by Gene Wolfe
Only hell was on their side, or at least they thought it was. I had never thought that heaven was on my side, but I told God I could sure use an angel with a flaming sword right about then.
What I got instead was tables with stone tops, or at least tops that felt like stone. I found a couple of those and had just figured out that there was a row of them side by side when my fingers found one that had somebody lying on it. I felt him, and he was not exactly cold, but you probably know what I mean. A kid, I thought, not moving and no clothes on. There should have been a stink, but there was a heavy smell pretty much like roses only not as good as a real rose. Not as good as the rose perfume a girl I used to know wore, either. You could tell it was chemicals formulated to smell like that.
So it was an undertaker’s for real, and I was just wishing that I had found a row of empty caskets instead when I saw a little gleam of light. Not much. Very, very small. Only light just the same. You know I went toward it.
The tough thing was going quietly. I wanted to walk faster, and I had to make myself go slow and step down easy and keep feeling my way with my hands.
It was a door, an old wooden one from the feel of it. It was closed and latched, but it was not tightly fitted enough to keep a little light from getting through here and there. Just a few gleams.
I laid my ear to one that was about the right height, and that was where the voices were coming from. A woman in there was saying, “… and the news would get out.”
The latch squeaked even when I turned the knob slowly. In fact, it squeaked so much I felt certain they had heard it, but when I pulled the door open they were still talking among themselves. The hinges squeaked, too. So, do I go in or stay out?
That one took maybe half a second. It would be dumb to go down there. I had sent the cop to Naala, and she would be here in another ten minutes or so. Probably she would bring the cop with her, and maybe a couple of other operators. So stay upstairs.
By then I had gone down the first couple of steps, and I kept going. Call it pride. I did not want Martya to know that I had been there but had waited for backup. I knew I was being stupid, and cussed myself, and went down anyway.
Every old wooden step creaked. I was being as quiet as I could and keeping to the edge of each step, but they still creaked under my weight and I could not do one damned thing about it.
They saw my feet before I could see them, and by the time I could they were ready. A man I had not noticed in the Golden Eagle and the woman I had followed had guns and had them out and aimed at me. The little guy who had said he was a photographer had a knife. He was holding it to Martya’s throat. I ought to have been watching the whole bunch of them. I know that, but I was not. I was looking at her. Only at her, really, and not paying much attention to the two with guns.
She was naked and tied to a cross, with ropes around her wrists and ankles. Here and there they had stuck skewers into her, long steel pins with metal ornaments at the ends. There was one in each arm, and one through her right leg about halfway between the ankle and the knee. They had gagged her, too, but when she saw me her eyes got big.
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “Help is on the way.” She could not nod or anything. She just stared.
The photographer said, “You struck me.” He made it sound meaner than I could make anything sound.
I said, “Yeah. I think I’m going to do it again.”
He held up his big knife. “This is good for both. If you come nearer, I cut her throat. Nearer still, and I cut yours. You think I cannot? Make the test.”
I gave him my best smile. “Later, maybe. Nice place you got here.”
“It will be the last place for you. This I think.”
“Maybe I’ll come back in fifty, sixty years.” I relaxed and had a look around. There were pictures on the walls, pictures that had been blown way up by an expert. They showed men raping women who looked dead, and naked women giving a little oral sex to dead men. One I remember a lot better than I want to showed this really good-looking brunette. She had stabbed a man’s corpse in the chest, or that was what it looked like, and still had her hand on the hilt of the knife.
“You have a gun.” That was the man who was holding one on me.
I shook my head. “Not me.” I had been trying to keep things casual, and I felt like I had been pulling it off pretty well. There was something about that place that was getting to me just the same. There were a lot of candles, which I do not think I have mentioned yet. Most of them were black, something you do not see often. One of them, burning in front of Martya, was as thick through as a young tree and had four or five wicks. Seeing them, I wondered if they were putting something into the air besides smoke. I was getting depressed, angry, and sad at the same time. Tonight I was going to be tortured to death and it did not seem right. Naala was not going to come, or if she did she would just look at this place from outside and go away.
All that stuff was crowding into my mind, but there was something else, too. It was the feeling that something really, really huge was studying me the way I might study a bug, something I could not see even though it could see me fine. The whole world had cancer, and the thing watching me now was the cancer. It did not make a lot of sense, but that was how I felt.
“You have a gun. Take off your jacket.”
I ignored him and talked to the photographer. “You think you’re going to get away with this and be somebody big and important. You’ll rule the world.”
The woman I had followed said, “We have the secret knowledge. He, I, all of us. You trust in God. Poor fool! The battlefields of all the world are manured with the bodies of those who trusted him.”
“I don’t trust in him,” I told her. “I don’t even trust in myself. But what if he trusts in me?” I was moving toward her as I said it.
“Stop!” That was the photographer. “Stop, or she dies!” He held his knife as he said it like he was about to stick it in Martya’s chest.
The woman’s shot came then, and for a minute I thought she must have shot me and wondered why it did not hurt. It had been so loud I felt deaf, but I heard the boom after it. I did not know what that was, but I dropped to the floor, and I must have drawn my own gun without thinking about it because it was in my hand. There was a little rattle that sounded faint, then another boom and another.
