Dagger Key and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  Mike and Rem Gregory.

  Abi’s friends, the purple sweatshirt non-twins.

  …they’re angels, really…

  You wish you hadn’t stumbled across the webpage; you don’t want conjecture about angels, or any peripheral matter, cluttering up your head and interfering with your ability to make judgments, now the essential circumstance that’s confusing you has been revealed. Though Reiner and Sessions corroborate each other’s story to an extent, the stories have different outcomes. Sessions may have been under pressure to tell you what he did—that could explain his haste in getting rid of you; but his anxiety could be also be chalked up to boredom or, as he indicated, to time considerations. Whatever, the bottom line is clear. Either you’re misinterpreting a series of coincidences, or Abi is serially fucking and crippling clients for purposes unknown, purposes that may involve the complicity of angels and will, if Sessions is to be believed, affect all of mankind.

  After interviewing everyone on Abi’s client list, you conclude that if Reiner is correct in his assertion, if she’s crippled six other men aside from him, five of them must be the five who have moved away from Seattle, because—except for Sessions—none of the rest qualify. Accepting Reiner’s thesis that he was Abi’s mistake, those five men plus Sessions plus you equals seven, the same number as Abi’s tattoo…yet according to Sessions, it’s not a backwards seven, it’s Chof, thus the number seven is irrelevant. Maybe it’s both a seven and a Hebrew letter. Maybe an upside-down L, too. You can’t fit all the details into a single theory. Angels, sevens and Hebrew letters, time, empty aquariums, Abi transforming men into cripples, the end of the world, etc.—you consider the possibility that one or more of the details may be extraneous, and if you removed it from the mix, the rest would cohere. That’s the crux of your problem. Your witnesses are unreliable. Reiner’s vituperation and Sessions’s nervous evangelism equally nourish your capacity for doubt and serve to cast everything you yourself have witnessed in a shaky light. You can’t tell how much to keep of what they’ve said and how much to throw away. Confronting Abi won’t provide an answer. She’ll only dissemble, or she’ll speak the truth and you’ll mistake it for dissembling.

  You finally come down with whatever it is you’ve been coming down with and are dog-sick for two weeks, debilitated for several days thereafter. Abi nurses you through the illness, a consolation for which you’re slavishly grateful, but your gratitude is tempered by the dreams that accompany your fever. In their basic architecture, they’re similar to the dream you had about your son, the fish—you’re crippled, bedridden, but instead of occupying an apartment, you’re in Abi’s house. From those fundamentals, the dreams diverge wildly in character and have different endings, some ordinary, some dire, some ecstatic, some perplexing. Especially memorable is a dream in which Abi proves to be a mental patient escaped from an asylum in the future, and has come back to the twenty-first century to save the planet, but bungles the job. In one, she assumes the role of an alien, a member of an invasion force bent on destroying the environment; in another, she’s a sexual demoness, a spirit named Lilith devoted to torturing young men; in another yet, she’s a Gaian incarnation with noble intentions and extraordinary powers. In the remaining two dreams (there are six in all, seven if you count the one with the fish) she’s the Abi with whom you’re familiar, a human female. In the first of these, she makes your life hellish with her psychotic fits, eventually setting fire to the house and incinerating you both; in the second, she nurses you back to health, you walk again, and the two of you embark upon a life of accomplishment and good works.

  The dreams are exceptionally vivid and too organized to be typical expressions of your subconscious, but you don’t concern yourself with them until they begin showing up in rerun, variants of each repeating night after night (except for the nightmare about the fish, which never resurfaces). The most significant variant elements are the endings: the dream about the time traveler, for instance, ended badly the first time, but ends well in rerun. The aquarium, Rem and Mike, and other facets of your life with Abi figure in all of them to one degree or another. You wonder if Abi’s responsible for the dreams, if she’s gotten into your head that deeply. But then you imagine that you may be on the wrong track altogether. Suppose you and she are at the center of a cosmic hiccup, an eddy in time, a branch poking up from the surface, disordering the flow, that must be cleared before the temporal stream can resume its customary race? The way the dreams are circulating in your head lends a physical resonance to this idea and you have the sense that you’ve given up your destiny to a game of musical chairs; when the music stops, you’ll be stuck with one of six possibilities. In essence, if not in actuality, you’ll wind up with a well-intended madwoman from the future, an ordinary psychotic, a seeker after truth, an alien, a sexual predator, or a goddess. It’s ridiculous, you think. Yet each of these roles signifies a color you have assigned to Abi’s character at some point or another, and you can’t avoid the feeling that one of your dreams will come true.

