by Marc Zicree
Venus had wandered to the front window, to be silhouetted by the seep of light through the blinds. “Charlie…” she said, her face obscured by the slices of brilliance, “Charlie hung himself. Smashed his horn to pieces and hung himself. We buried him in the park.”
“Jesus, Lord,” said Jelly. “Do you think it was the same with him as with Enid?”
“Maybe that was his way out,” said Venus. “Maybe it’s the only way out.”
“No,” Jelly whispered.
“No, there’s another way, and we’re going to find it.” Cal looked to Jelly behind his bar. “How well do you know Papa Sky?”
“He’s a mysterious old dude,” said Jelly. “Keeps to himself mostly. Like he said, he came from New York a while back. Just showed up on our doorstep like a stray cat. Comes back every day to eat.” Jelly shook his head and smiled. “Man, but he plays a mean sax. Some sweet horn, too. A 1922 Selmar. You heard him bribe Tone just now. That old guy is the riff king. He’s teaching Tone to blow some serious chops.”
Venus snorted. “He could have the Angel Gabriel’s chops, Jelly. That doesn’t mean he’s right in the head.” “What about this friend of his?” asked Cal.
Jelly shook his head. “He’s a bigger mystery than the old man. Papa talks about him once in a while, but that’s about it. The way he tells it, this guy practically carried him all the way from New York.”
“So, what’s next, Cal?” Colleen asked him. “Are we going to wait for our new friend to come back, or do you want to just try to bust into that place on our own? Blind.”
Cal did not answer directly. “It’ll be dark soon.” He took a deep breath and released it. “I assume bad things come out at night around here.”
Venus turned back toward us, shaking her head. “Not in the Red Zone. Primal pretty much takes care of things there.” Her mouth curved into a sardonic smile. “It doesn’t let the creepy crawlies get to its people. One of the perks of being a normal in Primal Land.”
“Perks?” Colleen laughed without humor. “You can’t friggin’ get out. I know—I tried.”
Venus shrugged. “A trade-off, I guess. We can’t get out, but other things can’t get in. If we behave ourselves, we do just fine.”
Colleen shook her head. “That’s still a prison, any way you cut it.”
“Yeah,” said Venus. “It is.”
“And we could be trapped here,” said Colleen, looking to Cal to refute it.
In the lamplight, the dark circles under her eyes were more pronounced. Colleen put on a brave show, always, but she had not recovered from her brush with Primal’s arcane fences.
“If this is a trap,” I said, catching Cal’s eye, “then I’m sure we will find a way to spring it. In the morning.” I canted my head subtly toward Colleen.
Cal glanced at her, then asked Jelly, “You have someplace we can crash?”
Jelly smiled. “That’s about the first sensible idea you’ve had since you got here. If you’re going to go out questing, you at least ought to do it on a good night’s sleep.”
I cannot speak to how good the night’s sleep was, but it was sleep, and welcome. We spent the night in what had been Jelly’s private residence. He now shared it with others who called this place home. Thanks to the cleverness of our hosts, we were blessed even with showers. They were hot, if brief.
By unspoken consensus, we granted Goldie and Magritte the right of a room to themselves. The rest of us slept in a pleasant bedroom made up with a large canopy bed and several cots. Colleen first opted for one of these, but after some argument, Cal convinced her the bed offered the best chance of comfort. She agreed, but only on the condition that one of us share it with her. It was not an unreasonable request; we had shared tents, plots of earth, and straw bales for months.
Calvin, eyes spilling worry, took me aside to ask, “Is Colleen all right, really?”
“You know Colleen. It is impossible to tell how much discomfort she is hiding.”
Cal glanced over to where Colleen sat cross-legged before a potbellied stove, drying her hair, wearing nightclothes composed of long, gray thermal underwear and a man’s red and black plaid woolen shirt. Shapeless, androgynous. “You take the bed. In case she needs you.”
I closed my eyes and thanked God my friend could not possibly see the precipice my thoughts teetered above. “Da,” I answered, not trusting myself to say more.
