999

by Al Sarrantonio

  I bypassed the doors to the rest rooms knowing that there was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. The bullets were chattering into the old plaster as I hit the rear door. It wouldn’t open! I fumbled with the deadbolt, then frantically pulled it open as constellations of lathe and wood flew past my head and struck me on the shoulder.

  I hurtled into the stinking back alley where Mike dumped his garbage and his hamburger meat when it started to turn into a laboratory experiment.

  And silence …

  Silence?

  Where was the unholy racket of the Tazzman’s machine pistol? you might ask. But that was the least of it, because I wasn’t in any stinking back alley. Turning around in a complete circle I could see that, well, let me put it this way, if I’d had a tiny terrier at my side I would no doubt have blurted out: “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

  I finally returned to the direction from which I’d come, but there was no filthy facade, no door back into Helicon; there was only air and space and light—glorious, luminous light. I was in a high-ceilinged room, looking out a tall window at a curiously familiar structure with a rounded dome that looked almost Middle Eastern. Lower down, a large city fanned away in the blue-and-gold dusk. But it had been morning just moments ago, and this place was definitely not Manhattan. The plethora of chimneys and mansard roofs made me think immediately of Europe.

  Around me, the pale stucco walls were hung with paintings. These huge Impressionist canvasses were dense with color, vibrant with protean movement. They swirled about me like eddies in a stream.

  “Do you like them?”

  The voice was melodious, rich as Devonshire cream.

  I turned around to see a woman with a long face whose determination made handsome features that were at best plain. She had a stem countenance eerily like the cursed headmistress of the Adirondack prep school I’d escaped to at the age of fourteen (even that had been better than my intolerable home life), then had promptly escaped from. Salt-and-pepper hair fell lankly to her slight shoulders and in one hand she held a cluster of paintbrushes, so I assumed she was the artist. She was dressed in an orange shirt and rust-colored trousers over which she wore a long red apron, stiff with dried paint. Even so, I could see a white pentagram stitched to its front. You might think this a curious getup, and you’d be right. But by far the most curious thing about her was her eyes. I swear they were the color of unpolished bronze, and they had no pupils.

  “Lady, I don’t know who you are but I’d be much obliged if you’d tell me where the hell I am. Also, do you have a drink—preferably something high in alcohol content.”

  “I was speaking of the paintings. Even though they are unfinished I’d be interested to know whether you find them effective.” She spoke with the intensity possible only when one is consumed by a passion. Had she even heard what I’d said? No matter; her passion impelled me to give the paintings a more focused look. So far as I could tell they were all of the same subject: a series of landscapes deliberately interconnected by composition and style, caught at different times of the day and season. I was certain I didn’t know what I was looking at and yet, curiously, that very certainty filled me with an inexpressible sadness, just as if I had been pierced through the heart.

  “Sure, sure. They’re beautiful,” I told her. But I was still distracted, and in desperate need of a stiff drink. “Listen, I don’t think you get it. One minute I was in a New York bar running from a madman with a machine pistol and the next I’m here. I’m asking you again, where is here?”

  “Regard the paintings,” she said in the slightly stilted locution of the European. Her arm rose and fell like the swell of the ocean. “They will tell you.”

  “Lady, for the love of—”

  “Please,” she said. “My name is Vav. And yours is William, yes?”

  “Did you say Viv, like Vivian?” I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right.

  “No. Vav.” She enunciated it clearly. “It is a very old name—ancient, one might say. It is the Hebrew word for ‘nail.’ “ She smiled, and her face broke open like a ripe melon spilling out its fragrant and delicious juice. “I am the nail that joins the beams overhead. I am the one who provides shelter to lost travelers.”

  Looking at that face I had to laugh; I had no other choice. I imagined she could make even a condemned criminal feel good about his final moments of life. “Well, that seems to be me, all right,” I admitted. I took a quick glance out the window. “That wouldn’t—Whoa! I mean, it couldn’t possibly be Sacré-Coeur. Hell, that’s in Paris.”

  “Yes, it is,” she said.

