Lowland Rider

by Chet Williamson

  "Enough? Enough for what?"

  "To make you come back up, come above again. It's over, Jesse. Can't you see, you've won, he's dead. What you wanted to do down here, you've done. You've done good, but you've done enough. You could stay down here forever and it would never be clean. Haven't you done enough?"

  Jesse looked at her for a long time. "One more thing," he said. "Just one. And then I'll come back up. Montcalm may be dead, but I'm not finished here yet."

  "Oh God, Jesse, when?"

  "Tonight. After tonight. I'll finish it, and I'll come above in the morning."

  He would answer no more questions. He rode downtown with her and walked her as far as the stairway that led to 86th Street, then held her as a priest might hold a grieving widow.

  "In the morning," he told her again. He turned away when she tried to kiss him, and walked back into the tunnels.

  CHAPTER 37

  He's anywhere, anywhere he wants to be. He want you to find him, you find him…

  Rags's words came back to Jesse as he stepped off the stairs and onto the platform. He wanted to find Enoch, but did Enoch want to be found? It didn't matter. He would find him if he had to search every tunnel, every hidden spur, every closed and abandoned station on the hundreds of miles of line. But somehow he felt that he wouldn't have to do that, that Enoch would know, and would rise to the challenge.

  It was after midnight now, and the station was deserted. That surprised Jesse. Even on a Tuesday night the Upper West Side was a center of activity long into the morning. Yet there was no one here, no one except Jesse.

  But when he looked down at the end of the platform he realized he was wrong. There was someone else standing down there, someone in the shadows. At first Jesse thought that there was a small light from overhead shining on the figure, but then he realized that the light was coming from the figure itself, and Jesse began to walk toward it, knowing who it was even before the man turned so that Jesse could see his face.

  Enoch was all in white, a white that blazed with brightness. His face was aglow and smiling, and his hands hung empty at his sides. When Jesse stopped walking, only six feet separated them.

  "Hello, Jesse," Enoch said. "I'm glad you've come. I've been waiting for you."

  His voice was like doves cooing in barn rafters. Jesse could smell the sweetness of hay, the sharp odor of fresh rain on grass, and exhaled sharply to drive the hypnotic scent from him. He would not be seduced. "I'd have found you," he said, "whether you waited or not."

  Enoch nodded. "You would have."

  "You know that I'm going to kill you."

  "I know you bring my end. My necessary end."

  Jesse took the pistol from his waistband. There were still four bullets left. "You are this place's heart," Jesse said. "You are the heart of evil, maybe of all the evil in this city, I don't know. It wasn't Baggie, it wasn't Montcalm, all they did was for you."

  "That is true," Enoch said. "Baggie knew it, Montcalm did not. But still, it was for me. And for you."

  Now it was Jesse's turn to smile. "For me? Father of Lies, isn't that what they call the devil? You're a poor devil, Enoch, but the only true one this place has. I don't know how you use people, how you twist them to do these things for you, but you do. If it was for money, I could understand it. Not condone it, but understand. But it isn't for money, is it?"

  "No. It isn't for money."

  "Fine." Jesse nodded. "Then maybe you'll understand that I'm not doing this for money. I'm doing this—"

  "You're doing this," Enoch gently interrupted, "so that your life has meaning."

  Jesse smiled a wry and bitter smile. "Maybe. And maybe so that some other deaths had meaning." Jesse brought up the pistol and pointed it at Enoch.

  "And that too is true. Your wife and daughter had to die."

  "My. . . my. . . how did you. . . " A red tide crossed Jesse's vision.

  "Donna," Enoch said. "Jennifer. It was necessary.”

  “You bastard!" Jesse shrieked, and pulled the trigger.

  He fired twice into Enoch's chest at point-blank range, but Enoch did not move, did not flinch. Jesse stepped closer, aimed the gun at Enoch's face, fired again, and Enoch did not move. He pressed the gun against Enoch's temple and pulled the trigger for the last time. The gun recoiled in his hand, and it seemed as though Enoch's flesh parted to receive the lead, then closed up again, clean and whole.

