The Pure Cold Light

by Gregory Frost

  There was fresh blood on the white marble. The dawn’s light flashed in it. His heart hammered. His spirit soared. Surely, they had killed Rueda—that was why they were dispersing. There was no reason to continue, they’d torn him apart. But where was the corpse, where the bits and pieces? The last half dozen of them turned aside, disconcerted, their instincts guiding them away from Mingo as well.

  Now he could see straight down to the dried-up fountain, to the Liberty Bell enclosure, all the way to the cupola of Independence Hall glowing pink in the light of dawn.

  Impossibly yet incontrovertibly, Angel Rueda had disappeared. Vanished into space.

  Some cog broke loose and jammed the perfect mechanism inside Mingo. He stood, feet planted, unable to sort it out. For a brief moment he considered putting the gun to his own throbbing, wounded head and pulling the trigger. Suicide is preferable. Eyes wide, struck apoplectic, he gaped at the white marble flooring and willed body parts to manifest themselves before him. He wanted severed limbs, crushed bones, heart and kidneys and spine; but most of all he wanted that damned elusive cybernetic head. Wanted to see it hoisted on a pole like an executioner’s trophy.

  “Rueda!” he bellowed, sustaining the last syllable operatically, a raging Alberich upon the stage, flinging his curse so powerful it could snap tree trunks and split mountains: “Verflucht sei dieser Ring, Rueda!”

  The whole of Box City stilled and a thousand heads turned to look at the murderous black figure on the top step of the quadrangle, lighted orange in the fires of the dawn.

  ***

  Angel heard his name and looked up, too.

  A ghost had rescued him.

  The hydra mob of a hundred limbs that he had plunged into had dragged him down to the marble tiles. He had expected to be killed and he hoped it would be swift.

  He’d skidded onto his wounded shoulder and cried out at the fresh pain, pinned his elbows against his head and curled instinctively into a ball. Feet and fists struck at him, but the crush of so many bodies enfeebled their actions. A few short jabs stung him, a snapped kick at his ribs barely scraped his side.

  One of the attackers directly over him fell prey to phobia, turned on his fellows, and began scrabbling madly to get out, bleating with foam-flecked lips, the sound drowned in the roar of the crowd. When the Boxer started peeing himself, the clutch quickly disgorged him. Music began to play.

  Somebody grabbed onto the bypass unit to wrench it free. Angel thought his neck would pull apart, and he tore the hands loose, then rolled to the side. A knee collided with his face, shooting bright sparks under his eyelids. Blood flowed warmly over his lip. Something struck him on the back, shoving him forward. His head dangled over the top step.

  Then a woman’s voice close beside his ear said, “Quick, get up.” Two hands slid beneath his arms and managed to turn him so that he could haul himself up by clinging to various bodies, ignoring the rain of blows as some of them tried to beat him away. Miraculously, the mob had spread out a little, allowing him room to maneuver. He absorbed a few more punches, but most of the people were now trying to shove him aside. They seemed to have become afraid of him.

  The woman who had spoken steadied him. Her head passed easily beneath his armpit. She stared up at him with heavy-lidded eyes beneath thick brows. She had broad round cheeks, black hair. He didn’t think he had ever seen her before. She explained, “I know a lot of these bastards, see. They all think I died and they did it, so I told them I’m my own ghost, come to haunt them to their graves for killing me.” She glanced around. “Word spread pretty fast, hasn’t it?”

  He understood: it wasn’t he they were getting away from, it was she.

  He wiped at the blood on his face. She tugged him free of the crowd, which, as if in a dream, released its hold and let him go. The battle waged on but the cause was lost. He stumbled down the broad steps of the quadrangle. The collapsing mass of people above still walled him off from his would-be assassin, trapping Mingo on the far side.

  When he reached the middle plateau—the narrow channel at the bottom of the steps—the woman tried to drag him to the left, behind a sidewall, but he resisted. He had to look back, to search for Lyell. The woman insisted, “You have to come. I’m taking you to your friends.”

