The Price of Salt (The Grim Arcana)

by Geoffrey Thorne

There was a hit-and-run on my block once. Some moron on a cell phone made an illegal turn and slapped right into a couple of teenagers skateboarding the opposite way.

  I didn't see the hit or the two boys in the air. I didn't hear them smash into the pavement or their heads and necks cracking from the impact. I didn't see the bastard who hit them speeding away in what later turned out to be a fresh-off-the-line SUV.

  But I was first, as the newspeople say, on the scene.

  It was me who called the paramedics and it was me who saw the life leaking out of those boys in thick red drops.

  One of the boys was still alive, still clinging to the shreds of life really. The other was gone. I'd never set eyes on a dead body before and I hoped I wouldn't see one again. The dead boy, a skinny Latino kid I'd seen around the neighborhood, had been transformed by the impact into a Jackson Pollock painting. Something had ruptured inside him, explosively, and spread him out over twenty feet of asphalt.

  His friend, a heavyset black kid in a green Los Luchadores tee shirt, was sort of conscious, sort of lucid and trying to talk. The back of his skull, like a partially smashed melon, had sort of merged with the ground beneath him– flattened by the sudden meeting of pavement and bone. There was blood in his mouth and ears. His hands twitched spasmodically.

  He stared straight up, up into the empty blue, and mumbled something. I knew better than to move him but I couldn't leave him there again. The fifty seconds it took me to run back into my house and call the emergency people had seemed like forever. If these were going to be his last moments– they were definitely his last ones of anything like a normal life– I couldn't let him spend them alone.

  So I sat next to him and listened to him babble, spewing nonsense as if his mind was an old-fashioned vinyl album with a needle skipping randomly from sound to sound.

  He talked about his mother and the crayons he had spilled out by accident, laughed at some cartoon that only he could see. He chattered away like that, with me next to him holding his hand, until the red lights and sirens rolled up.

  Just as the paramedics were hustling out of their van the boy looked at me, just with his eyes, his wide pleading eyes, and said, "Trade moments for the salt."

  It was meaningless, like the rest of his jabber, but the words stuck with me. Not for anything in themselves, they were gibberish, but for the sound his throat made while saying them. He was bleeding inside as I said and some of it must have pooled there at the back. When he spoke those last words his body made a strange wet sucking sound, like a whoopee cushion filled with syrup.

  Then he was gone, taken off by the men in black and yellow to whatever was left of his life. I never saw him again or heard if he survived. But the sound stayed with me.

  I mention all this because the frothy gurgle made by that dying boy's guts was infinitely more pleasant than the noise that came out at me then from the darkness. Compared to that terrible yawning wail the sound of the dying boy's voice was like a choir of angels.

  Then the thick brothy curtain of shadows fell away, revealing the more mundane darkness beyond. I could just barely see the stairs again but that was enough get my feet moving.

  Queen Babs wasn’t waiting when I got outside. I didn’t expect her. I don’t think I’d have noticed anyway if she had been there. Whether she just took off or melted down into her own pile of goo, I neither knew nor cared. All I could fit in my mind at that moment was the sound of my own feet slapping against the pavement as fast as I could make them go.

  From backyards and alleys in every direction I heard dogs barking and there was this taste in my mouth like the bottoms of all the shoes in the world.

  My hand hurt like hell. I don’t think it could have felt worse if I’d shoved it into a bowl of hot needles. The pain was so cutting I couldn’t make myself look at it for fear the visual would be more than I could handle.

  There was a terrible moment, I don’t know how long it lasted, where I thought I could feel that wriggley goop working inside me, changing me the way it had the Bug. It was hard but I resisted the compulsion to tear off my clothes and claw at the skin underneath.

  It’s just in your head, I told myself. I even said it out loud but there was a part of me that just couldn’t believe it. That part thought I was still back in the house, back in that awful black womb, smothering, being eaten and being happy about it.

