Seraphim

by Jon Michael Kelley

  Another bullet, her last, splintered the door jam.

  As he rolled onto his back, he couldn’t decide which burned deeper: the bullet holes, or his hypocrisy.

  Mo turned him on his side.

  Long blades of grass were poking at his lips. He stuck his tongue out and licked at the dew, moaning at the sweetness.

  Without manhandling him too much, Mo removed Duncan’s vest, ripped his blue wool sweater up the middle, turned him over, then plugged the entrance and exit wounds with his fingers.

  Duncan reached up to touch the Saint Christopher medal dangling from Mo’s neck.

  The silver was captivating.

  “Easy, buddy, easy.”

  (No, it wasn’t St. Christopher at all, he now realized. It looked...it looked like...

  It was a silver dog tag, and the insignia was evident to him. It was the same symbol that was on the grips of Dead Man’s gun. And, he realized, it may very well have been the design on Dr. Strickland’s necklace. It was unarguably iconoclast, as a sword was centered between seven dragons’ heads, all embossed over a lambs head touting seven horns and seven eyes. When Duncan had first seen the emblems on the grips, it struck him as being fanatically Semitic, but he hadn’t given it any more thought until now.

  He recalled the table discussion they’d had the night before. Mrs. Pendleton had told them that the number seven was significant to many religious tomes, the Holy Bible included. She’d mentioned the Seven Seals, Seven Angels, Seven Candles, Seven deadly Sins, Seven Falls of Man...)

  “So you were the wolf,” Duncan said.

  “Naw, that was someone else. We all got the same jeweler.”

  Duncan pointed to the open door. “Tyler.”

  “Tyler’s dead,” Mo said. “I’m sorry.”

  Just then, two men in plain clothes appeared at the doorway, guns drawn. Duncan recognized them as undercover narcotics officers.

  “Freeze!” they ordered as they entered the house, one behind the other.

  “Those are my guys,” Mo said. “We got this all worked out. Did you see the load of heroin we bagged? We’re heroes! Hell, I’ll even see that you get a medal for saving my life.”

  Duncan reached for the suitcase that had slipped from his hand when he fell to the lawn.

  Mo grabbed it before he could. “Don’t worry, McNeil. I’ll make sure Patricia Bently gets the money. Never figured you for such a romantic, though.”

  “Makes us even,” Duncan said, his world beginning to spin. “I never figured you for some half-assed angel.”

  “Listen up now,” Mo said, removing Duncan’s ski mask. “This is what we’re gonna do. Gonna get your older self back on the bus with the others, so I need you to look up into my eyes.”

  Duncan did, and found in their place two black marbles expanding in size, each containing an infinite universe. Within moments they enfolded him, wrapped him like a cocoon, then he turned into a bubble.

  10.

  Duncan opened his eyes, drew in a large breath of air, and realized he was standing before the doors of the shuttle.

  The doors opened and he stepped inside.

  All eyes turned to him. Then they left him and fixed upon the driver. Suddenly in Dead Man’s place was sitting a handsome man in his early thirties, wearing a police officer’s dress blues. A five-point hat was resting on his lap.

  The very uniform, Duncan now guessed, in which his partner had been buried.

  “Nice to see you again, McNeil,” said the driver in a fuller, more replete voice than Dead Man’s.

  “I suspected as much,” Duncan said, extending a hand. “Good to have you back, Ty. All the way, I mean.”

  “Tyler?” Patricia said, standing now. “Tyler Everton?”

  “Don’t look so spooked,” Tyler said, then turned to Rachel. “It’s better than my Grim Reaper outfit, isn’t it?”

  “But...I went to your funeral,” Patricia said.

  Rachel nodded, indicating that she’d attended the memorial service, as well.

  “And I appreciate that,” he said. “Really.”

  “Then why show up as a corpse?” Rachel said, pissed. “Damn it, why all the games?”

  “To help acclimate you, for one,” he said.

  Chris and Juanita just stared at the driver, sharing the same bewildered expression.

  Duncan said, “This was my—I’m sorry, is my partner, Tyler Everton.”