  “Friends?” The word tugged at him. Who could she possibly mean?

  “The others like you,” she said. “You have to come.” She dragged him behind the wall.

  Then, from over the quadrangle, his name roared like a jet of flame, like a flare across the sky. It echoed out of the arcades and over the camp, and he stared back in amazement.

  “Like somebody screamin’ their way out of Hell,” his savior observed, and with more urgency tugged him around behind the eastern arcade, down two more sets of steps to the ground.

  They headed toward a ramp beneath the quadrangle.

  “I think it was,” he replied. “Tell me who you are, why you helped me.”

  “My name’s Amerind Shikker. Glimet sent me after you. He described what you’d be like, right down to that thing on your head. He thought you’d be here in Box City—don’t ask me how he knew it, but he did. He sure did. I guess he must a seen you on TV, huh? Like maybe an earlier broadcast. I saw that one.”

  “Glimet?”

  “That’s how I know him, not the way you do. When I found him, he only had one arm left and part of his head. Now he’s all back together again, only he ain’t him no more. I mean, who he is didn’t used to be Glimet, he was somebody else real different.” She shook her head. “You better not have me tell it, unless you want to get it wrong from the start. I know it in my head but I can’t speak it right. Just come on and he’ll tell ya.”

  She led him down the curving, broken concrete ramp into darkness.

  ***

  Directly above them, hanging over the wall in back of the arcade, Mad Bucca helplessly watched his catch disappear into the underground parking garage. Bucca knew the garage as well as anyone. There was just one place where the black-haired woman could be going, which supported Bucca’s assumption that she was one of Mr. Mingo’s aliens. He was glad he’d thought to use his magic coin when he had.

  Getting down from the rail, he shoved his way through the open arches past an enraged fire tender who swung a chair leg at his skull. When he reached the inner plaza of the quadrangle, he found that the crowd had gone back to its general milling about, except for one group that stood clustered around what appeared to be a body over to the right. Where Mr. Mingo had bellowed his defiance, the light of the rising sun shone brilliantly, making the marble glitter. The metal tackle of the flagpole cables clanged overhead like morning bells against the tall aluminum poles. The man in black had disappeared.

  Bucca pulled idly at his lower lip. Events were requiring enormous efforts at reasoning, which happened to be an atrophied faculty in Bucca. Complexity and decision-making were at the top of the list of things from which Boxers in general had escaped, and Bucca was no exception. The simplest divergence posed a conundrum that could tie him up for several hours or even days.

  He was still standing indecisively at the same spot at the top of the quadrangle when the first of a dozen fires broke out below.

  Chapter Twenty-One: Toward an Explanation

  They wedged their way through a split in the wall of the parking garage, and entered another world.

  To Angel the woman named Shikker became a lifeline, and the journey she forced upon him took the form of an endless descent into a sunken realm where sound was the guiding sense. Had she let go of him at any point, he had no doubt that he would have meandered in darkness for an eternity and died in black confusion. What magic guided her in a realm so totally lightless that there was no discernible difference between open and closed eyes? What kept at bay the things scrabbling along to the sides, the things fluttering above him? It was as though the two of them walked a magical path through enchantment, through hell, and so long as they held to their course, the million lurking
demons could not touch them. He hadn’t known till then that he had an imagination. He was sure he hadn’t possessed one the day before.

  Once they had climbed through the hole, Shikker did not speak. Angel listened to the crunch of gravel underfoot, the skitter of broken things, the splash of unexpected puddles. Smells of all sorts wafted in and around them on various breezes. There was the obvious odor of urine, the organic stench of mildew, even the smell of smoke from God knew where. None of these offered him anything substantial by which to locate himself, and in fact only caused him to lose track of where he was while he pondered them. He stumbled from time to time, but Shikker did not. Nor did her grip ever relax. It was forged, welded, seamless.