“So, who’s my bunkmate tonight?” Colleen had gotten up from the stove and moved toward us, combing her hair. It had grown in the past weeks and curled disobediently around her ears, framing her face.
Cal nudged my shoulder. “Here’s your man,” he said. “He looks like he could use a soft feather mattress and a down comforter, doesn’t he? Besides, I’m not really ready to turn in yet. Enid and I are going to do some sleuthing. See if we can find out a little more about Papa Sky and his mysterious buddy. Maybe unearth some more tales of disappearing musicians.”
“Good luck.” She yawned. “Jeez, I’m tired.”
He leaned over and kissed her forehead. “Sleep tight,” he said, touched my shoulder again, lightly, and left us alone.
Neither Colleen nor I spoke again until we lay side by side under the canopy, veiled slightly from each other by the semidarkness of the room. Firelight wove itself through the bed curtains and played across the ceiling, having crept from the slotted door of the wood stove, which Colleen had carefully banked down for the night. There was moonlight, too, equally clandestine, slipping between sash and sill. It was a luminous violet.
We lay in silence for a time, then she reached up and knocked on the headboard. “God, this thing reminds me of my childhood. I ever tell you about the bedroom set from hell?”
“No, I don’t believe you did.” I glanced sideways in time to catch her grimace.
“I was about, oh, thirteen, I guess. We’d just moved… again, and Mom wanted to make up for it by buying me new bedroom furniture. Well, I’ll tell you, what I really wanted was Mom and Dad’s bed. Big, old, heavy, mahogany four-poster. I came home from school one day and here was this wretched gold and white French Provincial thing with dust ruffles and pink roses all over the quilt. Pink, for God’s sake. She’d bought me her dream furniture, not mine. I wanted a pirate’s bedroom, not a princess’s.”
Pirate Colleen. I could almost picture her at the helm of a ship flying the Jolly Roger. I smiled in the soft darkness. “Did you tell her?” I asked.
“Yeah. Eventually. She really did feel bad about it. About six months later she bought her and Dad a new bed and gave me theirs.” She reached out a hand and tugged at the brocade draperies. “Okay, so this isn’t exactly a pirate’s bedroom, either. More like a lord and lady’s. But it’s closer. I asked her why she got me that trashy white stuff, and you know what she said? She said she thought I was just pretending to be a tomboy. So Dad would treat me like the son he never had. She was afraid I thought Dad had wanted a boy and that was why he’d taught me to play baseball and shoot and ride a horse.”
“But you weren’t pretending.”
“Hell, no. And neither was he.” She rolled over on her side to look at me. “Pretending sucks, Viktor. Promise me you won’t pretend with me.”
Were I not a doctor, I would have sworn my heart had stopped beating in my chest. “What do you mean? What pretense would I make with you?”
“The ‘old bull’ shit. You’re not old, Viktor. But you’ve let yourself feel old. You don’t have to explain why. I know why. But it’s a lie you’ve made up about yourself and I don’t buy it. Neither should you. Promise me: no more old bull shit.”
“Yes, boi baba. No old bullshit.”
“Okay. And you can also stop pretending to be a father figure.”
“Colleen…”
She raised herself up on one elbow and looked down into my face. “Viktor, you are not my father.”
I looked up at her for what seemed an eternity, her face illuminated by the warm, red amber of firelight on one side
and cool moonlight on the other. Fire and ice.
I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to take her in my arms and hold her, and sleep, and awaken in the Preserve where there was no quest and no danger and no dreams of blood and death. I wanted more than that, and it terrified me. She terrified me. I tried desperately to call Yelena to mind, but she would not come. She left me alone with Colleen.
“No,” I whispered. “I am not your father.”
She gave me a smile that was at once smug and shy, then put her head down on my chest, wrapped her arms around me, sighed deeply, and slept.
I lay awake as long as I could, savoring her nearness, while my heartbeat slowed and desire ebbed.
By morning I had convinced myself I had suffered some sort of mental confusion. I was glad, desperately glad, that I had not acted out of misbegotten passion. Colleen could not possibly have meant what I had taken her to mean through my veil of exhaustion. I had seen her with Cal. I had seen the way he looked at her, spoke to her, touched her. I had seen them kiss.
