Frank O’Lynn scratched behind his ear. “You’ll know when the time comes to hide. To be sure, you’ll smell the difference.”
Louis lifted his pointy snout and sniffed, suddenly elated. The stench of horseshit was gone. In its place a not too displeasing smell of roasted peanuts, reminding him of the jars and jars of homemade peanut butter his grandma used to stack against the kitchen wall before she packed them into crates for market day. “How did you do it?” he asked. “You know, Pop from there to here.”
“The trick is knowing you are already where you want to be. We’ll talk about it later. Now’s not the time.” Frank O’Lynn then stretched up to see over the heads of the crowd. “Aggh, it’s no good. I can’t see what’s going on.”
Louis was about to tell him not to bother, that he had seen it all before and wasn’t in the mood to watch another public flogging, when Frank O’Lynn grabbed his paw and lifted him into the air. Within seconds they were hovering near the ceiling and looking down on the crowd, like they were perched on the uppermost branches of the Money Tree. His initial start at the unexpected takeoff (he had never really had the stomach for flying) was soon replaced with bemused intrigue. He had been wrong about the reason for the gathering. The crowd wasn’t waiting for another newbie to come through the archway; it was waiting to lynch its latest victim. He immediately recognized the bespectacled rat trembling in front of the archway as the obstinate official Santosa had condemned to the Fires of Oblivion.
Frank O’Lynn then warned Louis that he was going to let go of his paw. Louis flinched, fearing he would fall straight on top of the official and give himself away. “To be sure, you’ll stick like Spiderman,” Frank O’Lynn said, and showed him how to press his back against the roof. To Louis’ astonishment, he remained fixed to the rocky vault, even when The Partridge took his paw away. Just your friendly neighborhood Spiderweasel, he chuckled.
“You’re probably wondering how your friends got here so soon after the Lounge Lizard,” Frank O’Lynn said, and Louis nodded. “You might already know that space and time are intricately woven, like reeds in a mat. So when we jumped across the city we also jumped across time. The bigger the distance we jump or Pop, the more time we bypass before we rematerialize. A week has probably gone by since the peelers raided the club.”
Well fancy that and bugger me, Louis mused. “Why doesn’t everyone do it then? Why do they bother with Limos or walking?”
“To be sure, the same reason they do anything. Comfort. It feels safer to do something you’ve been doing your whole life than to try something new, wouldn’t you agree?”
Louis glanced down, sensing a change in the mood of the crowd. Previously ordered and restrained (wasn’t it amazing how a lynch mob could follow correct protocol?), a few of them were now getting restless, flexing their whips, shuffling from foot to foot, muttering to one another their disapproval. A jackal four deep at the back yelled out, “Hurry up! Let’s get this over with. We can’t stand around all day.”
A weasel near Smiggins raised his whip. Flash Freddy and several others did likewise. The official flinched and shrank down, yelping in fear, but Santosa wheeled forward and forbid anyone to act prematurely. The jackal and others muttered in dissent. Louis expected the torrent of whips to come lashing down, but the crowd remained hesitant. Santosa whispered to the cowering official that he didn’t have much time. Only Louis and Frank O’Lynn could hear what he had to say. “Do it now and save yourself some pain. I can’t control them for much longer.”
The official fell to his knees and grabbed Santosa’s wheelchair, pleading for mercy, but Santosa plucked his claws from the rim of the wheel and backed off a yard. The rat’s thick lenses had magnified his eyes into dark whirlpools of terror, and for the first time Louis actually felt pity for the wretch. He also felt the first inkling of something he hadn’t felt for a hell of a long time: guilt. Though it was probably nothing more than what he would have felt for a stray cur he had accidentally run over with his car.
“I can’t do it!” the official said, still on his knees. His claws were now clasped in front of him like a beggar. “I don’t want to be obliterated. I want to stay. I want to work. I promise to take bribes. Honest.”
“Have it your way,” Santosa said, and burped. He distanced himself further and nodded to the crowd. All at once, whips rained down upon the official. Although he must have known it was coming, he screamed as much in surprise as in pain. He tried to back away on his knees while whips lashed his head and chest and abdomen, ripping shreds from his suit. Another lashing knocked his spectacles off his face, which fell to the ground and broke. He yelped, fumbling around for them on the rocky floor. Another whip lashed his paw, which he withdrew and cradled to his chest, wailing in agony, just as another lash tore a chunk from his right ear. He squealed, shuffling still further backward on his knees.
