The Mask of Loki

by Roger Zelazny

  Eliza: Channeling... Oh yes, Tom. Thank you for calling me back. Is this late for you?

  Gurden: Not particularly. I'm working again—if you call getting mauled by a poolful of middle-aged water polo enthusiasts being a musician.

  Eliza: I don't understand you.

  Gurden: I'm engaged at the Holiday Hull off Atlantic City.

  Eliza: Excuse me. Accessing... I did not know that establishment had a piano, Tom.

  Gurden: It doesn't—just a Clavonica. But they want me to make music on it. In between friendly bouts of ducking, groping, and pinching. I am black and blue from my calves to my shoulders. I think they even dislocated one toe.

  Eliza: Did you see any more small, dark men?

  Gurden: Plenty of them—women, too. All fat and ugly. But no raincoats, no revolvers, no chain mail. There are some advantages to working in a nudie bar.

  Eliza: You can be drowned.

  Gurden: Only in the spirit of good clean fun. Besides, I'm a demon for keeping my head above water.

  Eliza: Any more dreams, Tom?

  Gurden: Unhhh.

  Eliza: Was that a reply, Tom?

  Gurden: One... A bad one.

  Eliza: Tell me about it. Please.

  Gurden: It must have been some kind of throwback. I was remembering a gig I did once on the Philadelphia Main Line. A big colonial house in the middle of about twelve acres of lawn and trees. White clapboard and fieldstone, it was, with a wide porch and four thick columns. Looked like the set for Tara.

  Eliza: Tara? Is that a place?

  Gurden: Mythical. The house in Gone With the Wind—an old movie. From the last century.

  Eliza: Noted. Proceed.

  Gurden: The gig was a birthday party for one of the Main Line families. A theme party, taken from that movie. Everyone was supposed to come dressed in swallowtail coats and hoopskirts, although the costuming got a little mixed up. We had everything from a hundred years on either side of the period: French grenadiers' braided tunics, empire gowns, pinstripe pants with black morning coats, and flapper's fringed dresses with yards of beads.

  The music they wanted was Old South Schmaltz. Mostly Stephan Foster, "Swanee River," that stuff. No jazz or stride, nothing happy. So I was grooving along on those really down and mellow tunes, the flower of an age lost to war, an aristocracy turned to dust and decay. The music of memory. And then it happened.

  Eliza: While you were playing?

  Gurden: Yeah, then. And again, stronger, in my dream the other night.

  Eliza: What happened?

  Gurden: I slipped outside myself and into another person. Not Tom Gurden. Not anyone I knew.

  Eliza: Tell me about him.

  * * *

  Louis Brevet came out of his own cushioning, gray fog into a narrow consciousness that was tinged with black and rode on waves of nausea. He was lying on his back and could taste the sour bile collecting in his throat. To close out the light and reorder his stomach, Brevet covered his eyes with his palms and rolled over, trying to bury his face in the pillowcases.

  Rough mattress ticking brushed against his cheeks in place of the fresh, white linen to which he was accustomed. Its smell went deep into his nostrils, and Brevet pushed straight up on his forearms, eyes wide open.

  The unsheeted mattress beneath him was dirtied with hair oil, spots of old blood, and dribbles of vomit long dried to a crust. The cot supporting it was made of iron pipes, once painted white, and slung with straps of loose hemp twine. The floor beneath the cot, which he could see in the gap left by the mattress, was bare pine boards with the pounded dirt showing between their cracks. The dirt was pulsing slowly... roaches busy with their morning forages in the light that flowed obliquely into the crawlspace.

  Brevet considered: No fitted oak floors, no pattern-woven rug, no oiled walnut bedstead, no sheets, no pillowcases, and no pillows. This was not Louis Brevet's bedroom. Quod erat demonstrandum.

  So, where was he?

