The Ends of the Earth

by Lucius Shepard

He gritted his teeth, pushed against the edges of the wound, trying to stifle the pain.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck!

  After a minute he hauled himself to his feet. He wavered, almost fell. Black nebular shapes floated before his eyes. Pain was beating inside him, the steady beat of oarsmen. Stroke, stroke. Once it had subsided a bit, he wobbled over to the bar and poured a double bourbon. He slugged it down. Poured another. He repeated the process twice more and felt much better. Maybe, he thought, he could make it back to Tasang-partsi.

  Not hardly, bozo, not without you growing wings.

  The funny thing, though, was why he should keep wanting to return there. He wouldn’t have minded seeing Cheni again. Birds of a feather, that sort of thing. And they’d had something going, something that had seemed of importance. What it was, he had no way of telling. Maybe it was merely a delusion.

  Delusion was always a possibility.

  But he could have sworn there had been something, some unity, some tie. Nothing mystical…or if it was, then mystical in a nuts-and-bolts sort of way, in a pragmatic sense.

  What the hell was he doing, just standing here and thinking about this dumb crap?

  Time to flee, to hie thee hence, to make tracks.

  The whiskey had steadied him, and he thought it would be good to get away from the house. Take a walk somewhere.

  Been a long time since you’ve had a chance just to walk around and feel the breeze without having mean things on your mind.

  Not since…shit! Not since Eddie Lavigne.

  Eddie, Christ! How long’s it been, man?

  Twenty-three years, pal. What the fuck you been doing with yourself?

  Dying, Eddie. I’ve been dying all that time.

  You always were a morbid asshole. Hey, remember when we busted out of the orphanage?

  Fucking A…it was great!

  Great? You ran out on me!

  What’d you expect, man? You freaked out!

  The hell I did!

  Hell you didn’t, Eddie! We were crossing a field, remember, and we saw this old horse grazing, and you said we should steal the fucker…ride it. But we were too short to get up on it, so you started jumping up and down, waving your arms, and the son of a bitch just keels fucking over. Dead. You claimed you’d killed it, that you had vast mental powers. You said if I didn’t do what you told me, you’d zap me with your mind rays.

  Clement.

  A cold, intimidating voice snapped him back to an awareness of Rice’s den. He spun about, the Magnum at the ready.

  I need you, Clement.

  “Oh, man,” he said, easing out of the room into the darkened corridor. “I don’t need this shit!”

  You have done evil, but your heart is pure.

  “Who the fuck’s there?” he shouted, dropping into a crouch.

  Kumari.

  Cold, black, deep as forever.

  Clement laughed giddily, realizing that he was starting to lose it in a big way. Time to flee. Yes, indeed. He stepped back into the den. His shirtfront was soaked with blood. He grabbed Rice’s overcoat, pulled it on, and buttoned it to cover the mess. He shoved the Magnum into his belt, then poured another bourbon. He glanced down at Settlemyre and Rice. Brothers in the bond, no matter how despicable. He toasted them and wondered how it would feel to be innocent and clean and full of hope.

  This world is a shadow, Clement. What you have done is cause for neither contrition nor pride.

  “No lie?” said Clement, and giggled; the bourbon was doing its job.

  Purity is a condition of fate. It has been your fate to be a child at war and pure. Thus you can be useful to me.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Got a previous engagement.”

