and corruption. You … you—”
The friar’s tirade halted abruptly, his eyes fixated upon Alex, concentrating on some fact buried deep beneath layers of religious insulation. When the words came, they spilled from Bartholomew’s trembling lips in a strangled whisper. “What have I done?”
Alex stepped back uncertainly, hands moving instinctively towards his guns.
(Not yet)
“I let you in! My God in Heaven, I … let … you … in! You made a mockery of me, pretended to be one of the prophesied ones, one of the grim warriors come to help the righteous in their struggle. You knew that was what I believed, and you delighted in your deception. Deceiver! Defiler!”
“Stop raving!”
And suddenly the man was at his throat, hands grabbing the red scarf in double-fists of rage. “And I let you in! I brought you to Janus! I have brought it all down!”
Alex slapped him, the blow knocking the friar to the street, then readjusted the scarf, fingers still shaking with adrenaline. Bartholomew had lost his mind.
But the friar only looked up at him accusingly, the expression of a man looking at something made of fire, or dripping poison. He remained where he was, one trembling hand brushing a thin line of blood from below his nose as he backed slowly away like a man facing down a wild animal; afraid to turn away, afraid to hold his ground. When he was a dozen feet away, he turned and started to run, screaming as he fled:
“The Red Knight has come! The Red Knight has come!”
* * *
Ariel November was taken to the Wall of Penitence. A part of her, thin and failing, thought she must try to escape; reasoned that she did not want to know what it was that frightened so many of the accused into choosing death over the Wall. But that fragment of her was drowning, centuries-honed ferocity surrendering to indecision and terror as she became less of Oversight and more of Ariel November, the new reality dragging her in, changing the rules, making her its own.
And neither was capable of escape anyway.
Within an hour of being sentenced, Ariel November was laid out like a carpet roll in an empty alcove, awaiting imprisonment in the Wall of Penitence. She could see the rows of the others, the ones that had come before her: the morning before, the day before that, all the days before that turned the Wall of Penitence from a means of torture into an unparalleled atrocity. But she could only see them from the waists down, the part of them left outside the wall, ankles tied to iron rings bolted to the walls, bare legs covered in dirty shifts, many soiled, some indiscreetly torn away.
She heard each stone the workmen laid, the squelch of mortar, the knock of tools on brick as they sealed away another. Ahead of them, a long row of fresh, unfilled holes like scars in the blighted tiles, wounds left open to drain. Even through the wall, she could hear terrified sobbing and screaming, petitions to God for help and mercy or simply death. But none were answered. Abandoned, she and every other woman doomed to the Wall of Penitence was given no more consideration than a stray cat.
Why, Jack? Didn’t I do everything you needed me to do?
There was no answer. What did she expect? Her world from before was one of isolation, her against God. But Jack’s world was completely different. In his world, God was the excuse for man against man.
Ariel began to cry. Strange that something she had never done before came so easily. Like being afraid. She had never known fear before, and now wore it as comfortably as her own skin, felt it crawling across her, destroying what was Oversight. This was Ariel November’s world, a world strangled with fear until everything and everyone succumbed. And the fear transformed to anger, and the anger hatred. It was a world without compassion, and she its latest victim.
She became aware of a new sound, a dull thumping, a sound she realized was her own skull falling repeatedly against the tile beneath her, slow steady thuds of her head upon brick, the sharp pain blossoming out into duller and duller regions of ache. She persisted until the center went numb, victim of her own self-inflicted punishment, an avenue of escape not considered until the full malady of the Wall of Penitence was realized. Just the dull pounding that reached her ears, growing ever more distant: thud, thud, thud.
“Don’t do that. You’ll hurt yourself.”
She turned her gaze, a blur of pain and fatigue, and saw sitting beside her a young girl with a bushy halo of curls. “Lindsay?”
“Uh-huh,” the little girl said. “Don’t hit your head anymore, okay? They’ll hear. They have collars that they’ll put around your neck if you do. It’ll make it worse.”
“Lindsay, please help me. Please!” She had so many questions, but would gladly forego them all if Lindsay would just help her get free.
“Everything will be okay. Jack’s taking care of us.”
“He … he’s not doing a very good job,” she said, her words shaky and desperate. “Lindsay, you have to help me!”
The little girl smoothed the hair at Ariel’s temple. “Jack’s the Caretaker. It’ll be okay.”
“Lindsay, please! Help me get out! Don’t let him do this to me, please!”
Lindsay was fidgeting, her hand withdrawing, her
gaze turning away. “I don’t have much time.”
“No, Lindsay, wait! Please!”
“He’ll get lost without me.” She stood up slowly, moving like a sleepwalker—a sleepwalker leaving!
“Lindsay, please don’t leave me here!” Ariel struggled against the ropes tied around her arms and wrists, but could not even snag the edge of Lindsay’s shift—so like the outfits worn by the condemned. “Please don’t leave me, Lindsay! Please!”
“I can’t help you,” Lindsay said, not knowing what else to do. Like her thoughts, the words were not her own; they belonged to another, left behind for her to read when the time was right.
And that time was now.
Oversight—no, her name was Ariel November now; Ariel November—was crying hysterically, fingers clutching for her, straining against the ropes until they wore into her skin. “Lindsay, don’t leave me! Please! Please, I need you!”
“I have to go,” she said, moving slowly. “I can’t do anything for you. You need a hero.”
And it was happening again. Lindsay’s mind was drawing back, back deep inside of her head, leaving her to look out from her eyes as if she were at the bottom of a deep well looking up. Her mouth was moving, lips speaking words that she heard and understood, but did not truly know, her thoughts not her own.
“He’ll come, Ariel November. There’s nothing I can do for you. But he can. It’s his destiny, just as it’s yours to trust him. I’m sorry I couldn’t do better, but this is all I have. I promise you, you have not been forgotten. You are a part of me now; I will never forget. Find the center. Find the doorway out. Go as deep into the darkness as you can. There you will find a way through to the light.”
The little girl leaned forward, placing her lips to the woman’s forehead as a parent might to calm a frightened child, and kissed the dark-haired woman from the Wasteland.
And then she was gone.
Ariel looked about, thinking she could still hear her in the distance, but realized it wasn’t the little girl at all. It was someone else, someone shouting the same thing over and over: “The Red Knight has come! The Red Knight has come!”
The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) Page 43