  Eventually, they leveled off. She tugged him over an ankle-high barrier; he nearly fell on his face. The strength in her arm kept him up. Then he started tripping over raised objects set at regular intervals in the floor of the impenetrable tunnel. He developed a sense of the spacing of these and began striding from strip to strip. Every so often the spacing changed, and he stumbled again before re-gauging his stride. At one point he sprawled forward onto his knees, and she lifted him back up as if he weighed nothing and they continued on—all without a word passing between them.

  He stuck his free hand in his jacket pocket and felt something small and hard there. He thought at first he had found another cube, but it was round, thin. It was a coin, and he didn’t remember having it when he had searched through his pockets earlier in front of the umbrella woman, but he closed his fist around it, pressing it into his palm.

  Soon the ground became uneven again, and he withdrew his hand in order to catch himself if he fell. He smelled sulfurous gases and a sweet cloacal reek for which he knew no name.

  Shikker muttered, “Someone dead in here,” and immediately the rebarbative stench of decay burst upon him as if her words had ruptured a membrane. It was worse than anything he had smelled in Box City.

  Something rattled just in front of them, and a dim rectangle appeared upon the air. His guide moved as a silhouette upon it, while he automatically blinked, believing it to be an illusion, like the amorphous shapes that manifest before the eyes in total darkness. But it was real enough. He could see her, and the rectangle. He had to step up to go through it, the doorway.

  Shortly, they emerged on an old subway platform. Nearby, a defunct escalator stretched two stories into bluish space. Voices and the sounds of clanking metal echoed from above. A flock of birds flittered around the ceiling. Fascinated by them, he tried to walk toward the escalator, but Shikker dragged him inexorably away—through a high turnstile with comblike teeth.

  They were going down again, he could tell. Back into unconscious darkness.

  From there they wove in and out of pockets of light, like a fever-ridden mind collecting fevered images: a platform strewn with bodies that, at Angel’s approach, erupted into thousands of agitated, feeding flies. Underneath, the true corpses could hardly be recognized but for their general shape. He was prepared for the smell this time, holding his jacket over his nose and mouth. The inexplicability of their deaths in this out of the way place troubled him, but Shikker ignored them, as if blind to the carnage.

  With mechanical strides, she tugged him again into utter darkness.

  ***

  The golden tent hung on the crest of a subterranean hill, a curious crown—more like a party hat—upon a rough black skull of earth. Climbing down into a ditch across from it, Shikker and Angel had to jump a wide trench to reach the other side.

  He was concentrating on his footing on the precariously loose hillside and didn’t see the contents of the tent until he was almost on top of it. Inside, on the floor, lay more bodies—or what had once been bodies—all in a row.

  Nothing like the ghastly scene on the platform, these withered, soft-boned torsos lay neatly aligned, their heads bowed and crumpled, their folded fingers like corkscrewed brown papier-mâché stubs. He recollected mummies he had once seen in catacombs, though he could not remember where or when that could have been. They looked as if they had just been unearthed, and their familiarity shook him as nothing else had.

  The Shikker woman stood beside him, her attitude reverential. It was as if she were praying over them. Then she simply let go of his hand. She moved off and sat down on a small rug. She was looking directly at him when her eyelids fluttered shut.

  The sides of the long tent fluttered, too. Angel twitched in response and looked from end to end, finding no one else, nothing but heaps of rags, blankets and debris.

  He felt it then—a tickle like an insect crawling across his scalp, except that this insect was deep inside the gray matter, a shifting, trickling chemical flow. Neurotransmitters forging new synaptic bonds. A pain stabbed through his right eye as if a splinter were pushing through it from inside his head. He clutched at the lens covering it and, with a groan, doubled over.

  The pain stopped.

  Someone said, “No, that’s not the way, is it?”

  Hunched over, Angel peered at Shikker, but she still had her eyes closed. It hadn’t been her voice in any case—this belonged to a man.

  At the far end of the tent, an arm arose, a cobra dancing, inveigling. What he had taken for a rumpled heap of clothes sat up. “Over here.”

  Behind him, Amerind Shikker fell over on her side.

  “Don’t worry,” said the man, “She’s sleeping.”