After that, people started screaming. They were trying to run out of that basement, but the stairs were the only way out. I had my gun up to shoot the photographer, but it seemed like he was gone. I ran toward Martya and slipped in blood and fell, but I kept my hold on my gun and did not shoot. That was because my father had taught me to keep my finger off the trigger until I was ready to shoot. It had sunk in, and I might have shot her if it had not. All this happened in a lot less time that it is taking me to tell you about it.
The guy on the stairs, the guy with the shotgun, was yelling at the Unholy Way people. I think he was trying to get them to shut up, but he was not having a lot of luck with that. For maybe ten seconds I felt absolutely certain the photographer was going to stab me; then I saw his knife lying on the floor and grabbed it with my left hand before I straightened up.
When things had quieted down a little, I pulled the skewers out of Martya’s leg and both arms. Then I cut off her gag and cut the ropes. She gasped for breath and just about fell.
“Oh, oh, oh!” and then, “I love you. Oh God, I love you so much!” I was not sure whether she meant God or me, but I figured either way was good. She was hugging me, only not hard because of the holes in her arms.
The guy with the shotgun was Russ Rathaus. Maybe you had figured that one out already, but I had not. I did not know until I saw him. You will want to know why he showed up, and I mean to tell you. But quite a few other things happened before I found out myself.
One was that I took off my shirt and cut strips from it to bandage Martya. Those skewers had been driven all the way through and into the wood of the cross. They were just puncture wounds, but th
ey were bleeding from both ends so I had blood all over my shirt and jacket anyway.
I was about finished when Naala showed up with Aliz and the guy who had been dancing with her and three cops. She sent the one I had talked to back to the station house, and after what seemed like a pretty long time we had a paddy wagon for the prisoners and an ambulance for Martya. I think it was really about an hour and a half, but it seemed like forever. American cops would have latched onto Russ’s shotgun, but Naala told these cops to let him keep it and they did. She told them he was working for the JAKA, which surprised both of us.
22
THE UNDEAD DRAGON
From this point on, there is not a lot of interesting stuff for me to tell you. After quite a bit of waiting around in JAKA headquarters and Naala, Russ, and I shaking hands and fielding tough questions, sometimes together and sometimes separately, we went back to the Golden Eagle. There are no closing laws in that country, so the Eagle (which was what people mostly called it) stayed open just about twenty-four hours a day. Naala said that in the morning they put the empty chairs up on the tables and swept the floor, but there were always at least a few people working there. If you wanted eggs and coffee there would be somebody there to make them for you, or you could go into the kitchen and make them yourself. We were all hungry, so Russ and Naala cooked, with me trying to help out and getting in the way.
Finally we sat down, and that is a meal I will always remember. Hot coffee made just before it was poured, three kinds of sweet rolls that had been warmed in the oven, lots of bacon, and Naala’s eggs poached in wine. I was tired and looked like I had been working all night in a butcher shop, so I should not have been hungry. But I was not only hungry I was practically starved. While I tell you what Russ said, you have to picture me nodding and nodding and chewing and swallowing and spreading butter on rolls, particularly a big fat kind that had nuts on top and jam inside.
“When you found me,” Russ said, “you told me you had gotten Rosalee out.”
I said sure.
“I don’t think I ought to use the name of the person I was staying with. What do you think?”
I looked at Naala and she looked at me. Finally she said, “He will not be arrested, I will see to it. But if he become known … there is the Unholy Way. We are fools if we think we catch all tonight.”
I chimed in. “We don’t have the Undead Dragon. As long as he’s around they’re going to be dangerous. How dangerous I don’t know.” The hand came to life in my pocket when I said that. I had almost forgotten about it.
“So after you had gone,” Russ said, “I asked the friend who had been sitting with us where he thought Rosalee might be. He has hunches. Maybe you know.”
I nodded and kept nodding.
“He said for me to try this place and told me where it was.”
“She is here when the hour is not so late,” Naala told Russ. “She is elsewhere now. Asleep I hope.”
“Right.” Russ used his handkerchief for a napkin. “I found her here and talked to her a little. She told me—”
“This is before I go? You are here and I do not see you?”
I wanted to say, “Magos X,” but my mouth was full, so I just nodded. It would have been a bad idea anyway.
“She told me the Satanists had taken Martya. I went back to my friend and asked where he thought they might have taken her. He had several suggestions, so—”
Naala said, “I wish to hear them.”
He told her. One was an old mansion on the lake shore. One of the others was the undertaker’s.
“I went to the closest first,” Russ said. “It was all dark, but I snooped around. I found a window that was wide open and climbed in.” He waited for us to say something but neither of us did.
“You’ll say it was a damned fool thing to do, but when I did it I didn’t know there was anybody in there. One part of me was thinking there was nobody in there, so it would be pretty safe, and the other was thinking maybe they had Martya in there tied up and gagged. Which they did, except that I pictured her lying on the floor in the dark.”
Naala was watching him and not talking, and my mouth was full.
