The Karma Booth

by Jeff Pearce

  “These monks are your enemy,” said Tim. “The enemy of wherever you come from.”

  “Enemy is too strong a word,” she answered. “Let’s just say where I… went, we don’t approve of their methods, though sometimes we can understand their verdicts. We’d prefer humanity here figure things out for itself. Like I said before, their approach is colonial. Their methods are loud, obnoxious, vulgar. Limonov was once one of their own, but they made a mistake, and they could make everyone everywhere pay for it. And they’re not strong enough to stop him on their own.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Tim. “You’re saying he’s mortal—you’re mortal. Wouldn’t shooting him or—or if he was given a lethal injection, wouldn’t that send him back to where he wants to go?”

  “It doesn’t work like that.”

  “Damn it! Then how does it work? You talked about evolution. Colonialism. Is that it? We accidentally opened a gate, and now we see our zoo handlers? We’re not ‘ready’ for the true reality of our existence, I suppose? What’s the problem? You’ll get back to us when we’re mature enough? Is that—”“No! No, it’s nothing like that—”

  Tim reached across the table and gripped her forearm. “What are you? What is Limonov? What’s happened to the Karma Booth victims?”

  “Let go of me,” she said quietly. “Please.”

  He resisted for a moment. He hadn’t known what to expect with her, and she had appeared so suddenly, he was afraid she might blink out of the restaurant like a passing thought the way she had come.

  “You people, you on Earth—you happened to the victims. The Karma Booth interfered with their natural progress. Because of your choices.”

  “Wait a minute… Progress?”

  “Yes, progress. Everything evolves, Timothy. No one is trying to keep the truth from you. Not even Limonov—he’s past caring, which is part of what makes him so dangerous.” She looked across the restaurant, then back at him warily, as if she were afraid he might physically impose himself on her again and prevent her from leaving. “I can’t stay.”

  “It’s not enough,” he said, feeling frustration leak out of him from every pore but knowing he couldn’t stop her.

  “It has to be for now,” she answered, lingering by the table. “You have answers. All of you here—even me when I lived here the first time—have access to the answers. You’ll figure out more in the days ahead, and when it’s safe… I said I would help you. Listen to me closely, my dear. There are natural laws to all things. Even if something fantastic has broken through into what you perceive as reality, it follows and must conform to the natural laws from where it came.”

  “Even you with your mind tricks?” he demanded.

  “I told you. I was born here. I’m a woman here like any other in most ways. Limonov is gathering strength, but he’s still trapped in this plane of existence, one where he has limits even if he’s partially successful. Whatever extraordinary power he has is because he’s stolen it. Remember that. I have to go…”

  “You’ve barely told me anything!” he complained. “If humanity is supposed to learn some great truth then you’ll have to spell it out plain because—”

  She made a high moan of exasperation, gripping the table with her small hands. She seemed to hover on the edge of a swoon from pain. “Tim, please. Stop…! Just stop. Why can’t all of you simply be here? I told you how back when I lived, we gloried in the now, we enjoyed what was here, and it was real enough for us! Maybe because of the Great War. Maybe that was the reason, but the reason doesn’t matter—there shouldn’t have been a reason. Just the joy! Why does your morality need an outside force or influence to make it true and right and good for you here?”

  He couldn’t say anything. It was the way he had always wanted to live, the way he had tried to live. And now, by her declaration out loud, she was demanding he shed all embarrassment for his private conviction and adopt a new courage, one that didn’t abandon curiosity but accepted that the world was as he found it.

  She sighed and leaned in close to his face. “Yes—yes, you will live and die and go on to a new level, Tim, because everything evolves. And if you kill and rape and torture and steal, you hurt yourself and your own evolution. But it’s an evolution that has pertinence here just as much as for the next level. There’s no revelation waiting for your lovely Miss Anyanike or you or anyone else! Or if there is, I haven’t climbed to it yet, but I revel in where I am just as I reveled in the life I lived here.”

  “Then where is it that you came from? After you died? What is that place?”

  “It’s different. That’s all. There are wonders like the painting I gave you. Pleasures sensual and textured in their delights and with intellectual splendors to challenge a contemplative mind. Like here. There are vistas to explore and microscopic anomalies and shorelines of infinite beauty! Like here. Here, where they’re squandered. Why do you think I was at peace after Ceylon? I discovered great things are in store for us, but we already have such wonders here!”

  She laughed, a beautiful, self-deprecating laugh, and added, “Don’t you see? I was murdered because the monks are as flawed as all of you! As all of us out there! There is more wisdom with knowledge, Tim, but that doesn’t mean more discipline over wants and ambitions and fears. They were paranoid I might share a great revelation when the truth is simple: it’s just different. They didn’t want all of you to know we’re not gods out there!”

