When he said, “What are you—?” she said, “Shh.”
There was a throbbing sensation. At first it felt like a second heartbeat. Then it grew more intense, like a mouth sucking greedily. The edges of his vision blackened and fluttered, as if a bird were perched on his head and beating its wings. Gravity seemed to shift, the world flipped over, as if she were carrying his weight, everything balanced, centered around that hand of hers.
And then she was pulling something away from him, something that didn’t want to leave. It looked like a kind of octopus, but black with too many tendrils dangling from it, many still clinging to him until she yanked it fully away. She lobbed it then—through the air, off the ledge. Together they watched it tumble through the air before splattering against some rocks and oozing into the river. A few seconds later, several fish went belly-up and pinwheeled away in the current.
“All right,” she said, and wiped her hand off on her thigh. “There’s my good deed for the year. You owe me some whiskey, I’d say. A swimming pool full of it.”
She left him there, at the edge of the river. Eventually he rose to his knees and wept, a position of prayer, but he did not thank God. He thanked her, whoever she was, whatever she was. He thanked the light.
He had been given another chance, and this time he wasn’t going to waste it on himself. Stashed in the trunk of the Buick, he still had a duffel bag of cash, more than a hundred large—and he pumped it all into opening The Weary Traveler. He would earn his oxygen by helping others.
Over the next year, he asked around about the woman. No one seemed to know who she was. He thought he would never see her again, but then one day, there she was, pushing her way inside the shelter, a lit cigarette pinched between her lips. “There you are,” she said, and blew smoke and walked through the cloud of it. Her eyes tracked his body, which had filled out again, slabbed with muscle and sheathed with a healthy layer of fat. “You look good. Healthy anyway. Kind of like a grizzly bear in jeans.”
“I keep thinking I dreamed you, but here you are.”
“Here I am.” Her lipstick was a purplish shade of red that clung to her cigarette. “How about that whiskey you owe me?”
That was her standard. She would appear unannounced—sitting on a stoop or leaning against the hood of his car—and ask for something. The favors started small. Pick up a shipment at the docks in Seattle. Stash these duffel bags in your basement, she would say, and don’t even think about opening them. “I know I’m not a saint,” she said, “but I’m no devil either.” The drugs she sold—the pills called Skulls—they were 100 percent organic, non-addictive, A-grade happiness. Some blend of dopamine, adrenaline, and raw sugar, or so she claimed. “I’m not only helping myself, making some bank—I’m improving the lives of the miserable, bringing a little sunshine to a cloudy city.” The same applied to her Blood Bank. Not only did the transfusions benefit her—helping her outlive her expiration date by several decades—but she was paying people who needed cash for a renewable resource. “They sit down for a few minutes, and when they stand up, they’re fifty bucks richer and a pint lighter. I basically run a charity.”
There were questions he was afraid to ask her. About what had happened to him, and about what she was asking him to do, but he preferred this new role of his. Unthinking. Purely helpful. In his old life, he was supposed to have all the answers everyone sought. Now he didn’t have any. And he was happily vacant. It was easier not to think. It was easier to be a servant. Hand somebody a plate of hot food, offer up a fresh pair of socks, a fluffed pillow upon which to rest their head. Sarin was trouble—of this he was certain—but he owed her, and she wouldn’t let him forget it.
Then something happened. Sarin asked him to drive her to a meeting at a warehouse. “Don’t say anything, even if asked directly. Just stand behind me and look tough. Oh, and if the need should arise, don’t be afraid to use this.” She dropped a pistol in his lap, and he nearly drove off the road in surprise.
He said he wasn’t sure this was a good idea, and she said, “You don’t want to protect me? Don’t you think you owe me that much? I think you do. I know you do.”
“I’ve never held a gun in my life.”
“Thought you were from Texas?” she said. “There’s no safety, so all you have to do is pull the trigger. Easy.”