  Chris nodded a greeting. “Dude.”

  To his partner reborn, Duncan said, “I’m so sorry about what happened back there, Ty. Jesus, if I—”

  “Don’t sweat it,” Tyler said.

  Juanita turned to Kathy. She appraised the girl with more certainty than not, then asked, “You knew all along that Dead Man was this Tyler Everton?”

  “Sure,” Kathy said. Then she stood, walked over to Duncan, and put her arms around his waist, hugging him. “Thank you, Donut. You did great.”

  “Don’t go thanking me just yet,” he cautioned.

  She gazed clemently into his eyes, focusing on something beyond the wetness, the glimmer. “It left in you remarkable wonders,” she said. “More than I’d imagined.” She stepped away from him and smiled. “Indulge them.”

  “You’ve been holding out, little miss,” Patricia said. “What else haven’t you told us?”

  “Gobs,” she said, then turned to Tyler. “Now, let’s go get the boy.”

  “What boy?” Chris asked.

  “You oughta know,” Kathy said, “you plugged him in.”

  Truly baffled, Chris just stared at her. “Oh yeah, wait, of course, the kid in Chicago. Went in pretending I was Santa Claus.” After chewing a moment on this disclosure, he chuckled. “That kid? No shit?”

  Kathy smiled. “No shit.”

  “What did you ‘plug’ this boy into?” Patricia said.

  “I don’t know,” Chris said. “They never tell me.”

  Duncan was still appraising the conversation he’d had with Gamble. Why had Gamble been so concerned with him going back in time? Was there something else about the boy Mo hadn’t told him? Was the seraph living inside the boy now? He looked at Kathy. “Why are we going after the boy?”

  “We’re supposed to protect him.”

  “Fair enough,” he said. “Let’s go, Tyler.”

  Rachel glared at Duncan; not so unlike the way she had, he thought, when learning of his infidelity.

  “You had better translate for me, Mr. McNeil,” she growled. “What boy are we talking about?”

  “Emilio Chavez,” Duncan offered. “The one I just saved.”

  And then it occurred to him that—in this and whatever other times around—his intentions had been no less valorous than if he’d rescued the child from a burning building, as it no longer mattered that he’d set the fire himself. Yes, the circumstances were crooked, but his heart had not been, at least not in those telling moments. If his soul had ever been incorruptible, it was then. Yes, he had truly sacrificed his own life for the child’s.

  It was time that he forgave himself. That was his lesson.

  And now it appeared—and by no means fortuitously—that he was going to have to save the boy one more time.

  But...was it going to be the first time, he wondered, the last, or somewhere in between?

  Part Six

  Seraphim

  1.

  Aside from the fact that theirs was the only moving automobile, Boston looked very much real. Still, now that it was done with him, Duncan knew it was only a stage abandoned by time-hopping thespians.

  As Tyler crested the on-ramp, seven toll booths loomed ahead on the interstate.

  Tyler peeked into his overhead mirror. “Which one, Chris?”

  After a few routine ticks and jerks, Chris barked, “One!”

  “I hope you know where you’re going,” Patricia said to Chris.

  As the shuttle entered the first lane, approaching the booth, a red gate descended before them.

  The attendant sl
id aside the glass window.

  “Know where the nearest Stuckey’s is from here?” Tyler asked the hooded employee.

  Although its face was concealed within the shadows of the burnoose, there was no doubt the attendant was humored, but not just with Tyler. It was megrim with all of them.

  With a voice full of good cheer, it said, “There once was a band of do-gooders, who chartered a bus for loftier tours, but the fare at the toll, was more than they could dole, so now it’s a trip to the sewers.”

  Duncan was already on his feet. “Back it up, Tyler,” he ordered. “Back this fucking thing up now.”

  Tyler slammed into reverse.

  “NO!” Patricia cried. “Behind us!”

  There, in the gray dimness that was just moments before the carapace of Boston, stood armies of cloaked figures, not so unlike the booth’s attendant, each grasping its own sickle and grinning a skeleton’s grin. The Reaper, cloned to the nth power, bellicose in intent.

