The point was a spine of blackish rock shaped like a lizard’s tail that extended about fifty feet out into the water. Tom and Alise would always wade around it. I, however, scrambled up the side and lay flat like a sniper atop it. From my vantage I overlooked a narrow stretch of gravelly shingle, a little trough scooped out between the point and low brown hills that rolled away inland. Tom and Alise were sitting ten or twelve feet below, passing a kef pipe, coughing, exhaling billows of smoke.
That puzzled me. Why would they come here just to get high? I scrunched into a more comfortable position. It was a bright, breezy day; the sea was heaving with a light chop, but the waves slopping onto the shingle were ripples. A few fishing boats were herding a freighter along the horizon. I turned my attention back to the twins. They were standing, making peculiar gestures that reminded me of T’ai Chi, though these were more labored. Then I noticed that the air above the tidal margin had become distorted as with a heat haze…yet it was not hot in the least. I stared at the patch of distorted air—it was growing larger and larger—and I began to see odd translucent shapes eddying within it: they were similar to the shapes that the twins were always sketching. There was a funny pressure in my ears; a drop of sweat slid down the hollow of my throat, leaving a cold track.
Suddenly the twins broke off gesturing and leaned against each other; the patch of distorted air misted away. Both were breathing heavily, obviously exhausted. They sat down a couple of feet from the water’s edge, and after a long silence Tom said, “We should try again to be certain.”
“Why don’t we finish it now?” said Alise. “I’m so tired of this place.”
“It’s too dangerous in the daylight.” Tom shied a pebble out over the water. “If they’re waiting at the other end, we might have to run. We’ll need the darkness for cover.”
“What about tonight?”
“I’d rather wait until tomorrow night. There’s supposed to be a storm front coming, and nobody will be outside.”
Alise sighed.
“What’s wrong?” Tom asked. “Is it Lucius?”
I listened with even more intent.
“No,” she said. “I just want it to be over.”
Tom nodded and gazed out to sea. The freighter appeared to have moved a couple of inches eastward; gulls were flying under the sun, becoming invisible as they passed across its glaring face, and then swooping away like bits of winged matter blown from its core. Tom picked up the kef pipe. “Let’s try it again,” he said.
At that instant someone shouted, “Hey!” Richard Shockley came striding down out of the hills behind the shingle. Tom and Alise got to their feet. “I can’t believe you people are so fucking uncool,” said Shockley, walking up to them; his face was dark with anger, and the breeze was lashing his hair as if it, too, were enraged. “What the hell are you trying to do? Get everyone busted?”
“We’re not doing anything,” said Alise.
“Naw!” sneered Shockley. “You’re just breaking the law in plain view. Plain fucking view!” His fists clenched, and I thought for a moment he was going to hit them. They were so much smaller than he that they looked like children facing an irate parent.
“You won’t have to be concerned with us much longer,” said Tom. “We’re leaving soon.”
“Good,” said Shockley. “That’s real good. But lemme tell you something, man. I catch you smoking out here again, and you might be leaving quicker than you think.”
“What do you mean?” asked Alise.
“Don’t you worry about what I fucking mean,” said Shockley. “You just watch your behavior. We had a good scene going here until you people showed up, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you blow it.” He snatched the pipe from Tom’s hand and slung it out to sea. He shook his finger in Tom’s face. “I swear, man! One more fuckup, and I’ll be on you like white on rice!” Then he stalked off around the point.
As soon as he was out of sight, without a word exchanged between them, Tom and Alise waded into the water and began groping beneath the surface, searching for the pipe. To my amazement, because the shallows were murky and full of floating litter, they found it almost instantly.