Louis was fixated. It was something he would have expected in a goddamn gladiator fight. Sensing the end, the crowd closed ranks and edged forward. The bright white rays through the archway now glinted off the official’s back like sunlight off the surface of a small pond. He glanced over his tail, clearly feeling the heat, whimpering under the hail of lashes. Still, he wouldn’t voluntarily jump through the arch, preferring to curl into a ball and suffer the relentless onslaught. Flash Freddy raised and flicked his whip in a steady mechanical rhythm, each time collecting its mark. Smiggins was hopping from one foot to the other, his tail swishing from side to side almost as fast as the lizard was letting fly with the whip. Only Tiffany remained motionless.
Santosa then burped long and loud and the lashing came to a sporadic halt. One or two eager-beavers got in a last shot while they could before an eerie calm descended on the mob and its victim. The official, still quivering with his head tucked between his knees, didn’t move. Santosa told him to get up, but he refused to budge. Santosa told him again. Then, when the official didn’t move for the second time, he nodded to two jackals to pick him off the ground.
Only now could Louis see the full extent of the punishment. With a jackal holding him under the arms on both sides, the official looked as if he had just been mauled by a mountain lion. His suit had all but been stripped off, now just torn and tattered, reminding Louis of the old scarecrow in his grandfather’s cornfield, the one he used to take potshots at with the air rifle he had been given for his seventh birthday. That scarecrow had had a head that lolled back and forth when the westerly wind picked up and clumps of straw that poked through the old workman’s overalls his grandfather had outworn. Likewise, Louis could now see clumps of fur sticking through the holes in the official’s tattered suit, and his head seemed to loll from side to side with exhaustion. He seemed even too weak to speak; but when Santosa told the jackals to throw him into the Fires of Oblivion, he struggled and thrashed about, screaming at the top of his voice, “I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!”
“You’re already dead,” Santosa said, and nodded to the jackals.
“Have mercy! Have mercy!” he screamed, thrashing his head from side to side. The jackals picked him up and flung him into the bright white light, not too unlike Mr. Scarecrow being chucked onto the bonfire of discarded junk and timber the day the officials snatched his grandfather’s farm. The Fires of Oblivion swallowed the squealing official whole, cutting short his protests in mid-scream. “Have mer…”
Louis half-expected a cheer to ring through the air in triumph of one more vermin rid from the streets of LeMont. Instead, the obliteration was greeted with demur silence, many in the crowd looking at one another with expressions of what do we do now? At that moment, he caught a whiff of something he had hoped he would never smell again. Glancing at the golden archway, he was suddenly struck with horror. “This is the gates of hell, isn’t it?” he said, gulping. “And I’m on the wrong side of them.”
Frank O’Lynn, with his back still pressed to the roof, took his attention away from the dispersing crowd and sighed. “To be sure, Louis,
I had had my doubts about you.” He sighed, but at the same time held out his paw to congratulate him on his newfound knowledge. “You no longer deny the truth of what you see. Welcome. You are now a member of the White Rabbit Freedom Fighters.”
“Do I have a goddamn choice in the matter?” Louis asked, though suspected he already knew the answer to that.
“The question is not whether you have a choice,” Frank O’Lynn said, “but what choice do you make now?”
Louis didn’t have to think too goddamn hard about the answer. His whole life had been defined by it. Ever since he was a kid running from the bullies in the playground, escaping to his grandfather’s farm from the dreariness of his no-hope parents, resigning from his job to create his own company, there had been one underlying motivation for it all, the one hidden desire that drove him to become what he was. The one goddamn thing he was willing to die for. “Freedom,” he said. “I want out of here.”
“Then you’re going to have to break a habit of a lifetime and learn to trust again,” Frank O’Lynn said.
The smell of horseshit was now more than just a whiff; it was threatening to overwhelm the sanity of roasted peanuts. “Try me.”
