The Fissure King

by Rachel Pollack

  He'd been up all night, and the sky was just growing light enough to streak purple and orange and reveal the odd little figurines hidden among the pine trees, when Jack heard a wail, a short, high-pitched blast of sorrow that knocked him backwards. He'd looked all around until he saw a young woman in a tattered black dress kneeling before an older woman whose long hands rested on the young one's shoulders.

  Jack stared and stared at the older figure. She kept changing. One moment she seemed a 50s suburban housewife with brassy hair, the next a businesswoman in a light blue pantsuit, and then something else entirely, dull and wood and covered in leaves, or else with water constantly running down her body, like one of those urban fountains where water streams down a marble wall only to be pumped back to the top to do it all over again.

  Jack couldn't look away. His teacher, Anatolie, had always told him that the main attribute of a Traveler was True Sight, the ability to see things as they really are, and after her training, Jack had considered himself pretty good at it. During his apprenticeship she would send him places—Macy's ground-floor escalator on Christmas Eve, Herman Melville's house on Long Island across from the Walt Whitman shopping center, a biker bar on N. Moore Street—and tell him to say what he saw. If he'd reported frantic shoppers checking their lists, Anatolie would bark into his bluetoothed ear "Look again!" and, "Again," and, "See what there is to see," the first line of the ancient Traveler's Directive: See what there is to see/Hear what there is to hear/Touch whatever you touch/Speak the thing you must speak.Only when he could tell her that for some riders the escalator did not end at the 2nd floor, but rose and rose until they were swallowed in a green cloud would Anatolie grunt and say, "Good enough, Jack. Come home now."

  So Jack had stared at the woman, trying to figure just what the hell she was, until the younger one, the one on her knees, the one who didn't change shape but only bent forward and wept, suddenly cried out, as if something had burned her. "Hey!" Jack called, "what are you doing to her?"

  The young woman didn't move but the older one lifted her head, and without looking at him, she'd said, "John Shade, you have no stake here. Leave now, without blame."

  Confused, Jack had wondered if he'd met her. It was never good when someone knew your name and you had no idea of theirs. Was she some kind of Power? But it didn't matter, he'd decided, he couldn't just walk away. He'd done that too much in his life.

  "No," he'd said, and hoped he sounded confident. "Not until you tell me what is going on."

  For a moment, the woman had stayed still, but then she nodded, as if to herself, and turned to face him. She looked now like some ancient forest creature standing on its hind legs, for leaves swirled all around her body. Then she raised her hands to frame her face, palms facing Jack, with her fingers together pointing at the sky. "John Shade!" she called, and her voice had cut him like the wind on the stretch of Avenue D that Travelers called The Empty Window. "See what there is to see!"

  Jack stared at the hands. The skin appeared to move and shift, to reveal something hidden. Eyes. A large, unblinking eye watched him from each palm, and he wanted to turn away but he couldn't, he could only look, until eyes appeared within the eyes, and more eyes on the fingertips, and Jack discovered he could see out of every one of them, see everywhere, everything, all at once.

  Around the world, so-called psychics were looking, searching—cards laid on silk cloths, hungry faces staring into crystal balls, nervous hands casting cowrie shells or bamboo sticks, fingertips on photos or trinkets of the dead—they were all trying to see. And most had no idea that it all passed through her. The open channel, the transformer. Mariq Nliana. The Queen of Eyes.

  When Jack tried to look away, he'd discovered the eyes were all over his body, like a swarm of spiders. He wanted to swat them but didn't dare, for fear of what they might show him if he got them angry. And then it was over. He was himself again, standing on a rocky beach with pine trees behind him, and hidden in the high grass the small grimacing figurines that may or may not have been carved, but were certainly far older than the trees.

  The Queen had settled on her corporate woman-of-the-world-look. Pant suit, smart, expensive shoes, shoulder-length blonde hair. She looked, oddly, like a former Secretary of State. The young woman was still on her knees but now rested her head against the Queen's belly while the Queen stroked her hair. Looking past the girl, the Queen said gently, "You did well, Jack. Go home now and rest."