Certainly, my dear friend Colleen had only meant to keep me from becoming old before my time.
I might have asked her, but she had risen and was gone; only Enid still snored peacefully in a nearby cot. That was good. It saved me further confusion, further possibility of betraying myself. Daylight grounded me, ordered my thoughts. I was well-rested, sober. And I recalled clearly that I had not let slip anything revealing. I recalled, with equal clarity, that I had promised to forswear pretense. Honor would have me go to Colleen and confess… what?
Say it, you old fool. What possible good is to be gained from lying to yourself?
Old bullshit, indeed. Here I was late in my forties, pretending to myself that life was over. I had told myself life was over when I took up that damned hot dog cart. And since then, since I had given up on myself, look where I had been and what I had done. And I had not taken a single step of the journey without repeating that old chestnut: Your life is over, Viktor Lysenko. You are an old, dead, hollowed-out man.
I sat up in the empty canopy bed, hand over my heart, and felt it beating. I was not old, she had said. Most assuredly, I was not dead… yet. And at this moment, I did not feel hollow. Truthfully, I had not been hollow since Cal brought me to his apartment to examine his sister. Since the four of us had set foot on the road together. With that first step outside myself, the cavity within had begun to fill, until this moment when I was forced to recognize that it was half full. Perhaps more than half.
Downstairs in the restaurant, breakfast was on. It was simple but substantial fare, and it seemed the whole neighborhood, such as it was, had shown up to partake. I took bread and porridge to a table near a window, where Colleen sat drinking hot tea.
She smiled at me as I sat down across from her. “I’d kill for some coffee,” she said, “but Jelly says they exhausted the supply about three weeks ago. He thinks he can arrange to get some more from ‘a certain warehouse on the waterfront.’ We’ll probably be out of here by the time he gets the deal set up.” She cocked her head to one side and checked me over thoroughly. “You look better this morning. Still like to see you get rid of those dark circles under your eyes, though.”
“I feel much better this morning. But I’m afraid the dark circles are a permanent fixture. You didn’t give me a chance to check your burns this morning.”
“You mean that little rash?” She leaned forward into the wan sunlight. Her softly tanned face was completely unblemished. “All gone. And I slept better than I have since we left the Preserve. Thanks. You make a nice pillow.”
Her green eyes were warm and open down to her soul, but she did not speak of last night, nor did I. There was nothing I could say, no question I could ask, that would not lead somewhere I was uncertain she wanted to go. I would die before I shattered these comfortable bonds.
Cal came in before long, trailing Goldie and Magritte. The three of them generated sufficient nervous energy to power Jelly’s cook stove. When I thought Cal would be unable to resist a blind thrust into Primal’s domain, Papa Sky reappeared on Tone’s arm. He accepted his breakfast with sincere gratitude and sat at table with us. Calvin showed admirable restraint, holding his questions until the old man had done with his meal.
When Papa had finished, he put aside his porridge bowl, picked up his mug of chicory and sat back with a sigh of contentment, his face warmed by the crimson stained sunlight that poured through the street-level windows. “So, you still want to go charging off into the heart of darkness, do you, Mr. Cal?”
“We don’t have a choice.”
“Surely you do. You could stay here. Here, you don’t have to search and Enid don’t have to play.”
“Staying here doesn’t get my sister back,” said Cal. “Staying here is giving up—not just on Tina, but on everything. I can’t do that. I couldn’t live with knowing I’d done that.”
Papa gazed at Cal in such a way that I almost believed he could see him. “Well, you got this far. I didn’t figure you for a quitter. You’re a lot like my friend in that, Mr. Cal. He understands your desire to persevere.”
“Does that mean he’ll help us?”
“He can’t do miracles. But he did tell me some things. About that Tower? He says you oughta find the seventh floor real interesting.”
“Why?” Cal glanced at Goldie, who sat at one corner of the table with his back pressed against the wall. “What’s on the seventh floor? The legal records? Primal? What?”