Frank O’Lynn nodded to the bright white light streaming through the golden archway. “Ever wondered why someone can emerge from the Fires of Oblivion unscathed, but not enter?”
“You’re not suggesting that I…”
“Contrary to popular belief, the best kept secret in the world is not that hell does not exist, but that its gates are always open.” Frank O’Lynn had that glazed over, distant look in his eyes again. “We walk in and out of them, at our own free will.” Then he shook himself out of his daze. “The question you have to ask yourself is this: Do I trust him to be telling the truth? Am I willing to risk obliteration for the chance of Eternal Freedom?”
Louis glanced at the Fires of Oblivion. He could almost feel the heat of the bright white light. Not yet I don’t, he thought. Not goddamn yet.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Awakening
LOUIS and The Partridge sought sanctuary in a nearby tunnel to rematerialize before anyone, especially the secret police, caught them adhered to the ceiling of Conduit Number 1. Louis could hear the chink, chink, chink of tunneling going on somewhere at the end of the narrow passageway, interspersed with the occasional wailing and gnashing of teeth from some newbie in his holding cell; but other than that, there was little chance of anyone stumbling upon two renegades emerging out of the ether like developing images in a photographer’s darkroom.
Wiggling his snout, he grimaced at the putrefaction worming up his nostrils. Roasted peanuts had been taken off the menu five minutes ago. Gut-turning, throat-wrenching horseshit had been slopped up for mains, and then dessert. Goddamn stench was probably worse now than ever before – probably? definitely – given the delight of roasted peanuts and the nostalgia it had evoked; and if Mr. Goddamn Partridge told him he would get used to it, he might just find himself flattened with a right hook aimed fairly and squarely at his pointy jaw, notwithstanding all he had done to save his furry tail from the secret police in the last half hour or so.
“Hope you’ve got your walking shoes on, Louis,” Frank O’Lynn said. “To be sure, the heat’s still on and we’ve got some serious miles to cover before we’re safe.”
“Why walk? Let’s goddamn Pop.” It wasn’t the effort he was averse to; he just wanted an end to the god-awful stench up his nose.
Frank O’Lynn started back toward Conduit Number 1, ambulating this time, not floating. “No such luck. We have to wait at least a year before we can do it again.” He saw Louis’ frown of disappointment. “An ether-channel has been opened between the blues bar and ourselves,” he said. “No matter where we are, if we try to Pop somewhere else before it closes, we’ll end up back where we were. The peelers have no doubt set up an ambush. It’d be foolish to Pop too soon.”
So that was goddamn it then, Louis sighed, for a year anyhow. They had used their get-out-of-jail-free card and now they had to wait to pass Go on the mega-monopoly board of LeMont International Enterprises before they could use another one. At least he had one thing working in his favor: time went a lot quicker in the After Life. He wouldn’t have to wait too long; it would be like rolling double sixes to get around the board.
They exited the tunnel after the next bend, emerging into the vaulted grayness of Conduit Number 1 several hundred yards from the archway. Nobody had hung around for a chat and a laugh after the lynching – no friendly beers around this backyard BBQ – the archway now just a deserted beacon of white (Fires of Oblivion, Louis, that’s what it is, and it’s the only way in and out of this god-forsaken place). It drew his attention like the alpha-omega logo at the top of The Tower. Unlike the mind-sapping hold of the logo, however, this he found somewhat comforting, the kind of feeling he could remember as a kid eating roasted marshmallows around the fireplace with his grandfather. With one major difference, Louis my pal: if you stuck your claw in that fireplace it would more than give it a sting – it would obliterate it like you’d stuck it in a vat of hydrochloric acid.
“Ironic, isn’t it?” Frank O’Lynn said, following his gaze.
“Huh? What?” Louis said, shaking the image of his clawless paw.
“Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t.” Frank O’Lynn now had a contradictory mix of sadness and mirth across his whiskered face. “Wouldn’t you call that the perfect definition of hell?”