  Careful not to move his head, and thereby dislodge the cap of cold iron that had clamped to his brow and threatened to crush it, Brevet swung his hips around into a sitting position. He looked left and right, avoiding the bright wedge of dawnlight in the doorway at the room's far end. Raw pine planks made up the walls. Square cuts in them resembled windows, unglazed and unscreened, except by bars of black iron. Beds and more beds formed a long row of rusted white paint and crusted mattress sacks. Rumpled lumps of blue denim and cold flesh rounded out the profile of each mattress.

  "Louis has gotten himself drunk again, and joined the Army," was his first sober thought. "How will I explain this to Angelique?" was the instant second.

  "All right, you slugs! Assembly time in five minutes!"

  Did not the Army blow trumpets or have some other formal awakening procedure? Then Louis was not in the Army. Q.E.D.

  Around him, the denim and fleshy forms stirred and groaned, rumbled and farted, shifted and rose up like zombies lifting themselves from the matted vegetation of the bayou. Their heads swung back and forth like sick hogs looking for something to rush. One by one, the baleful glances found Louis Brevet. Then their voices rose around him while the bodies sleepwalked through their morning rituals of finding boots, scratching both exposed and unexposed skin, and straightening bedrolls.

  "Who's the new meat in Seventeen?"

  "Dunno. Trusties brought him. Last night."

  "Did they use him?"

  "Naw. There ain't a mark on him."

  "Maybe they was too tired."

  "Not them!"

  "Maybe they didn't want to disturb you ladies."

  "Or share him, you mean."

  "I tell you there ain't a mark on him."

  "Knock it off in there!" That voice, bellowing from beyond the doorway, carried an edge with it: dull anger, bored authority, the blunted temper of institutionally damped feelings.

  No, Louis decided, this was definitely not the Army.

  Still holding his head precariously erect, he rose to his feet and began walking down the central aisle between the cots.

  "Hey, wait your turn!" somebody shouted.

  "Look here! Perrique must go first!" from another.

  "He can walk!"

  The room fell into a sudden hush.

  "He must be some kind of gentleman!" This last was injected into the quiet air, said more in awe than in any overt anger.

  "Excuse me!" Louis Brevet called toward the doorway. "Would the porter there, or whoever you are, please present yourself? There has been a terrible mistake."

  "Excuse me!" someone in the room sang, sotto voce.

  "Get back!" from behind him.

  "Don't arouse Wingert!"

  "He'll send us all to the causeway today."

  The human forms beside the beds moved slowly forward into the aisle, appearing to converge on Louis's position. For the first time he could identify the random sounds he had been hearing and dismissing as unrelated to the situation, the sort of auditory hallucination he usually dismissed as too much sobriety too soon: the clank of chains.

  The steel links of a medium-weight anchor chain passed from bed to bed and through the legs of the men standing between them. Each man's legs were also connected by his own set of irons, fastened ankle to ankle below the communal chain. The two ends of the long chain were presumably shackled to the irons of the first and last man on each side, respectively.

  As the men moved forward to block Louis's progress toward the door, their chain dragged down across the bedcovers and dropped onto the plank floor with a jangling, sort of musical thunk.

  "What y'all got in there?" That same dull voice, presumably Mr. Wingert's. Its tone had risen out of the bored depths. In the hush of the room, his bootsteps upon the porch planking sounded loudly. The man's shadow filled the doorway and blotted out the light.

  Wingert was a huge man: broad in the shoulders, thick through the gut, as wide in the hips and thighs as a woman.
He was even wide in the head, given the tangled nest of unbarbered hair that hung past his ears and swept the collar of his trusty's denims.

  His shadow was thick and dark—except for the whites of his eyes as he glared into the sleeping chamber, and for a glint of gold on the third finger of his right hand. Gold and something else, a brownish oval that might have been a carved signet stone. It was an odd sort of jewelry, Louis thought, for a moron set to guard the sleeping barracks of a road gang.

  Possibly something he stole from one of the prisoners, Louis decided. Solving that minor mystery so neatly only left him to confront the greater one: What was he doing here? How did he come to be sleeping with the gangs, without having any personal memory of his own transgressions, trial, or sentencing?

