by Justin Bloch
“No one ever tried to attack Heaven while you were Gatekeeper either, remember,” Sol pointed out.
“Yes, yes, the Silver City and the Shimmering Sea are long and far away, detective. I prefer not to dwell on those memories.”
“But you like it here?” he asked. In the moments he had spent thinking of her, he had worried over this point the most: was she happy as the Gatekeeper of Limbo? When he had chosen to give her watch over it, he had only sought to give her back what was being stripped from her and let her keep that sense of duty and responsibility that she had spoken of so proudly as they sat on the steps of the Pearly Gates. And now, looking at her frazzled, paranoid demeanor, he wondered if he had made a mistake.
“Yes,” she said carefully, “yes, I do like it here.” And then she smiled, and it was the radiant one he had seen on that first night he had met her, glowing and jubilant and without care. She smiled and her face lit like a full moon emerging from cloud cover.
Sol grinned back at her and felt deep relief wash over him. “I knew you would like it,” he said. “I knew when I chose it you would like it.”
The joy bled slowly from her face. Her eyes went steely, cold, like steel covered with a rime of frost. “What do you mean?”
“When Peter replaced you as Gatekeeper,” he said, looking right at her but not seeing her at all, “I interceded on your behalf so that you could take over guardianship of Limbo.”
“Why would you do something like that?” Bertha seethed, and it was only now that the karma policeman realized that he was no longer speaking with the cheerful Siren of moments before, but with a very angry, very dangerous one.
“I just…I thought you would like it. I thought it would make you happy.”
“Why would I be happy?” she snapped. “Because you have given me a gate? Because you have replaced my title?”
“I was just—”
“How dare you interfere with my life like this!”
“Interfere?” he retorted. “Interfere with your life? I saved your life, Gatekeeper. You were to be executed, last of the Sirens fallen for what she was, and I plucked you from that fate and gave you a new one, and you’re angry?”
Her taut, furious face went slack. “Better death than this nonexistence, detective,” she said, speaking barely above a breath, and the unnatural calm with which she spoke chilled the policeman’s blood. Her voice was a cadaver’s voice. “You took me away from my sea and abandoned me to solitude in this place. You ask me to be grateful to you? You ask me to kiss your hand and show my gratitude? I will not, for I see no gift in what you have done to me.” She paused and closed her eyes, then stood on trembling legs. She pointed back over the hill in the direction he had come from. “Leave this place,” she whispered. “We are finished, you and I.”
“Bertha,” he said, looking up at her. He couldn’t take his eyes off the blood on her cheek. “Please.”
She turned her head away from him and closed her eyes. Her face was set and resolute, and the karma policeman rose slowly to his feet. None of this had gone how he’d thought it would, from the very first frenzied moments when she had attacked him to now, with his banishment from the ring valley of Limbo. He looked at her for several seconds, willing her to turn to him, but she only pointed. After a moment, he walked in the direction she prescribed, pausing only once as he crested the hill to see if she would at last meet his gaze. Her back was to him, her arms limp by her sides. He opened his mouth to call out to her and closed it when he realized he had nothing to say. He looked at her for a heartbeat more, then turned and started down the other side of the hill. It would be the last time he saw her for over one thousand years.
Chapter XVII
Time, however, is flexible, and for none more so than the karma police, who move between worlds as if they are simply visiting neighbors across the street. Sol threw himself into his work after the disastrous encounter with Bertha, chasing every tiny karmic interference with a zeal that bordered on obsessive. For him, a scant three years passed while the Gatekeeper sat alone in her valley. After the first year and a half, he thought no more of Bertha, not even in passing. He did not let himself think of her.
He did not regret using his boon to help the Siren. He had left the valley annoyed, traversed the fields of Elysium angry, and bridged back to Heaven furious, but his ire had left him shortly thereafter. He had made the decision to give her the keeping of Limbo and he knew he had done the right thing. Bertha could say what she wanted, but she would not have chosen death given another option, and certainly not at the hands of Luna, who would not have had the decency to make it a clean kill. Sol had chosen wisely, he knew that. Whatever the Gatekeeper thought was beside the point.