“Once I was inside, I saw light from a doorway and heard voices. I was pretty sure one of them was Grafton’s, so I went to have a look. I was still going down the steps when one of them took a shot at me. That stopped me, and I started shooting back.”
I said, “You had that shotgun.”
Russ shrugged. “They’re legal here. Only the army and the police can have pistols, but anybody can have a rifle or a shotgun. Even foreigners. I had mine wrapped in a throw rug so I could carry it through the streets, but I took the rug off before I climbed in the window. Now you’re going to ask what it was loaded with, and I don’t know. Some kind of bird shot, probably, but we were close enough that even quail shot would do a hell of a lot of damage.” He hesitated for a moment, then he said, “It only holds five shells.”
To keep him talking, Naala said, “They have shoot first. Grafton says this.”
“That’s right. There was a woman in there with a gun, and she fired before I had gone down the steps far enough to size up the situation. She was on the other side of the basement, and she missed. I shot back. You must have seen her body.”
Naala nodded.
“There was a man who had a gun. I killed him, too.” Russ paused and swallowed. “Probably you’ve killed people. I’m over sixty and I spent some time in the U.S. Army, but I never shot anybody until tonight. I killed three people tonight, and I haven’t worked my way through it yet.”
I was buttering another roll. “They were going to kill you, Russ.”
He said, “Uh-huh.” And then, “One was going to kill Martya. I don’t love Martya, but I like her. I owe her. He pulled his knife back to stab her and I shot him.”
Naala said they were killers and would have killed both of us if they had gotten the chance.
He said, “Is the U.S. government going to find out about this?”
She shrugged. “They do not care. It is our law here, their law there.”
“I suppose.”
Everybody got quiet and ate after that, which I had been doing already. After a while I went to the door and looked at the sky. It was getting gray, so I knew then why I was getting sleepy. Night was nearly over. Besides, I had eaten my eggs and six or eight buttered rolls. My jaw ached, reminding me of the aspirin I had found in Naala’s medicine cabinet.
While Naala and I were walking back to her apartment I asked her if she knew who had killed Butch. She said she did not, but we had ten prisoners and they would be quizzed all day. “Also others search there for papers. It may be they find something. If so, I will be told. Also who throws the head in. I must have the lock changed.”
There is not a lot left to tell about that night. I had a shower and Naala had a bath and got me to come in and scrub her back. “So you are useful after all,” she said, and grinned at me.
We had a drink before that, and we had a couple more before we went to bed and talked some. It was mostly private stuff so I am not going to give it here. Then we went to sleep.
When I woke up I was in my room and Naala was gone. So were all the clothes I had worn the night before. My gun and my badge case were lying on top of a stack of new clothes. I thought of the hand and was worried sick. It was not in the box or anyplace else I looked in. When I dropped my badge case I saw there was an identity card in there now. It had my picture on it, and it probably said I was JAKA. I put on the new clothes, threading the new belt through the holster, and so on. I got a paring knife from the kitchen to cut off the tags. The wad I had taken from the guy I fought was at the bottom of the stack.
The clock on the mantel said it was almost three, and for a minute I thought it had stopped. I watched it until the minute hand moved. So I had slept all day and most of the night. I went into Naala’s room, being very quiet, and she was in there sound asleep and snoring.
After I ha
d shaved I knew what I had to do. God knows I did not want to, but I had to. I found a new jacket in the closet. This new one was wool, too. When I went out I made sure the door had locked behind me.
The walk to the cathedral was long and dark, cold and lonely. I kept hoping to catch sight of the tower, which did not really happen until I was just about there. Then I saw it, dead black against the stars, and it seemed to go up forever.
The big door in front was locked, but there was a little path around to the side, and a little door there that was not. I went in and up a narrow, pitch-black stair, and found I was right underneath the tower in an alcove full of hanging ropes. It had no ceiling but just went up and up. It was still dark as hell in there, even though a little starlight sifted down. One side was open to the main part of the cathedral. It was dark in there, too, although a candle was burning on each side of the altar. I did not see the ropes until one bumped my face.
There was another stair off to the side. It was wider than the one I had just come up, but steeper, too, with nothing to hang on to. A cold stone wall on one side and a really good drop on the other. The steps were narrow, like they had been made for feet that were smaller than mine. I kept telling myself that if I fell I would grab one of the bell ropes, but I do not believe I could really have done it. Pretty soon I learned not to try to take those steps fast. You went slow or you stopped every so often and sat down on a step. Your choice. I went slow, feeling the wall with my left hand.
When I finally got to the top, it was maybe twice as big as I had expected. I have had hotel rooms that were a lot smaller than that. My bedroom in Kleon’s house had been smaller, too. There was a big hole for the ropes in the middle, and a walk all the way around it with a low wall around that. No rail on the bell-rope side. For a while I tried to figure out why it was the way it was. Then I realized that eventually the ropes must wear out, and when they did somebody would come up here with a plank and lay it across the hole so he could get to the broken rope, cut the knot and let the rope fall, and tie on a new rope. I would not want the job, but somebody must have done it. Of course you could reach some of the ropes just standing on the walkway.
