The Pure Cold Light

by Gregory Frost

  Whatever they were, they seemed not to notice her. When they passed close, she smelled something familiar—the reek of old boots that had been worn until tanned by the body’s natural oils and the cracking leather began to exude a fulsome vinegar pong. She’d had clients who smelled like that.

  She wondered where the squishy beasts had picked up the stench—or maybe they hadn’t, and she was putting form to smell as well as vision.

  The shapes—she strained to find a sense to them. Globby fat rabbits turned inside out and tied in knots; some, particularly the smaller ones, dangled from the sky, attached to nothing, reminding her of meat hanging out of the holes in a grinder. They should have dripped down to the ground, but did not, as if gravity had been suspended. Clearly she had no control over the substance of the hallucination.

  She couldn’t imagine having hit upon such images on her own. The bestriding creatures took no notice of her. They appeared not to have eyes. If they sensed her in any way at all, they gave no indication.

  Secure in her seeming invisibility, Amerind looked for Glimet, but he was nowhere, excised from the vision.

  When the lumpish shapes and the world they inhabited began to fade against the darkness, Amerind felt a growing itch at her temples. Soon it became fierce, like flame. Her other aches disappeared against it. She clutched at the blankets and began to rock back and forth. She would have scratched at the agonizing itch, dug the flesh off her head, clawed through her skull if she could have moved her arms; but Glimet had tied them to her sides—the broken one, carefully, to protect the knitting fracture.

  She lay in the wooden booth that was his home, where he’d fed her and tended her wounds for two days. He’d cleaned her the time she shit herself, an event that would have recurred except that Orbitol tended to speed up the metabolism, consuming most of the body’s fuel. There were no fat Orbiters, at least not for very long.

  She screamed a wordless, frustrated cry.

  She wrestled against his bonds, and he floated out of the darkness and crawled atop her. He whispered, “It’s all right,” over and over as he would have to a dying dog. “A few weeks and your t-temples’ll scar over and the itch will get small. Then you’re okay.”

  His body had become increasingly difficult to maneuver, and he took great care not to press on her broken arm. She responded to his voice and grew calm. Her muscles relaxed. He eased off her. She still did not struggle, so he untied her arms, then sat back against the wall. The candle flames flickered from his moving. She turned her head and peeped through achy eyelids at him.

  His eye flashed like sunlight in a mirror and something huge and awful passed between them, drenching the room in its sour smell. It made her cough. He seemed unaffected.

  “Yeah, my time’s coming real soon now,” he said, as though she’d asked him a question. “You’ll be a light year behind me, even if you can get supplied all the time. That’s okay, though. I know you’re gonna f-follow someday. It’s the same for you, isn’t it?

  “When I close my eyes, my mind focuses somehow. I can see me in the Other Place now—least, I think it’s me. I’m like twisted ropes—like plastic, like taffy all gooey or melted candles. Don’t know what I am anymore. More there than here, but you saw that right away, too. Sure.”

  Amerind babbled under her breath. He crawled up and leaned close, knocking the atomizer gun onto its side. She watched it, an onion-shaped bulb with a ring-trigger, rock back and forth, then magically right itself—his invisible hand picking it up. She could imagine the hand well enough almost to see it.

  Wonderful, she thought, to be invisible and move through the world, to spy on anything you liked. Glimet could almost do that now. Just that little bit of him left—his eye, his forehead and that piece of smile. She blinked herself conscious. What had happened to the rest of him? Where was his right arm? Gone, already?

  “You’re awake, then,” he said, crawling back to his spot, and after a moment, “I’m worried, sweetie.”

  “Don’t be. You’re okay,” she replied, misunderstanding.

  “I’ve been through the concourse while you slept. Trying to hunt up some medicine for you, to make your bones knit fast. Need to get something with zinc in it, see.” The blue eye shifted, glancing around as though jungle animals lurked outside the perimeter of the candles’ light. “I found out that topsiders made a foray down today.”

  She did not know how to react. His tone suggested concern, maybe fear. But exhaustion from the Orbitol was depriving her of body heat, and gathering warmth took precedence over everything else. She got a hold on a rug and dragged it across her. She drew her knees up. Her stomach gurgled in hunger. Glimet began nattering again.