  In his office in the Hôtel Rêve, Jack calmly picked up his chair and sat down again as if his outburst had never happened. He observed Sarah Strand a moment. She appeared unperturbed by his reaction, and it occurred to him that if the Queen had kept Jack's card on display (no wonder she knew about the frogs, he thought, she's the fucking Queen), then her daughter would simply trust him, no matter how unprofessional he seemed. The real question was, how could the Queen of Eyes be missing? He said "Are you sure she's not just doing her duty someplace beyond reach?"

  Sarah shook her head. "No, she always keeps in touch."

  "How? Some sort of psychic eyespeak?"

  Thin smile. "Only if there's no cell coverage."

  "And you know she's alive because you would—"

  "Become Queen as soon as she died."

  "So until then, do you have any power of your own?

  "No. Oh, I suppose maybe I can sense certain vague things, like whether someone's going to call. But many people can do that. To be honest, Mr. Shade, being the Queen of Eyes is pretty much all or nothing. And there's only one."

  "Does that excite you? Becoming Queen?"

  She frowned. "Excite me? I remember when my mother became Queen—when my grandmother died. It was a Saturday, of course." Jack frowned at the odd statement but didn't interrupt. Sarah said, "We knew Grandma was sick, but really, we didn't expect—we were home, taking a break from the hospital. And then, out of nowhere, the strangest look came over my mother. She kind of gasped, and then she turned over her hands and stared at her palms, and suddenly she started crying, and whispered to me, ‘Grandma is dead.' So am I excited at the idea of becoming Queen? No, Mr. Shade. I would rather have my mother."

  Jack blurted out, "I met her."

  "Really. In her aspect?"

  "Yes."

  "Then I'm sure you can't think of her any other way. It's very impressive, I know. But she's my mother. When I think of her it's not what she can do, not what I will have to do after—it's how she kissed my forehead when I had a fever, or the video games she played with me on rainy afternoons. In the weekend I graduated college, she'd off in South America somewhere, doing God knows what for some group of defrocked shamans or something. But she made sure to come back and sit in the front row and embarrass me by yelling and releasing a flood of owl-shaped balloons when I got my diploma." She stopped, took a breath. "Please, Mr. Shade. You have to find her."

  "What about your father?"

  "I'm sorry?"

  "Did you have one?"

  "Of course. We don't reproduce parthenogenetically."

  "Then what about him? What did he do when you had a fever?"

  "The fathers—they don't last long. It's not as if we deliberately push them away or anything. When I met . . . Julie's father, I told myself I would be different. My daughter would grow up knowing her dad for more than a few innocent years." She'd been looking away but now she stared at him. "It's just not possible. No matter how hard we try, there are things they can never know. Things our daughters have to know."

  "What if you found someone who already knew?"

  She laughed. "You mean a Traveler?"

  "Or a mage. A seer."

  "Mr. Shade, you met my mother. She let you see her. Did that leave you with the yearning to marry her?"

  Jack didn't answer. It was all he could do just to hold her gaze without blushing. And yet, he found himself wondering how much this woman had lost in her life
because of who her mother was. And how much she would have to change when her mother died, and she took over the family business. Did it terrify her? Thrill her?

  He said, "I'll need to come out and see the home. That is the last place you saw her, right?" Sarah nodded. "All right, then. I'll go back with you tomorrow morning. You'll have to stay here tonight—the hotel will be safe but the roads won't be. Will your daughter be all right alone?"

  "She's fifteen, she'll be thrilled."

  "Good." Jack sat up. "I'll ask Miss Yao to give you a room. Assuming the roads are okay, we'll leave at nine." He walked out.

  Jack headed for his room, but changed his mind and went up to the roof. Standing in the protective calm of his spell he watched the few people still on the street try to make their way through the rain. What would happen if they started to see what was really going on? There—that man yelling at a cab because it wouldn't stop for him. Suppose, just for a moment, he saw that Yellow Taxi as it really was, a Piss-Lion escaped from the Alchemical Zoo on top of the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Jack could see, but even he needed to concentrate.