  “But that’s impossible!” I closed my eyes, shook my head and opened them again. There was Sacré-Coeur. It hadn’t dissolved in a sudden puff of smoke. “I must have lost my mind.”

  “Or most likely gained it.” She chuckled. “Come now, do not be alarmed.” She led me away from the window. “Have another look at the paintings, yes? I am creating them just for you.”

  “You mean you knew I was coming?” Why did that make me feel so good?

  “That hardly seems possible, does it?” She laughed until I joined her, and we shared a joke the origin of which was beyond my ken. She took my arm as if we were old friends. “But come, tell me if anything here seems familiar,” she urged as we moved slowly around the high-ceilinged room.

  My brow furrowed in concentration. “Funny, I’d been thinking just that, but …” I shook my head. “Maybe when you’ve completed them.”

  “Obviously you need more time,” she interrupted. She did this a lot, as if she was oddly pressed for time.

  “All things considered, I think I’d prefer to get back home,” I said.

  “Didn’t I hear mention of a madman with a machine pistol?” She stripped off her apron. “Why in the world would you want to go back there?”

  I considered a moment, thinking of poor dead Mike and the Tazzman, Ray on my back about Lilly, and that sonuvabitch brother of mine, not to mention a writer’s block as frightening as the death zone atop Mount Everest. Then I considered the unusual woman beside me, being in Paris on a perfect drizzly velvet night, and I felt a certain lightness of being I hadn’t felt in I don’t know how long. “To be honest, I can’t think of a reason.”

  She squeezed my arm. “Good, then you’ll come with me to the opening of the new exhibition.”

  I licked my lips. “First, I need a drink.”

  She went to an antique sideboard, poured a liquid into a squat glass of cut-crystal, and brought it back to me. I put the glass to my lips. My nostrils flared at the scent of mescal, and I threw my head back, downing it in one long swallow.

  “That’s always helped before, hasn’t it,” she said as I put the empty glass aside.

  Normally, I’d be pissed as hell at that kind of comment, but Vav had a way of speaking that held no judgment. It was as if she were simply holding up for me to examine a facet of my life. It was entirely up to me what I thought of it.

  “It certainly has its place,” I said as we walked across the apartment’s living room. I got a brief impression of deep-cream-colored walls, a long Deco-style sofa, a couple of Art Nouveau lamps, all of which seemed to have been put there with a minimum of thought. Then there was the antique Oriental carpet on which was curled a black cat with a single white spot in the center of its forehead. The cat awoke as we passed, its luminous citrine eyes following us as Vav led me out the front door.

  At the bottom of a well-worn stone staircase, we found ourselves in a high, musty vestibule typical of Parisian apartment buildings. It smelled of stone softened by the dampness of the ages. A light came on as we entered, then winked out as we departed.

  Mist borne like a flock of birds on the evening wind fluttered in gossamer veils past the iron streetlights. We began to walk east, into the night.

  “The gallery is only a few blocks away,” Vav said.

  “Listen, I can see for myself I’m in Paris, but how the hell did I get here?”

  We cam
e to a curb and crossed the street on a fairly steep upgrade. “Which explanation would satisfy you?” she said. “The scientific, the metaphysical or the paranormal?”

  “Which one is the truth?”

  “Oh, I imagine they’re all equally true … or false. It all depends on your particular point of view.”

  I shook my head in frustration. “But that’s just it, you see. I don’t have a point of view. To do so I would have to understand what is happening, and I don’t.”

  She nodded, thinking through every word I said. “Perhaps it’s only because you aren’t ready yet to hear what I’m saying. In the same way you aren’t ready to see the paintings.”

  As we turned left, then left again, past the Art Nouveau entrance to the Anvers Métro station, I curiously found my mind wandering backward in time. I saw with astonishing clarity my mother’s face. She had been a handsome woman, powerful in many ways, weak and frightened in others. In her dealings with other people, for instance, she was rock solid and extremely forceful. Once I’d seen her wrangle the price of a Rolex watch down a hundred dollars by telling the shop owner she had nine sons (instead of the two she really did have), all of whom would one day require graduation presents just like this watch she’d picked out for me. I remember having to keep my eyes cast down lest I giggle into the shop owner’s greedy face. Outside, the Rolex encircling my right wrist, my mother and I had laughed until we cried. That moment still reverberated inside me, though she was long gone.