“He didn’t enlighten me on that point, son. He just said to tell you that you’d find the seventh floor of interest. His words. He also suggested you leave Enid and the pretty flying lady outside the building. Said it’d be bad for both them in there. And he said you should go in through the car park underneath. There’s a delivery exit on the northeast corner, and a fire stair that goes up from the sublevel. Now, I’ll tell you something I know. You go in there, you gotta be ready. Up here.” He tapped his temple. “I told you before, that thing ain’t what it seems. You gotta watch yourselves and keep your heads in what you’re doing.”
“You’ve said that before—that it’s not what it seems. But you won’t say what that means. Primal is powerful—we understand that.”
Papa Sky sat forward in his chair, blind eyes on Cal. “Primal is a trickster.”
“Puppet-master,” murmured Colleen.
Papa Sky cocked his head toward her. “Smart girl. Don’t forget that.”
“You seem to know an awful lot about Primal,” Cal pressed.
The old man shook his head. “I only know what I hear and see and feel. I know what my friend tells me. He’s a very observant soul, my friend.” He finished his drink, then rose and held out his hand. “Toney-boy, it’s time for me to go. Could you take me to my place?”
Tone got up from the table and came to Papa’s side.
“Oh, yeah, one other thing.” He felt in his coat pocket and drew out what looked like a small triangle of shell-hard leather. He held it out to Colleen. “I’m supposed to give you this.”
Colleen took the bit of hide and turned it on her palm. “Weird. What is it?”
Enid leaned across the table. “Looks kinda like a guitar pick. Too thick, though.”
“You feel anything from it, do you?” Papa Sky asked Colleen.
She stared at it, then enclosed it in her fingers. I found my muscles knotting, as if I believed this harmless old blind man might put something in her hand that would injure her. Yet, had he not himself observed that some things were not what they seemed?
I shook myself. Whatever else this changed world did to me, I could not let it turn me to knee-jerk distrust.
Colleen looked up at Papa Sky and shook her head, then apparently remembered he couldn’t see her. “No. No, I don’t feel a thing. Am I supposed to?”
“You ain’t been touched by the Storm, girl. You’re as pure as you were before the change was made. Backwards as it seems, that means you can see stuff that can’t be seen by them that’s
been touched. But that stuff can hurt you like it can’t hurt them. My friend says you carry that on you all the time, you’ll get through. Wear it next to your skin,” he added, and shuffled off on Tone’s arm.
I looked at the thing in Colleen’s hand. It was dark, gray-green, and oddly textured. Hesitantly, I put a finger on it. It sent a strange, uneasy tingle through my fingertips.
Cal reached over and took the thing out of her hand, then dropped it as if it had burnt him. It fell to the table with a click, firing a faint blue spark. “Damn,” he murmured. “I don’t like the feel of that, Colleen. It’s …” He shook his head, wiping his palm on his jeans. “I’m not sure you ought to carry it.”
Colleen retrieved the strange chip and slipped it into her pocket. “After colliding with Primal’s little force field, I think I’d just rather be safe than sorry.”
“Yeah,” murmured Goldie, “but which is which?”
Cal swung into high gear then, formulating plans. He, Colleen, and Goldie would try to gain entrance to the Black Tower; Enid, Magritte, and I would remain outside, on watch. We would rely on Magritte’s connection with Goldie for instant awareness if anything should go awry inside.
We prepared as if for battle, taking only emergency food and water, concealing small weapons. Except for Goldie. Goldie’s arsenal consisted of such things as his rattle, a wooden flute Kevin Elk Sings had given him, tiny bells laced upon a string about his wrist. Only when Colleen pressed him did he consent to slip a knife into his boot.
As preparation went forward, I was consumed with a sense of dread. But as closely as I watched Colleen, I saw in her nothing but a bulldog’s determination. When I would look up to catch her watching me, I would wonder if she feared, as I did, that she might walk into the Black Tower and never come out again. I could not help but remember that in my nightmares the Tower was associated with loss.
For me, the tension was unbearable. While they pored over Cal’s map, settling on a route that would take us into hell, I slipped into the scullery off the bar and made myself busy finding odds and ends that might have medicinal value. I am not a man who paces the floor. Action must at least seem to have meaning.
