The Fissure King

by Rachel Pollack

  "It's okay," Jack said. "I won't let them hurt you anymore. I'm going to put my hand around you but don't be scared." The last thing that Jack saw before he took hold of the girl was the White Rebbe, her eyes closed, her mouth set in a smile that seemed to express the sadness of centuries. Then the whirlwind hit.

  Tight swirls of power, so intense they felt more like wires than gusts of wind. The room was gone, and there was stone all around. But Jack couldn't worry about that. He managed to get the hand holding the girl next to his face, and said above the screeching winds, "There is a tree in my pocket. When I put you there hold on tight to the tree and you'll be safe." The tree was a six-hundred-year-old sequoia Jack had gotten as a gift in the Miniature Forest. He'd thought he might plant it somewhere as an offering, but this was the best use for it. Now they had to get out of there.

  There wasn't much time. He could feel the lacerations on his face and wrists, anywhere that wasn't covered. Jack closed his eyes and mouth and didn't dare breathe. Somehow he managed to reach a hand into a long shallow pocket and take out a crow feather. Every year, on no set day, thirteen such feathers appeared on the unmarked grave of Peter Midnight, the early New York Traveler buried in Manhattan's Inwood Hill Park. There were people who spent weeks camped out in the park in hopes of getting one, but Jack had received a message this past year from the Queen of Eyes, telling him the exact moment the feathers would drift to the ground from a high-flying murder of crows.

  With his left hand Jack moved the feather counter-clockwise, in flat horizontal circles. At first he could only do it right in front of him, but slowly the winds backed off and he could turn his whole body around. He stopped when an opening appeared in the air. It was clearly a way out but all it led to was some kind of cave, and Jack was done with hopping world to world. Using the feather as a kind of paintbrush, he drew a doorway where the rough opening was. At the same time he called out a set of numbers. They were like GPS coordinates, except they included more dimensions. And were much older, invented by an Italian Traveler who'd had to rescue a foolish poet who'd accepted an offer of a tour of Hell.

  Jack's office materilized on the other side of the doorway. The air appeared thick, almost congealed, but Carol Acker was there, still on her chair in the circle of roses. A couple of hours must have passed, because he could see it was dark outside the windows, but Carol looked peaceful, her eyes closed, her hands in her lap

  Though Jack knew the tiny figure in his pocket couldn't hear him above the angry winds, he said "Be brave, little soul. You're almost home." With a twist of his body he propelled himself through the doorway.

  He landed hard on the floor, just outside the circle. "Jack?" Carol asked, and lifted her head but kept her eyes closed.

  "Yes, it's me. Don't open your eyes just yet." He turned on a desk lamp so he could see her more clearly. When he glanced at the digital clock on his desk he discovered even more time had passed than he thought, for it was nearly nine o'clock. He frowned. Had she been sitting there all that time?

  Carol said, "Did you—"

  "Yes. I have it." Jack hoped these were not empty words. What if the girl—Carol's soul—had not survived the winds? When he reached in his pocket he could feel her still clinging tightly to the sequoia, so he lifted out the tree, with her attached, and set it on the table. He whispered to her "It's okay. You can let go now." As gently as he could he pried loose her arms, then placed her on his left palm. She looked up at him with a mixture of hope and fear. "Get ready for something wonderful," he whispered to her, then louder, "Carol, something's about to happen. It may feel like a jolt, but it's okay."

  "I'm ready," Carol said.

  As Jack moved his hand closer to Carol, the girl on it became even smaller, no more than a quarter-inch tall as he brought his palm close to Carol's ear. With a sharp puff he blew on the girl and she vanished into Carol's ear canal.

  Carol spasmed, and gasped, but she kept her eyes closed, and her hands clasped. And then she didn't move. Jack pulled up a chair to face her, then waited a full three minutes before he said softly, "Carol? Are you all right?"

  For a another twenty seconds or so she didn't answer, but then the left side of her mouth turned up a slight smile, and she said "Oh, yes. That's much better." The voice sounded the same as before, but with more notes and undertones. Still in her seat, Carol opened her eyes. They were the same as before, only deeper, with new subtleties of color. Jack found that if he looked long enough he could see flickers of red deep inside her.