  On the other hand, my mother was riddled with fear and superstition, especially when it came to her children. Her own father, whom she had adored, had died when she was only fourteen. She once told me that when I was born she was consumed with all the terrible things that could happen to me: disease, accidents, being gulled by the evil people she imagined on all sides. She did not want me taken prematurely from her as her father had been. She dreamed of him, of seeing him asleep in his chair at night, in shirt and vest, carpet slippers on his feet, his gold pocket watch lying open in the palm of his hand, as if he needed its weight to ensure he’d wake up in time for work. She would pad softly across the living room and climb into his lap, curling like a dog, closing her eyes and dreaming of him.

  My mother did not, as might have been expected, relax after I and my brother, Herman, were born. This, she would later tell me, was because she knew she was fated to have Lily. Lily confirmed my mother’s worst fears, her essentially bleak view of the world. Of course she blamed herself for Lily’s deformities. Of course she had a nervous breakdown. And of course this made everything worse, for us and for her. You could say with a fair degree of certainty that hers was a self-fulfilling prophesy. She was terrified of life and so she gave birth to a life that terrified her. Was it any wonder then that Lily horrified us? We learned, Herman and I, like all animals, by example.

  It’s not that I blame my mother. She could no more help herself than a robin could help but fly. That’s what robins do: fly. And to be perfectly truthful Lily was an unholy terror. Not that she could help herself, either. But the truth is the truth, no matter how painful. There was simply no point in going near her, let alone trying to make contact. For a time, I tried to pity her, but though I could pity my mother I couldn’t pity Lily. There simply wasn’t enough of her. Then, I tried to pretend she didn’t exist, but that didn’t work, either. Nothing worked when it came to Lily—no diagnosis, no therapy, no form of rationalizing, nothing. Eventually, even her Exorcist-like twitching and drooling became banal, part of the scenery that’s seen but no longer registers. She was a sad fact of life, like my dad’s pathetic easy chair that was so smelly and decrepit we all wanted to throw it out.

  A swelling burst of sound pulled me out of my odd reverie. Up ahead, I saw a crowd spilling out of a large arched, iron-clad doorway. I felt certain this must be the entrance to the gallery where the exhibition hung.

  I wanted to go on, but instead I stopped dead in my tracks. My gaze had been drawn, possibly by an unexpected movement, to a shape crouched atop the ornate cornice at the corner of the building nearest us. It projected out over the sidewalk, a dark and sinister countenance that made my blood run cold. It was merely a gargoyle, I realized after this initial jolt, but it was unlike any I’d ever seen before. I squinted into the drizzly gloom. It appeared as if the thing was half man, half reptile. It had an eerie oblate head with a face that was wider than it was high. Oversized eyes flanked an inhumanly large mouth and a horrific ophidian snout.

  “What has caught your attention?” Vav asked.

  “The gargoyle above us.”

  “Ah.” She nodded. “You know, don’t you, that gargoyles were originally added to buildings to remind man of the dark side of his nature.”

  “Jesus, if this one represents someone’s dark side I certainly never want to meet him. The thing is downright hideous.” And yet I couldn’t stop myself from staring up at it. Possibly this was because I had a personal horror of reptiles that dated back to when I was a child of seven. I’d been lost in the Mexican coastal swamps and had had a truly terrifying encounter with a crocodile intent on having me for lunch. I got the willies just recalling it.

  “The crowd is big, isn’t it?” Vav said without even turning her head to look.

  “And getting bigger every moment, I’m happy to say.” In truth, I was delighted to get my mind off the horror squatting above us. “You’re obviously quite popular.”

  “Ah no, now you are confusing the messenger with the message,” she said. “It’s nothing to do with me. They have all come to see the paintings.”

  “But the paintings are you.”

