Devil in the Wires

by Tim Lees

  They weren’t my thoughts. I had never wanted fame, not even as a teenager; one of the things I relished about Field Ops was the chance to fade into the background, the moment work was done, to go home, visit the pub, the Laundromat, the deli . . . to be no one for a time. Or anyone. Either way was good.

  Yet still, a feeling of elation gripped the district. It radiated through the streets of South Shore and Hyde Park, innocent for the most part, it seemed—­already friendly ­people growing friendlier, more relaxed; I saw it in the rowdy groups of students, shouting and catcalling, the beggar sitting on his milk crate, singing out, “It’s Mon-­daaay. Any spare cha-­ange?” I saw it in the excitement of the crowds watching Assur—­feeling Assur, for this was more than just spectacle, it was experience, it was knowing—­it was, for them, what Dayling had described: a sense that you were truly in the presence of a god.

  And I saw it, too, in Angel. There was no escaping the question, and I wondered how much of her renewed affection for me was due in part to the presence of the god, this plague of light that seemed to spread among us. I wanted to ask her. I wanted answers. At least, sometimes I did; or I wanted one answer: “It would have happened anyway.” But in my worst moments, I was scared that any reference to it would set her reexamining her motives and at last rejecting me. So it went unspoken, and became a great hole in our relationship, an unsaid gap between us. The kind of thing I knew would bring us trouble later on.

  I was tolerated at the Beach House. A mood of easygoing camaraderie had taken over, and, rather than being excluded, it was I who kept myself apart, avoiding their nights out, their Saturdays at the game, their evenings at this bar or that. It was clear that two or three affairs, or at least flirtations, had sprung up, while elsewhere, friendships were blooming. Farnham Kuehl became more distant. I no longer merited the greeting, or the massive handshake; at times I walked right by him and he didn’t even look up from his screen. But he knew I was there. Of that, I’d no doubt.

  I had become irrelevant. Just as the Colonel had promised me. I was no longer a threat, no longer a help. And therefore, I no longer merited attention.

  I was alone. I was alone, and I didn’t trust myself. I’d been around the gods a long time now, and knew the way emotions and ideas got twisted up and changed under their influence. They were stronger than we were, and the pressure gradients ran one way.

  So. It was about six in the evening, still bright, the heat of day just fading, and I was walking home. Rather than take the beach route along the lake, as I usually did, I cut inland, through the park, and eventually into Bobolink Meadow, a partitioned area kept as a nature reserve, with a single, strict pathway for visitors. And it was there, I saw the fight.

  They were kids, just kids, but they were bigger than I was, most of them, standing on the banks of the lagoon, pushing and jostling one another. I thought they were just fooling when I first saw them, just larking about. But they weren’t. As I drew closer, I saw that only one of them was getting pushed. The others stood round in a ring and shoved him, this way, that way, like a human pinball.

  I knew that game. I like to think I don’t take too much shit these days, but as a kid, I’d had my share, and it stays with you. I started walking faster, meaning to intervene, not even thinking how. When all at once, the game changed.

  Perhaps he fell. Perhaps they tripped him. But suddenly, the kid in the middle was on the ground, and the others were at him—­kicking, spitting, and I saw one bend down and grab his arm, wrench it up behind—­

  I began to run. I left the path, jumping through the waist-­high grass.

  “Hey! Hey, you lot!”

  They could easily have turned on me. I didn’t even stop to think of that.

  I took out my phone. I held it high, and videoed them.

  It was bluff, really. They could have flattened me, taken my phone, done what they wanted. But a ­couple of them instantly turned their backs. Hoods went up. Hands went over faces. There was a moment while I stood there, phone in hand. And then they moved away, traveling in a mass, like hostile animals.

  I went to the boy on the ground. His shirt was red with blood, and for a moment I was worried that they’d stabbed him. It turned out to be a nosebleed. He groaned. He sat up.

  “I’ll call an ambulance,” I told him. “Can you stand?”

  I tried to help him up. He winced. The air hissed through his teeth. I sat him down again, and crouched beside him. He didn’t look at me. His head swung slowly, side to side.

  “You’ll be OK. Don’t worry. We’ll get you cleaned up, get you home . . .”

  I thought that he was praying for a time, a long, mumbled litany in a language that I didn’t know. But when I listened closer, I realized it was something else: the random syllables of glossolalia. There was spit bubbling on his lips. I tipped his head back, and his eyes were white slits.

  I had just dialed 911 when all at once he seemed to snap to life again. He recoiled from me violently.

  “Get off, you motherfucker!”

  He stumbled to his feet, cast about him as if lost for a moment. Seeing me again, he snarled accusingly, “I was almost there!” Then, with a furious, dismissive gesture, he followed his companions, off into the long grass.

  It was that same night Angel said, “I saw you yesterday. You walked right by me.”

  “You were at the Beach House?”

  “No. On Fifty-­third, near Starbucks.”

  I thought back. “Not yesterday. I didn’t go to Fifty-­third.”

  “I called out and you didn’t even look.”