  She sat back and looked at Jack, a slight smile on her face. "So," she said, "you met Der Wisser Rebbe." He must have looked startled because she laughed and said, "Did she make you feel like a young girl again, Jack? That delightful beard. She really is quite old, you know. Well, not as old as me, of course. But all those rules. Things you can say, things you can't say, how does she keep track? I wonder, dear Jack, my hero, my rescuer—if she'd allowed herself to tell you the full truth, would it have made a difference? I doubt it. I imagine plucky Jack Shade still would have brought back timid Carol's missing soul." She stood up and stretched.

  Jack tried to stand, but she flicked her fingers and he discovered he couldn't move. When she picked up her purse she said, "Did I pay you? Yes, of course, prudent Jack got his fee up front. Maybe I should double it. You did go through a lot. And I certainly won't want for money. But no. A deal is a deal, and we wouldn't want to spoil you."

  At the door she stopped and said "Oh, and Jack? Remember how you told me to envision a homecoming cake? I just want you to know—I blew out all the candles."

  And then she was gone.

  Jack stayed frozen in his chair a long time. The night passed and the dawn came and still he couldn't move. When he was finally able to get up it was seven in the morning. He raced to the bathroom, then ignored all the debris and went straight to his laptop. Usually, if he needed to know what was going on, he opened Jinn-net, the dark web service for Travelers and Powers. But something told him he needed the outside world, so he went to the standard Internet.

  It didn't take long to discover what he didn't want to know. CNN.com burst forth with the headline, "Breaking news! Grisly Double Murder In New Jersey Suburb!" The live feed showed an ordinary ranch house surrounded by police cars. In front, a young correspondent, her face set to "grim" to hide her excitement, said "We still don't know much yet, Wolf. The police have released the names of the victims, Jerry and Marjorie Acker." Jack began to shake. The woman went on, "According to one policeman I spoke to—and Wolf, I have to tell you, he looked very shocked—the bodies were, quote, ‘torn to pieces.'" She paused, as if to convey her own horror, then added, "And one strange detail. Apparently, the killer, or perhaps killers, used the blood, maybe even body parts, to write a cryptic message on the wall of the murder room. Just two words, Wolf. ‘Much better.'"

  Jack closed his laptop. Still shaking, he reached for the phone.

  2.

  Feebie" Sam Harwin and Dean "the Fed" Margolis, so-called because of their ability to impersonate FBI agents, showed up at Carol and Bob Acker's home on Long Island only half an hour after Carolien Hounstra had called them. Though Carolien had said she did not expect Carol to be there, she also told them to bring every level of protection they could manage—etheric body armor, spells written on their faces, clothes, and genitals in invisible ink, entire cans of demon repellent sprayed on their bodies, and whatever charms and weapons they could carry in their conservative FBI suits. Sure enough, however, it wasn't Carol who opened the door, but her grief-stricken and confused husband.

  "Is this about Jerry?" Bob Acker asked, and Sam said yes. "But why would I—I haven't seen Jerry in months. Well, Carol—" He stopped himself.

  Dean asked, "Is Mrs. Acker here, sir?"

  Terror crept into Bob's eyes. "No, she—she was so upset—hearing about Jerry and Marge's death—she said, she said she needed to be alone for awhile.
"

  The two Travelers looked at each other. Sam turned to Bob and asked "Did she say anything else?"

  Bob looked down. "Yes—she said, she said I and the kids and our grandkids would be safe. That no one would bother us." Now he raised his eyes. "What did she mean? Officer, I mean agent, how could she know that? I mean, did the killer speak to her? Was she going away to save us somehow? She's not—she's not going to get hurt, is she? He's not going to do to her what he did to—oh God."

  Dean cast a glamour over the poor man to erase such thoughts from his head. In a voice enhanced by Basic Persuasion, he said "There's no need to worry, Mr. Acker. These kinds of cases never work that way."

  Acker looked confused. "These kinds of cases?" he said, but then his voice trailed off, and a moment later said, "Oh, thank you. That's so good to hear."

  "We're sorry for your loss," Sam said, and then the two men headed for their car.

