Dagger Key and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  Her brow furrowed, expressing a transparently insincere degree of concern. “I’m working very hard in therapy. I’m sure I’ll have a breakthrough soon.” She brightened. “But I do have something to tell you. Whether you perceive it as an encouragement…that’s entirely up to you.”

  I signaled that she should continue.

  “Joan Gwynne, as you recall, came to embody the soul of Villon’s lost love, Martha Laurens. Carl was Tacque Thibault. John Wooten…Guillaume du Villon. But have you ever asked yourself who embodies the soul of Amorise LeDore, and why, of all those people gathered in the Martinique to celebrate the inception of the Sublime Act, she is the only one with whom you have no apparent previous connection?”

  “Is that important?”

  “Everything is important, David.” A note of venom crept into her voice. “Surely as a craftsman, a devisor of murderous machines, you realize the importance of details?”

  “Very well,” I said. “Who are you?”

  “Let us suppose that this woman, the woman whom you know as Amorise LeDore, is also named Allison Villanueva. And that her brother Erik and her sister-in-law Carmen were murdered by one of your security devices.” She gave these last two words a loathing emphasis. “Let us further suppose that in her grief Allison came to recognize that if the courts would not punish you, she must seek her own vengeance, and after the lawsuit against you was dismissed, she traveled from her home in Merida to do that very thing.”

  Astonished, I jumped to my feet and the guard stationed behind Amorise gestured at me with his baton. I sat back down. “What are you telling me!”

  “What I’m telling you,” she went on, “is what I am telling you. Make of it what you will.” She reached into her purse and withdrew the book I had taken from her locker at Emerald Street Expansions. “Novallis. Did you notice, David, that by rearranging the letters you can also spell out the name Allison V? It’s not a difficult chore to forge an antique, and Allison may have taken pains to do so. Or she may not. Did you verify the book’s age?”

  “No,” I said in a tight voice. “I did not.”

  “Well, if you had, you might have discovered that the book, if a forgery, is a very good forgery. I doubt any expert would claim that it is inauthentic. Be that as it may…” She restored the book to her purse.

  “I don’t believe you!”

  “What is it you don’t believe? That I’m Allison, or that I’m Amorise? Perhaps both are true. That would suit the subtle character of the Sublime Act, would it not? The subjects must be suitable, and Allison is perfect for Amorise. But then, too, Amorise is precisely what Allison needed.”

  “You fucking witch!” I said. “Don’t try to con me!”

  “Why not, Francois? You’re a natural-born mark.”

  “I know who you are…and I know who I am.”

  “Let’s examine who you are,” said Amorise. “I must confess I’ve deceived you to an extent. We did do a little something to you at Emerald Street.”

  “That’s crap!” I said. “The woman there…the blonde. She told me the machine didn’t work. The leads were burned out.”

  “Jane Eisley. She’s a friend. Actually, you know her, too. You dated her sister at Stanford. There was some slight unpleasantness involved. A pregnancy, I believe. An abortion, a broken heart. And a very long time ago, you may have known her as Fat Margot, a Parisian prostitute.”

  I was at a loss, capable only of staring at her.

  “We didn’t have to do much,” she said. “It’s as I told you the other night, you were perfect for Francois. Well…almost perfect. I needed you to fall in love with Joan, so we tweaked your emotional depth a bit. The rest of it…the anger, the violence, the disdain. You supplied all that. But love was needed to make you fully inhabit those qualities, to bring them to flower.” She fixed me with her disturbing green eyes. “Do you understand me, David? I wove the web, but you flew into it with passion, abandon, arrogance. All those qualities you thought you lacked and wanted to explore. From the moment we met, you surrendered yourself to me. You desired what I have given you…and what I have given you is yourself.”

  “What do you want?” I pressed my palms hard against the plastic barrier, hoping for a miraculous collapse that would allow my hands to close about her throat.