  “Once you are there, you will see.” She led me into the mouth of a dank alley along the near side of the stone building. Instantly, the city was obliterated by darkness.

  “Shouldn’t we be going into the gallery?” I asked.

  “We must hurry,” Vav said. “From what you have told me there is very little time.”

  “But I’ve told you nothing—”

  I broke off. There was something about this alley, something oddly, eerily familiar, but I shook off the sensation as nonsense. Besides, I was too busy being the paranoid New Yorker, figuring the odds of us getting mugged. I felt a thoroughly unpleasant creeping along my spine the farther we went. It built to such a pitch that I was literally forced to glance back over my shoulder. I let out an ugly expletive as my worst fears were realized: a misshapen form was slouching behind us.

  “What is it?” Vav had halted at my cry and now she turned.

  “There’s someone coming after us,” I said. “Can’t you see him?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t see anything,” she said. “I thought you’d guessed. I’m quite blind.”

  “Oh, hell.”

  “No, no, it’s all part of my gift,” she said, misunderstanding me. Out of the wok and into the inferno, I thought as I grabbed her by the arm and dragged her backward down the alley.

  “Hurry,” she said. “Hurry now, William.”

  The figure was gaining on us at an alarming rate. All of a sudden I knew what it felt like to have my blood run cold, because I found myself staring face-to-face—if you could call it that—with the hideous gargoyle. It was so hideous I could barely glance at it. Now I knew what had drawn my eye up to it in the first place: I had seen it stir. The problem was I hadn’t been able to believe it. Now I had no choice. It was alive and it was after us.

  “It’s the gargoyle,” I managed to get out. “Vav, if you have any idea what the hell is going on, now would be the time to tell me.” Right about then it occurred to me that the Tazzman had shot me and this was really … Hell?

  “Vav, tell me I’m not dead.”

  “It’s worse than I had been led to believe,” she said more to herself than to me. What mystery were her blind bronze eyes seeing? “Trust me, William, you’re not dead.”

  No sooner had Vav said this than a gargoyle leapt at us with such frightening speed that it was all I could do to d
uck out of its way. A misshapen taloned hand swung across my vision and struck Vav with such force that she flew out of my grip and bounced like a ball against the stones of the alley. Then, to my surprise, the beast drew back as if sensing something I could neither see nor hear. Foolishly, I turned my back on the horror while I knelt beside her.

  “William, are you there?”

  “You know I am.” There was blood all over, hot and sticky. “I’ve got to call an ambulance.”

  “Too late. You must get to the exhibition,” she whispered. “It’s absolutely vital.”

  “Vav, please tell me why.” But she was gone, and I could feel the beast almost upon me, so I let her go and ran. But I had left it too late. One of its paws tripped me and I went sprawling face first onto the cobblestones. I tried to get up, but I seemed paralyzed. I had only strength enough to turn over. I saw it looming over me, its awful snout contorted in what seemed to be a ghastly grin.

  I threw a hand across my face and at once I was seized by a violent bout of vertigo. The very cobblestones beneath me seemed to melt as I plunged into a dark and formless pit. I think I screamed. Then I must have lost consciousness, because the next thing I saw when I opened my eyes was a cool, leafy glade. Birds chirped and sang in the oak branches in counterpoint to the soft lazy drone of insects. I could smell clover and the tangy scents of loosestrife and mock orange. Looking up at the sky, I could see it was that time of the day when, having riven out the sunlight, the lovely cobalt of evening has spread like inscrutable words upon a page.

  I heard a horse whinny and, turning my head, discovered close by a magnificent chestnut hunter-jumper cropping the grass. He was fitted out in English riding habit.

  The quick beat of a horse’s hooves caused me to look up into the face of a woman. She was quite striking, with emerald eyes and lustrous dark-blond hair that fell thick as the forest around us to the edge of her jawline. Radiant, that was the word one might use in defining her; radiant in the way few people ever are or could hope to be. Seated confidently astride a black mare with a white blaze in the center of its forehead, she was dressed in expensive but practical hunting togs of a deep blue, save for her silk shirt, which was milky-white.