by Paula Guran
Jack doubted the truth of all these stories. It wasn’t that he believed Carolien would not try to rescue a relative. He’d seen how she’d dropped her work at NYTAS and everything else, including Jack, when her teenage cousin from Rotterdam had come to New York for a couple of weeks. No, it was just that people liked to make up stories about her. Six feet tall, one hundred eighty-five pounds, and very Dutch, with long blond hair, large breasts, and a tendency to say or do whatever she wanted, she was a natural target. She didn’t appear to notice, but Jack thought that might be an act.
If Jack doubted that Carolien had a relative who’d been turned into a frog, he strongly suspected that Mr. Suke was in fact a frog who’d been turned into a man. He just wasn’t sure if the frog Suke had been alive or carved. Jack was wondering if he should outright ask him, and whether that might violate some code of privacy, when he felt something brush against his leg. He smiled, and looked down to see Ray, his reddish-gold spirit fox, moving his tail to get Jack’s attention. No one could see Ray but Jack, so when he spoke he kept his voice low. “What is it, buddy? What do you want me to see?”
Ray lifted his head to point his snout downtown, and Jack followed the line of sight to the helix-shaped tower of the new World Trade Center. As Jack watched, a dark cloud rolled over it, until all you could see was grey sky. Oh shit, Jack thought, not again. But then he heard someone to his left say, “Jesus, look at that,” and someone else say, “You can’t even see it,” and Jack let out a breath. Not an omen, then, or at least not just for his eyes only.
It would take a few minutes before he realized how wrong he was.
As Jack and everyone else watched, the dark cloud poured toward them. Soon it began to rain, hard slashing drops that sent umbrellas and coat collars up, and a few people scrambling into doorways. Jack just stood there, squinting at the rain as if the drops might form a pattern. He looked down and Ray was still at his side, body rigid, tail straight out, telling Jack there was something in the rain. Something about Ray . . . his tail was wet! How could—
A border storm! Half in this world, half in the Other. Shit, Jack thought. He didn’t like border crossings, no one did. You could meet your mirror, your Traveler From The Other Side, and then things would get really tangled. Some people said that that was how Peter Midnight, all those years ago, had lost Manhattan to the Man in the Black Cravat.
Hold steady, Jack told himself. Even if it was a border crossing it was just a shower. And then the hail started. Not huge, about the size of a shooter marble, it came down heavy, and on wild swirls of wind, so that anyone who’d braved the rain now ran inside shops or doorways. Except Jack. Even Ray had vanished, but Jack knew he couldn’t leave, there was something he was supposed to see.
The hail began to move around itself, separating, coming together, forming shapes, columns—a man. Vague at first, not as defined as, say, the Face on Mars (set up by some prank Traveler to embarrass NASA) but still clear. Tall, strong-looking yet somehow graceful, with the long, tapered fingers that marked a Traveler. Jack squinted at him, the posture, the shape of the head. “No,” he whispered. Light appeared in the face. Whether from a flash of lightning, or the sun coming through a gap in the storm, it lit up the right jawline from the ear almost to the mouth, showing a surface smooth as melted gold. Down Jack’s jawline, his scar throbbed.
“Oh fuck,” Jack said, then loud, shouting, “You’re dead! I killed you, goddamnit. I killed you!”
It took a couple of seconds for Jack to realize that the hail had stopped, and the sun now lit up the street and people had ventured back into the open, only to stare nervously at this man who’d just screamed about killing someone. Some already had their phones out, to call 911 or to take a picture. Either one was as bad as the other. Quickly, Jack glammed himself so that no one would remember him and any pictures they took would be blurred. Then he turned and headed uptown. Carolien’s frog would have to wait.
Jack and Irene Yao were playing mahjong in Jack’s office in the Hotel de Rêve Noire. The office was really just a two-room suite several floors down from the larger suite where Jack had lived for the past nine years. Irene owned the hotel, but she and Jack had long ago become friends. Elegant as always, the fiftyish woman had let loose her long grey-black hair to flow gently down the back of her maroon linen dress. Jack himself wore a pale yellow shirt, collar unbuttoned, dark brown pleated pants, and a thin red silk tie draped around his neck.