  “No more than what I told you at the club. I want you to enact the laws of your nature. So far you’re doing a splendid job.” She settled back in her chair, folded her arms and regarded me coolly. “I’d like you to consider the possibilities. On the one hand, it’s possible that this is no more than an ornate Latina cruelty. That Allison Villanueva has manipulated you through completely ordinary means in order to avenge her brother and her sister-in-law. That utilizing your suggestibility, your gullibility, your penchant for the macabre and your underused yet nonetheless potent imagination, she has persuaded you that a witch has come from the fifteenth century to implant the soul of Francois Villon into your body for some arcane purpose—something she may have done many times before. And now she’s telling you that the entire scenario may be a fraud. That would be the logical conclusion…at least if we are to accept the logic of the age. On the other hand, it’s conceivable that the story of the witch is true. Or, a third possibility, both stories are true. This speaks to the beautiful symmetry of the Sublime Act. It begins with a multitude of options, but eventually reduces those choices to three. Ultimately those three become indistinguishable.”

  It took all my strength to restrain anger—I wanted to yell at her, to revile her; but if I did the guards would return me to my cell, and I wanted to stay, to hear everything she had to say.

  “Next,” she said, “consider the character of the Sublime Act. I believe Guillaume du Villon told you that it was ‘to ensure our continuance.’ Were those not his words?”

  I nodded.

  “For the sake of argument, let’s say that our continuation is simply the mechanism by which the Sublime Act is effected. Its character may well be something other than mere immortality. Why would a woman, a witch, wish to drag the same ninety-three souls forward in time, skipping like a stone across the centuries, causing the same event to be re-enacted over and over? What purpose could this painful form of immortality serve…if not vengeance? Do you see the correspondence, David? Why the subjects must be suitable? A crime, a terrible crime committed millennia ago, is redressed endlessly by conforming to a contemporary crime and thus achieves the most terrible of vengeances. The kind that never ends. An eternity of punishment. A hell that the object of vengeance creates for himself by enacting the laws of his nature. The Sublime Act. Sublime because the witch achieves sublimity through her creation. She is an artist, and vengeance is the canvas upon which she paints variations on a theme.”

  “What crime,” I asked shakily, “could merit such a punishment?”

  “Perhaps I’ve already told you. Perhaps someday I will tell you. Perhaps I’ll never tell you. So many questions, David. Were some or all of your acquaintances in the Martinique acting, or were they, like you, manipulated by science or witchery or both? Is Joan Martha, and will you ever have her again? Or is she just another person whom you have wronged and who hates you with sufficient passion to be my complicitor? Could she have a connection to that ancient and possibly fraudulent crime? You will never answer any of these questions…unless you create the Text. Then you may discover the truth, or you may not. The thing you must accept is that whoever I am—Amorise or Allison or both—I own you. I control you. I may testify in such a way that you will be set free, but I will still control you. I’ll continue to cause you pain. I’ve surrounded you with a circumstance you cannot escape. You may come to think that you can injure me, but you can’t. My wealth and power insulate me. I swear you will never be happy in this life or any other. Not until I decide enough is enough. If, that is, I ever do.”

  She closed her purse and stood looking down at me. “There is one way out. But to take it you must go contrary to your nature. You can d
isobey me and not create the Text. Then I’ll testify that you murdered Carl McQuiddy, and you will die. That’s your choice, the only one I offer. To die now, or to create the Text and die after long years of suffering. What will you do, David…Francois? You can’t believe a thing I’ve told you, and yet you cannot disbelieve me. The stuff of your being has been transmuted from confidence to doubt. Logic is no longer a tool that will work for you.”

  “I wouldn’t be here,” I said, “if I hadn’t killed McQuiddy. It was an accident. You couldn’t have predicted it.”

  “You always kill, Francois,” she said. “A priest, a lawyer…Are not lawyers the true priests of our time? You’re drawn to detest such authority as they represent. If you hadn’t attacked McQuiddy, he would have attacked you. I own him as well.” She let out a trickle of laughter, a sound of sly delight. “So many questions. And the answers are all so insubstantial. What will you do?”

  She walked away and my anger faded, as if my soul had been kindled brightly by her presence, and now, deprived of her torments, I had sunk back into a less vital state of being. At the door she turned and looked at me, and for an instant it seemed I was gazing through her eyes at a man diminished by harsh light and plastic into a kind of shabby exhibit. Then she was gone, leaving me at the bottom of the world. I perceived my life to be a tunnel with a round opening at the far end lit like a glowing zero.