The warehouse was empty except for a folding table and two chairs. A small Asian man occupied one of them. He wore a black suit with a red tie. His hands were folded neatly on the table. To either side of him stood two men. Their jackets bulged suspiciously along the left sides. Beside them a hound panted. The floor was concrete and oil-stained. Pigeons cooed in the rafters, and shit and feathers and bits of nesting straw dirtied the floor. Rusted iron ribs held up the roof, and sunlight speckled in from the holes in the sheet metal, and shadows gathered thickly in the corners.
“We’re the good guys. Just remember that,” she whispered to Juniper as they crossed the twenty yards of floor to the table. Their footsteps filled the space with thudding echoes. The men were heavily tattooed. They all carried the same design on their skin—suction-cupped tentacles, curling from their shirtsleeves and collars and hairlines—which came into focus as Juniper drew near. He had shoved the pistol into his waistband beneath his fleece. The grip bit into his hip, but he resisted the urge to readjust it.
The man at the table did not stand but smiled and addressed Sarin. He spoke another language, one that Sarin shared, and when his eyes flitted to Juniper, it was clear he wanted an introduction but got none.
Sarin knocked a cigarette from a pack and sparked it with her Zippo. “Where’s Babs?”
Babs, Juniper would later learn, ran an underground club called The Oubliette. He also dealt and pimped on the side. Sarin controlled the east side of the river, and he controlled downtown. He was the one who arranged the sit-down.
At that moment there came the whirring of a tiny motor. Everyone turned toward the sound. Out of the shadows rolled a three-wheeled scooter with a grocery basket between the handlebars. Seated on it was a man—though his considerable size made his gender at first uncertain—wearing sunglasses and dangly earrings and gold chain necklaces and bangled bracelets and sparkling rings and a purple velour jumpsuit. His head was shaved, and the skin of it was as black and polished as obsidian. He was smiling but didn’t say anything until his scooter squeaked to a stop a few feet away.
“Welcome, everyone,” he said, his voice high and fragile. “I’m glad we could all come together for a friendly chat.” He lowered his sunglasses to eyeball Juniper. “And who, pray tell, is this big old piece of meat?”
Sarin said, “We look after each other.”
“Do you now?” Babs said, and then slid his sunglasses back into place. “I bet you do.”
“Can we get on with this?” Sarin said.
Babs asked her to please sit—“Stay awhile, girl”—and she did, and they all went back and forth, sometimes in English, sometimes in what Juniper guessed to be Japanese, their words growing more severe and sometimes punctuated by long, uncompromising silences. The word Yakuza came up more than once. It was a turf war—that became clear. These men wanted to expand their operation to the West Coast and wished to headquarter on the east side of Portland. At one point Juniper caught the hound studying him with its lip curled and a thick line of drool oozing from between its teeth. He quickly looked away. He didn’t know that they were sometimes called Grims or Barguests or Shucks. He didn’t know they were the companions of the dark, the guardians of the gates of hell. He only knew that the mere sight of them made him feel like he was swallowing a blade.
“Somebody’s got to give.” Babs’s bracelets clinked when he motioned from one side of the table to the other. “Either y’all offer more money or y’all negotiate more real estate, or our asses are going to be sitting here the next hundred years.”
Sarin ashed a cigarette. “Why should I give up anything? I was here first. Fuck that. Not for the price point
they’re offering.”
The man in the suit said nothing in response to this, only smoothed his tie and crossed his arms.
Sarin tossed away her cigarette and stood and said, “Come on. We’re leaving.” With one hand she led Juniper by the elbow, and with the other she reached into his fleece and ripped out the pistol.
He didn’t realize the bullets were blasting from the muzzle until after the shots pounded his ears and the bodies of the men and the hound slumped to the floor.
Babs remained on his scooter, shaking his head. Gun smoke drifted in the air between them. He wiped away some blood that had splattered his hand. “Well, I guess you told them.”
Juniper didn’t realize he had been holding his breath. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said with a gasp, and Sarin said, “He’s got nothing to do with it.”
“Why,” Juniper said. “Why did you do that?”
Blood pooled around the bodies, and merged, like the shadows that spread at dusk. Sarin avoided the blood when approaching them, kicking them each softly. When one moaned, she fired another round into his head.