They played with a three-hundred-year-old set of ivory tiles backed with bamboo. Jack couldn’t remember exactly when they’d started playing together, but it was always just the two of them, and never for money. Jack was a high-stakes poker player, and even though mahjong was closer to gin rummy, he didn’t want to trigger his professional skills by letting the game get serious. At the same time, he kept wondering if Irene was setting him up somehow. The tiles had been in her family a long time.
Two soft knocks came at the door. Startled, Jack looked up from his hand to see that Irene was gone, her empty chair slightly away from the table. Another knock, just one this time, and Jack stared at the back of the door, eyes narrowed. He knew that sound, knew what it meant. He glanced once more at the empty chair, then stood up and went to open the door. Sure enough, Mrs. Yao stood there, dressed the same but with her hair up, and yes, she was holding the small silver tray with Jack’s card on it. “Mr. Shade,” she said. It was only “Mrs. Yao” and “Mr. Shade” when Jack was working.
Jack looked down at the card. “John Shade, Traveler,” it read, and the name of the hotel, and the black horse’s head from the Staunton chess knight. Only, someone, the client, Jack assumed, had scratched a jagged line through the embossed head. Like a scar.
Jack didn’t need any work at this point. A few months back he’d taken a case to find a missing woman who’d turned out to be the Queen of Eyes, holder of all the world’s oracular power. Jack hadn’t asked for a fee when the case ended, but a few weeks later his client, the Queen’s daughter, had shown up with a check for 100K. Jack was pretty sure the money had come from La Societé de Matin, the international order of gangster magicians—his finding the Queen had helped them avoid a faction war—but that was okay. He’d earned it. So he didn’t need to work, and didn’t want to, but a curse Jack had foolishly put on himself years earlier gave him no choice. If someone showed up with Jack’s business card Jack could not refuse the case. Travelers called this compulsory obligation a “Guest,” after an old Irish term, geass.
Jack sighed. “Thank you, Mrs. Yao,” he said, and took the card from the tray. It was cold.
When he looked up, Mrs. Yao was crying. Jack had never asked her how much she knew, but he suspected it was more than she let on. “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s just a case.”
She dabbed at her eyes with a fingertip. “I’m sorry,” she said, then, “He’s downstairs. In your office.”
“What—?” Jack looked around, saw he was in the living room of his suite. Hadn’t they been—weren’t they—something was wrong. For a second, Ray appeared, fur bristling, then vanished, as if—as if someone was blocking him. But Ray belonged to Jack, who could interfere with that?
And then Jack was in his office, sitting at the mahogany table that served as his desk, and across from him sat a man who was hard to see. He looked around Jack’s height and weight, six feet and a hundred seventy-five pounds, and was dressed in an open-necked black shirt, black jeans, scuffed cowboy boots, and a long, unbuttoned black leather coat. His face was hard to make out, sometimes blurred, at other moments deeply shadowed. Except—down his jawline, from his ear to his mouth, ran a jagged line of golden light. Only when Jack unconsciously touched his own face did he realize that the light followed the path of his scar.
Jesus, Jack thought. I’m dreaming. This was all a goddamn dream. He almost laughed. People could attack you in dreams, but it was easy enough to fend them off.
“I have a case for you,” the man said, his voice a harsh whisper.
Jack leaned back in his chair. “Go ahead,” he said.
“I have an enemy. Someone who wants to destroy me.”
“Do you know why?”
The hidden face flashed brightly, then a moment later faded back into darkness. “It doesn’t matter,” the man said. “You’ve got to make him stop.”
“How do I do that?”
“You’ll find a way. That’s what you do, isn’t it? I’m hiring you to beat him. I want to win.”
Jack said, “I can’t just kill him.”
“Why not? He tried to kill me, didn’t he?”
“You haven’t told me who he is,” Jack said. “What’s his name?”
The man shook his head. “No, no, no, that’s the wrong question.”
Jack felt his voice dry up, as harsh now as the man’s rasping whisper. “What’s the right question?”
“My name,” the man said. Now he leaned forward, as if to bring his face into the light. “You’re supposed to ask who I am. Isn’t that right, Johnny? Isn’t that the first step?”