The Silver City was currently enraptured with gossip. There had been an Allamagoosalum, the first since the Son had descended and lived among men, but at last it had been struck down by the Cipher, a warrior named Beowulf. Already his legend was growing on all the worlds. In Heaven especially it had become an inferno, for the angels, as they had with the previous two Ciphers, fanned the flames of the Scandinavian’s tale until he was nearly a god, his manner of death altered and elaborated. This Allamagoosalum had been particularly fierce and elusive, and the Citizens were overjoyed that it had been stopped. The monster’s victims would take much longer to reach the Pearly Gates than they would have otherwise, and the most supreme joy for a Citizen was in the sharing of the glory of Paradise with others.
On an early afternoon a few days after the death of the Allamagoosalum, Sol strolled through the central park of the Silver City. Winter had come to the metropolis, and the karma policeman wore a black watch cap pulled low over his ears and a long scarf the color of new leaves on a dogwood. His jacket was buttoned to the throat. Snow had fallen the previous night, covering the ground with a fine white dust, and his shoes sent up little clouds of powder as he walked, his breath coming in long, ghostly plumes. The air was cold and crisp, the world was filled with light. Sol walked with no set destination in mind, nor purpose or path. He wandered among the dark, naked trees, curving every so often to ensure that he stayed within the bounds of the park. He had wiped the slate of his mind blank, dwelling on nothing more challenging than the slow drip of icicles and the play of sunlight through the snow-heavy limbs of trees. He would come to the park to walk like this, unburdened and unwinding, once every month or so. And so it was that he did not notice the first cardinals appear like drops of blood in the trees around him, swooping out of the air and onto branches both high and low. He did not notice the way their eyes followed him as he walked, or how, when he moved too far away, those behind would fly forward and ahead of him and take their places on the icy branches once more.
Even as the trees filled with the birds, the karma policeman walked on, oblivious, for the cardinals made no noise save the beat of their wings through the air. After a few minutes, the trees were not just filled but inundated with the silent birds, hundreds upon hundreds and more. A single cardinal, larger than the rest, took to wing and landed in the karma policeman’s path a few feet in front of him. The scarlet bird stood out startlingly against the white snow, a bright exclamation point on a blank page. The karma policeman halted, regarded the bird with curiosity. It looked up at him with dark eyes, its head tilted.
“Go on now,” Sol said in his soft voice. He flicked the toe of his shoe in the snow, sending a puff of white powder toward the bird. The cardinal hopped back to avoid the snow, but immediately returned to its previous position. It chirped once, loudly. “Go, I said,” he repeated and kicked snow once again. The cardinal fled back to the trees, but Sol’s eyes tracked its path and saw, finally, what surrounded him.
“What is this?” he whispered, turning in a circle, mystified. All around him the cardinals perched and stared, so many that they blocked out the winter gray sky with their scarlet multitudes. His hand stole unconsciously into his pocket and gripped the handle of his straight razor. He had never seen so many birds congre
gating in one place, packed so tightly on the branches that there was little distinction between them. And all of them, every single cardinal, seemed to be watching him with their unnerving black eyes.
They began chirruping suddenly, all together, a vast, high, echoing song. A ripple went through the flock like a ring wave in a pond, and every bird lifted from its perch, hovered in the air for a moment, and descended on the karma policeman, crashing upon his startled form. Thousands of them, a bloody flood, the air alive with feathers, filled with the endless cacophony of the birdsong. And still they came, emptying the trees, emptying the very world it seemed, until the clearing was a surging, whirling crimson mass with Sol at its center.
At last the final cardinal dove into the swollen mob, and the flock broke. The birds exploded away in all directions, passed above the trees, went higher, became red stars in a gray sky. On the ground, fallen feathers lay on the snow in strange patterns, like a love letter written, regretted, and partially erased. Of the karma policeman, there was no sign.