  I sat up then. “Angel,” I said. “Tell me what you saw. Exactly. What I looked like. What I was wearing. How I walked. Everything.”

  “Chris,” she said, “you’re scaring me.”

  “Yeah. I’m scaring me, too . . .”

  Chapter 46

  A Change in Temperature

  “Do me a favor?”

  “Depends.” She laid an index finger to her cheek, pressed her lips together, watching me.

  “Angie. I need to count on you for this. It could be important.”

  “Hm. Like I can count on you.”

  “And you can, you can,” I said quickly.

  She raised her brow.

  “OK, I mean, I know that in the past—­I know I haven’t always—­”

  “I’m kidding, Chris. Again. Doesn’t mean you don’t deserve it though.”

  “I know. I know I do.”

  “Once more with feeling, hey?”

  “I—­yeah. Yeah, I know. But this is really important, and there’s no one else that I can trust. Do you know anyone in picture archives? Anything like that?”

  “In the Registry? I know Press and Media.”

  “You’ve got a contact there? Someone reliable? Discreet?”

  “What is this?”

  “I want pictures of Shailer. Going back, say, six or seven months. Not the stuff used in publicity. Any candid shots—­meetings, events, anything like that. Especially if there’s other ­people in them. In fact, only if there’s other ­people in them. Does that make sense?”

  “Not to me. Do you think it makes sense?”

  “I hope not.”

  “Well,” she said. “I’ll do you a favor. And maybe you’ll do me a favor some time, too, hey?”

  So I said I would.

  I hadn’t reckoned on how quickly she was going to call it in.

  She played on the piano, a simple, Eastern-­sounding tune, changing the harmony beneath it so that each time it sounded different. “It’s not a twelve bar, it’s an eight bar,” she remarked, as if this meant much to me. “Still blues.” Then she played me a CD.

  “Remind you of anything?”

  “Well, a few things, I suppose. I don’t know the artist, but . . .”

  “Sounds like John Lee
Hooker, but it’s not. Recorded in Khartoum.”

  “Khartoum?” I said.

  “See? You like it, don’t you?”

  “I think I do, yeah.”

  “It’s why I want to join Field Ops. If it’ll get me there. It doesn’t matter how, it doesn’t matter what I have to do.”

  “I want you to think about that—­”

  “I’m offering a trade,” she said. “I find your pictures. You get me into Field Ops.”

  “It doesn’t—­I mean, you can’t just—­” Then I said, “You know a guy named Woollard, possibly? You’re not related, are you?”

  “I don’t know any Woollard. I know you. So what’s the answer, big boy? How we set?”

  It was my fault. It had to be my fault. Two years back, I’d told her stories of the places that I’d been, the things I’d done. I’d wanted her to be impressed. I’d wanted her to think of me as brave, resourceful, intrepid. I’d wanted her to think that I was Indiana Jones. This, I realized now, had been an error.

  Men try to impress women. But women are never impressed by the things men think impress them, or the things men think are impressive. Men want to be action heroes. No one wants to date an action hero.

  Whatever had brought us together, all that time ago, it must have been something else she saw in me, though God knows what.

  The stories, though, had stayed with her, a fact I now regretted.

  “Morocco,” she said. “You went to Morocco.”

  “Yes . . .”

  “You heard the music there. You told me how they’d play around the campfire every night, out in the desert . . .”

  “Well, yeah. It’s a big thing, if you play an instrument there. They don’t have television.”

  “Nor do I.”

  “But—­”

  “I could go there, Chris. I could record it. They have these great little studios now, they’re the size of a laptop. You can do anything with them. They’d let me take that with my field gear, wouldn’t they? It wouldn’t interfere.”

  “Is it getting cold in here?”

  “The AC’s probably too high.” She got up to adjust it. Coming back, she said, “You need new clothes. We’ll have to do some shopping.”

  “Clothes?”

  “You don’t have any jeans.”

  “I don’t wear jeans. I’ve not worn jeans for years.”

  “And that shirt’s awful. It makes you look like a children’s entertainer.”

  “I thought it brightened me up a bit. You know. A bit of color . . .”

  She didn’t seem convinced by this.

  “We’ll go shopping tomorrow. You can meet me after class. Are you free tomorrow?”

  “I’m free whenever I like. I don’t seem to be doing much, in any case.”

  “Good. That’s settled.”

  A bit later, though, she said, “Did it get really cold in here? Like, just now?”

  “I thought it was me.

  It happened very quickly. The temperature dropped, all in the space of fifteen, twenty minutes. There was no warning. Angel found a sweater that would fit me. But by that time, we were freezing.

  “What’s wrong with this building?”

  The windows had grown dark. The sky had gone gray.

  And then the snow began.

  It was like somebody had picked up a great chunk of somewhere very, very cold, and dropped it on our heads.

  Snowflakes whirled against the window, and the glass itself was icy to the touch.

  I called the Beach House.

  There was no reply there for a long, long time.

  Then someone said, “It’s not us. We don’t know what it is. But it’s not us.”

  I said, “They say the system’s perfect. It’s responding well to the cold. Can’t find one thing wrong. But something . . . something . . .”