  He went staggering through the house, out onto the street. Swarthy wild-eyed men in loose white cotton shirts and trousers milled everywhere, going arm-in-arm, singing drunkenly. The night was music and incense and shrieks, the darkness slashed by channels of torchlight and glitter. As Clement moved with the crowd toward the heart of the city, he spotted three men in suits. They had the cut of Company men. They were craning their necks, peering in every direction, and Clement thought that they might have been watching Rice’s house in hopes that he would show up; they probably had seen him leaving. He worked his way to the middle of the crowd in order to hide from the men, and then, feeling weaker, disoriented, he let the press carry him along, turning this way and that, and finally pouring into a wide street lined by wooden stalls with hotly lit interiors and necklaces of light bulbs that illuminated signs lettered in both English and Newari. Like little stages in which dozens of two- and three-character plays were being performed. Tinsmiths, basketsellers, men hunched over sewing machines, cobbler’s benches, men hammering inlay into copper plates, offering scarves and rings and silver charms. The jostling of the crowd had worn away Clement’s reserves. He pushed toward the nearest of the stalls, a place no larger than a toolshed in which a pudgy man wearing an old tweed coat and a green turban was embroidering a shirt; he slumped against the wall, slid down into a sitting position, and stared at the forest of legs moving past, growing numb and thoughtless. Somebody tapped him on the shoulder. The stallkeeper, his face crimped by a frown. He shook a finger under Clement’s nose.

  “No stay here!” he said, shaking his head. “No!”

  Clement fumbled in his pockets, hauled out a handful of bills and thrust them at the man. “Just a few minutes, okay? I just want to rest up for a few minutes.”

  The money vanished along with the frown.

  “Okay!” said the stallkeeper, beaming. “No problem, no big deal.”

  The music swirled around Clement, no longer seeming an assault on his senses, but rather comforting him, supporting him on billows of sound, and he began to feel at peace. This troubled him. By all rights, he thought, he should not be granted peace, he should be tormented for his crimes.

  But peace was cool with him if it was cool with everyone else.

  How ’bout it, guys? Little time-out? Little King’s X?

  Beyond the market stood a three-story building of crumbling friated brick, with slices of light leaking through shuttered windows. Shadows were hundreds of deaths passing behind them.

  Can’t scare me, man.

  I live with those fucking shadows.

  Hey, Cheni! There’s worse than being unlucky.

  “Right, D’allessandro?”

  Absolutely, Roy.

  You know how it goes…Born under a bad sign, I been down since I began to crawl, if it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all.

  No luck at all, Cheni, that’s really the pits.

  But no luck wasn’t an excuse, he wasn’t going to hide behind excuses, not at this point.

  He fingered the wooden tiger from his pocket and looked it in the eyes. “What do you think?”

  You were hard wood to work, Roy, but I finally got you right.

  I loved you, old man.

  Please, Roy…love?

  The stallkeeper tapped him on the shoulder again and handed him a cup. Tea. Clement thanked him and set the cup down.

  Can’t drink it, might spring a leak.

  I’m a little teapot, short and stout, just tip me over and pour me…

  Fuck that shit!

  He put the tiger down beside the cup.

  You stay there, pal, and keep watch for demons.

  His wound throbbed like a sick heart.

  Clement.

  That cold voice again.

  “Go away,” he said.

  Look at me, Clement.

  Wearily, he lifted his head. Torchbearers were approaching, and the crowd parted before them. Following the torchbearers came a platform borne on the shoulders of six men, and seated on it was a Newar girl of about twelve, clad in embroidered gilt cloth. Her black eyes opened like tunnels through golden flesh, and he flowed along them, passing through the bleak serenity of the girl’s presence, a presence that struck him as being both masculine and feminine, until he touch
ed a more erratic presence, touched it briefly, but for long enough to acknowledge an intimacy that was better than love, better than trust, one he had been too earthbound to accept and Cheni had been too distraught to convey, a unity that was too individual to have a name. Then the contact was broken and he found himself looking up at the Newar girl. She had descended from her platform. Her eyes were swelling, pushing toward him, threatening to burst and loose a flood of blackness.

  “No,” he said, “no, I don’t want this.”

  Then, before he had time to doubt what was happening, the blackness of Kumari’s eyes poured over him, and he saw, mounted upon a field of darkness, like a rip in the fabric of night, a Tibetan man, a soldier weary of war who joined company with an anguished, distraught woman, an unlucky woman, and shortly thereafter, wounded by his enemies, lay dying at the feet of a little girl dressed in gilt cloth.