  “—never happened before—both halves of the city stay away from us. They don’t know what we got down here. These ones charged right into a camp. They tore up some curtains, broke down a wall and smashed Tecato’s larder, see, and he wasn’t doing anything, he’s real quiet. Way up to 15th Street they say a group’s k-killed two people since morning, no clear reason for it. Tortured ’em. There’s a rumor the topsiders were looking for somebody and promising anyone who helped them a big reward.”

  “Who’s it they want?”

  “They’re after somebody—somebody new. I thought, I mean, it could be you.”

  Wearily, she tried to puzzle that out, but she was losing consciousness, and her thoughts tumbled out of order. “No,” she slurred. “They threw me down ’ere, don’ want me back.”

  He said, “I didn’t say anything. Nobody knows you’re here. I told ’em the medicine’s for me. Big rewards’ll work on anybody. Maybe I’d go for one if it was someone I didn’t know. But, see, I do know you, and I couldn’t give you up, sweetie. I love—”

  He leaned up and stared hard at her. She had passed out. He sighed and pressed his invisible skull against the wall.

  ***

  When Shikker awoke, he was still sitting there and the last of the hallucinations had left her. So had the hunger that had been a craving earlier. Maybe it was an effect of the drug. Awareness of the implications of that dripped like a distilling liquid into her consciousness—a gauzy memory of his babbling, of the little bulb-shaped gun pressed against her head, and then a fire, a flame, searing her brain.

  She sat up and wildly kicked the covers back. In the dimness she counted her fingers, her toes, rubbed her good hand over the hair on her legs—everything in order, everything still there. Someone had washed her.

  “There a rat in the bed?” Glimet asked. “They get in there sometimes, ’cause it—”

  “God damn you, you crazy fucking Orbiter! What you think I am? You think I want to be like you? There’s hardly any of you left—you got a piece of a smile and a nose and an eye. Where’s the rest of you, huh? You don’t even know!”

  As she berated him, a huge tear welled up in his eye, then spilled down his cheek. The tear clung to his invisible chin a moment before it dripped into his lap. He made a tiny mewling sound.

  She fell silent, gaping. No man had ever behaved like that in front of her. Usually they hauled off and smacked her if she got mad at them. This was more like the response she would have expected from a little kid. “Hey,” she said more gently, “c’mon, don’t be that way. Glimet? Goddam, Glimet, stop.”

  He wiped a wad of the cloak across his cheek. For a second it masked his incompleteness, and gave a sense of a whole face, unutterably sad and lost. “I was—was just … I knew you’d want to see, because you’d like it once you did.”

  “Sure.” What she saw was the atomizer in among the blankets. She reached for it. A stabbing pain gouged her side. The wound—she’d forgotten the knife attack. She checked herself out. Even in the low yellowish light her breast looked bad. He’d set the arm well enough but all he’d been able to do for the gash under her tit had been to sop up the blood. The line where crazy Jack slashed had crusted up and was tufted with bits of cotton. It was seeping. When she pulled up at her nipple to get a better lo
ok, the abrupt pain made her stop. “Infected,” she said.

  “That’s why I went to get you medicine,” he explained, sniffling.

  “Where is it, then? That’s not any fucking medicine.” She slapped the atomizer away. He made a grab for it, whining, scooping it up into his cloak.

  “I t-told you, I couldn’t get any medicine because the people from above’s come down after you.”

  She nodded, remembering enough. “No way there’s anybody wants me back up there. Better have another guess.” She glanced around, taking in the tiny room as if for the first time. “You got any smokes here?”

  Sluggishly he rose up and hauled himself over to the little rack beneath the barred window. He looked like a jack-o’-lantern set on top of a sheet to scare kids, she thought.

  At the juvey center where she’d been deposited on her fourth birthday, they’d carved pumpkins and stuck ’em on sheets like that. A grower from Ceebco-Jersey had sneaked a cartload in off the Vine Street docks. Just that one time. She’d forgotten all about it till now.