  I couldn’t make the key fit the car door at first, I was shaking so much. I wanted to scream and I wanted to get under some water and soap– maybe even under some bleach– for the rest of my life, whatever it took to get the touch of that darkness off me.

  I said Priscilla’s name over and over, under my breath, like a mantra or something. I don’t know why but it gave me comfort just to hear it, just to think of her in her overbig Grape Street tee-shirt bringing me hot coffee or the last swig from her wine glass.

  I had to talk to her, I realized suddenly. I needed to wake her up and get yelled at and apologize and beg to come over and crawl into her bed and screw all the shadows away.

  I sat there in the car, shaking, with the door hanging wide into the street. I fumbled for my cell phone with my good hand, hardly seeing the damned thing for the salt water welled in my eyes.

  “C’mon, Pris,” I heard myself saying. “C’mon, Baby.”

  I jabbed a finger at some buttons, one of which I hoped was the speed dial function, and listened for the ring.

  “Who’s this?” said a gravely voice from what sounded like the other side of the world.

  “Who’s this?” I said. Who the hell was this guy answering my girl’s phone? Yeah, she was still hot when we left off but not so mad as to pull a one-niter with a stranger for payback. A part of me was grateful for the flash of jealous anger. That, at least, was a feeling I could handle.

  “This is Grim,” said the voice. “What do you want?”

  Must have hit the redial instead of the speed. Whatever. I couldn’t believe I was actually talking to Grim. Perfect, deadly, all-knowing Grim.

  I told him everything and was surprised to find that there really wasn’t much to say beyond what I’d left already on his voicemail.

  Two grubby idiots, an abandoned house in the Border, a box with writing I never got to see and some sweaty meaty blackness that made faces from jellied fat.

  “You gotta come deal with this, man,” I said, forcing my jaw tight to keep the clatter out of my teeth. “It’s too big for me.”

  “Can’t,” said Grim. He’s not one for long speeches.

  I screamed at him, called him names. I begged him. I told him I had a gun, that there were enough slugs left in it to end me, at least, and that’s exactly what I would do if he didn’t promise to come help.

  “Can’t,” he said again. “Got my hands full here.”

  He let me go on a little longer, let me vomit up the tension and the fear like the remains of a poison meal. Then he waited while I glued myself back together.

  “You okay now?” he said after a little.

  I told him I was– as okay as I was going to get that night.

  “Good,” he said. “Because you have a lot to do before dawn.”

  ***

  Mr. Wu Kong Sun was who Grim dealt with sometimes when he needed a particular special knife or the antidote for some exotic poison.

  Sun’s Market takes up most of the corner of Cherish and Métier just to the left of the heart of Little Korea. Despite the garish lights and colorful banners that hang off the front of the place, it’s one of those joints that you just can’t seem to find unless you’ve already been.

  That’s where he told me to go and he didn’t care I had to break the speed limit to get over there, make the deal and get back to the Border in the two hours left before dawn.

  I still wasn’t sure I had it in me to go back anyway.

  I tried to call Pris on the way but I only got the machine. I fumbled through a babbling cross of an apology and a valentine and then hung up.

  The main pa
rt of Mr. Sun’s store is just that– one of those traditional knickknack joints that deals in everything from bootleg dvd’s to knockoff designer clothing. The front’s as far as people like you and me usually ever penetrate.

  There’s a green door in the back wall with EMPLOYEES ONLY written on it in large gold letters. Mr. Sun’s real business was done on the other side of that door. I wasn’t sure he would even talk to me much less invite me into the back rooms but Grim said it was Mr. Sun or nothing.

  I’d never said two words to the guy before that night, Grim usually did the talking, but I’ve spent a fair amount of time cooling my heels in the front of that shop.

  I’ve spun the weird little tricycle people and bounced the transparent rubber balls. A thick but pleasant smell fills the place– a mix of sesame oil, plastic and time. Mr. Sun seems to prefer family members when it comes to employees but once-in-awhile there’s a Spanish chick called Flora who fills in. She’s a heartbreaker, Flora– all smiles and brown curves. She plays for the other team but that doesn’t mean you can’t take in the beauty. She’s going to make some lucky girl very happy one day.