In the Persian desert, Nova paused in what she was doing and cocked her head to one side, frowning. Suddenly, there was something…not wrong exactly, but different. Something had happened to Sol. She shut her eyes, focused, and realized what it was: she couldn’t feel his presence any more. He was gone. The desert winds howled around her and sand stung the exposed skin of her face. Her hair flew about her head like bed sheets left on a clothesline during a tornado.
The ghoul she was sentencing sensed her distraction and tried to pull away from her, but the seraph jammed her knee further into its back, wrenched its arms behind it. She had caught it trying to beguile a Muslim man with promises of sex on the desert sands. It would have come through with the sex, she knew, and then it would have devoured him. The young man fled when Nova appeared, and she had chased down the ghoul and pinned it, which was when the strange feeling had overcome her. The demon writhed beneath her, became a woman, a dog, a gangly, long-limbed creature with a face that was mostly mouth. She hung on through all.
It hissed at her and she shushed it and chastised, “I’m trying to listen.” Something was going on, something…but the ghoul was bucking and screeching beneath her and she couldn’t concentrate. She huffed and shifted her position so that she could hold both of the demon’s wrists with one hand, dipped in her pocket and came out with her pearl-handled straight razor. “You have interfered in the karmic path of a Resident,” she pronounced, “and for this there is no penance.” She released the ghoul’s wrists, jerked back on its hair, and slashed its throat in one smooth, swift motion. The demon went rigid beneath her, arched its back like an upended horseshoe crab, then went limp and lay still.
Nova turned her attention back to her brother, closing her eyes as the sands whipped around her. Her brow creased in worry. She could not feel his presence on any of the worlds. She didn’t know what could cause such a thing to happen, and she realized something else, something so rare that she hadn’t noticed it at first: she was scared.
The world was red. No…no, it was more than that. The universe was red. Existence was red. A thousand thousand swirling shades of red, burgundies and vermilions, carmines and cerises, rubies and rusts, shades that there were no names for, that defied categorization. The colors ran and bled and blended and the only constant was that there was nothing but red. Red was god. Red am what am.
The karma policeman tumbled and flowed through the crimson space. The sensation was something like bridging but different in a key way that he couldn’t quite grasp. His mind was overrun with red, and his thoughts ran a course interrupted with exclamations of color. He could see his long black jacket floating around him, and the unredness of it hurt his eyes. He was only able to continue looking because the red was taking over, turning the dark fabric to scarlet like a chameleon changing to suit its environment.
“Where am I?” he asked without knowing he meant to, much less to whom he thought he was speaking.
“you are traveling,” spoke a tiny voice, the voice of the red, pulsing deep within his head. He was surprised to find that the words forming inside his mind were blue until he realized that here, blue was simply another shade of red.
“To where?” he asked. He caught sight of his hands and saw that they were burning and that the flames were the color of garnets. This made him feel good. This made him feel red.
“to nowhere. you cannot travel to a place where you have already arrived,” answered the voice, and all of the red seeped out of the universe. The karma policeman found himself laying on a hill, with long blades of green grass waving back and forth in his view and a brilliant blue sky stretching out above him, and for an instant he felt an utter terror unlike any he had ever before experienced. How could he live in a world with so little red? How could he exist with such a varied color scheme? He shut his eyes and the sunlight on his closed lids turned his vision pink, and he lay like that for several minutes, readjusting and calming himself. When he opened his eyes again, he felt more together, less monochrome.
He sat up slowly. The landscape was filled with weeping willows and rolling hills, and he realized with some surprise that he was in the Elysian Fields. He leaned his head upon his upraised knees. Behind him was the ringed hill that circled the entrance to Limbo. He stared up at the crest of the hill for a few moments, then got to his feet and climbed to it, looking down into the valley.
“Hello, detective,” called Bertha from where she sat by the black stone, and her voice thrilled his heart. “I’ve been expecting you. Come down and say hello.”