  He had graying blond hair that was oily and uncombed. It stuck up absurdly. He needed a shave, which reminded Angel emptily of Chikako.

  “What is it?” asked the man. “Tell me, what passed through you just now?”

  Angel turned inward. He groped for the shape of his feelings and, when he could not find it, chose words that applied, that everyone else used. “Loss,” he said. “Sadness.”

  The other shook his head. “You don’t know but a ghost of either of those things. Sadness, loss, joy—they’re all estranged from you.” His voice itself expressed more sadness than Angel felt. This man knew.

  “That’s so,” he admitted. He sat down across from the man. “I don’t feel anything toward anyone.”

  “They’ve taken it away.”

  “Who?”

  “All of them—the corporation, the government. The great collusion that has never seen light of day but lurks behind the teeth and tongue of those who make promises. Orbitol, by way of example.” He reached into his loose cloak and produced a small plastic atomizer. Its silver head gleamed.

  “The drug they all take,” Angel commented.

  “And you.”

  “Me? No. No,” he repeated, adamantly.

  The man held him with a look for a moment, then touched the sides of his own face. “And me. See my scars, here and here?”

  “I don’t have any,” Angel argued.

  “Under that contraption you do. I’ve seen.”

  “When? I don’t know you.” His stomach seemed to be expanding into a vast pit that his heart would fall into.

  “On the Moon I did. Before they got their hands on you.”

  On the Moon! This man had known him before the amnesia. “Did I,” he asked in dawning fear, “did I kill all of those people?”

  The man said, “The name I have now is Glimet. To answer your question, we must rid you of your artificial limitations.” He leaned forward until his fingers brushed the crab. “Then you won’t need to ask.”

  “You can do that?”

  Glimet nodded. “Only … it will be very unpleasant.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “No, you wouldn’t.” He stood, stiffly. His head brushed the glowing side of the tent. “I want you to come with me. And to do exactly what I tell you.”

  Angel glanced at Shikker. “Did she follow this course?”

  A dry chuckle. “No. Light hypnosis is all that was, to enable her to find her way back. Now, please.” He offered his dirty hand to help Angel up. They walked outside the tent.

  In the deeper reaches of the hu
ge vault, there was a petaled, shadowy shape. At first it looked like a drawing done in black paint on the far wall. Drawing nearer, Angel saw it sparkle, glistening with something like moonlit quicksilver—droplets that cascaded over the petals but did not fall. The ground beneath was unblemished.

  The flower shape moved. Its rounded petals stretched wide, exposing a membranous silver center. The beads, or whatever they were, came from there. He looked questioningly at Glimet.

  “This will be hard,” Glimet told him, and the way he said it revealed the deeper truth.

  He was going to die.

  Glimet put the atomizer gun against Angel’s head. They looked into one another’s eyes, trading fear, and hope, and esteem. Then Glimet squeezed the trigger …

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Dead Is My Body

  Imagine a place that is no place, has no ground or sky, no solidity to which you can affix your reason. Where a vortex swirls nearby and your thoughts say “dust,” the concept of dust being all you have with you. In naming it, you have transformed it, and dust, spit from a whirlwind, scrapes you. It stings, which is odd, since you don’t have a form to be spattered in the first place. But “me” is a tenacious concept, able to give life to form and form to life. You manifest.

  You have no memory, nor can you imagine a moment succeeding this. There is only now, moment to moment. How you came here, if it hurt, who you were or want to be, and if you are content—these things cannot be addressed in a place such as this.

  There are others, too. The autochthonous inhabitants of this non-place. They appear to be strands of raw tissue, muscle and gristle without skin or bone. At the top is a lumpish knot of strands upon which your mind’s subjective grid identifies the features of eye sockets and thin lipless mouths. Toward the bottom, their ropy essence flattens out into a calyx from which dangle more ragged strands, long deformed fingers. These others float and bob, moving as if by force of will alone. But it is your will at the helm. That is how form evolves here—through the exercise of interlopers. The inhabitants themselves don’t require any.