  Jesse sobbed convulsively, and the gun dropped from his hand. He began to hammer his fists against Enoch, crying as he did, but Enoch stood like rock, immovable, his flesh unyielding. Jesse pounded his fists against skin more solid than steel, putting every ounce of effort he possessed into this all-encompassing need to destroy this man, this creature, this thing.

  And slowly his muscles weakened, his will subsided, his hatred was drained by exhaustion until he fell against the very being he longed so to annihilate, and he felt Enoch's arms around him, no longer arms of stone, but of flesh, comforting him as he wept.

  He looked up into Enoch's face, and saw there all the things he had hoped he would not—caring, sympathy, and a trace of sadness. "What. . . are you?" Jesse asked.

  "I am the Axis."

  "The . . . the what?"

  "The Axis. The pivot, the balance."

  "The balance," Jesse said, remembering his own words spoken what seemed like centuries before. "The balance. Between what?"

  "Between good and evil," Enoch answered.

  "But . . . you are evil!"

  Enoch smiled, his face full of love, and shook his head. "You do not know what evil is. But you have begun to learn."

  Jesse's legs gave out, and he slumped to the cold concrete, his arms wrapped around Enoch's legs. Enoch knelt and sat beside him, holding him again. "Jesse, there was purpose," Enoch said. "What happened to you was ordained. But not to bring you down here to kill me. It was to bring you down here to speak to me. Not like the others spoke to me and served me, for you are not like the others. You came here to be tempered, to be tried in the furnace, to be turned to stone . . .

  "To be apotheosized."

  Jesse had not heard the word in years, and its meaning was nearly lost to him. He looked up, his face streaked with tears. "I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know what you mean!"

  "I mean that you will take my place."

  Jesse's body trembled as though a train had crashed out of the darkness beside them. But there was no train, there were no people, and there would be none, Jesse knew, until Enoch willed it so. Jesse could not speak. He was afraid to.

  "We were all men once," Enoch said, "until we were chosen to be more than men, and we were afraid, just as you are. But when we understood, when we knew, we made our choice, as you will make yours." Enoch paused. "It is the only choice you can make."

  "Then," Jesse said in a voice pinched with ignorance, "it's really not a choice at all, is it?"

  "When you know," Enoch said, "then it will be the only choice you can make."

  "The Axis, you said," Jesse went on weakly. "What does it mean? What is this . . . balance?"

  "Good and evil, Jesse. We feed the evil so the good can survive. We're God's servants. We do His will."

  "Feed evil? I've seen how, oh Christ, have I seen. But why?"

  "Because if it was not fed, if it was not satisfied, held at bay, it would overcome the world."

  Jesse pushed away from Enoch's embrace, and Enoch let him go. He crawled several feet away, then said, "I don't believe this. I can't."

  "You've seen the power I hold. It comes from God. How else can you explain it?"

  "I don't believe it!" Jesse shouted. "I see what you do, but I still don't believe it! It doesn't make sense! Holding evil at bay? That's bullshit! This is evil, this place, the things people do here, good Christ, what greater evil could stalk the world than what I've already seen?"

  "If I show you—"

  "Oh yes!" Jesse shouted, pushing himself to his knees. "Oh, by all means, show me, Enoch!" He
laughed brokenly. "You just show me if you can!"

  Enoch stood effortlessly. "Close your eyes then. And see."

  Jesse laughed again, the flat, barking laugh of a man close to madness, the laugh of a man who fears no longer. He laughed, and then pressed his eyes closed, a wide, white grin slashed across his face.

  And he saw.