  Brevet had to shelve speculation on that point as the wide man stepped through the doorway, working his hips and thighs past each other as a tiger works its shoulders in stalking through the high grass.

  Wingert might intimidate any normal road-gang felon, but not Brevet. Louis had taken lessons in pugilism since he was nine years old. He had continued the training through his military academy and then his college days at Tulane, and he had won the intramural Greek Championship there three years in a row.

  The trusty might be big, but he looked slow. His hands, each the size of a Smithfield ham, looked to be as soft as hamfat, too.

  Seeing Louis standing free in the middle of the room, the man moved down toward him, slowly, contemptuously, majestically. The great hands clenched. The knees bent sideways to lower the long body for greater leverage.

  Brevet readied his own body: rising onto his toes, loosening his shoulders, rolling his fists, taking long breaths to build up his reserves of oxygen.

  "Hey, Win, nothing's going on."

  A small man, almost as wide as the trusty but two heads shorter, came forward from between the beds to Louis's right. His step caused a louder version of the same clanking that the other men's shufflings had made. "He didn't mean nothing. Just a new guy and all."

  The massive head swung in the direction of the smaller man. Before the chin reached his approximate bearing, however, the nearside Smithfield ham rose in a straight blur, backhand, and caught the protester under the arch of the ribcage. The man collapsed around the hand like a rag doll dropped over a chairback. Then he rebounded, like that same doll with a rubber spine, and flew backward over the bed to strike the plank wall six feet up, near the ceiling joists. His trajectory pulled tight the chain along the right side of the room, and half the audience flopped over.

  Louis went lower in his crouch and began orchestrating his footwork and breathing.

  Wingert's chin came back on course and the pumping legs picked up speed down the aisleway.

  It was finished in three moves: Louis threw a picturebook left jab and right uppercut, both of which connected perfectly; Wingert, unmoved, drew his right hand across his body and backhanded Louis's head like a man sweeping a cabbage off a table.

  The stone, or whatever it was, in the trusty's ring laid open Louis's jaw from his right ear to his chin, with the blood flying in a flap up into his eyes. The immediate impact snapped his neck sideways, so that his opposite ear smashed down on his own shoulder and began swelling. The blow's secondary impulse pushed him backwards, over one of the bedframes and into the knees of one of the chained men. That man's staggers tightened the chain until every man on the left side of the room was dragged down.

  Having subdued the entire barracks with two massive blows, Wingert was now departing. He moved up the central aisle with—seen from the rear—a portly waddle.

  Louis was all for rising up and taking him on again. But, as he reached his knees, one of the prisoners behind Louis had the presence of mind to smack the back of his head with a length of pipe which had been carefully preserved between the mattress and the bedsling for such occasions.

  Louis Brevet slumped forward and bled quietly.

  * * *

  "Oh, you poor, sweet darling!"

  Cool, dry fingertips touched his forehead—about the only spot on his face that was not swollen, painful, or covered with bandages.

  Louis was lying in a real bed, in a real room with plaster walls, a decorated ceiling, and deep rugs to muffle the comings and goings of doctors, nurses, and mistresses. His Claire was there, with her dry hands and her masses of golden-hued hair, to coo over him and pretend how much she shared his discomfort.

  For once, however, Louis Brevet felt almost good upon waking. Certainly, he was battered and in pain—the worst being a deep throb along his jaw—but his head was clear. His limbs, while stiff from the impromptu flight across that improbable room, did not feel the leaden weight of drink and its residual poisons. Perhaps this was only the effect of some drug they had given him for pain.

  "Where was I?" To his own ears, his voice came out muffled by the swathings of cotton lint around his mouth. It felt, too, as if some teeth were loose or missing in there.

  "You're at home, now, darling."

  "This isn't Windemere."

  "Of course not. These are my rooms at the hotel. I wouldn't dream of taking you back to the plantation and that woman."

  "But where was I?"

  "You were in a carriage accident. Last night. The horses bolted, or so your driver said—he jumped clear, the coward—and they took you over the levee. Three of the foolish beasts were badly damaged and had to be put down."