  Clement felt a searing pain that did not seem associated with his wound. He ignored the pain and watched the Tibetan tumbling through the darkness toward a golden light, and knew that the man was melding with the blackness of Kumari, becoming part of an ancient process, and when the blackness penetrated the light, it would be wedded to the soul of a newborn girl child, and soon priests would come for her and bear her away to the temple where she would be pampered and paraded before the faithful on festival days, and do battle with the fuming emptinesses who menaced all and everything, aided by that soldierly essence with whom she had allied herself, until the time arrived when a new incarnation would be chosen and the worn scrap of the Tibetan man’s soul would be granted release, and the girl stood in the market of Katmandu above a dying American and instructed him on the nature of his fate.

  I need you, Clement.

  He recalled what Cheni had told him about Kumari’s ally. More craziness, he thought. More delusion. Why, after all, would he be the one chosen?

  It’s no reward.

  Oh, yeah…right.

  He wanted to pull back from the vision, but discovered that he could not, that he was falling toward a distant golden light. Frightened, he twisted and turned, but had no option other than to confront the pain that assaulted him from every side, huge ebony shadows veering close to tear at him, and it wasn’t fair, he thought, it just wasn’t fair for him to have to keep on fighting, even though he recognized that there was a certain justice involved. He fixed on the golden light, hoping that concentrating would help ease his pain. It didn’t look much like an opening, he thought. It was solid and serene, like a fat autumn moon floating over the emptiness of a Wyoming night, and he remembered having seen it before from this same angle, hiding in a barn on the night he split from Eddie Lavigne, wondering what monster might come out of the dark to rend him with its teeth, wondering if there would ever be an end to solitude, to grief.

  Clement!

  Another cold voice, or was it the same one?

  Coincidence or magic?

  And then his grief was subsumed into the light, and it felt strange to be free of grief, as if half his weight had been taken away, and he drifted toward the golden moon, drowsing, afraid that something would snatch him if he slept, but too sleepy to sustain fear.

  Clement! Goddamn you!

  His thoughts eddied, and he gazed at the wooden tiger that somebody had given him, liking the way it stood there, facing the battles ahead with a fierce frozen glare. Seeing it gave him courage.

  C’mon, Clement! Talk to me!

  Courage made anything bearable. Sorrow, pain, even being shaken…shaken hard. And he thought someday he would look back on this night, this one night that seemed emblematic of the entire character of his life, with the clean smell of hay and the sound of semis hitting the spacers on the highway down through the mountains, and loneliness fitting around him like a heavy coat, muffling emotion…yeah, someday he might think back on this night and realize that it had been a pretty good time.

  Clement!

  More shaking.

  The pain had started again. His eyes blinked open, and he saw a man in a suit kneeling beside him, another man standing above him, holding a machine pistol.

  Demons.

  No doubt about it.

  Their suits and pale skins were containers of emptiness and cold.

  Behind them, the celebrants had cleared a space about the three men, formed a loose rank, and were looking on with sober expressions. Some were whispering one to another. Clement could no longer see Kumari. Her keepers must have hustled her away, but he could feel her off somewhere in the midst of the crowd.

  Her Serene Darkness, waiting for him.

  He focused on the man with the gun. Deep within the black tunnel of the barrel a golden full moon was shining.

  “Oh,” he said, and gave a feeble laugh.

  The man with the gun laughed, too, and said, “Hey, dying must be fun, huh, Clement?”

  “I don’t think he’s dying, I think we might be able to patch him up,” said the man kneeling. He had a receding hairline and curly brown hair and the lined, rugged face of a sympathetic counselor, like a football coach or a juvenile probation officer; his tone, however, was anything but sympathetic. “Hear that, asshole? You might just live to do a little suffering.”

  “You’re not such bad guys,” Clement said. “You’re just in a lousy play.”

  The two men exchanged glances, then the kneeling man asked Clement a question. Clement paid it no attention.

  The pain was getting very bad. He stared at the shining moon within the gun barrel.

  If you have nowhere to run, you have to make a stand.

  Shut your ass, bitch!

  Clement tried to collect himself, to gather his thoughts into a coherent pattern and make a judgment. This was all wrong, this shit about goddesses and soldiers, this crazy bullshit about demons. He was going to live. Okay. What then? Figure a way to buy some time. Tell them a tall tale, a Tru-Life Adventure.