  Glimet sat down beside her and offered her an open tin. It held two real cigarettes and a collection of discarded butts. She looked into his blue puppy-dog eye, then took one of the longer butts. He turned to put the tin away. She crawled over to the nearest candle, then balanced upright on her knees to light it.

  The first puff tasted ten years old and as wonderful as a fuck. She hauled it deep in her lungs.

  “You got beautiful skin,” Glimet said.

  She craned her head, looking at him, then at her own naked ass and legs. She said, “Well, Glimet, at least I got some,” and laughed even though it hurt. His expression clouded up and she thought he was going to cry again. She quickly asked, “What about the medicine?”

  “I brought you clothes,” he announced excitedly. “I did that. I know where to get them. May be they’re too big, but I kind of had to guess.” He gestured into the corner past where she had been lying.

  She climbed the rest of the way to her feet, expecting dizziness, nausea—some kind of nasty reaction. When none followed, she walked back beside him and started rummaging. Glimet continued staring at her body.

  She found a shirt and pants. As predicted, both were too large. The bulky shirt didn’t matter—it would be warm. For the trousers, she took the rope he’d tied her arms with and looped it around her waist. Glimet had to tie it for her. He was as clumsy as she would have been. He hadn’t found shoes but there was a pair of ragged wool socks that she let him put on her, too. She watched the excitement in his expression while she finished her brief smoke and wondered if he’d ever fucked anything alive in his life.

  He brought her out of her reverie suddenly by announcing, “I know who it is.”

  Amerind looked up from crushing out her cigarette. “What?”

  “I know who the topsiders wanted.”

  “Who?”

  “Horrible Woman. It’s gotta be.”

  “Who’s Horrible Woman?”

  “She’s the one I got to go see now, to get your medicine. Nobody’ll have gone down to her camp. Hardly anyone knows about it. She only appeared a week or so ago maybe. Nobody else much goes down there in the all-dark. But I like it, see. The Other Place comes through real good there. I’ve traveled all through it.”

  “Wait now,” she ordered. “If you’re going, then so am I.”

  “But you’re hurt, sweetie. And it’s a long way.”

  “Sure. So the sooner I get helped the better. If I’m with you then I won’t have to wait till you come back to get my first dose.”

  The truth was, she didn’t think he would be alive much longer, and she wanted to learn everything she could about the Pit while he could still teach her.

  He scrunched up his remaining features while mulling over her argument, finally giving in. “Okay,” he said, “but we got to have some barter, though.” He groped around and came up with a small canvas sack from beneath the blankets, then turned to his small pantry. “Here. Can of peas and one of potatoes.”

  “That’s all? Two cans of food?”

  He nodded sagely. “Doesn’t take much down here, and food’s worth a lot. She’s plenty hard up from what I seen. Her people got funny stock to trade—things nobody else has. Like the medicine. They live way way down in the deepest tunnels, like maybe under the river, so probably they found an old place in the west city that was closed up and forgotten. It happens sometimes—I got most of my cans of food from one of those, a little teeny store that had got overlooked. Got a lot more squirreled away.”

  “Really?”

  “Hauled them myself. I was more ‘here’ back then.”

  She smiled tenderly. “You’ll have to show me where you keep them.”

  He gave her a troubled look and made no commitment in reply. She knew better than to pursue the issue.

  They set off at a slow pace, Glimet trudging along and Shikker, aching, being careful not to step on anything sharp.

  ***

  Horrible Woman had twice emerged into the upper tunnels. Like a go-between from a subterranean realm, a troglodytic guardian of some unfathomed Symzonia deep inside the planet, she appeared and then vanished again.

  The two who claimed to have bargained with her, an orbiter named Chemosh and a schizo called Tecato, said she had a cache of rare supplies that they argued could only have been stolen from the Overcity—drugs and unusual tools, flashlights and things. All Glimet knew for certain was that Horrible Woman had traded her supplies to Chemosh and Tecato for cans of food.

  By their description, she was so grotesque that, upon her first appearance, she had put the passively drugged Market Street encampments to flight. At least twenty people corroborated the sighting, although descriptions varied wildly as to what exactly had been seen. Chemosh, who’d been in Orbit at the time, claimed she had multiple, pink, gummy heads with big, stubby tentacles around her eyes.