In a previous existence Louis might have disagreed. More like spending the rest of eternity with his wife, he would have said; except now he was beginning to think differently. Good ol’ Lady Di might have had her faults, and God knew he would have had no difficulty in recalling the hundred or so occasions he wanted to strangle, shoot, horse-whip, poison, or behead her over the past forty years, but compared to the eternity of false promises, inbuilt obsolescence, contractual obligations, mind-numbing logos, spying peelers (was it possible to outrun the law for eternity?), Hot Potato scams, no sleep, no sex, no money, 24-hour employment and whatever else the goddamn mega-corporation of LeMont International Enterprises had to offer, then his ex-wife was almost the very picture of heaven.
Good God, Louis, he mused, how did you ever get yourself into such a goddamn mess?
Sighing, he trudged with Frank O’Lynn down Conduit Number 1 in the direction he had last seen Santosa, Tiffany, Flash Freddy and Smiggins disperse to after the unfortunate official had been wiped from the face of existence. The gravity of his predicament was only now beginning to be felt. His first reaction was to deny it: if he didn’t think about the horrors of his eternal future, it wouldn’t be that bad. Denial didn’t last long, though, about the length of time it took to amble past the Chamber of Life, where not so long ago he had witnessed his first, and hopefully last, crucifixion. Where now, if he pricked his pointy ears and listened hard, he could hear the muffled moaning of a thousand lost souls through the doorway: “Why hast thou forsaken me? Why hast thou forsaken me? Why hast thou forsaken me?”
He knew he couldn’t pretend everything smelled of roses when it really stank of goddamn horseshit. He wasn’t an ostrich (Nope, you’re a despicable little weasel, Louis, and don’t you forget it), sticking his head in the ground and convincing himself that if he couldn’t see trouble then trouble couldn’t see him. Leave that attitude for the hippies and no-hopers of the world. He was a man of action, and proud of it. Sitting on his butt in the land of make believe never solved anything. “Are you going to tell me where we’re headed?” he asked. “I’m not one for surprises.”
“To be sure, it’s better left unsaid.” Frank O’Lynn wasn’t in any mood to compromise, Louis could tell. Certainly not the same guinea pig he had met for negotiations in Room 1706. “It’s no certainty the peelers have lost our trail. If they catch us, I don’t want you spilling the beans on the location of one our safe houses. Our most reliable one, too, I might add.”
They had just passed the do
orway to a Chamber of the Senses, evoking memories of the last time he had been here. What a difference a goddamn day (week?) made. Then, with Flash Freddy and Smiggins, he had been bursting the seams of his toga like a sixteen-year-old virgin visiting a downtown brothel. Now he wouldn’t lose any sleep (there’s a joke lurking in there somewhere, Louis) if he never saw inside any of the chambers again. The whole scenario made him shudder. It was… well, goddamn hell.
“To be sure, Louis, you look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Frank O’Lynn said.
The attempt at humor wasn’t funny, not in the mood he was in. Not a goddamn bit. “Is it the tunnel, or what?” he said, hugging his chest. “I could do with some warmth.”
“An after-effect of rematerializing. You’ll get used to it.” Head down, tail straight, Frank O’Lynn showed no signs of slowing down. “On the other hand, if you’re that cold we could always go and warm ourselves back at the Fires of Oblivion.”
Another joke that was about as funny as discovering the only so-called friends he had were trying to scam him. Louis shivered and kept hugging his chest, trying to stop his teeth from chattering. To make matters worse, the bell atop the archway had begun to sound its god-awful call. Even at this distance, probably more than a mile or so away, the screeching warbles squirmed inside his skull like maggots burrowing into the once fleshy part of his brain. He shot his paws to his ears, but the warbling only seemed to echo louder down the tunnel and squeeze between his claws. All around, doors were opening and closing as jackals and rats and weasels hurried to greet the newbie emerging through the archway. Next to him, Frank O’Lynn hadn’t even broken stride. Louis almost begged him to grab his paw and Pop away. Somewhere, anywhere, it was worth the risk of rematerializing back at the club. They could outrun the peelers. Goddamn it, even crucifixion had to be better than this.
Then, just as suddenly as it had started, the bell fell silent. His head was clear and he could hear the excitement building behind him. Sighing with relief, he dropped his paws back to his side, except now he found himself fearing for the newbie and wishing he could do something to help with his transition into the After Life. The shock of the surprised emotion stopped him in his tracks, like he had walked into a glass door he had forgotten was there. It was so foreign, so un-Louis.
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