  I nodded to the window. Snow had piled against the glass, almost a hand’s width deep.

  “There’s that out there,” I said. “And murders.”

  “You’re creeping me out.”

  “Sorry. Look. There’s nothing to worry about. I’m just making connections—­or following some other guy’s connections, anyway. They probably aren’t even there. But I’d just say . . . be careful, OK?”

  “It’s a talent,” she said, “seeing links between disparate phenomena. It’s a recognized thing.”

  “Really.”

  “I’m serious. Not everyone can do it.”

  “It’s only any use if they’re right.” I had to borrow a coat from her, a big thing like a lifeboatman’s jacket. “Saddle up the mutt,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  I’d expected it to be cold, but it was worse than that. It was biting cold, the kind of cold that ­people tell you is too cold for snow, cold that felt like it would scour the skin off your cheeks.

  Two hours back, I’d been roasting. Now I was shivering.

  And Riff just wouldn’t go. He’d barely leave the back door of the building. He stood, and whined, and looked at Angel, asking, “Do I have to?”

  “Come on, come on!” She tugged his leash. He planted his feet in the snow. She wrestled with him. She bent down, scolded, pleaded. He cocked his leg and turned the new snow yellow. But he wasn’t going to squat. Not till somebody did something with this lousy weather.

  “He’s got standards,” I said.

  Snow caught in my hair. It gathered in my collar, dribbled down my neck. A foggy yellow light appeared further down the road, and it got bigger and brighter and resolved itself into a bus moving at a snail’s pace down the street. It sailed by like some ghostly Arctic liner, depositing a file of disbelieving passengers, all shivering in springtime clothes.

  “Poop!” yelled Angel. “Poop! Poop! Poop!”

  The dog looked up at her, then craned his head around, gazed longingly towards the doors.

  Angel was furious. “If he doesn’t go now, he’ll have to go at three in the morning! I know him! Go on!”

  “I’ll take him,” I said, already knowing that, at 3 A.M., it would be about the last thing I would want.

  Still. I said it anyway.

  Chapter 47

  The Freeze

  Polar vortex. Freak winds. Climate change. Unprecedented incident. I liked that last explanation, just because it sounded so dismissive: “Oh, don’t worry, it’s only an unprecedented incident.” I liked it more than the guy we saw on TV with the beard and glasses, trying to explain how global warming had resulted in us all half freezing to death.

  I didn’t go home. I was tired of my sublet apartment, anyway, the sense of tiptoeing round someone else’s life. I stayed with Angel. We watched TV. We made love. We dozed a little. Now and then we stared out of the window, watching the snow get deeper. It spread across the roofs of the building opposite. Clouds of steam floated from the vents and chimneys, capturing the light like glowing ghosts.

  You think your life is going one way. You think it’s doing one thing. Then something else swings up out of the past, and it’s all changed . . .

  At 2 a.m., we walked the dog.

  There was no traffic now. Hadn’t been for hours, from the look of the road. Cars on the street side were piled high with snow, like they’d been sitting there for fifty years or more.

  She walked Riff up and down, cursing the weather. I had never heard her curse so much; it just went on and on, almost like a litany. Then Riff began to curse as well. He growled. He hunkered down, pushing himself backwards through the snow. It was bizarre. Angel tugged him with the leash, and when he wouldn’t move, she dropped down, petting him, brushing the snowflakes from his fur. “What’s wrong, boy? What’s wrong?”

  I looked up.

  “Something’s coming . . .”

  The wind had gone. The snow was dropping straight down, curtains of it;
where it passed before the street lamps, each flake was illuminated, tumbling over and over. Within a few yards, visibility grew vague. The house across the street was a baroque snow-­castle. Snow swept up around the parked cars. But further on . . . further on, I saw something. A shape that moved in no way that seemed normal here, that wasn’t a bus or a car, and I saw it move into the middle of the road, a shadow behind veils of snowflakes, big as a horse, and something hung above it, outstretched like gigantic wings . . . It was coming closer. Riff growled. “Keep him quiet,” I said, though there was no real point. Or possibility. A shadow came trotting through the snowstorm, taller than I was, and behind it, a second shape, almost as large—­

  “Moose,” said Angel.

  But it wasn’t a moose.

  A sudden rush brought it abruptly out into the light. I took a step back. Couldn’t help myself. The thing was huge—­it towered over the surrounding cars, peering about with an imperious gaze, nostrils twitching, breath a smoke amid the snow.

  It was a stag. Huge, sail-­like antlers jutted from its skull. Snow crusted its fur. It pawed the ground, lifting long, elegant legs, and sending up a spray of white. It turned a tight, nervy circle, looking for somewhere to go.

  Behind it came a doe—­antlerless, a little smaller. The male was dark gray or brown, the doe more reddish. I was so busy watching them I failed to see the second female come bounding from between the houses, leap the barricade of cars and land beside her kin, skidding in the snow. I heard her breath snort. I saw the stag lift his head, give a short bray. Then he turned and, with a peculiar, bucketing run, galloped off along the street, the does headlong in pursuit.