  He saw the blade of a knife sliding down the front of a body, and skin and breasts laid back like a leather shirt, and arms slipping in under the skin and embracing the living viscera, and wet, red organs slapping against flesh,

  saw a young boy with hair the color of honey and skin the color of milk held over a velvet chair, a line of naked, laughing men behind him, each taking their turn, fat, dripping, black candles in their free hands,

  saw an old woman hanging by her neck from a rope, her sister, a white-haired and wrinkled crone, jerking on her legs so that the neck stretched, the rope dug under and broke the jaw, the blood pumped from the dead woman's nose, bathing the grinning sister,

  saw a soldier in a room full of bound men, castrating each one, then slicing each across the eyes with the same razor,

  saw priests and nuns drinking each other's vomit, rolling in each other's filth while they prayed the Our Father,

  saw a mountain of dead women rotting in the sun, while their children played about them, throwing balls and sticks onto the pile for dogs to fetch, urinating on the faces of their mothers' corpses,

  saw limbs and heads hewn off in joy,

  saw babies raped and smashed on stones,

  saw the wombs of pregnant women sewn up,

  saw flesh ripped open and fire forced in the rents,

  saw agonies and abnormalities and sicknesses, and founders of plagues and murders thousandfold, and curses and abominations and blasphemies, and excremental baptisms and the incestuous births of monsters and tortures unimagined, and cannibalism and self-mutilation and semen splashed on crosses, and hatred and terror and blood, always blood, drowning everything he saw in red rain.

  He saw.

  And what he saw drove him beyond fear, beyond nausea, beyond repulsion. What he saw, so much evil compressed into an instant of understanding, took away his words, refused to even allow him to think, to correlate that multitude of sights into one unforgivable whole.

  He opened his eyes, and saw Enoch, and Enoch was no longer smiling. On his face was the expression of the crucified Christ. "What…" Jesse whispered, “what could be. . ."

  "No, Jesse," he said. "Not what could be. What you saw was what exists, and what has existed. What walks the earth now. I have not yet shown you evil's true face, evil set free. I have not shown you the ultimate potential of evil, the evil that would become reality if not for me, for you, for those like us."

  Show me then, Jesse thought. Madden me. Mold me. Enoch heard, nodded, closed his eyes, and Jesse closed his own.

  Again, Jesse saw. Nothing was held back, or seen through a dark glass.

  This time, he saw everything.

  Everything.

  ~*~

  When Jesse opened his eyes, Enoch's face was bright with tears. "You see now," Enoch said. "You see what the balance preserves. You see what would otherwise come to pass."

  "The death of love."

  Enoch nodded. "The death of any love."

  Jesse shook his head. "I can't," he said. "I'm afraid. I can't do what you've done. I couldn't. All those deaths . . ."

  "You can. You have. You have killed, and today you sent a kind and simple man to murder an insane old woman."

  "But how . . ." Jesse choked on the words. "Even if I agreed, how could I do those things? How could I bear to be around those people, those hateful people?"

  "Do not hate them, but learn to love them, and they will love you. And serve you. And when your time is finished you will be full of love, too full of love to go on, too full of love to stay here anymore."

  Jesse ached with the need to understand. "But how can you feel such love, and still . . . condone this . . . demand these . . . atrocities?"

  "You do what you must."

  "But how can you do it . . . and not feel ... pain?”

  “You can't."

  "Oh God . . ." Jesse said softly.

  "Imagine my agony," Enoch said, "when I think of theirs. And that same agony will be yours. But you have the strength to bear it. And the strength to make the others serve you. To feed the evil. To keep it below."

  "But the balance . . ." Jesse said desperately. "You spoke of yourself—and of me, if I take your place—as part of the balance. If there is evil, then mustn't there be good? Am I . . . are we . . . ordained to do only evil? Will I just be a butcher, a feeder of beasts in some metaphysical zoo? How can I do that? How could anyone?"

  "You will find your way," Enoch said kindly, then smiled. "There may be more than one."

  "Enoch . . . I don't think I can."

  "You will. You are already a legend. Now you must become more."

  Jesse, on his feet at last, nodded slowly, painfully. "But how? How, Enoch?"

  "For that, there is only one way. There was ever only one way."

  The whiteness around Enoch began to glow brighter, blinding Jesse, and when he could see once more, Enoch was gone.

  But Jesse was no longer alone in the tunnel. Other people stood nearby, waiting for trains, the usual late night assortment, kids, night workers, people who liked the night.