  I let the guard lead me back to my cell. For a long time I sat puzzling over the conversation. A hundred plans occurred to me, a hundred clever outcomes, but each one foundered and was dissolved in the nets of Amorise’s gauzy logic. Eventually a buzzer sounded, announcing lock-down. The gates of the cells slammed shut, the lights dimmed. Everything inside me seemed to dim. A man on the tier above began to sing, and someone threatened him with death unless he shut up. This initiated a chorus of shouted curses, screams, howls of pain. They seemed orchestrated into a perverse and chaotic opera, a terrible beauty, and I recalled a line from “The Testament” that read: “…only in horrid noises are there melodies…” I wondered what Villon had been thinking when he reached this point in the Act, what kind of man he had been before meeting Amorise. If, indeed, any of that had happened. For an instant, I felt a powerful assurance that the Act was a fraud, a mere device in the intricate design of Allison Villanueva’s vengeance; but then this sense of assurance dissolved in a flurry of doubt. It would never be clear. Only one kind of clarity was available to me now.

  From beneath my pillow I removed the stub of a candle I’d bought from a trustee. I lit it, dripped wax onto the rail of my iron bunk and stood the stub upright in the congealing puddle I had made, and as I did I seemed briefly to see an ancient prison, begrimed stone walls weeping with dampness, a grating of black iron centering a door of age-stained wood, a moldy blanket and straw for bedding. I slipped a writing tablet from beneath my mattress, thin and smelly as an old man’s lust. I opened the tablet and set it upon my knee. It made no difference whether the woman who had done this to me was Allison or Amorise. Either version of reality provided the same sublime motivation. I felt words breaking off from the frozen cliffs of my soul and scattering like ice chips into plainspoken verse, the ironic speech of a failed heart. Then, in the midst of that modern medieval place, with the cries of the damned and the deranged and the condemned raining down about me, I began:

  Villain and victim, both by choice and by chance

  I hereby declare void all previous Testaments

  Legal or otherwise, whether sealed by magistrate

  Locked away in the rusty store of memory

  Or scribbled drunkenly upon a bathroom wall

  Not knowing whether it is I, LeGary, who writes…

  LIMBO

  …limbo, limbo, limbo like me…

  —Traditional

  The first week in September, Detroit started feeling like a bad fit to Shellane. It was as if the city had tightened around him, as if the streets of the drab working-class suburb that had afforded him anonymity for nearly two years had become irritated by the presence of a foreign body in their midst. There was no change he could point to, no sudden rash of hostile stares, no outbreak of snarling dogs, merely a sense that something had turned. A similar feeling had often come over him when he lived back east, and he had learned to recognize it for a portent of trouble; but he wasn’t sure he could trust it now. He suspected it might be a flashback of sorts, a mental spasm produced by boredom and spiritual disquiet. Nevertheless he chose to play it safe, checked into a motel and staked-out his apartment. When he noticed a Lincoln Town Car across the street from the apartment, he trained his binoculars on it. In the driver’s seat was a young man with short black hair and a pugilist’s flattened nose. Beside him sat an enormous, sour-looking man with bushy gray sideburns and a bald scalp, his face vaguely fishlike. Thick lips and popped eyes. Marty Gerbasi. Shellane had no doubt as to what had brought Gerbasi to Detroit. A half-hour later, after doing some banking, he picked up a green Toyota that had been purchased under a different name and kept parked in a downtown garage for the past twenty-nine months, and drove north toward the Upper Peninsula.

  At forty-six, Shellane was a thick-chested slab of a man with muscular forearms, large hands, and a squarish homely face. His whitish blond hair had gone gray at the temples, and his blue eyes were surprisingly vital by contrast to the seamed country in which they were the only ornament. He customarily dressed in jeans and windbreakers, a wardrobe designed to reinforce the impression that he might be a retired cop or military man—he had learned that this pretense served to keep strangers at bay. His gestures were carefully managed, restrained, all in keeping with his methodical approach to life, and he did not rattle easily. Realizing that assassins had found him in Detroit merely caused him to make an adjustment and set in motion a contingency plan that he had prepared for just such an occasion.