  "There was no carriage accident, Claire."

  "Well... that's the story everyone has been telling."

  "They are wrong. What time is it?"

  "A little after nine."

  He craned his neck to look toward the windows, but they were muffled in heavy, green velvet. "Morning or evening?"

  "Evening. You have slept the day away, you poor dear."

  "I awoke this morning in a strange place, a pine-board room somewhere out in the bayous. I was with a road gang in chains, although I was free. When I called for someone to come and attend me, this giant of a man came in and beat me. I hit him twice, but he laid me out with one blow. And now I am here."

  "What a terrible dream you've been having!"

  "It was no dream, Claire."

  "Then what a terrible raving you are engaged in," she said coldly. "People will say your wits have been addled by the accident—and by drink."

  "Was that your doing? To put me in a place with the lowest order of men, show me to what depths I had sunk—or might still sink?"

  She looked at him with those rifle-bore eyes of hers. When her face closed like that, her mouth a smooth line and not a lift or droop of expression to her eyes, Louis knew better than to continue. Claire was a million miles away from him, waiting for him to say something unforgivable, waiting to lash out at him for it.

  Louis held his breath and reflected on how really well he felt.

  * * *

  It was on the following Sunday, as he was sitting at mass beside his wife Angelique, that the call came to him. While the parish priest droned on with his Latin and his incense, his wine and his wafers, the goodness of the Spirit descended upon Louis Brevet and never lifted again in that earthly life.

  "The Lord is my shepherd," Louis whispered around a jaw still taped and painful. "He keeps me as He kept the paschal lamb of the Hebrews..."

  Angelique turned to him with a shush ready on her lips. She stopped it on seeing the light glinting from his eyes.

  "As He kept the blood and water of His Son, flowing perfect and fresh beyond the grave"—Louis's voice rose above a whisper—"so He tends me like the vine and spreads me like the light. He sends my soul flying upward, to melt in the sun above the air."

  Heads around him in the pews turned with anger or confusion on their faces.

  "He raises me with the majesty of a Prophet of Ages, and he casts me down in sheets of flame, as He did the Prince of the Air."

  A small hand, Angelique's, closed around his arm above the el
bow. Her fingertips dug into the hollow of the muscles, intending to cause pain but achieving nothing with it. Levering her nails into a nerve, she tried to lift him.

  Louis went to his feet, rising only with the Spirit, and his voice rose beside it.

  "But He shall raise me yet again, the Sword of the Lord lifted high—"

  "Oh, do hush!" Angelique wailed and thrust him sideways into the nave, where he stumbled. Then he seemed to waken, genuflected awkwardly, and turned to walk slowly up the aisle.

  From the mutter of voices around him, two words came through clearly: "Drunk again." But he wasn't.

  * * *

  The heat and moisture of the tent were like the oppressive atmosphere right before a thunderstorm. The tension in the air produced the same kind of itchiness, a screaming willingness to feel the flash and bang of calamity and damnation, if only to be freed of the suspense.

  Part of the itchiness came from the snake handlers. Their liquid movements rolled forward through time: meeting the reptiles' dodging heads and bared fangs with the flexing of supple wrists and forked fingers. Oiled arms and writhing black bodies slid faster and faster, until the mesmerized crowd could only watch through slitted, agate-hard eyes and pray the fangs to strike and a scream of agony to stop the dance in an instant of certitude.

  After the snakes, came the people.

  "I was an adulteress..."

  "I coveted my neighbor's horse..."

  "I beat my wife..."

  "I was a drunkard," the words felt right in Louis Brevet's throat. "The drink was like a friend to me, at first, warm and comforting. Then it was like a lord to me, commanding and rewarding. Finally, it was like a devil, mocking me and tempting me to greater folly."

  "Amen."

  "I was a rich man, of a family well known in these parts. My drug was wines of good vintage and brandies brought by ship from France herself. I squandered gold coins and the love of a good woman on those vintages. And when I was done, then any low spirits—dark, raw rum or clear whisky—would taste just as fine to me."