The Way of Sorrows

by Jon Steele

  She edged to the bed with Harper in her gun sights. She reached down and pulled something from under her pillow. She threw it to Harper and he caught it. He saw the halting script on the cover.

  piratz

  Une histoire drôle de Marc Rochat

  pour Mademoiselle Katherine Taylor

  “He was a brain-injured child in a man’s body. He could barely write his own name. He lived in a world of angels and bells. So let me tell you how it is, Harper, how it really is with the poor kid who wrote that book, with Anne, with everyone. Once upon a time, the cop, you, and all your fucking friends crawled out of the same stinking gutter, and you’ve been fucking us over and calling it ‘free will’ ever since. Everywhere you go people die. Everyone I love dies.”

  She’d talked long enough for Harper to get a read on the manner of her thinking. Katherine Taylor’s mind was broken by an unspoken grief. Just then a faint rumble echoed in the tunnels. No matter how much time was getting squashed, this bloody world within a world could only be a few ticks from destruction.

  “Where is Max?” Harper said.

  Her jaw clenched tight and she did not speak.

  Push her.

  “Is Max dead?”

  Rage flashed in her eyes. She rushed at Harper, set the barrel of her gun to the side of his head.

  “Shut up! You do not get to say his name. No one gets to say his name. Just shut up about my son. He was never my son, he was always one of them. He belongs to them. I was only the hooker who delivered him.”

  He could grab her gun and put her under now . . . No, keep her awake till she spills the intel on Max. He waited for her to blink. When she did, she lost focus long enough for Harper to scan her eyes. He found phantom images in the axons of her optic nerves, images she was hiding from her consciousness. As he uploaded them into his own eyes, he sensed her body relax, as if a great burden had been lifted from her. He had her now. He let the images roll in his own eyes and he forced Katherine Taylor’s broken mind to see them.

  “This is how it happened. Officer Jannsen was rushing you down the stairs. Two guards at the top of the stairwell were holding off the killers, but they ran out of ammunition. Then you heard them scream as the killers went at them with knives. Officer Jannsen got you into the bunker and started to close the door. You begged her to get in with you and Max, but she didn’t. You heard the killers charging down the stairs. Jannsen told you she loved you, forced the door closed on you. The hydraulic bolts slammed into their sockets. It was quiet. Max was in shock. You hit him with an injector jet from the med kit. You were holding him, comforting him. For a moment, you hoped he was safe. Then the killers started to break in.”

  Harper felt the barrel of the gun shake against his head.

  “You put the gun to the side of your son’s head, same as you’re doing to me just now. You were going to kill him, but you hesitated. That’s when the killers cracked open the steel door and seeped in. You panicked, pointed the gun at them as they took human form, and fired. The shot passed through them and into the stairwell. They got to you, tore your son from your arms. You reached for him. You saw his face as they carried him away. He was looking at you, he was afraid. Then one of the killers jabbed you with a needle and you were paralyzed. The last thing you remember is your son screaming ‘Maman.’ It all happened so fast, you were left with your arm as it was when you last held him. You hate yourself for panicking, for not killing him. You can’t bear to imagine what’s happened to him. You can’t even say his name. If you do, you’ll sink.”

  He scanned her unfocused eyes. He was deep within her consciousness.

  “Madame Taylor, listen to the sound of my voice. Max is still alive. Do you hear me? Max is still alive.”

  As if being hit with a live wire, she bolted a meter from him, then adjusted her targeting at the kill spot between Harper’s eyes.

  “You’re right, you’re not the same as the bad guys. The bad guys only raped my body, you just raped what was left, you filthy piece of shit.”