She flipped the pistol and handed it to Juniper butt-first. “I don’t like it when people tell me what to do.”
Babs backed up his scooter, shifted gears, and rolled away from them. “Good night, folks,” he said over his shoulder. “Pleasure as always. If it’s any consolation, I would have done the same.”
Juniper’s ears whined in the aftermath of the gunfire. So he wasn’t sure he could trust his hearing. What sounded like a fire slowly catching or insects chewing their way through something. It came off the bodies, and he noticed then their skin was darkening, cracking, and from those cracks leaked a gray dust. In no more than a minute, they were gone. Nothing remained but the scorched outline of where they once lay.
“What are you people?”
Sarin smiled and pinched another cigarette out of a pack and popped it between her lips and spoke around it when she said, “I already told you. We’re the good guys.”
Chapter 8
EVERYONE HAS A PLACE—a listening place, Lela calls it—where they feel most connected and thoughtful, almost transcendent. For some people, it’s an alpine lake ringed by pines. For others, it’s a gray stone church with light streaming through the stained glass. For Lela, it was here among the stacks of books and maze of shelves at Powell’s.
The store took up a whole city block. Its books and its layout were not neatly arranged, but pleasantly cluttered, matching her mind. She always knew where she was, but she wasn’t sure how, since the building encouraged misdirection. The lighting was sometimes dim and sometimes bright, and the shelves were mismatched, and the split-level floor plan narrowed and widened and shot up or down into staircases surprisingly.
Sometimes, when she was looking for inspiration—an angle on a story, a shot of lyricism to the jugular, or just space to think—she’d come here. The smell of ink and paper made her mind buzz, and the mild funk of mold caused her nose to run. She would buy a short cup of coffee and wander, pulling books off the shelves, seeing what leaped out at her.
Tonight she comes with a clear purpose. She needs help. This happens every now and then. She stumbles upon some mystery—usually troublesome—that bothers her mind. She knows it’s important even if she doesn’t know why. She makes inquiries, and someone says or does something that makes it clear she’s moving in the right direction. She discovers a clue, what she calls a happy accident, and then moves with a more dogged intentionality toward an answer, seeking out those who can help her get there more quickly.
That’s how she feels now. She has her mystery. She’s found her right direction. She’s got a handful of happy accidents. But she has no narrative, no frame that holds it all together. That’s where Daniel comes in. She bothers him for answers with the regularity that others consult Google. He’s better than Google. And fuzzier.
She enters the bookstore at ten to eleven. Over the loudspeakers she hears the announcement warning shoppers Powell’s will soon close and they ought to take their selections to the register now. Her feet squelch and rain drips off her as she works her way through and around and up and then up again to the rare books section, the crown of the building. Powell’s was once the site of a used car dealership and the architecture is rather industrial, but the Rare Book Room feels like something out of an English library, decorated with antique furniture and tidily organized and dark-wooded and glowing with lamplight. Here she finds Daniel.
He’s an owlish man with a head that is bald except for a half-circle of gray puffy hair. He wears sweaters and slacks year-round. Rather than bifocals, he perches one set of glasses on his head and another on his nose, trading them out. He calls them his cheaters, and he keeps extras all around because he constantly misplaces them. His voice always comes across as uncertain, stammering, rising in pitch as if every sentence ended in a question mark. On occasion he slips into a British accent, though he is originally from Corvallis.
His desk is an antique, like all of the furniture in the room, and she catches him standing up from his chair and pulling on his jacket. “Not so fast,” she says, and he says, “Oh!” and fumbles the correct set of glasses into place, so that he might see her.
“Oh,” he says again. “Lela?”
“I need your help.”
“But it’s late? It’s time to close?” He pulls out a golden pocket watch and unlatches its cover. “Isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”
“Of course you wouldn’t.” He winds the watch and tucks it away. “Would you?”