  And now a train was coming. It was the IND local, roaring into the station. Jesse heard the rumble of the steel wheels, saw the light growing out of the darkness, the light that presaged the one way of which Enoch had spoken.

  A few people saw him move toward the tracks as the train drew nearer, watched him cross the yellow line and stand so that his toes touched the knife-edge of the platform. A woman divined Jesse's intention first, and her cry alerted others, so that over a dozen people saw what happened.

  Jesse waited until the train was several yards from where he stood at the platform's edge. He closed his eyes, leaned forward, bit back fear, and despite the roar of the wheels, the glare of the golden eye of the engine that filled the station like the eye of God, Jesse slept.

  And Jesse fell.

  PART

  5

  So Jamie Gordon, cursed by God,

  Or blest, as some do tell,

  Became Death's trusty harbinger,

  Who doth man's fate foretell.

  And when ye ride the low country,

  Gae fast, and nae by night,

  Else ye may spy the Gordon bold,

  Who causes men to fright.

  And if the Gordon cross your path

  Your life is at an end.

  He hath nae mercy nor nae love,

  And nae man is his friend.

  For he must ride the lowland dark

  Till time itself may cease.

  Ne'er Heav'n above nor Hell below

  Gie Jamie Gordon peace.

  —Jamie Gordon, the Lowland Rider

  CHAPTER 38

  MAN FALLS FROM SUBWAY PLATFORM

  Several witnesses saw a man fall in front of an IND downtown local train in the 86th Street station early this morning. The man was identified as Enoch Soames, 33, a Haitian political refugee who had been missing for three years. Soames came to the United States after the deaths of several members of his family in former Haitian President Duvalier's prisons, and disappeared shortly thereafter.

  There is some confusion among witnesses, all of whom reported seeing a man dressed in a dark sweater and pants falling in front of the oncoming train, while the victim was found to be wearing white clothing...

  —New York Post, July 21, 1987

  ~*~

  Claudia Dorner found Rags three days after she read the newspaper stories. He was eating a hot dog at the 59th Street station. Although at first she thought he was going to walk away from her, he remained seated on the bench, and moved over slightly to allow her to sit beside him. "Is he dead, Rags?" she asked him.


  Rags nodded. "He's dead. He fell in front of that train."

  "But it wasn't his body. The papers said—"

  "I don't care what no papers said. Fella I know was there, fella named Sam. He saw Jesse, knew Jesse to see him. He said he saw Jesse fall in front of that train. Don't care what they pulled off the tracks, but it was Jesse fell in front of that train."

  "But the clothing, and what was in the wallet. . .”

  “None of that matters. Jesse's gone."

  She stood up. "All right. I just had to be sure."

  He looked at the last bite of hot dog, sighed, and held it in his hand. "You gonna write about him now?"

  She shook her head. "How can I write a story without an ending?"

  Rags watched her for a moment. "He liked you, I think."

  "I liked him. I liked him very much." Claudia brushed a stray wisp of hair back from her forehead. "How about you, Rags? Ever coming back up?"

  "No." Rags shook his head, and Claudia saw him wince, and noticed that his head was cocked even further to the side than when she had seen him before. "Not goin' up. Not goin' up no more."

  She nodded, raised a hand in farewell, and walked back up into the sunlight that seemed unaccountably cold, and the air that smelled stagnant, like damp, endless tunnels.

  ~*~

  Two weeks later Rags was riding the Queens line westbound, dozing in the early morning, when he was awakened by the sound of a struggle. At the other end of the car a man with a cracked and worn brown leather jacket was tugging at the suit coat of an elderly, white-haired man. The old man was wheezing asthmatically, and his efforts were growing weaker, until his arms dropped and the younger man was able to wrench a wallet from an inside pocket and run into the next car.

  Rags thought about trying to help the old man, but by the time he got to his feet the young man was gone, and his victim had toppled to the floor, gasping for breath. Rags hurried up the length of the car, and saw that the man's face was already blue from cyanosis. His breathing had almost stopped.