  Flora was off that night, another sign that Mr. Murphy was running the world, and without her Mr. Sun’s had taken on a vaguely hostile feel. It took no effort at all for me to picture all those porcelain dolls suddenly springing to life, baring their fangs and introducing me to the Death of a Thousand Bites. The way my mind had been twisted by then all the hanging Good Luck streamers could just as easily have been the tentacles of an unseen creature lurking above, hoping for me to get careless and look up.

  Just tell him what you need and give him whatever he wants for it, Grim had said. And don’t let him scare you

  Yeah. Like anything could after what I’d already been through that night.

  “You are a proselyte,” said Mr. Sun. “You do for the Inconnu, yes?”

  He was just there all of a sudden, much bigger than I remembered and sporting a grin that seemed just a little too wide for his face. His teeth sparkled like razors even in the low light of the store. I could never get a handle on his age on the earlier visits- somewhere between fifty and a thousand I guessed. Tonight was no different.

  Mr. Sun was a head taller than me, with a face that was both thin and round and hands with long tapering fingers that reminded me too much of claws. He sported a perfectly trimmed goatee and what I’m sure was a ruby in his right ear. His shiny black hair hung in a long rope-like braid down his back.

  Every other time I’d seen him he’d worn normal clothes– chino’s, work shirts, once even a starter’s cap– but that night I guess I’d got him out of bed because he was draped in this green silk thing that was halfway between a toga and a bathrobe.

  I had no clue what proselyte meant but Inconnu was what Mr. Sun always called Grim.

  “Yeah, “ I said. “Grim sent me. I need to–”

  “I will tell you what you need,” said Mr. Sun. “Come on.”

  I followed him through the green door.

  “Something wrong?” said Mr. Sun.

  I shook my head but there was something wrong. There was something massively, blackly, life-eatingly wrong. That’s why I was there. I could tell he wasn’t talking about that.

  I didn’t say anything. I was busy trying to get a handle on what I was looking at.

  You got to understand; I’d been wanting to get back there for years. Every time Mr. Sun took Grim past the green door and left me out, I felt slighted– cheated in a way.

  With Grim I got looks at some amazing stuff, sure, but mostly those were over my shoulder while we were hauling ass in the opposite direction from something insanely unpleasant. With Mr. Sun I always thought I might see a shinier side.

  This room wasn’t it.

  It was big, ran the whole length of the building easy. There were some run-of-the-mill flourescents in the ceiling. The floor was polished hardwood. There was a big wooden table pretty much dead center– nothing fancy. Just a solid looking oak table you could pick out of a catalogue.

  Aside from me and Mr. Sun himself that was it. No winged dancing girls. No dogs made out of fire or dragons the size of your hand. If you didn’t know better you’d think you’d stepped into a store room in the back of a Korean knickknack shop.

  The only things that were even a little out of the ordinary were the walls which were just row after row of shelves from floor to ceiling. Two of them were just spices in glass jars. I couldn’t read the labels, of course– they were written in Korean– but I know oregano when I smell it. And ginger.

  The other two walls had the same shelves but with boxes instead of jars. The boxes were all different sizes from shoe sized to wide-screen TV and they were all white cardboard.

  “You’re lucky,” said Mr. Sun, moving around behind the big table.

  Yeah. I felt lucky. As long as lucky included a hand that had been through a meat grinder and a brain that was still doing everything it could to keep me from screaming for the rest of my life.

  “I’m serious,” said Mr. Sun. He’d pulled a stepladder from somewhere and was climbing up to one of the top spice shelves. “It’s not everybody who can do what you do.”

  “What I do?” I said. “I don’t do anything.”

  He opened a jar of some yellowy powder, sniffed, closed it and set it back on the shelf.

  “You help the Inconnu,” said Mr. Sun.

  “Yeah, well, me and Grim go back,” I said. “I owe him a lot.”

