Lightfall

by Paul Monette

  “I’m mailing it out to the papers today,” said Michael, his eyes like pearls in the blue-gray light. He fingered a stack of envelopes briefly, like somebody weighing evidence. “I figure it’ll hit the stands by Friday. What do you think they’ll do?”

  “The press?”

  “My people.”

  Just then a curious pause ensued, from which they did not recover. Though Michael spoke without conscious ego, the moment was—inevitably—an exercise of power. No use to say the truth: he was no more possessive of the legion of souls than he was of Norman Cates. When he used to know who they all were, it was quite different. The first conversions, ten years back, had seemed to summon up in him a curious mix of pity and contempt. So helpless were they, he was sure they were better off gathered in tribes, for all the use they’d be to the world at large. It wasn’t any wonder that he claimed them as his own. They were his because he brought them home.

  Yet the more their number grew, the more did he grow dispassionate. Like any other luckless fool with a perfect system, he saw how quickly dispossessed an original man could be. Inventors of guns and confidence schemes, fast-food kings and gadgeteers—it happened to the best of them. In the end, one was the slave of demographics. Once the earth was franchised, with outlets in even the smallest towns, the man with the first idea was only in the way. As time went on, Michael could have sworn he owned them not at all—not these tens of thousands who chanted his name six times a day. If anything, they owned him.

  “They’ll wait for you, Father,” the lawyer assured him.

  “Oh, I doubt it, Norman,” he said quite kindly, almost as if to apologize. “I expect what they’ll try to do is find some way to follow me.”

  “To prison? I don’t understand.”

  “Well, of course you don’t. This is all for them.”

  There was a moment when the lawyer might have saved himself, being as Michael turned so slowly. Perhaps it was still night enough to be nothing but a dream. The one man looming above the other, the arc of the knife, the gesture that drove it—the whole tableau so perfectly attenuated, Michael might have been doing an Oriental dance.

  It was manners that decided it, of course. Norman saw the knife come down but didn’t like to make a fuss. He simply went rigid and ceased to breathe. At last he searched the prophet’s face, to see if he might discover there what harmless toy this was. He clung to the line of reason fiercely—as if he could will it from happening, even as it did.

  And when the blade connected, slicing his windpipe, even here he made a final superhuman try to be discreet. The blood came fountaining out on his pin-striped shirt. The gash yawned open like a scream. With steely patience, Norman grasped his throat and sat as still as a scolded child. He was not a man who ever permitted things to go too far. The horror on his face was all bound up with the wish to live fastidiously. He hated to leave a mess. Little wonder then, when Michael struck the second time—clean through the jugular, half beheading him—he only meant to put the lawyer out of misery.

  Norman Cates was dead before he hit the floor, and his killer had already lost all interest. He bent to the table and fetched up the last of his loot. He stuffed his pockets with goldwork till they sagged. He tucked his letters to the daily papers into his waistband. Then he walked briskly away. He had had enough of law.

  He jingled slightly as he threaded his way among the robes and plaster saints. Perhaps it was so easy to be untouched because he bore no hate for the man he’d killed. He took a certain pride in never having murdered out of passion. Hate was a labyrinth, just like love. To him the use of violence was mainly to draw attention. Perhaps he would have felt differently if someone had ever fought back—but no one ever had.

  He went lightly down the spiral, crossed the hall, and opened the double doors to the alley. He resisted a further trip to the altar, on the theory that those who prayed at dawn were far too sober to drop their jewels. Always, it was the pitch of the night that brought in the biggest haul. This had to do with the timing of guilt, which wandered the dark like a vampire.

  It was cold in the sunless canyon between the church and the Turkish baths. He would have gone right back up and thrown on a musty vestment, except he knew he was going south and wouldn’t need it. South as far as the road ran, all the way to Panama, maybe. He had an idea that what he needed was some vast tract of land. The wilder the better: he was sick to death of city streets. Not that he really expected to know what he wanted until he got there. The cutting loose was the main thing.