I was angry at Shockley, both for his treatment of the twins and for his invasion of what I considered my private preserve, and I headed toward his house to tell him to lay off. When I entered I was greeted by a skinny, sandy-haired guy—Skipper by name—who was sprawled on pillows in the front room; from the refuse of candy wrappers, crumpled cigarette packs, and empty pop bottles surrounding him, I judged him to have been in this position for quite some time. He was so opiated that he spoke in mumbles and could scarcely open his eyes, but from him I learned the reason for Shockley’s outburst. “You don’t wanna see him now, man,” said Skipper, and flicked out his tongue to retrieve a runner of drool that had leaked from the corner of his mouth. “Dude’s on a rampage, y’know?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
“Fucker’s paranoid,” said Skipper. “Be paranoid myself if I was holding a key of smack.”
“Heroin?”
“King H,” said Skipper with immense satisfaction, as if pronouncing the name of his favorite restaurant, remembering past culinary treats. “He’s gonna run it up to Copenhagen soon as—”
“Shut the hell up!” It was Shockley, standing in the front door. “Get out,” he said to me.
“Be a pleasure.” I strolled over to him. “The twins are leaving tomorrow night. Stay off their case.”
He squared his shoulders, trying to be taller. “Or what?”
“Gee, Rich,” I said. “I’d hate to see anything get in the way of your mission to Denmark.”
Though in most areas of experience I was a neophyte compared to Shockley, he was just a beginner compared to me as regarded fighting. I could tell a punch was coming from the slight widening of his eyes, the tensing of his shoulders. It was a silly school-girlish punch. I stepped inside it, forced him against the wall, and jammed my forearm under his chin. “Listen, Rich,” I said mildly. “Nobody wants trouble with the Guardia, right?” My hold prevented him from speaking, but he nodded. Spit bubbled between his teeth. “Then there’s no problem. You leave the twins alone, and I’ll forget about the dope. Okay?” Again he nodded. I let him go, and he slumped to the floor, holding his throat. “See how easy things go when you just sit down and talk about them?” I said, and grinned. He glared at me. I gave him a cheerful wink and walked off along the beach.
I see now that I credited Shockley with too much wisdom; I assumed that he was an expert smuggler and would maintain a professional calm. I underestimated his paranoia and gave no thought to his reasons for dealing with a substance as volatile as heroin: they must have involved a measure of desperation, because he was not a man prone to taking whimsical risks. But I wasn’t thinking about the consequences of my actions. After what I had seen earlier beyond the point, I believed that I had figured out what Tom and Alise were up to. It seemed implausible, yet equally inescapable. And if I was right, this was my chance to witness something extraordinary. I wanted nothing to interfere.
Gray clouds blew in the next morning from the east, and a steady downpour hung a silver beaded curtain from the eaves of my porch. I spent the day pretending to write and watching Alise out of the corner of my eye. She went about her routines, washing the dishes, straightening up, sketching—the sketching was done with a bit more intensity than usual. Finally, late that afternoon, having concluded that she was not going to tell me she was leaving, I sat down beside her at the table and initiated a conversation. “You ever read science fiction?” I asked.
“No,” she said, and continued sketching.
“Interesting staff. Lots of weird ideas. Time travel, aliens…” I jiggled the table, causing her to look up, and fixed her with a stare. “Alternate worlds.”
She tensed but said nothing.
“I’ve read your notebooks,” I told her.
“Tom thought you might have.” She close
d the sketchpad.
“And I saw you trying to open the tunnel yesterday. I know that you’re leaving.”
She fingered the edge of the pad. I couldn’t tell if she was nervous or merely thinking.
I kept after her. “What I can’t figure out is why you’re leaving. No matter who’s chasing you, this world can’t be as bad as the one described in the notebooks. At least we don’t have anything like The Disciples.”
“You’ve got it wrong,” she said after a silence. “The Disciples are of my world.”
I had more or less deduced what she was admitting to, but I hadn’t really been prepared to accept that it was true, and for a moment I retrenched, believing again that she was crazy, that she had tricked me into swallowing her craziness as fact. She must have seen this in my face or read my thoughts, because she said then, “It’s the truth.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Why are you going back?”
“We’re not; we’re going to collapse the tunnel, and to do that we have to activate it. It took all of us to manage it before; Tom and I wouldn’t have been able to see the configurations clearly enough if it hadn’t been for your drugs. We owe you a great deal.” A worry line creased her brow. “You mustn’t spy on us tonight. It could be dangerous.”