  The concrete room shook and the sound of cracking thunder rumbled through the outer tunnels. She quickly glanced to the stairwell; looking back she saw the palm of Harper’s right hand in her eyeline. She froze and held her breath, waited for her soul to be guided. He almost spoke the words of the spell to put her under, but her desperate voice replayed in his head: He belongs to them. I was only the hooker who delivered him. Then he flashed the vestibule of Lausanne Cathedral. His first trip to the place on Inspector Gobet’s orders years ago, before he was awakened, even. When the heavy wooden doors closed behind him it was quiet, but he had the feeling he wasn’t alone. He looked up. Above the high arch that opened to the nave there was a statue of the Virgin Mary. She was enthroned under a sky of faded stars painted on the stone ceiling. Her head and hands had been sawed off. Long ago, from the look of it. The stub of her neck suggested she was looking at him anyway, and the articulation of the arms suggested she’d been holding a child at her breast. He blinked back to nowtimes, saw Katherine Taylor standing statuelike and still.

  And the stone was made flesh, he thought.

  He closed his palm into a fist, slid both his hands into the pockets of his coat.

  “Max isn’t one of them,” he said.

  She’d been primed for guidance and she would remain still until her soul realized it had to find its own way and reconnect to her consciousness. If the plastic egg timer in his pocket was working, it’d clock the wait at 3.2 seconds. Coming to, she snapped the gun at him.

  “What did you say?”

  “Max isn’t one of them. He doesn’t belong to them.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The ones who raped you in Lausanne didn’t make you pregnant.”

  “They drugged me and raped me for days. I woke up in a semen-soaked bed.”

  “I know what they did to you, but that’s not how you fell pregnant.”

  She shook her head, afraid to believe him. “How then? Who did it?” she said.

  “No one. Max is your son and your son alone.”

  “What?”

  “When I waved my hand in front of your eyes years ago at the cathedral, the way you were talking about. The three of us were there, you, me, the lad with the lantern. Do you remember why I did it?”

  He could see her mind working.

  “Yeah, I had a dream.”

  “That’s right. You said you dreamed about a man on the altar. You said he walked you around the altar, stood you in the light passing through the cathedral rose in the south transept wall. He turned your palms to the light and told you he was—”

  “Protecting the life within me.”

  “That’s right.”

  She became anxious. “It was a dream, Harper. And the man of my dreams was a fucking bum.”

  “The bum’s name is Monsieur Gabriel. He’s one of us.”

  “Stop it.”

  “Listen, there’s a prophecy about a child conceived of light, born into the world to guide the creation through the next stage of evolution.”

  “Stop it, I said.”

  “Max is that child.”

  “Fuck off!” She put the gun to her own head. Harper saw the wet of tears forming in her eyes. “No more fairy tales, no more lies, Harper. Find yourself another whore to play with.”

  She took a breath, closed her eyes. Harper reached for her.

  “Don’t!”

  Then a booming voice down the stairwell. “Hey, anyone down there lose a cat?”

  Katherine wobbled and Harper charged. He ripped the gun from her hand. He made the move before she could open her eyes—not quite as fast as a speeding bullet, but fast enough. And it left Katherine Taylor disoriented. She stumbled, fell back onto the camp bed, and opened her eyes. Now heavy steps down the stairs.

  “What is happening?” Katherine said.

  “Not sure, actually.”

  As he said it, the ash-covered roadie appeared at the bunker’s entrance with a fa
t, ash-covered cat dangling from his hand. The animal was disoriented and submissive. Its legs dangled in the air like limp spaghetti. Harper thought the beast looked familiar.

  Mew.

  “Monsieur Booty?” Katherine said with a disbelieving voice.

  And as she pronounced the cat’s name, Harper saw the beast on his timeline. In the belfry during the cathedral job. It was the lad’s cat. More of those wonders never ceasing, Harper thought.

  Mew.

  Tears formed in Katherine’s eyes. “Oh my God.”

  Krinkle lowered the cat to the floor. It ran to Katherine and jumped on her lap. At first, she was afraid to touch it.

  “It can’t be . . . How?”

  The cat snuggled close to her.

  “Jesus, Boo, it is you. You’re alive.”

  Mew.

  She cradled her arms around the beast. “They took Max, Monsieur Booty. They took him away.”

  Mew.

  The cat purred, and Katherine lowered her head. She took a sharp breath, then trembled and wept as if holding the only living thing left to her. Harper looked at Krinkle. The roadie had his index finger to his lips: Quiet, brother. Harper knew what was coming. No. But Krinkle had already shifted space and was standing behind Katherine Taylor; he had an injector jet at the back of her neck.