  He went around to the back of the beat-up Cadillac and slipped the key in the lock. The trunk popped open, swinging up. Here was more than enough to buy a kingdom: the cash alone stood at a depth of six or eight inches, none of it stacked or counted. Bills had slipped under the spare tire and curled up into the taillight. Others were gummed with slicks of oil. It was not so much that he didn’t trust banks, having knocked them over like ninepins. But he’d been getting ready to fly for the last two years. Had kept this much negotiable, against the neat accounts that had to be abandoned.

  He tossed in the dollars from his pocket. Then the gold jewelry. He now drew out the silver case he’d picked up an hour before. It bore an engraving of a four-masted schooner. Just below that, in a vivid scrollwork, some man’s name—it looked like Edward Dale. And underneath, in microscopic script, these six small words: To the end of the world. He did not throw this in with the rest, but slipped it back in his jacket.

  He slammed the trunk and came around to the driver’s side. He pulled the door open, slid in with a sigh—and jumped.

  “I had to see you,” the woman said.

  “But I told you,” he answered coldly, gripping the wheel, “I have to be alone now.”

  “Please, please,” she begged him. Here she fell so quickly to sobbing, it wasn’t clear what she pleaded for.

  Ruby Joel was thirty-four, but she looked just shy of fifty. She wore her hair in a dismal bun, and the shaky hands she buried her face in were blotched a liverish gray. Fifteen years of chronic pain had racked her, spidering up her skin with wrinkles—all the deeper for her long insistence that Father Paradise had healed her. She winced and sighed at the best of times. When a rose wilted, she agonized. Michael had only kept her on because she was so useful. A vivid iridescence played about the words she spoke. She had the soul of a certain sort of poet. Thus could make the simplest dogma sing with the tongues of angels.

  He had no further use for this.

  “Don’t go to jail,” moaned Ruby Joel, wiping her eyes on her kerchief. “Why don’t we just take off—just you and me? We’ll settle somewhere quiet. I’ll get a job.”

  No pity here. She’d had her chance to survive the judgments of his final hour. He’d told her not to come. The afternoon before, he’d given her more by way of a good-bye than anyone deserved. He promised to write her letters. Swore she could come on visiting days. He’d never have let it get so human, except she’d been so kind. In small ways over the years, she’d come so close she could almost touch him. Why go out of his way to hurt her?

  Now all that had changed. He saw no reason not to. It was as if her death alone would put them in their places.

  “Michael, can’t you see there are no laws? A man like you—that’s why you’re here. To release us.”

  Michael Roman stared down the alley. Not far off, a drunk lay slumped behind a barrel, covered up with the daily news. A little further on, a skinny dog and a rat were circling in the trash, staking claim to a mess of chicken bones. Pigeons rose and alighted up and down the fire escapes. He’d have gladly killed them all right now. What galled him was that he had no weapon.

  He’d thrown his knife aside. He had bothered to pack no other because he lived without the fear of natural enemies. He could outrun cops and federal agents with something like a second sight. Dead ends he could talk his way out of. Besides, the absence of passion notwithstanding, he was surfeited now like someone fresh from bed. A good murder tended to
blunt the need to murder—for a while. He could strangle her, of course. Nothing to it: like snapping a twig off a winter tree. Yet he felt a pang of deep revulsion, to think he would have to hold her in his hands.

  “I have money,” she said, more sprightly now. She seemed to attribute the glaze of his eyes and his stony silence to some profound relief. Reaching into a needlework bag beside her, she pulled out a fold of cash, wrapped tight in elastic bands, and dropped it on the seat between them.

  Stupid, pointless woman. How could she ever suppose he’d let himself be trapped in an act of charity? She should have left her savings in the drawer. She should have gone on with her invalid aunt, wheeling her out for a little sun. What made her work so hard to be a victim? Of course, he blamed himself. He’d allowed her the illusion that he cared. A hundred different times he let her go on about herself for half an hour at a stretch, while he—abstracted as the moon—fingered a new gold brooch and mulled his power over. She mistook his vast inertia for the stillness of the soul. This only made him want to hurt her more.

  “And look,” she said proudly, coy as an easy girl about to show her body.