  It occurred to me that I really did owe Grim. It was him who picked me up out of that suicidal depression I was in when my old life fell apart. It was him who hooked me up with the bouncer job at The M-Plant. It was him that introduced me to Pris. Just on that I owed him big.

  “I’ve told him to stop meddling but he won’t,” said Mr. Sun, now squinting at the identical jars of identical green something he had in either hand. “Too excitable, that’s his trouble.”

  Heh. There’s a lot of ways I’ve heard people talk about Grim– scary, frosty, please-don’t-let-him-kill-me– but excitable?

  “You help him,” said Mr. Sun, climbing down finally. “You give him an anchor. Keep him from drifting.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said. I was suddenly feeling flushed, embarrassed in a way. “What are friends for, right?”

  “What indeed?” said Mr. Sun.

  I tracked him as he moved over to one of the shelves with the boxes on. As I watched he would pull one down, lift the lid, look at me and then put it back. He did this at random it seemed to me and enough times that I remembered I was on the clock.

  “No disrespect, Mr. Sun,” I said, “but can you speed it up? Grim said–”

  “This,” he said suddenly, “is for you.” There was something triumphant about the way he said it too, like a guy lost in the Jungle stumbling on the Fountain of Youth.

  He brought the box over to the table with the lid still on and set it beside the jar.

  “Now,” he said, taking a position on the opposite side of the table, ”tell me what you want.”

  “Grim said I needed–”

  “No,” said Mr. Sun. All of a sudden it was like his voice was everywhere. Not hard and scary like before with the thing in the dark but sort of rising up out of the floor like mid-summer heat. “You tell me what you want. You.”

  I had to think about it. I got the impression that whatever I asked for I would get.

  What did I want? The answer used to be money, hot sex on demand with the biker chick of my choice, a cherry ‘57 Corvette– not necessarily in that order. But that was the old me, right. Before I screwed everything up– Before the Flood, I used to say– and definitely before Grim. The old me wanted all that stuff and a hell of a lot more and wasn’t too picky about how he got it or who got broken on the way.

  The new me wanted– what?

  When I wasn’t chasing around the underworld with Grim, my life was pretty good. I had nice digs, a chick who loved me– okay, she’s crazy, but look at me
– a good job with nobody bugging me to do anything I don’t want to. And, with Grim, I get to help, you know? Really help.

  “I just want what anybody wants,” I said.

  “What is that?” said Mr. Sun. His eyes were blazing green which was odd because only a second ago I’d have sworn on a stack they were gray.

  “I just want to be happy,” I said. It was true. That’s all I did want and mostly, lately, that’s what I was. Pris was a lot to do with that. Hell, Pris was almost all of it.

  I really wanted to call her right then, just to check in, hear her voice, but there wasn’t time. Soon as I finished up with Mr. Sun, it was back to the Border.

  “Yes, proselyte,” said Mr. Sun. The word sort of hissed out of him and he leaned back the way you do after a great meal. “What you say is true.”

  “So,” I said, trying to step things up. “What about this other situation?” I wasn’t eager to do the thing but I knew, if we waited around too long, my nerve would fail and not come back.

  “Yes,” said Mr. Sun, all business again. “This is what you need.”

  He opened the box and inside it was a short rod made of some dark varnished wood. It wasn’t long enough to be any kind of walking stick. There were carvings all over the thing, some looked like letters and some like faces. You could tell it was old.

  He asked me about what happened to me, my hand, what exactly it all felt like. So I told him.

  “It was like I was a kid again, y’know,” I said. “A lost kid all alone in a dark place. Only the dark was a person and the place was a person and I was just there for both of them.”

  “For them?” said Mr. Sun.

  “Yeah,” I said. “For them to do whatever they wanted with me. I was like nothing.”

  He nodded somberly and it seemed like he actually understood what I was telling him which was funny because I didn’t have a clue.

  “You should have died there,” he said finally.

  I knew it was true. Hell, I’d wanted it to be true even after I got out.

  “You had protection,” he said. “Aegis.”