  Click.

  She did not react for a moment, then slowly, she raised her face. Harper saw a heavy dose of comfort flood through her eyes. She blinked, saw Harper. He scanned her, got a read. It was as if a sword had been embedded in her heart and there wasn’t enough comfort potion in the world to ease her suffering. He walked to her, knelt before her on one knee.

  “Max is alive, Madame Taylor. Do you hear me? Max is alive.”

  She looked at him as if trying to comprehend his presence. “Harper?”

  Down the stairs came a squad of Swiss Guard in tactical gear; they stopped at the entrance of the bunker. Krinkle waved them in with a whisper. “Get her to the bus. We’re out of here, pronto.”

  The guards surrounded Katherine Taylor and wrapped her in a shock blanket.

  “You’re safe now, Madame Taylor. Come with us.”

  “But what about Monsieur Booty?” she said.

  “Bring the cat with you, madame.”

  She rose from the bed without resistance with the cat in her arms, and the Swiss Guards led her slowly to the stairs. When she disappeared from view, Harper looked at Krinkle.

  “I suppose it was bloody necessary to juice her up. Not like she hasn’t had enough.”

  “I do what I’m told to do.”

  Harper nodded to the stairwell. “How long have you been out there?”

  “Long enough, brother. I was just waiting for the proper moment to announce myself, apparitions being what they are.”

  “Apparitions.”

  Harper walked around the room with the Glock in his hand. A camp bed and crib over here; against the wall was a kitchenette with a small table, one adult chair and one child’s high chair; an open door to a bathroom over there. He looked back at Krinkle.

  “And the lad’s cat? Where did you find it?”

  “We crashed through the time warp, opened the door, and there it was. It mewed, turned around, and led us here. Smart friggin’ cat.”

  “That it is. Why hasn’t the bloody time warp collapsed yet?”

  “Couldn’t say, just yet.”

  “Meaning not until I ask the right question.”

  “That’s generally how a mission debrief works.”

  Harper made the tour around the room again, stopping at the kitchenette to look at the lad’s book on the table. He read aloud the words on the cover.

  “Piratz, a funny story by Marc Rochat for Mademoiselle Katherine Taylor.”

  There was a flash of light in his eyes and he saw himself with the lad. On the roof of the belfry as evening fell on the last day of the lad’s life. He pulled the book from his black coat and showed it to Harper. It was full of drawings about a caterpillar and little men in paper hats and an evil wizard and a beautiful princess and a fat gray cat.

  “I made this story for her when I thought she was an angel,” the lad said.

  “It’s swell,” Harper said to him.

  “Merci.”

  Looking at the lad’s face, Harper could tell something bothered him. “What is it, mate?”

  “I know the truth about her now and don’t know what I should do with the story, monsieur.”

  Harper smiled at him. “I think you should give it to her. I think she’d like it.”

  “C’est vrai?”

  “Yes.”

  The lad pulled a pen from his long black coat and held it to Harper. “I’m not very good at spelling, monsieur. Would you help me write on the cover? I know the words I want to say.”

  Harper blinked to nowtimes.

  He felt something burn in his eyes. He raised the Glock and ejected the bullet from the gun’s firing chamber; it chimed hitting the concrete floor. He dropped the gun on the table; it landed with a thud. He reached in his coat pocket and found the plastic egg timer. He dropped it on the table, too. He picked up the Glock by the barrel, aimed the gun’s butt, and hammered down.

  Riiiinng.

  The timer broke open to reveal a rusting winding mechanism and a tiny bell. It was ten times the size of the thousands of nanometer-sized electrical circuits scattered across the table.

  “Well, well. What do we have here?”

  A few of the circuits landed on top of the lad’s storybook. He brushed them off and grabbed the book. He rolled it up and stuffed it in his mackintosh. He walked to Krinkle.

  “What the fuck is this place?”

  The roadie nodded. At last, you’re asking the right friggin’ question.

  “A dark wood, where the true way is wholly lost,” he said.