  He turned with huge disdain. For years she had brought him pots of flowers; was constantly bestowing on him stones and feathers and leaves and acorns, all picked up on her sensible morning walks in the Berkeley hills. She had a misconception that he saw in all this bric-a-brac a sort of Buddhist unity. Nonetheless, he laid her motley offerings in a row along his window ledge, restraining the wish to fling them in her face. For the sake of the gospel copy she could churn out day after day, he didn’t mind a little clutter. No other sect he knew had more persuasive utterance. They’d cornered the market with it.

  Too late he saw what he ought to have done. He should have spat on every token of her love and whipped her black and blue for her presumption. People needed pain. He had every intention to make up for lost time now, till he saw she held a gun.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “It’s my father’s,” she said with a dreamy smile. “He always kept it ready.”

  She held out her frail exhausted hand. The handle lay toward him on her palm. He clasped it. For that small moment, as the thirty-two passed from one to the other, they had their brief encounter.

  “Ready for what?” the prophet asked.

  “In case he got cancer. To kill himself.”

  “And did he?”

  “No,” she said, without the slightest irony. “He got hit by a bus coming home from work.”

  It’s loaded? he almost asked.

  But the question was clearly irrelevant: either it was or it wasn’t. He slipped his index finger through the trigger. Shyly Ruby drew her hand away, as if she could not bear to linger quite so near. She smiled into his eyes and stayed on her side of the car. He could see she wanted nothing more than a proper thanks. She preferred it to a kiss, no doubt. He gave her back a smile that was the mirror of her own. Then he squeezed a bare half inch.

  The noise was so loud, it startled even him.

  Ruby Joel looked away like someone shamed. Though the blood seeped out and spread across the front of her shapeless coat, she seemed to hold it back, like tears. Michael looked out at the alley. The pigeons had wheeled when they heard the gun’s report, but already they were doubling back to perch on the iron stairways. The dog fled, leaving the dull unruffled rat to pick his way through dinner. The drunk had slept through worse.

  “I’m sorry,” whispered Ruby, but she died before he ever knew what last regret she had.

  He rested his head on the steering wheel, sick of thinking fast. It spoiled his master plan to have two murders. He did a quick sketch of a cover-up—drag her inside, bring the drunk in after, put the man’s prints on the gun—but could not get to the end of it. He had a sudden horror that his senses, one by one, were going out. His stomach twisted up with cramps. Though he’d never gone in for dreams, suddenly his head was on fire with visions. He was high, high up, with the sea below. A terrible roar of waters gathered toward the land. He was sure there were people screaming right behind him. Though he couldn’t understand a word they said, the wind on the lonely cliff was ripe with death.

  He looked up stunned. He didn’t dare glance to his right for fear the corpse might be staring at him. He heaved the door back on its hinges and staggered out. He retched, but he had not eaten. He went into a terrible shake. Still he stumbled toward the church, like a desperate man who wished to die at home. He reached the open doorway. Then he saw something move—over there, in the shadows. He fired.

  The stiff-limbed drunk had propped himself on his elbows, to give a squint at the rising sun. He was scarcely twenty-five, though his face was gray with time. The bullet caught him square in the throat, so he didn’t cry out as he fell back.

  Michael staggered and clutched at his clothes. He dropped the gun on the pavement, as if he dared not take it over the threshold. In fact he supposed it had run out of rounds, since he couldn’t still hear it shoot. He lurched inside and through the velvet draperies into the high-domed room. His hour had come at last, he thought. The God he had blasphemed his whole life long had finally made His vengeance felt. Despite his boiling guts, the prophet shivered with a strange and unaccustomed joy. He had dared the empty sky a million times. Now he seethed with exultation, to think the balance of pain would be struck through him.

  But when he reached the altar, ready to sink to his knees, the blank indifferent look of things was wholly undiminished. Nothing but his rattling breath, the tail end like a whimper, rose and fell in the incensed air. Dead silence was the name of God. The drowning candles were small as fireflies, now that the first light gleamed in the long arcade of amber windows. The room took a tint like whiskey.