Jack came awake in his bed with a shout. Despite everything, his Traveler training told him it was 4:17 in the morning. The narrow steel posts at the corners of his bed glowed slightly, as if heated. He lay there, unable to move or breathe. It was him! The Dupe. Jack Fake. Hidden Johnny. The Man Without A Scar. And now it turned out that the Dupe—the fucking Duplicate—was also a goddamn Revenant. Johnny Rev. The Man Who Didn’t Leave.
“Goddamn it,” Jack said out loud. What the fuck did he do now? His own Revenant had hired him. Did it make any difference that it was in a dream? Dream Johnny still had Jack’s card, didn’t he? And the man the Rev wanted Jack to kill? Well shit, that was easy enough to figure out. That could only be Jack himself.
People make Dupes for all sorts of reasons—to assist in some enactment, to take their place in a dangerous operation, to trick an enemy or escape a trap. Jack Shade was probably the only Traveler to duplicate himself to go speak to his mother-in-law.
On the worst day of Jack Shade’s life, after the poltergeist that had possessed his daughter Eugenia had killed Jack’s wife—after Jack himself had tried to save his daughter and ended up exiling her as the only living resident in the Forest of Souls, that dark woods of the unhappy dead—as Jack squatted next to Layla’s body on the blood-drenched kitchen floor, rocking back and forth, howling—the doorbell rang.
Jack could never say for sure what drove him to answer it. Did he think it was the police and he should just give himself up? Did he imagine it was a team from NYTAS, the New York Travelers Aid Society, come to take him away for endangering Traveler anonymity? Or did he somehow hope it was Layla’s remnant, come to forgive him, and together they would go to rescue Genie? But when Jack opened the door, barely conscious of the blood running down his face and neck from the knives the geist had flung at him, what he saw was indeed a dead person. Just not his wife.
Elvis Presley stood there, young and dangerous, with that lush Captain Marvel Jr. haircut, dressed in worn jeans and denim jacket and a dark T-shirt, and a pair of very scuffed blue shoes. Elvis looked Jack up and down, then cocked his head, as if to say Yeah, brother, I’ve had days like that. Instead, all he said was “Hey, man, my damn truck’s gone and over-heated on me.” Jack couldn’t help himself, he glanced past Elvis to where a rusty old Chevy pickup, from around 1955, was parked at the curb. It sure looked real enough, as oily steam came off the filthy hood. Elvis said, “Ain’t nothin’ I can do but let it cool down some. So I figured maybe I could go see if there was a friendly face around.” He grinned. “And shit, maybe some beer and peanut butter.”
Not sure he could speak, Jack just nodded and stepped aside for Elvis to enter the house.
Almost from the moment of his death, Elvis Presley had been a member of the most exclusive group of Friends and Helpers this poor suffering world has ever known, the Dead Quartet. Except for its leader, the Quartet’s personnel changed with the times. The current lineup consisted of Joan of Arc, permanent anchor and chief, plus Nelson Mandela, Princess Di, and Elvis.
Anytime someone new joined, he or she wiped people’s memories clean of the person they replaced, but that didn’t stop people who knew from speculating. Carolien Hounstra had made it a kind of hobby to try to track down any traces of previous members. She was pretty sure that Joan had originally taken over from the Quartet’s founder, the Virgin Mary. Mary had gotten sick of it and agreed to Joan’s demand for a permanent slot. Di, Carolien said, had replaced Eleanor Roosevelt. She was less sure about Mandela, thinking Che Guevara or Gandhi. And Elvis, she suspected, had taken over from either James Dean or maybe Billie Holiday.
What the Quartet did was pretty simple. They helped people. People lonely, desperate, all out of money, friends, or hope. They were said to specialize: Joan to warriors, queer people, and the young whom everyone had deserted; Di came to the sick and abandoned; Madiba to people in the low ebb of a long struggle; and Elvis to ordinary folks with weights that were too damn heavy, and no one to help carry the load. Jack Shade was not exactly ordinary, but he sure as hell qualified otherwise. In fact, since Elvis mostly showed up at gas stations and 7-Elevens, his appearance at Jack’s door made it clear how much Jack needed him.
Jack said, “Come on,” and headed for the kitchen with Elvis behind him, as if all that mattered was peanut butter and beer.