  The words popped hot. From the opening line of Dante’s Inferno.

  “That would be a place called Hell,” Harper said.

  “Check.”

  “There’s no such place.”

  Just then the earth quaked and spiderlike cracks opened in the walls. Black mist began to seep in and crawl along the floor. Krinkle looked at Harper.

  “Yeah, that’s what we thought. Turns out we were wrong.”

  TWELVE

  The black train did not stop at Khabarovsk or Chita and passed through those towns unseen. Coming to the Buryatia steppe, the train raced through forests of conifer and larch. The forests were vast, broken only by villages that appeared beyond the windows in ripping flashes.

  In the parlor car Komarovsky was alone, sitting in a Chesterfield armchair of burgundy leather. It was the only chair in the sparsely furnished space of oak-paneled walls. There was a mating bed in the corner. The red silk sheets were disheveled and smelled of sweat. The length and width of the floor was covered with a Fereghan carpet from the Markazi province of Iran. The carpet was unique, hand-crafted for Komarovsky in 1918. The border was indigo with shades of green, woven in series of curvilinear patterns that seemed to move with the motion of the train. The central medallion, set in a red field, was a tightly woven pattern of ivory-colored triangles surrounding a cluster of black interconnected circles, three feet in diameter. Like the carpet’s border, the circles seemed to move with the motion of the train to take different shapes. Now the inner workings of a clock, now the orbits of the spheres, now the flower of life.

  Tinted windows and the single floor lamp near Komarovsky kept luminance levels low in the parlor car. The lamp glowed at 1.0 lux to create a sensation of drifting through moonlight. In this place Komarovsky could remove the dark glasses from his silver-colored eyes.

  On the nearby side table was a tombac samovar and a porcelain tea set with polychrome paintings over glaze. The samovar had been handwrought by the gunmaker Nikolay Mailokov in 1837 and presented as a gift to Tsarevich Alexander II of Russia. As emperor, young Alexander started off well: ethnically cleansing the Circassian people from the North C
aucasus and decreeing Jews had no place in Russian cities. He later developed absurd notions of himself as “liberator of the serfs.” But he was easily disposed of by a bomb in 1881 while riding in his sleigh. A charming scene: legs blown off, stomach torn open, his face disfigured beyond recognition. The tea set had been commissioned in 1883 as part of the Raphael Service by Alexander III, ridiculously dubbed “the peacemaker.” In truth his Russian nationalism, carefully inspired by religious fanatics within the Orthodox church, was most helpful in setting the stage for the slaughter of sixteen million souls in the Great War with Germany. The Romanovs were such an amusing family; so amenable to suggestion. The tea set was a favorite of Komarovsky’s. The delicate grisaille painting of Cupid presenting a garland to Venus, goddess of love, delighted him. A wisp of steam rose from Cupid’s cup and found its way to Komarovsky’s nose. It invited him to taste the somniferous potion again.

  He took the cup and sipped.

  It tasted bitter.

  He closed his eyes and dreamed.

  “Yes, my goddess, come to me.”

  She approaches; he smells the scent of her oiled skin. She sinks to her knees before him, opens his robes, takes his penis into her mouth. Her pupils dilate as the potions in her blood release a rush of rapture. She is bewitched and does not turn her eyes from him. She feeds on his pleasure as if it is the source of her own. He touches her long blond hair.

  “My goddess, my goddess.”

  A chime sounded.

  Komarovsky opened his eyes and returned Cupid’s cup to its saucer. He picked up his dark glasses and set them over his eyes.

  “Adjust to one hundred lux.”

  Light levels in the car increased to the dullish glow of an overcast day. Komarovsky pressed a button on the side table. The door opened and in came a beautiful man wearing a cutaway coat and pinstripe trousers; the man closed the door gently. Komarovsky watched him cross the Fereghan Sarouk carpet and stand on the center medallion. The chamberlain bowed and raised his eyes, but he did not dare to look directly at Komarovsky. Instead, he maintained an unfocused gaze at the far wall.

  “Speak to me,” Komarovsky said.