  Wait. If this was so—if it wasn’t the hand of judgment on him, and there was no God, not even now—then what? Why did he feel he had just come under someone else’s power?

  Just then he felt a break in the region of his brain. Go north, he thought. And when he turned, he remembered only that. He didn’t miss—didn’t care—whatever else he used to know. Now he must go north. The whole vast other structure of his self had vanished, sloughed off like a snake’s skin.

  “I thought you’d left,” said Danny Merritt, coming up the aisle.

  A bearded man about his age, with wire-rim glasses and a cowboy hat. Michael had no notion who it was. He had just embraced amnesia like an addict. In a flash, it had made him young as a boy again and blissfully alone. Why had this sweet-faced amiable stranger turned up now to trouble him with smiles?

  “I’m going,” Michael replied in a guarded way, as the two came face to face. He kept the point of the compass to himself.

  “I just talked to Kansas City,” Danny announced, quite matter-of-fact. “We’re upping the dose of the men to thirty milligrams, twice a day.”

  “I see.”

  “It’s just an idea I have. You triple the men and cut the women back to aspirin. We’ll see what happens.” He shrugged and grinned. When he walked, he lumbered like a bear. “Where’s Clarence Darrow? Upstairs?”

  “I guess so,” Michael said.

  He must not care. He must not stay. How many lies could he tell, before this man saw through him? He would have bolted, except there was an echo here he could not seem to shake. What if the tall and bearded stranger turned out to be his brother? He had a sudden longing to embrace him. Perhaps he could cry it all out if he could cling to someone long enough.

  “You better take a Bible, Mike. It’ll look good, honest. Over here.”

  Not stopping for an answer, Danny led the way down the side aisle past two stations of the cross. Michael trailed in his wake, looking out over rows and rows of pews without a clue as to what a place like this was for. Oh please, he prayed to the darkness—but could not find the words to ask. So little was left in his head, he couldn’t imagine any bargain they would meet. The two men reached a low arched door that opened off the nave. They ducked through this a
nd down a narrow hall. If only we could switch, thought Michael. The man with the beard knew all the secret passages. He was surely better suited to a journey with no end in sight.

  “Remember, ask for Alan,” Danny said, as they turned into a small chaotic office. Flyers and broadsheets littered every surface. Bales of Covenant tabloids waited to be shipped. “He’s your inside man,” continued Danny, rooting around in his second-class files. “He’ll get you whatever you need. Don’t worry—you’ll have a bodyguard with you whenever you’re not in your cell. So don’t take shit. Anyone you want to have hurt, just say.”

  He turned with the book in hand and gave it over. Michael cracked it open to a page, but of course he could not see to read. The blur in his eyes was a law laid down. As Danny shuffled past and out the door, a small pathetic thought took shape in Michael’s head: If only I could stay and do it here. He turned to follow, certain that this kindly man would let him clear a little place to sleep. In the attic perhaps. A place this big must have an attic. Absently, he pulled the coil of wire from an untied bale of leaflets. His own round face, in a slit-eyed trance, stared out at him from every handout. He did not see the resemblance.

  When he came back into the church, Danny was down on his hands and knees at the altar. Michael drifted up the aisle, thinking he would help him. He remembered nothing, not his name, but he knew this was the source of him, where Danny Merritt crouched and peered into the dark.

  “The cupboard is bare,” said Danny wryly, reaching one hand in. He seemed to sense when Michael was behind him. “Or have you already checked?”

  Michael didn’t even have to think. Carelessly, he tossed the Bible on the altar. He took up the other end of the wire and hunkered down in the shadows, close to the man who seemed to love him. It looked as if the prophet meant to gather him in his arms. But no—he slipped the wire over Danny’s head and stood and pulled it taut. The thin-gauge wire dug into his hands, as deep as it dug into Danny’s throat, but he gritted his teeth and would not loosen his grip. The strangling man squirmed and pawed the air. Michael lifted his foot. He braced it against the back of Danny’s head and used this added leverage to yank the wire twice as tight.