  Glimet believed he had followed her sound through the darkness of the lower tunnels. He had threaded his way along at a respectable distance, wary of her untried powers, until he had come upon her camp.

  It wasn’t a half-bad camp by underground standards—a glowing oasis on the banks of the Styx: a few sheets hung on cables, yellow lights burning behind them. Clearly, she was not alone. Others were in there with her. And something more.

  Even now he couldn’t be sure if the shape he had seen far back in the recesses of the camp had been part of this world or the other. If it were alive or not. If the Horrible Woman had known of his presence all the time and had deliberately never moved too fast to lose him.

  As if he had called to them, six figures had come shambling out of the tents. They had all fixed their stares straight through the blackness at Glimet.

  A wind had come up then, belched from out of the sewers—a stench of such nauseating decay that he’d covered his face, turned and run from it.… At least, that was the way he recounted it to himself—he’d run from the smell.

  ***

  Glimet and Shikker wove their way quietly through the upper strata of underground. At the station stop she was surprised to find tiled walls and pillars that looked as though they had only recently fallen into disuse. Tiled walls led along the narrow corridor to which Glimet led her. He pointed to a side tunnel labeled with an old sign: “SEPTA Police Vehicles Only.”

  “There’s a big somniferum camp down there,” he explained, “a whole bunch of room. Cleaner than most.”

  “What’s a somnif—what you called it?”

  “Somniferum. That’s a d-drug name. You know.”

  “You mean kif?”

  “Naw, opium. We’re not allowed, down there, most of us. The Somnis come up sometimes. Even up to your level, to give shows with their puppets in the tea houses. Very well connected there, very secretive about it, with ties to outside plantations where the poppies are grown.” He shook his head at the inexpressible possibilities, and turned away. “They won’t t-talk with us,” he added. “I just
wanted to show it to you. We should go on.”

  Numerous entrances to the underground concourse dimly lighted their way. They encountered few people on the trail, although the walls were lined with abandoned shop fronts, behind which Shikker guessed there must be some inhabitants. Glimet pointed out where there were, according to him, encampments far back in the limitless recesses of the concourse; she couldn’t see a thing. “Lots of camps in there,” he said.

  Eventually, they descended a stairwell to a second level. Three high turnstile gates blocked their way, but he went directly to one that rotated freely. They entered a darker realm. She commented, “I smell smoke,” but Glimet made no reply.

  At first they crossed a long platform. There were tiled walls again, orange ones this time. Each platform so far had been tiled in a different color. Shikker began to understand how Glimet took his bearings. A chrome fire-hose valve glinted where it jutted out of the tiles. It still had its little wheel, although there wouldn’t be any water pressure. In the distance the glow of a fire revealed a busy platform camp. Glimet suddenly dropped down off the platform and crept along in the shadowy rail pit. She had more trouble getting down, and had to run to catch up.

  Once they had skirted the camp, he climbed back up. This time, he helped her up. “Not a friendly bunch back there,” he told her.

  The walls soon changed to graffiti-covered concrete. She couldn’t read the strange symbols and weird scrawls, although Glimet nodded at it from time to time.

  They chanced upon a few other nomads wandering through the murk; some greeted them and some ignored them. And once Glimet led her into a thriving camp that even had a pen for a couple of scrawny goats. He introduced Amerind to everyone, making it very clear that she had been living with him for some time. Nobody questioned anything he said. Some of them acted dopey, and she figured they were drunk or Orbiting. Many of them—even those she saw only from a distance—were missing body parts, although none was as comprehensively abstracted as Glimet; in fact most of the others seemed to hold him in great reverence. He had attained stature bordering on sainthood among the Orbiters, poised as he was upon the lip of that final transubstantiation. She’d never given much thought to what Orbiters believed in. Mostly, they seemed docile—like the bear-things in Australia that lived in trees and chewed some kind of drug—harmless to everyone but themselves. To that extent they were no different from anyone else she knew: everyone trying to die, just calling it by different names.