  Overhead, thousands of harpies swooped and circled angrily; starving vultures ireful and confused over the reanimated, meatless dead below.

  A crevice, as deep and black as frigid space, separated them from the ghoulish legions.

  “We’ve already passed the threshold,” Kathy said.

  The attendant pushed a lever, lifting the red gate, beyond which lay a paved, narrow road sided by an ever-morphing landscape, as if an indecisive, psychotic god had been caught in the act of creation.

  “Enjoy your visit,” said the attendant. “And please, try to not feed the animals.”

  Tyler shifted into first gear. “Fuck you very much.”

  Clutching her rosary to her chest, Juanita turned to Chris. “You stupid little shit—you picked the wrong gate!”

  Chris did not meet her gaze, just stared out at the roistering worlds ahead of them.

  Duncan was already on his way down the aisle, toward Chris.

  “Don’t hurt him, Duncan,” Rachel warned.

  Yanking Chris out of his seat, he said, “Where the fuck are we?”

  “I don’t...” Chris started, then relented. “I had to, dude! He promised to hurt Patricia and Kathy if I didn’t. Hurt them bad.”

  “If you didn’t what?”

  “Bring...bring you in.”

  “Bring me into where?” Duncan growled.

  Chris’s eyes were pleading now. “Into his mind, into Gamble’s Wonderland.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Tyler moaned. “Oh sweet Jesus.”

  Duncan stared deeply into Chris’s eyes, as if searching for the kinds of torture he would lavish upon this Judas.

  “A sign!” Patricia said. “Up ahead, there’s a sign!”

  Chris collapsed back into his seat as Duncan released him, heading up the aisle now, toward the windshield.

  As a stationary piece upon a permutating puzzle, there was nothing prototypically wrong with the sign, the kind of large green placard one so often encounters on the highways of America. It was the message, however, that would have had any literate motorist heavily pondering its meaning way into the next town. That was, if they hadn’t already pulled to the curb to puke on their dashboards.

  WELCOME TO THE BEAUTIFUL STATE OF KISS MY ASS

  PLEASE DON’T LITTER

  2.

  Following Mr. Gamble, Eli managed to enter the window with little effort. His Milquetoast mother, on the other hand, along with her vituperative mouth, had to be pulled up and in; into a place even more twisted and snarled than her rants and ravings. Into a twilight world of sinking, deep-violet skies, toward which the dour delineations of massive baobab trees reached with morbid intentions. Herds of animals clustered in the far distance, their species unclear. It was dusk encroaching upon an African savannah—only this one being reminisced, Eli thought, in the Ebola-ravished mind of a Botswana tribesman.

  Gamble was nowhere to be seen.

  “This place stinks,” his mother growled, peering around, as if searching for any signs of the pictures that had been touted in the brochure. Beside Josephine, leashed to her hand like a dog, Jacob gave his coat the once-over.

  But Eli was already trotting away from them, flapping his wings, looking for all the world like some depraved lunatic determined to finally get Leonardo Da Vinci and his ornithopter out of The 15th Century’s Biggest Duds and into the more respectable pages of Popular Mechanics.

  “Ha!” Josephine yelled after him. “Save your strength, choir boy!”

  After fifty yards, however, Eli was no longer running.

  He was flying.

  3.

  Just minutes past the placard, the road forked yet again into seven different directions: three stretching out to their left, three to their right, or they could continue straight ahead.

  Still stinging from his gallant though no less foolish decision to trick them straight to Hell, no one solicited Chris’s psychic opinion on the matter, nor had he volunteered one. Rather, it had been Juanita pointing the way this time.

  It really wasn’t her way, she’d explained, but the Blessed Mother’s.

  “‘Know now that if you pass on my right’,” she’d quoted Mary, “‘the fields are thin and bane, pass on my left and the river runs but a fiery wind. Continue onward and you will be blessed with the Father’s own mighty hand.’”

  Kathy sealed the deal when she agreed with Juanita. That was all the convincing anyone needed.