When Elvis saw the body he shook his head. “Jesus, man,” he said. “You really are in trouble. You off your old lady?” Jack stared at him. “Hey,” Elvis said, “wouldn’t be the first time. People fight, they get carried away.”
“Bullshit,” Jack said. “You know what happened here.”
Elvis looked at him a long time, then said, “Yeah, I guess I do. Thing is, man, not everybody can see like I can. Anyone who heard anything, anyone who just come up to the door, they’re going to see shit they won’t understand. You got to take care of this, man.”
Jack found himself shaking so hard he had to grab hold of the kitchen table. When he saw that his hands were covered in blood his first thought was that he better not stain Layla’s antique oak table, she’d be really pissed off. And then he wondered, was it his blood or hers? He remembered then, he’d been down on the floor, holding her, even as a stone door had opened in the air and a kind of wind had pulled his daughter into the Forest of Souls. He looked at Elvis. “What am I going to do?” he said.
Elvis nodded. “Okay. First thing you gotta do is cast one of them things around the house. What d’you call ’em?”
It took Jack a moment, then he said, “Oh, right. A glamour.”
“Yeah. Funny word for it, huh?”
“It’s old,” Jack muttered. He closed his eyes to concentrate. A glam wouldn’t solve anything but it would keep outsiders—non-Travelers, or “nons” as some people called them—from noticing anything.
It was a simple enough action, but it took Jack three tries to get it right. When he did, however, he discovered he felt a little stronger. No cops were going to rush in and take Layla’s body away from him. He looked at Elvis. “Thanks,” he said.
Elvis shrugged. “Sure. But you know, Jack—” Despite everything, a smile flickered across Jack’s face, for he was pretty sure he hadn’t told Elvis his name “—this ain’t an answer. You’re going to have to call those guys in.” Jack looked at him. “What do you call them, COLE?”
Jack sighed. “Yeah, I know.” The Committee of Linear Explanation existed to clean up messes that the outside world couldn’t know about. Without them, Jack could be arrested for killing his wife. And probably his daughter. God knows what the cops would think he’d done with Genie’s body. He squeezed shut his eyes a moment, made a face and shook his head, like a child trying to banish everything. But that’s what COLE would do, make it as if it had never happened, cast some alternate reality sheet over everything, so that as far as the outside world was concerned, Layla and Genie had just—what, gone on a trip? Left him? Died in some fucking
tragic accident? “Shit,” Jack said.
Elvis said, “I’ll tell you a secret, man. I always loved his singing.”
“What?”
“Nat King Cole. He could do that kind of velvety cat voice, but every word was clear as a bell. I always wished I could sing like that. Y’know, they called me ‘King,’ but he really was. I mean, he was colored and all, but the best goddamn singer I ever heard.” Then he smiled sheepishly and waved a hand. “Shit,” he said. “No offense, man.”
Jack shrugged. “None taken.” He stared down at his hands, at Layla’s blood.
Elvis put an arm around Jack’s shoulders. “Tell you what, man. It’s gonna take a while for my truck to cool down. What do you say we grab a couple of cold ones and you tell me about your wife and kid. COLE can fuckin’ wait, right?”
So Jack Shade and Elvis Presley sat down at Layla’s oak table, knives and cleavers scattered on the floor, with Layla’s body at their feet and Genie gone where probably even Elvis and the whole Quartet couldn’t find her. And Jack talked about how he and Layla first met, before he was even a Traveler, how he was a carny magician back then, making a few extra bucks doing tricks at a wedding where Layla Nazeer was one of the bridesmaids. They’d gone out for a while, and Jack was smitten, but then he’d lost track of her in the upheaval when he saw the stars and galaxies in a lion’s mouth, and his life changed forever.
Jack found Layla again when his teacher, Anatolie, sent him on a training mission to de-possess a law firm. Jack always suspected that Anatolie knew that Layla was working there as a paralegal, but when he asked Anatolie, she accused him of “distraction,” the great danger to apprentice Travelers.
When he told Elvis that, Jack had to stop a moment. Not just apprentices, he thought. Distraction was what had killed his wife. If he’d been paying fucking attention to the geist that was taking over their daughter, shit, if he’d listened to his wife’s fears instead of telling her that poltergeists were harmless—