  "Oh, excuse me," Bob Acker called after them. They stopped, turned. "Do you guys have an agent named Jack Shade?"

  "Fuck," Dean said, under his breath. All they knew was that Carolien had called them at the New York Travelers Aid Society and asked them to check on this Acker guy. Something to do with his cousin's death. And that they should protect themselves, and if the wife was there, to be prepared for trouble.

  To Bob, Dean said, "Yes, we do. New York office. Do you know him?"

  "No, no, but my wife asked me, she said if anyone came asking about her, to find out if they knew this Shade person. And if they did, to give them a message for him. For Mr. Shade, that is."

  "So what's the message?"

  "She said to tell him she was just getting started. Warming up."

  "Were those her exact words?"

  "Yes. Yes, I think so."

  "Thank you," Dean said, and then, "Mr. Acker, look at me, please." Acker's face slackened. "Good. Now this is important. It's for your country. You do love your country, don't you?" Acker nodded. "Good. You will forget the name Jack Shade. You will forget us. You will forget your wife's message. All you will remember is that you and your family are safe. Will you do that for me? For your country?"

  "Yes," Bob Acker said.

  "Very good." Dean walked to the car, where Sam already had the engine running.

  As their black Altima jerked away from the curb, Dean said, "Jesus fucking Christ. Jack Shade. What the goddamn hell has Johnnie Reckless done now?"

  Jack's phone call to Carolien had been only three words. "I need you." When she arrived, seventeen minutes later, and saw Jack just sitting there, so clearly frightened, and the other chair inside the remains of a rose petal circle, she grabbed a third chair to sit down right in front of him, and took his hands. "Tell me," she said.

  A long shuddering breath ran through Jack, and then he said, "A woman named Carol Acker—or some thing inside her—has just slaughtered her cousin and his wife in Teaneck. She might go for her own family next. We have to protect them."

  Carolien said, "Do you know where they are?"

  Jack got up and retrieved the check form the table. As he'd figured, it was from a joint account with her husband and displayed their address. "Here's the husband," he said, as he sat down again. He added, "Carolien, it was her cousin who gave her my card. The one she just killed."

  Carolien was wearing a navy pea jacket over paint-spattered overalls. She took a cell phone from her jacket pocket and speed-dialed a number. "Sam," she said, "I need you and Dean to go check on someone." When she'd given them the information—and added that they should protect themselves—she hung up and focused again on Jack. "Now," she said. "Everything."

  Carolien was Dutch, six feet tall, one hundred sixty-five pounds, with long blond hair, and the whitest skin Jack had ever seen. He found it hard to look at her without thinking of milk, or vanilla ices, or some other ridiculous food cliché. Maybe it was because that was how most of the males, and some of the females, from NYTAS talked about her, as a wondrous meal they'd like to devour. Jack knew that part of their hostility to him came from the fact that Carolien had turned them all down and chosen him. He and Carolien were still more friends than lovers, a relationship that suited both of them, Carolien most of all.

  It was only as he talked about it that Jack realized how little he understood. "What was that thing?" he said. "Was it really a lost part of a suburban housewife who'd always been too nice all her life? And what was holding it prisoner?"

  "It may be," Carolien said, "that this is something much older than Mrs. Acker."

  "Then what's her connection to it?"

  Carolien closed her eyes and let her head drop, something Jack had seen her do just before she came up with some link no one else would have found. Sometimes she would sit like this for a long time, hours even, but now it lasted only ten or fifteen seconds. When she opened them again she said, "Schatje—(Dutch for "little treasure," or sweetheart)—tell me again, please, when you saw this thingetje on the stone wall, what did it look like?"

  "Like some kind of beast surrounded by coils of wind."

  "Ah," she said, and reached for his laptop. "Password?" she asked.

  Jack looked down and mumbled "Carolien." She laughed and began to type.

  A minute or so later, she turned the screen around and held it up to him. "Is this it?" she said.

  Jack found himself staring at what looked like a cave painting of some kind, like those in Lascaux or Altamira. Only, where those were mostly realistic images of bulls and horses, this showed a demon or monster, upright like a man, yet wild and ferocious, with long claws and teeth, and arms that looked like it was trying to break free of the world. Or the lines that swirled around it like a cage. "Yes," Jack said, "that's it. What is this?"