  There I was, guys, surrounded by an old man and my wife, with only my body for a weapon.

  What for? Why make the effort?

  The faces of the crowd glistened, flat and unreal, facades pressured by the blackness behind them. Screams of joy and deliverance, wild men drunk on holiness.

  Swirling music and moonlit clouds on fire.

  Aw, what the hell!

  He wanted to remember something, something sustaining, enabling, something that would shore him up, but he realized that there had never been anything of the sort in his life. His world had consisted of the apparent, the illusory, of moments whose vividness and poignancy had been the product of a misapprehension or a sleight of hand. He could conjure sweet words, the softness of a woman’s breast, the feeling of accomplishment, of conquest, but they were all funded by lies or a lying sensibility. He could see in his mind’s eye Lily’s lips curving up as he touched her, that sly, sexy way she’d had, he could see into the heart of a thousand such moments, and they were all wormwood, all betrayal and dust. What did it matter if his ending was colored by another lie, by a clever delusion, a delusion so clever that it didn’t matter if it was real, because it offered nothing but pain?

  You’ve always been a sucker for punishment, right, slugger?

  Bet your ass!

  Pretty goddamn remarkable, he said to himself, I mean this is very tricky how you’ve managed to work the whole deal in Tasang-partsi and everything since into a nifty little metaphysical gig, a nice job opportunity out on Fifth Dimension Avenue.

  Well, ready or not, here I come.

  The man kneeling beside Clement asked another question, but Clement only smiled. He squeezed the wooden tiger tightly in his fist, imagining that his soul was shrinking to fit within that lethal compact shape.

  I love you, he said under his breath, talking to Lily, to D’allessandro, to Cheni, to anyone who might receive with understanding the minute spark of love that he had nourished, the spark that had weakened and killed him.

  What’s next? There must be something next, some final formality.

&n
bsp; Any last words, pal?

  Forgot about that.

  Clement searched out the eyes of the kneeling man. Watery blue eyes, little humid puddles empty of feeling.

  “I give,” he said to him.

  He focused on the tiny golden moon within the barrel of the machine pistol. Then, summoning all his strength, he kicked the man, sending him onto his back, and made a quick, crafty move toward the Magnum tucked inside his overcoat. For an instant he was dismayed, thinking that he might have moved so quickly, he had caught the other man by surprise.

  Then he fell through darkness into the light.

  They’d robbed her of her life, sucked out the middle of her joy like marrow-eating ghouls. Memories she had, but they’d drained them of juice and left the husks stuck in her head like dead flies in a web. Left her bitter and dotty, an old cracked hag fit for taunting by the neighborhood children.

  Take those Kandell boys.

  Always traipsing across her lawn and peeing their initials in the snow-crust, shaking their tiny pale things at her as if the sight would do an injury. There they were now, sneaking up to the house, clumping onto the porch. A piece of notebook paper scrawled with a kid’s crooked letters was slipped under the door. Hanging on to the knob for balance, teetering, Willa picked it up and read: “Old lady Selkie is a fuking bitch!”

  She snatched open the door and saw them humping toward the fence, two blue-coated wool-hatted dwarfs sinking to their knees in the snow. “You got that right,” she squalled. “Fucking with a C!” Yelling took the wind out of her, and she stood trembling, her breath steaming in ragged white puffs, her eyes tearing.

  The Kandells stopped at the fence-line, and one gave her the finger.

  “I see you back there,” she shrilled. “I’ll go down in my cellar and make me a Black Clay Boy. Jab pins in its eyes, and prick you blind!”

  Now where the hell had she gotten that idea? A Black Clay Boy? Some senile trick of broken thoughts happening right for once. Well, maybe she could hex ’em. Maybe she’d shriveled up that pure and mean.

  She shut the door, leaned against it, her heart faltering. The next second, a snowball splintered one of the side windows, spraying sparkles of glass and ice over her new sofa. She was too weak to shout again.