  You understand that you should put some distance between yourself and Abi, that the relationship has become entirely too unrealistic—in your head, anyway—and you should tell her that you need some time apart; but the thing is, aside from the fact that you love her, this has all come to seem normal, this world of mystic possibility, of dreams and portents, of secrets and Tantric orgasm. You’re dizzy with it, yet you don’t mind being dizzy, you’ve come to enjoy the spins, the drama, the meta-fictional weirdness. As is the case with Abi’s food, you’ve adapted to her ways and you don’t believe you can function without them. It could be simply that you’ve gone too far—or are too far gone—to jump ship. You’re in a canoe going over a falls, right at the edge, and it makes no sense to start swimming now.

  The day after Christmas, 2004. You wake early, before first light and, leaving a note for Abi, who’s still asleep, you go for a walk. You intend it to be a short walk, but the day dawns clear and crisp, a rare sun break in the gloom of winter, and you keep on walking until you reach the U District. Around 8:30, you’re idling along the Ave, browsing store windows, and there’s hardly any traffic, pedestrian or otherwise, but suddenly there’s Reiner, recognizable by his cane, his crookedness, standing on the opposite side of the street about a half block away. In reflex, you start down a side street, but decide that this would be a good time to deal with him, with nobody about. As you draw abreast of him, he stares at you grimly, but doesn’t speak or try to approach. Though easier to live with than his curses, his silent regard is disconcerting, and you suspect that he sees some new crookedness in you that has made you not worth hassling.

  You call Abi, but she’s not up or not answering; you step into a chapati place, recently opened, and order the Mandalay Combo, watch patches of ice melting on the asphalt outside. Once you’ve eaten, you call Abi again—she’s still not answering—and head home, keeping to the sunny side of the street. By the time you reach the house, it’s gotten cloudy and colder. You hear the TV muttering in the bedroom as you enter. Abi’s sitting in the chair by the window, still wearing her robe, watching CNN. “I tried to call,” you say, and fling yourself down onto the bed. On the screen, in a tropical setting, people are weeping, being consoled, digging into a wreckage of palm litter and concrete. You ask what happened and Abi says it was a tsunami.

  “A tidal wave?”

  “Yes.”

  She makes it clear that she’s in no mood to talk. The screen shows a replay of the wave, caught on tourist video, striking a Thai resort; then a pulsing red dot in the Indian Ocean with little cartoon waves radiating away from it to strike the coasts of Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Indonesia. The death toll, it’s estimated, may rise into the hundreds of thousands. A commercial for L’Oreal intercuts the news and you try once again to talk with Abi, but she flounces out of the room, goes to stand by the kitchen sink, staring out the window into the back yard. Her shields are up, maximum power, and she’s sealed inside her envelope of
intimacy-rejecting force. Though you follow her, you don’t say a word. You sit at the kitchen table and wait for her to speak.

  “I knew this would happen,” she says without turning from the window.

  With anyone else, you would offer comforting platitudes, but she takes these natural disasters personally; platitudes would only provoke her.

  “I didn’t know it would be today.” Her voice catches. “Over the holidays…yeah. But I didn’t expect it today.”

  You stretch out your legs, enlace your hands behind your head.

  “Aren’t you going to say anything?” She whirls on you, her face full of strain, spoiling for a fight, needing to vent the frustration and pain she feels. You no longer doubt that she feels it. She has this general empathy, this overweening concern for the species, though she seems to lack empathy in the specific; you remain dubious as to its authenticity, thinking that she may be like a Method actress, submerged in her role.

  “What can I say? This is so huge, you can’t feel it. Maybe you can, but it’s tough for me. I walk in and see a little red dot on the TV and cartoony wave symbols striking map countries. It might as well be a hundred thousand cartoon people are dead.” You shake your head, as if sadly bewildered. “I think there’s something that protects most people from feeling so much death. A basic indifference that kicks in when it’s needed. You don’t seem to have that protection.”