  There were people who thought Jack Shade didn't care about anything. Callous Jack, but also Jean Oui, a name given to him by the Societé de Matin, a group of gangster magicians formed in Paris in the eighteenth century. The American branch turned the pun around as Johnny Non. But it wasn't true that nothing mattered to Jack. It was just—seeing your wife cut apart by a poltergeist and your daughter taken out of the world made the things most people care about not very important.

  He watched as a homeless woman pushed her stolen shopping cart furiously up the street, as if she had somewhere to hide from the snow. Across the street, a skinny ehite kid bumped up against a middle-aged businessman, also white, and picked his pocket. Storms were good for pickpockets, the marks having their minds on other things. When the businessman made it home and discovered his wallet gone, would he remember the kid but think he'd been black? Racism was a kind of magic, Jack knew, affecting what we see, or think we see.

  You could cast a glamour over yourself and people would look right at you and see something completely false. The Societé de Matin operated that way. That, and spells of cruelty and raw violence. The Society of the Morning had come to America not long after its French beginnings. Some said Lafayette had been a member, others that Ben Franklin had brought it back from Paris. Its everyday schemes and crimes were run by the DHO, Deputy Head of Operations, who traditionally took Matin as his last name. Usually the American DHO came from the head office in Paris. The real power, however, lay with a figure called the Old Man of the Woods, a hermit sorcerer who lived in a stone cabin hidden in the French Alps. Recently, Jack had heard stories that the DHO had tried to stage some coup against the Old Man. He didn't know any more than that, and didn't want to know.

  Down in the street, a woman in her thirties rushed her young daughter into a building. The little girl wore a red coat and yellow rain boots, and Jack was sorry to see that bit of brightness leave the street. He sighed and headed for the stairs down from the roof.

  In the morning, it turned out that Sarah had come to New York on the bus, so Jack got his black Altima out of the hotel garage and they headed up the Thruway. Due to certain hidden design features, all Travelers drove Altimas. Happily, the only special feature Jack needed today was cruise control.

  They rode mostly in silence. About halfway, Jack said, "So how did it begin?"

  Sarah hesitated, then asked, "Begin?"

  Jack was pretty sure she knew what he meant, and was sorry he'd said anything, but it was too late now. "Being the Queen," he said. "It goes from mother to daughter, but how did it start?"

  Sarah didn't answer for awhile, then said, "Have you heard the stories?"

  Every Traveler knew the various theories. One version said the Lord of Night fell in love with a human woman. Maybe the first human woman. When she slept with him, he granted her the power to see as a reward. Or a way to survive without him, since he knew how fickle he was. Or maybe she refused, and he gave her the sight as a curse that she would pass down through all her daughters.

  Another claimed that the Shaper brought three women out of the rock and asked each one what she wanted. One looked at the flowers and the animals, and said she wanted children to love and to fill the Earth. The second watched birds mating in the sky, and said she wanted beauty, and desire that could never be contained or controlled. But the third looked at all the strangeness of the world, and then up at the stars, and said, "I want to see."

  A third theory described a starving woman who'd been cast out of her tribe for disobedience, how she'd faked experience as an apprentice mage, and was hired by a sorceress to help stir up a batch of pseudo-immortality elixir to sell to some gullible king. Having no idea what she was doing, she burned her hands and thrust them into what she thought was a bucket of water. When she lifted them up again, she discovered they were covered with eyes.

  "Sure," Jack said. "I've heard a whole slew of stories."

  Sarah said, "Then you know as much as I do."

  The moment Jack saw Margaret Strand's two-story house at the edge of Gold River, he realized he'd expected something different. More fake. Despite Sarah's insistence on her mother's off-duty life, Jack had expected to see a façade, an All-American front. But there was nothing Hollywood about the hundred-year-old house, with its white paint and green trim that would need a touch-up in the next year or so, or the weather-worn chairs on the front porch, or the remains of Halloween decorations, the not quite rotten pumpkin, the droopy, fake cobwebs, the plastic skeleton bent forward as if asleep, or maybe passed out after a party.