“Because someone might be waiting,” I said. “The Disciples?”
She nodded. “We think one followed us into the tunnel and was trapped. It apparently can’t control the fields involved in the tunnel, but if it’s nearby when we activate the opening…” She shrugged.
“What’ll you do if it is?”
“Lead it away from the beach,” she said.
She seemed assured in this, and I let the topic drop. “What are they, anyway?” I asked.
“Hitler once gave a speech in which he told us they were magical reproductions of his soul. Who knows? They’re horrid enough for that to be true.”
“If you collapse the tunnel, then you’ll be safe from pursuit. Right?”
“Yes.”
“Then why leave Pedregalejo?”
“We don’t fit in,” she said, and let the words hang in the air a few seconds. “Look at me. Can you believe that in my world I’m considered beautiful?”
An awkward silence ensued. Then she smiled. I’d never seen her smile before. I can’t say it made her beautiful—her skin looked dead-pale in the dreary light, her features asexual—but in the smile I could detect the passive confidence with which beauty encounters the world. It was the first time I had perceived her as a person and not as a hobby, a project.
“But that’s not the point,” she went on. “There’s somewhere we want to go.”
“Where?”
She reached into her airline bag, which was beside the chair, and pulled out a dog-eared copy of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. “To find the people who understand this.”
I scoffed. “You believe that crap?”
“What would you know?” she snapped. “It’s chaos inside the tunnel. It’s…” She waved her hand in disgust, as if it weren’t worth explaining anything to such an idiot.
“Tell me about it,” I said. Her anger had eroded some of my skepticism.
“If you’ve read the notebooks, you’ve seen my best attempt at telling about it. Ordinary referents don’t often apply inside the tunnel. But it appears to pass by places described in this book. You catch glimpses of lights, and you’re drawn to them. You seem to have an innate understanding that the lights are the entrances to worlds, and you sense that they’re fearsome. But you’re afraid that if you don’t stop at one of them, you’ll be killed. The others let themselves be drawn. Tom and I kept going. This light, this world, felt less fearsome than the rest.” She gave a doleful laugh. “Now I’m not so sure.”
“In one of the notebooks,” I said, “Tom wrote that the others didn’t survive.”
“He doesn’t really know,” she said. “Perhaps he wrote that to make himself feel better about having wound up here. That would be like him.”
We continued talking until dark. It was the longest time I had spent in her company without making love, and yet—because of this abstinence—we were more lovers then than we had ever been before. I listened to her not with an eye toward collecting data, but with genuine interest, and though everything she told me about her world smacked of insanity, I believed her. There were, she said, rivers that sprang from enormous crystals, birds with teeth, bats as large as eagles, cave cities, wizards, winged men who inhabited the thin Andean air. It was a place of evil grandeur, and at its heart, its ruler, was the dead Hitler, his body uncorrupting, his death a matter of conjecture, his terrible rule maintained by a myriad of servants in hopes of his rebirth.
At the time Alise’s world seemed wholly alien to me, as distinct from our own as Jupiter or Venus. But now I wonder if—at least in the manner of its rule—it is not much the same: are we not also governed by the dead, by the uncorrupting laws they have made, laws whose outmoded concepts enforce a logical tyranny upon a populace that no longer meets their standards of morality? And I wonder further if each alternate world (Alise told me they were infinite in number) is but a distillation of the one adjoining, and if somewhere at the heart of this complex lies a compacted essence of a world, a blazing point of pure principle that plays cosmic Hitler to its shadow selves.