  Practice makes perfect. Whether or not it’s bullshit, you’ve said exactly the right thing; perhaps you even halfway believe it. Mollified, she sits beside you and caresses your arm. “I’m sorry,” she says. “You know how I get.”

  You shrug. “It’s okay.”

  She draws circles on your arm with a finger. “I have to start making things ready.”

  “Things?”

  “Me, mostly. I have to prepare myself.”

  You’ve got a feeling of prickly numbness in your left foot, sciatic damage from the old car accident, and you react to this with a noise that, it appears, she assumes to be a sign of disapproval.

  Exasperated, she says, “Do you remember the conversation we had months ago? I told you I wanted you to accept that I knew some things you didn’t?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I knew this would happen in late two-thousand-and-four. I didn’t know what form it would take, but I knew where, more-or-less, and I knew it would involve water. In two-thousand-and-eight there’ll be a second cataclysmic event. Much worse than this. In Latin America, I think. It’ll involve the earth. Maybe a quake…I’m not sure. From that point on, there’ll be a string of disasters, all coming close together. In two-thousand-twelve…it ends.”

  “The disasters end?”

  “Everything ends. I can’t explain it. I could make up a story that would present an explanation, but no matter how hard I tried to be truthful, it would be so far off the mark, it might as well be a lie. I could tell you I’ve seen it happen, but how I’ve seen it, it’s too diffuse to explain. What you said about me not being protected like most people? That’s more accurate than you know. I’ve exposed myself to a force that…” She clicks her teeth in frustration. “If I could explain it to anyone, I’d explain it to everyone. All I can do at this point is try to remedy it.”

  “This remedy,” you say, recalling Sessions and his books. “Does it have anything to do with time?”

  “Yes, partly. And the Tantra…and other things.” She gives you a sharp look. “How did you know?”

  You’re tempted to lie, but can’t come up with one that would be persuasive. “I talked to Nathan Sessions.”

  “Nathan? How did you…?” She breaks off. “You looked at my client list.”

  “I needed to know what was going on. You wouldn’t tell me, so…yeah.”

  “What did Nathan tell you?”

  You’re astounded that she’s not furious. You report the conversation, as best you can recall it.

  “I should have trusted you,” she says. “If I had, you might not know much more, but you’d be more grounded in the ritual.”

  “Us having sex, you mean? That’s part of it?”

  “An important part. Your body’s the launching pad that makes everything I’m going to do possible.”

  You don’t particularly like being characterized as a launching pad, but you let it pass. “Then do I have to prepare, too?”

  “I’m going to fix a special tea that’ll help you be more receptive.”

  “It’ll get me in the mood, huh?”

  She smiles at your joke, takes a pause, and then says, “You’re worried about a mistake, but I won’t make one. I won’t hurt you.”

  “You’ve made mistakes before?”

  “Things haven’t always gone the way I wanted them to, but I didn’t know as much as I do now. You’ll be safe, I promise.” She worries her lower lip. “I can’t walk you through this. There’s too much for you to learn and I don’t have time to teach you. What I need now is for you to trust me.”

  “Okay, but…”

  She sits up straight, hands in her lap, face neutral, her pre-annoyance pose. “What?”

  “I still don’t get why you can’t explain it better.”

  “I don’t know what more to tell you. I’ve given you the basics. I could give you some specifics, but without any context they’d be meaningless. If I told you there’s a power out there that hates mankind, that derives pleasure from tormenting and torturing us, deceiving us, fooling us so completely that millions, maybe billions of people worship it, and now it’s tired of us and it’s getting ready to close the show…would that help?”

  “It sounds like you’re talking about God.”

  “It’s got lots of names. That’s one of them, for sure. Legion’s another. But what’s that tell you?”

  “You’re saying God, the creator-of-the-universe God, he made all this just so he could have someone to screw with?”