  When he reached the Upper Peninsula, he headed west toward Iron Mountain, intending to catch a ferry across to Canada; but an hour out of Marquette, just past the little town of Champion, he came to a dirt road leading away into an evergreen forest, and a sign that read: Lakeside Cabins—Off-Season Rates. On impulse he swung the Toyota onto the road and went swerving along a winding track between ranks of spruce. The day was sunny and cool, and the lake, an elongated oval of dark mineral blue, reminded Shellane of an antique lapis lazuli brooch that had belonged to his mother. It was surrounded by forested hills and bordered by rocky banks and narrow stretches of brownish-gray sand. Under the cloudless sky, the place generated a soothing stillness. A quarter-mile in from the highway stood a fishing cabin with a screen porch, peeling white paint, a tarpaper roof, and a phone line—it had an air of cozy dilapidation that spoke of evenings around a table with cards and whiskey, children lying awake in bunk beds listening for splashes and the cries of loons. Several other cabins were scattered along the shore, the closest about a hundred yards distant. Shellane walked in the woods, enjoying the crisp, resin-scented air, scuffing the fallen needles, thinking he could stand it there a couple of weeks. It would take that long to set up a new identity. This time he intended to bury himself. Asia, maybe.

  A placard on the cabin door instructed anyone interested in renting to contact Avery Broillard at the Gas ’n Guzzle in Champion. Through a window Shellane saw throw rugs on a stained spruce floor. Wood stove (there was a cord of wood stacked out back); a funky-looking refrigerator speckled with decals; sofa covered with a Mexican blanket. A wooden table and chairs. Bare bones, but it suited both his needs and his notion of comfort.

  The Gas ’n Guzzle proved to be a log cabin with pumps out front and a grocery inside. Hand-lettered signs in the windows declared that fishing licenses were for sale within, also home-baked pies and bait, testifying by their humorous misspellings to a cutesy self-effacing attitude on the part of ownership. The manager, Avery Broillard, was lanky, thirtyish, with shoulder-length black hair and rockabilly sideburns; he had one of those long, faintly dish-shaped Cajun faces with fe
atures so prominent, they seemed caricatures of good looks. He said the cabin had been cleaned, the phone line was functional, and quoted a reasonable weekly rate. When Shellane paid for two weeks, cash in advance, Avery peered at him suspiciously.

  “You prefer plastic?” Shellane asked, hauling out his wallet. “I don’t like using it, but some people won’t deal with cash.”

  “Cash is good.” Avery folded the bills and tucked them in his shirt pocket.

  Shellane grabbed a shopping basket and stocked up on cold cuts, frozen meat and vegetables, soup, bread, cooking and cleaning necessities, and at the last moment, a home-baked apple pie that must have weighed close to four pounds. He promised himself to eat no more than one small slice a day and be faithful with his push-ups.

  “Get these pies made special,” Avery said as he shoveled it into a plastic bag. “They’re real tasty.”

  Shellane smiled politely.

  “Might as well give you one of these here.” Avery handed him a leaflet advertising the fact that the Endless Blue Stars were playing each and every weekend at Roscoe’s Tavern.

  “That’s my band,” Avery said. “Endless Blue Stars.”

  “Rock and roll?”

  “Yeah.” Then, defensively, “We got quite a following around here. You oughta drop in and give a listen. There ain’t a helluva lot else to do.”

  Shellane forked over three twenties and said he would be sure to drop in.

  “If you’re looking to fish,” said Avery, continuing to bag the groceries, “they taking some pike outta the lake. I can show you the good spots.”

  “I’m no fisherman,” Shellane told him. “I came up here to work on a book.”

  “You a writer, huh? Anything I might of read?”

  Shellane resisted an impulse to say something sarcastic. Broillard’s manner, now turned ingratiating, was patently false. There was a sly undertone to every word he spoke, and Shellane had the impression that he considered himself a superior being, that the Gas ’n Guzzle was to his mind a pit stop on the road to world domination, and as a consequence he affected a faux-yokelish manner toward his patrons that failed to mask a fundamental condescension. He had bad luck eyes. Watered-down blue; irises marked by hairline darknesses, like fractures in a glaze.