  Sarah noticed Jack's stare and smiled. "My mother loves Halloween," she said. "She dresses up as a witch, pointy hat and all, and keeps a cauldron full of candy next to the door."

  Inside, the house had that same comfortable realness. In the living room, a slightly sagging brown sofa and two maroon chairs were angled to face a forty-seven inch LED.

  "New TV?" Jack asked. Sarah nodded. "What does she watch? Please don't say Ghost Hunters or that one about the Long Island psychic."

  "No," Sarah said, looking around the room rather than at Jack, as if her mother might suddenly walk in with a jug of cider and a plate of homemade donuts. Except, of course, that Margaret Strand probably just bought her donuts at Krispy Kreme like everyone else. Sarah said, "She likes cop shows, mostly. Oh, and this time of year she gets all excited about those Christmas movies on Hallmark." Jack nodded. He knew the ones she meant, where a struggling single mom discovers that Santa has left the North Pole and is running a deli in Jersey. Layla used to watch them.

  He looked about the room. An old oak table held a gallery of photos showing Margaret's daughter and granddaughter at various ages and life-events. A woman who was obviously Margaret herself appeared in two or three of them. Jack picked one up and stared at it, trying to remember the different forms the Queen had taken that night on the beach, and if any of them looked like the proud grandma. He realized he was doing it again, trying to see the middle-aged woman in the photo—slightly overweight, not exactly stylish but not dumpy either—as a fake, a disguise. Maybe the changes were the disguise. The Queen was human, despite her powers. He put the photo back with the rest.

  Sarah said, "Did you get anything?"

  Startled, Jack realized she thought he'd been trying to absorb her mother's vibrations, as if he could sniff her and follow the trail like some psychic bloodhound. "No," he murmured, and wished he just hadn't answered.

  He was about to leave the room when he spotted the small jade frog on a narrow ledge above the simple fireplace. When he walked over and picked it up he discovered it wasn't jade but emerald, and very old. It was probably worth more than the rest of the room, new TV included. He said, "This is where she had my card?"

  Sarah nodded. "Yes, that's right."

  "How long di
d she have it there? The card."

  Sarah started to speak, then stopped. "You know," she said, "I wanted to say forever, that it was something I'd seen all through my childhood. But now I'm not sure." She frowned. "It could be—just a month? A few weeks?"

  Jack put back the carving. So, he thought, she knew something was coming and wanted Sarah to find the card but think of it as automatic, something she'd known her whole life, as if her mother had said to her back in kindergarten, "If anything ever happens to me, sweetie, go find nice Mr. Shade. Don't forget, now."

  Jack made a cursory search of the rest of the house but knew he wouldn't find any more signs of what he still considered Margaret's—Margarita's—true self. Now what? he thought. He couldn't just stand there. "Let's go look at your place," he said

  When they got back in the car and drove a mile to Sarah's house, closer to the village, it was more of the same. The house was newer, a 1960s ranch with the same white and green paint scheme as Margaret's, but without the porch or Halloween decorations. It stood on a quiet street with other houses from roughly the same period, except for a McMansion that loomed over the rest of the block like an overdressed lottery winner at a neighborhood picnic.

  A strictly clipped lawn went around the front and sides of Sarah's house. It looked absurdly green for mid-November. He glanced sideways at her. Did she get wood sprites in at night to water the grass with their golden-stream fertilizer? A lot of sprites were meth addicts and would do pretty much anything for a few bucks. Looking at the house again, Jack could see a white fence in the back, and the corner of a large propane barbecue. Somehow, the thought of the Queen of Eyes munching a hot dog made him queasy. A couple of maple trees and a young oak broke up the flawless lawn. The branches were bare, of course, but Jack didn't see a single leaf on the grass. He smiled a moment, remembering how hard it had been to get Genie to do any yardwork. He'd guessed it was Sarah who'd done all that raking. Or sprites.