  She set down the computer but didn't close it. "The pre-historians call it ‘the Whirlwind Enigma.' It is strange for them because it seems wrong in so many ways. This, you know, is how they understand things. By making categories."

  "Carolien," Jack said, "we have no time for this. I need to know what I'm facing. What I've done."

  "No," she said firmly. "We cannot simply rush ahead. We must understand."

  Jack looked down, nodded. Carolien didn't need to say that rushing ahead, his rushing, had killed Jerry and Marjorie Acker. And they were probably only the start.

  "First," Carolien said, "the painting, if indeed that is what it is, is sixty-five thousand years old. Much older than any other complex cave art. The paintings in Le Chauvet are only thirty-five thousand. Second, all the caves with advanced paintings have many examples. Here there is only one. And the cave is very hard to reach, so much so that it was only discovered ten years ago. Third, the great cave art shows almost all animals, and with great realism. Here we see a monster. Fourth." Her voice was rising. "The paints. There is the usual ochre and other mineral pigments, but also something else. And that something is very toxic. The scientist who scraped a sample used gloves, of course, but a very little bit fell onto his arm. In the next hour his skin began to itch, and then an hour later he collapsed, and two hours after that he was dead."

  Jack waited a second to make sure she was done, then said, "And this Enigma thing—you think it's a picture of what I brought back to Carol Acker?"

  She shook her head. "No, schatje. Not a picture."

  "Fuck," Jack half-whispered. She was right, of course. Not a painting. The thing itself, imprisoned in that wall for sixty-five thousand years.

  Softly now, Caroline said, "Do you know Johannes Ludann's theory of cave paintings?" Jack nodded. Ludann was a Danish Traveler who became obsessed with cave art. Instead of the usual academic belief that they were magical attempts to benefit hunting or fertility, Ludann claimed they were trapped hostile Powers that had preyed upon humanity until it figured out how to imprison them. In 1987, Johannes Ludann disappeared after declaring that he would "find clear proof and bring it back." />
  Jack said, "So you think this thing, this fucking Enigma, is what Ludann was talking about?"

  Carolien nodded. "Possibly. Look." She grabbed the laptop and ran her fingers over the keyboard. Then she turned it around so he could see the screen where a news article declared Mysterious Cave Painting Vanishes From Rock Wall. Scientists Stunned, Angry. She said, "I saw this just before you called me. It was how I knew."

  "Christ," Jack said. "Are you telling me this—this thing—was trapped in that wall, and I fucking released it?"

  Carolien said, "Yes, that is possible."

  Jack discovered his nails were digging into his palms. He spread his fingers, breathed deeply, then said, "But what does this have to do with Carol Acker? She was just some bored housewife."

  "Who knows?" Carolien said. "Maybe that creature reached out to her. Maybe it searched the world until it found what it needed, a possible vessel . . ." Her voice trailed off.

  Jack said, "And a Traveler who didn't think to ask questions."

  "No," Carolien said sharply. "To worry about such things will only waste time." Her accent always became stronger when she was being stern. "There is a more important question."

  "I know," Jack said. "What does she do next? And how do I stop her?'"

  Jack's phone buzzed. He'd set it on the table after calling Carolien, and now it vibrated towards him. He reached across the table for it. "What the hell?" he said, when he saw the display. "Margaret Strand," it read. Now he looked up at Carolien, somehow more amazed by this than everything else that had happened. He said "It's the Queen of Eyes!"

  Carolien, too, looked startled before she quickly said "Then you had best answer it, yes?"

  Jack touched the connect button. "Margaret?" he said, then put it on speaker.

  A strong yet distant voice said, "This is Margarita Mariq Nliana Hand." Jack nodded. "Margaret" was her everyday name. She was in her aspect now, her power. The Queen of Eyes was the holder of all oracular power in the world, an office that had passed from mother to daughter for far longer than anyone knew. Some time ago Jack Shade had brought the Queen back after an assassination attempt, and he knew she liked him, but still, the Queen rarely spoke directly, let alone called someone on the phone.