The karma policeman started down toward her, making himself walk at an even pace despite his legs’ wish to run. Even after all this time he was still drawn to her as he had been that first night. She had tamed the tangled bird’s nest of her hair, and it glowed in the sunlight, framed the smooth, milky curve of her neck as it dipped down beneath her gown. He forced himself not to hurry and walked a little faster all the same.
When he reached the bottom of the hill, Bertha broke into a sudden dash toward him. Sol, having not yet forgotten the way she had greeted him on his last visit, dropped into a defensive crouch, but when she leapt to him with her arms spread wide, he caught her easily and they tumbled together onto the ground. The Gatekeeper hugged him tightly, her head upon his chest, and he squeezed her back. They remained like that, wrapped together on the warm grass, for several minutes, neither speaking nor moving.
It was Bertha who broke the embrace, sitting up and stretching her long limbs. Sol lay where he was for a moment more, watching her. She turned her face and he winced at the sight of the small scar beneath her eye, the scar he had put there. “Hello, Bertha,” he said softly.
She smiled at him, a true, radiant smile. “Hello, Sol. It’s good to see you again.”
“And you.” He brushed some grass from his jacket and took off the watch cap he had been wearing, stowed it in his pocket, unwrapped the scarf from about his neck. “You said you were expecting me?”
“Yes. I sent for you.”
“I don’t understand. How did I get here? I was in the Silver City, and there were birds, cardinals, and then there was…” He paused, trying to recall, but the memory of his passage was fading like a dream. “There was…redness. I think. And then I was here.”
The Gatekeeper laughed like a melody and seemed delighted by his confusion. “The cardinals brought you here, my dear. Through the Crimson Corridor.”
Sol gave his own short laugh. “The Crimson Corridor doesn’t exist, it’s just a legend. A story.”
She watched him, a playful smile lighting her oceanic eyes. “You forget, detective, that stories form the reality of this world. What else but the Crimson Corridor could have brought you here?” she said, curling a lock of hair behind her ear. Even after all this time, the gesture still gave the karma policeman shivers. “Yes, it exists. The cardinals are alone in their ability to access it, however.”
The karma policeman pushed away his amazement. He wan
ted to focus on her, not on how he had gotten to her. He could ask more about the Crimson Corridor another time. “You said you sent for me.”
“Yes,” she answered, and a tiny flower of pride blossomed in his chest. “It always hurt, the way we left things between us, and I wanted to set things right. And it’s been so long now, I figured you must have forgiven me for the way I acted. So I called the cardinals to me and they agreed to help contact you.”
“You can talk to birds?”
“I am a Siren. I am half-bird.”
“You could have just written to me. Or come to the Silver City.”
“I cannot leave the bounds of the valley. If I were to cross the top of the hill, karma police would be summoned immediately,” she said with a tightening of her lips. “I am Gatekeeper and I cannot abandon my post.”
The karma policeman nodded. He looked at her for a moment, overcome. He saw no sign of the woman he had encountered on his previous visit, the dazed, defensive Gatekeeper. “How are you, Bertha?” he asked seriously.
“I am very well,” she said, smiling, and he saw no lie in her eyes. She smiled all the time now. It was like watching the sun rise over and over again. “Very pleased. And how are you?”
“Fine, thank you.” Another question occurred to him, and he was surprised it hadn’t come to him immediately. “Why did you call me here? Why now? It’s been…” He paused, calculating the span of years. “Over a millennia for you since we last parted.”
The Gatekeeper was quiet for a moment. “It was the Allamagoosalum. The one that just died. It killed so many people, I could think of nothing but death and murder and sacrifice. And what happened to the Sirens. I am the last of them, the last of the maidens of the sea, the sister of none, the mother of none. I am a part of no community, I am a part of no family, I am a part of nothing. And then I started thinking about you, about what happened between us, and I thought that maybe things didn’t have to stay the way they had been. That maybe I didn’t have to continue on so unfulfilled, stuck between life and existence; that I could have satisfaction. I thought about it and thought about it and figured everything out. And now here we are.”