Again, the voice sounds over the loudspeakers—announcing that the store has closed, that all customers must depart immediately—and Daniel winces as if he’s been caught doing something indecent. Then he sighs and begins to peel off his jacket. “Well, if it’s important, I suppose we’d better sit down for a chat?”
She reaches into her purse and withdraws the skull and sets it delicately on the desk before him. “Tell me about these symbols.”
❖
An hour later, the store is dark and she sits alone in an oasis of light thrown from a lamp with a stained-glass shade. A pile of books sits before her on the desk. Daniel fetched them for her—most from the Purple Room, where they keep the occult books—and set them in a neat stack that she immediately disarranged.
“This’ll be great,” she said. “You’re the best.” She convinced Daniel to leave her here—it’s not the first time—so long as she promised not to cause, as he put it, “any disorder that I shall come to regret, yes?”
She promised.
She takes notes in a yellow legal tablet. First replicating the designs on the skull and indicating the different vectors they come from—snout, left and right cheekbone, forehead, cranium. There are circles and crescents and triangles and stars and what looks like a whirlpool design.
Then she works her way through the books. She studies hieroglyphs and understands how symbols are sometimes meant to chronicle history. And she looks up hobo ciphers scratched on fence posts and sidewalks, and she studies wartime correspondence sent across enemy lines, and learns about symbology as a secret language. Here are tattoos meant to impart power and wisdom, and runes meant to doom a person to death or disease. If you scratch down a certain pentagonal design on paper—and if you send it to a person by mail, or sneak it under their pillow, or rip it up and put it in their food—then they will supposedly perish within a week.
Most of the books are old—brittle and yellowed with red mites chasing away from the light when she turns a page—but some are ancient. These he pulled from climate-controlled glass cases. The one she cracks open now has a mottled leather cover with what looks like a warped face cast onto it. There is no title. It is handwritten in slanted black letters with sharp corners.
She has trouble with this book. The language is not always English, and even when it appears to be, the letters bend occasionally into shapes she cannot translate. There is
no table of contents, no index, no chapters, no clear design—just a bramble of ink and illustrations. But she encounters two words over and over again. Door. And open. And she begins to understand that these signs and symbols, many of which appear replicated on her skull, are meant to beckon or allow entry, like keys. Her skull is a key. Could that be right? An honest-to-goodness skeleton key? But to what?
She reads a word aloud, “Demonis,” that opens into a yawn. By this time it is nearly two in the morning. The rain takes on a lulling timbre, a thrum that would be nice to fall asleep to. Her eyelids slip lower. She slaps her cheeks softly, pinches her thigh, stands up to stretch and swing out a few jumping jacks. She needs to use the bathroom and splash some water on her face.
A gray glow seeps in through the windows and burns hellishly from the exit signs, but otherwise the store is dark. She fetches a lipstick-sized flashlight from her purse. It doesn’t give off a lot of light, but enough.
In the bathroom she locks herself in the stall. For a long time after she’s done, she rests her face in her hands and listens. One of the sinks drips, a counterpoint to the rain drumming outside. But beneath that she thinks she catches something. A click-click-clicking. A sound she recognizes distantly. The sound her dog, Hemingway, makes when he roams the wood floors of her apartment. The sound of claws.
Maybe it was a register clinking to life. A pipe settling. A mouse scurrying in the walls. She flushes and slides the lock and washes her hands and splashes her face and dabs it dry with a paper towel. And listens. Nothing but the rain.
The door to the bathroom snicks closed behind her. When she climbs the stairs and reaches the landing and moves toward the Rare Book Room, she sees, at the far end of an aisle, that one of the windows carries the shrinking steam of something’s breath.
At least she thinks so. What else could it be? A vent’s gust. She swings the flashlight left, right.
She isn’t far from the Rare Book Room. The desk is an island of light. She knows she shouldn’t look at it directly, for fear she’ll ruin whatever night vision she’s established. But her notes are there, her purse is there, the skull is there. She has kept it close since she stole it from the construction site—has guarded it as though someone might snatch it away any instant—and now it feels irrevocably distant. She can’t not check to see if it remains.
The Dark Net Page 8