  “I don’t pretend to understand its motives, and that’s probably an oversimplification, but that’s how it seems. If you look at the world, anyone rational would conclude that God’s the ultimate villain. Cruel and uncaring. Vicious, whimsical. Trouble is, God’s got this great PR department. Anytime anyone jumps up and says that, thousands of idiots start preaching about you’ve got to have faith, mysterious ways, his master plan, all that crap. You’ve got to trust in God, they say. So what if he sponsors rape, usury, genocide, cancer? You can’t see his real intentions, they say. You can’t know him. You just have to trust him. What I’m saying is this. You can know God, you can learn to see him, to detect his hand in things. And once you do, you discover that your original impression of indifference and cruelty, that was the correct one. And once you reach that point, you begin to be able to understand how to thwart him.” Abi rests her hand atop yours. “Does that help?”

  You think it has helped, but now that she’s stopped talking, now that her words have become merely words in your head, without her conviction to back them up, they seem generic, lacking solid foundation.

  “The disasters,” you say. “You’re going to stop them? Just you?”

  “My friends and I. It’s a coordinated action. We’ve been preparing for this a long time.”

  “Mike and Rem?”

  “Among others.”

  Sleet begins falling, sounding like a series of little slaps against the tarpaper roof, slimy drops oozing down the panes like the thick crystalline blood of some magical creature—a translucent angel, a hazy gray gargoyle—who’s been crouched up there for years. Abi studies the tattoo on the back of her hand, waiting for you to say something, but not pressuring you—it’s a conversational habit the two of you have developed, these bursts of dialogue that border on argument, followed by silences during which an accord is reached. The room seems colder and smaller than when you entered, as if it’s settled around you, revealed its mystical drab, the secret order of second-hand refrigerators and chipped coffee cups; the air is aswarm with tickings and small hums, and out in the wild world
, the horn of a Chevy Suburban or a Volvo, three quick blasts, gives voice to urgency or impatience. You have a feeling of great sobriety, the sense of an enclosing moment.

  “I trust you,” you say.

  For the next seven days, the house reeks of bitter incense and herbal candles that Abi’s had custom made—tall candles placed at the four corners of your bed, sallow in hue, with dark thready stuff embedded in the wax. The overall scent reminds you of a Paris outdoor market (which you visited one undergrad summer), but damper and more cloying. Abi speaks rarely, but you gather she’s purifying herself for a ritual that must be performed soon. She sits naked on the bed, meditating for hours, and when she’s not in bed, she’s bent over the kitchen table, scribbling symbols on scraps of paper, which she will burn later in the special candles, as if she’s writing cheat sheets for a supernatural exam; or she’s taking baths in hot water so dense with herbs, a greenish brown matte is left in the tub after it drains. Twice a day, she asks you to fuck her Yab-Yum style, with you sitting in as close to a Lotus position as you can manage and her facing you, astride you, scarcely moving. During these encounters, her eyes roll back, the whites visible beneath half-lowered lids, and at such moments you appreciate the strangeness of her sexuality, its eerie mix of the sublime and the sensual; but you mainly appreciate her power. It’s like you’ve embraced a dynamo. She throbs and shivers, undergoes surges of heat and tremor. Even after you’ve disengaged, you feel her energies coursing around you.

  You no longer doubt that she has the power to cripple you (okay, maybe there’s a little doubt), and while you can’t quite wrap your head around the whys and wherefores, how a union of crippled men and friendly, kicked-out-of-the-club angels and Tantric witches is going to be of much help to the world in its hour of need, you’ve gone a ways toward conceding that she and her pals might have the power to avert a planetary disaster, or at least to minimize it. The issue of trust…well, you understand that trust isn’t really at issue. You’ve been drawn into unnavigable waters, committed yourself to Abi’s deep, and you have no choice except to let her steer. If it eventuates that you’ve opened yourself to a particularly vile form of torment, if Abi turns out to be a psychotic, or the embodiment of a demoness, or a more ordinary crippler of men, a deluded Goth chick who’s wrong about everything, you’ll have to deal with that. And you will. You’ll find a way. You won’t be anybody’s chump. With that settled in your mind, you give up your pursuit of answers and live as happily as you can in the green house—it seems to have gone green from the fresh charge of her vitality, so much so that you half-expect the furniture to put forth sprigs of leaves and blossoms—and assist Abi by fielding her phone calls.