  Duncan stared out at the alternating vistas; the insalubrious thought processes of a demigod wracked with fever.

  Then, suddenly, the worlds united into one; the windows of a slot machine finally showing up “jackpot.”

  Now upon them, the prospect of nightfall bruised a sky in lethargic descent, while below ridges of razor-sharp mountains and, closer still, the gnarled and defoliated branches of immense trees aimed to shred that contused skin should it weaken and fall. Molten rivers, distant and orange amid the scabrous periphery, oozed leisurely away into the rifts and fissures, feeling no obligation whatsoever to warm the cold, settling night. Nearby, shadows groped worm-careful from their sponsors, cast by the spectral light of a meandering, non-existent moon.

  Africa, Duncan thought, in a Dali-esque sort of way.

  If the good Virgin’s insinuation had been that they would enter God’s mind should her itinerary be followed, then they’d arrived far too late, Duncan thought, if their goal was to save the Old Boy from a nervous breakdown.

  “Company,” Tyler said.

  A figure up ahead, alongside the road. A man, his arm out, thumb extended.

  4.

  Eli hovered attentively over his mother, his wings swathing the air, though far too slowly to actually keep him aloft. But here, those old rules didn’t apply. Physics was now but a dream, and the dream now reality.

  Dazzled in wavering shards of heat, a gargantuan structure loomed in the distance.

  The moment he’d stepped foot into the window a heightened consciousness burgeoned in his being. It was as if he were back inside a recurrent lucid dream, but with no fear of waking, this time having finally sneaked passed the veil of retrogress. Yes, he knew these odd environs, how to navigate them, sensed the direction he should now take, as if a long-dormant chromosome had suddenly awakened, triggering in him the sapience necessary to comprehend and, ultimately, have elite governance over this new kingdom.

  Trepidation, however, was still a friend to be heeded. He would test these waters carefully, alluring as they were, and try not to drown in them.

  Stick to the plan, Stan.

  His covenant with Gamble had finally and so graciously been secured. And it was beyond all his expectations, his euphoria reaching critical mass, threatening to irradiate the duskiness that had for now, it seemed, postponed its slide into the inkier depths of night.

  Below him, however, Josephine hampered aimlessly on; just as she had, Eli mused, throughout her preceding and much more confining reality, no wiser for the wear.

  Each time Jacob would pause to inspect a sme
ll, or to do a bit of grooming, she would grouse and yank his leash.

  “He’s not a basset hound, Mother. Keep it up and he’ll likely have you for dinner.”

  “Ha!” She was shaking her cane at him now. “Get your ass down here, Eli! I mean it!”

  “I’ve places to go,” he said

  “Well, don’t wait for me, batboy! You can fly your sorry butt into the side of a cliff for all I care. Just stop gloating over me like some goddamn vulture!”

  “If you would just let me carry you, we could be off—”

  “No!” she insisted. “It ain’t natural. I’ll stay planted firmly on the ground, if it’s all the same to you.”

  It wasn’t. He fluttered down, reaching for her shoulders.

  “Fuck off!” she cried, batting him away with her cane.

  “Alright, have it your way. Just don’t dally. Once you reach the aviary, stay there and wait for Mr. Gamble’s instructions.”

  She squinted at the structure in the distance. “That what that is? Some kind of bird sanctuary?”

  “I mean it mother,” he warned. “No fiddle-farting around, or there’ll be hell to pay.”

  “That supposed to scare me, batboy?”

  “Yes,” he said, “it is.”

  5.

  Twilight had ripened but stopped short of falling off the vine.

  Mantled in shadow, the shuttle’s interior now donned the dreary attributes of a tomb.

  With everyone on their feet, Tyler switched on the headlights, illuminating the hitchhiker.

  “Oh my God!” Patricia cried. “That’s him!”

  “Him who?” Rachel said, squinting through the windshield.

  “Jack Fortune,” Duncan said, answering for her.

  As if Duncan couldn’t speak the truth if he had sodium pentothal for blood, Rachel turned to Patricia. “He’s Jack Fortune?”