The storm that blew in just after dark was—like the Mediterranean—an age-worn elemental. Distant thunder, a few strokes of lightning, spreading glowing cracks down the sky, a blustery wind. Alise cautioned me again against following her and told me she’d be back to say goodbye. I told her I’d wait, but as soon as she and Tom had left, I set out toward the point. I would no more have missed their performance than I would have turned down, say, a free ticket to see the Rolling Stones. A few drops of rain were falling, but a foggy moon was visible through high clouds inland. Shadows were moving in the lighted windows of the houses; shards of atonal jazz alternated with mournful gusts of wind. Once Tom and Alise glanced back, and I dropped down on the mucky sand, lying flat until they had waded around the point. By the time I reached the top of the rocks, the rain had stopped. Directly below me were two shadows and the glowing coal of the kef pipe. I was exhilarated. I wished my father were there so I could say to him, “All your crap about ‘slow and steady wins the race,’ all your rationalist bullshit, it doesn’t mean anything in the face of this. There’s mystery in the world, and if I’d stayed in school, I’d never have known it.”
I was so caught up in thinking about my father’s reactions that I lost track of Tom and Alise. When I looked down again, I found that they had taken a stand by the shore and were performing those odd, graceful gestures. Just beyond them, its lowest edge level with the water, was a patch of darkness blacker than night, roughly circular, and approximately the size of a circus ring. Lightning was still striking down out to sea, but the moon had sailed clear of the clouds, staining silver the surrounding hilltops, bringing them close, and in that light I could see that the patch of darkness had depth…depth, and agitated motion. Staring into it was like staring into a fire while hallucinating, watching the flames adopt the forms of monsters; only in this case there were no flames but the vague impressions of monstrous faces melting up from the tunnel walls, showing a shinier black, then fading. I was at an angle to the tunnel, and while I could see inside it, I could also see that it had no exterior walls, that it was a hole hanging in midair, leading to an unearthly distance. Every muscle in my body was tensed, pressure was building in my ears, and I heard a static hiss overriding the grumble of thunder and the mash of the waves against the point.
My opinion of the twins had gone up another notch. Anyone who would enter that fuming nothingness was worthy of respect. They looked the image of courage: two pale children daring the darkness to swallow them. They kept on with their gestures until the depths of the tunnel began to pulse like a black gulping throat. The static hiss grew louder, oscillating in pitch, and the twins tipped their heads to
the side, admiring their handiwork.
Then a shout in Spanish, a beam of light probing at the twins from the seaward reach of the point.
Seconds later Richard Shockley splashed through the shallows and onto shore; he was holding a flashlight, and the wind was whipping his hair. Behind him came a short dark-skinned man carrying an automatic rifle, wearing the hat and uniform of the Guardia Civil. As he drew near I recognized him to be Francisco, the guardsman who had tried to cozy up to me. He had a Band-Aid on his chin, which—despite his weapon and traditions—made him seem an innocent. The two men’s attention was fixed on the twins, and they didn’t notice the tunnel, though they passed close to its edge. Francisco began to harangue the twins in Spanish, menacing them with his gun. I crept nearer and heard the word heroina. Heroin. I managed to hear enough to realize what had happened. Shockley, either for the sake of vengeance or—more likely—panicked by what he considered a threat to his security, had planted heroin in Tom’s house and informed on him, hoping perhaps to divert suspicion and ingratiate himself with the Guardia. Alise was denying the charges, but Francisco was shouting her down.
And then he caught sight of the tunnel. His mouth fell open, and he backed against the rocks directly beneath me. Shockley spotted it, too. He shined his flashlight into the tunnel, and the beam was sheared off where it entered the blackness, as if it had been bitten in half. For a moment they were frozen in a tableau. Only the moonlight seemed in motion, coursing along Francisco’s patent-leather hat.
What got into me then was not bravery or any analogue thereof, but a sudden violent impulse such as had often landed me in trouble. I jumped feetfirst onto Francisco’s back. I heard a grunt as we hit the ground, a snapping noise, and the next I knew I was scrambling off him, reaching for his gun, which had flown a couple of yards away. I had no clue of how to operate the safety or even of where it was located. But Shockley wasn’t aware of that. His eyes were popped, and he sidled along the rocks toward the water, his head twitching from side to side, searching for a way out.
The Best of Lucius Shepard Page 9