  She leaned over and cradled his face in her hand for a moment. “You are so gifted, you have no idea. Haven’t you guessed? The others went away and came back with empathy. But you…”

  He sat, stunned, not knowing what to say to that.

  “Monsieur Cale—”

  One of the French detectives at the table nearby was coming out of whatever she had done to them. He and his female colleague sat staring in disbelief that Emily Derosier could suddenly, impossibly be there, just as Tim had been amazed only a short while ago.

  Tim came back to himself, putting aside her tantalizing compliment and knowing he still needed answers. The detective could wait. “But Limonov…”

  “Imagine a Hitler or Stalin gaining abilities like the ones you saw in Mary Ash, in Geoff Shackleton,” said Emily. “Remember, Limonov was exiled to a place where such abilities were incompatible with the natural laws. Here: this place, your existence. Now the Karma Booth has upset all that. He has to be extinguished. He should be your priority. I have to go now.”

  From the corner of his eye, Tim saw Crystal rushing into the restaurant. Her eyes were dark, and he could read a mild panic, a protective anger as she hurried to what she must have thought was his rescue.

  “What about the Booth?” he asked. “Wait!”

  As he stood up, she was suddenly very close, stealing a kiss from him and smiling at his bewilderment. What are you? A woman. The answer was a woman. Here. Now.

  Crystal hung back, almost as surprised, clearly uncertain what to do. Then Emily Derosier reached out and took her hand. “Sorry, I couldn’t resist him, anymore than you could! But he’s yours. You’ll know what I’ve told him.”

  Crystal stood still as their mystery woman let go and walked—in no rush at all—out of the restaurant like any other patron.

  “She’s leaving,” said Crystal.

  “But you don’t want to stop her either,” said Tim.

  “No.”

  “You don’t think we can.”

  “No,” said Crystal. “Do you think it’s true? That there’s no great revelation waiting?”

  So she had kept her word, thought Tim. Heightened empathy, sharing of thoughts—the “illusion” of Crystal sitting at the table instead of Emily wasn’t such an illusion after all. Crystal must have been present all along in some form, passively listening, retaining all that she heard and awakened at Emily’s convenience.

  “Tim,” Crystal tried again. “Do you think it’s true?”

  “I… I don’t know.”

  In this moment, it h
ardly mattered what he believed. His witness sounded credible enough. And Emily Derosier’s words were on rewind and playing over and over in his mind: I discovered great things are in store for us, but we already have such wonders here.

  Thinking over the encounter later, he decided Emily had never intended to be deliberately cryptic. He didn’t know why she had rushed off. Perhaps she was still in danger from Limonov’s network of accomplices, though she had said nothing about this. Given the power she had demonstrated outside the Beaubourg, it was difficult to imagine. He couldn’t help but wonder whether she flitted back and forth between their plane of existence and what now must be the one that was native to her. But if that were so, then coming through the Karma Booth would have been unnecessary, especially when she was so easily detected.

  It’s different, she had told him. That’s all.

  But there are wonders there, waiting to be explored.

  He was convinced—as was Crystal, his witness—that Emily Derosier had mysteriously arrived to help. They certainly needed help. It was possible she could be acting in an interest they couldn’t fathom, at least not yet or maybe not ever, but he couldn’t see what there was to gain in arranging the meeting and bothering to confide details to Tim at all.

  Orlando Braithewaite was “not their immediate problem.” Interesting how she had put that. And she had suggested that Limonov craved a power beyond human comprehension. Could it be that simple? That, while he might have existed once in an advanced realm, he was no more than a predator, just as he was in the human life that the world was familiar with now? At least we know what’s he done here, thought Tim. His tortures and cruelties had been enough for a sentence of death before.

  Hunt Limonov. He should be the priority, she said. He found it strange that Emily should issue no warning over the Karma Booth. Mankind had opened a door to a spot where morality intersected with the physics of actual existence, though she wanted to impress on him that mankind was supposed to live by its own laws as if within a closed system. But if the Booth had upset these natural laws, why wasn’t she urging him to get the technology destroyed, banned, kept out of the hands of those who might abuse it?

  She said there had been a war. She said that war was over.

  He wanted to believe she had come to help, but he wondered if he should accept all that she had told him.

  And he found himself wanting to believe the vision she had imparted, that there were multiple realities beyond the stained-glass Sunday school hierarchy, still elusive enough for Man to no longer fear death, but to treat existence beyond lives here as a new ocean waiting for exploration, with fresh and lush continents.

  It was far more comforting than Heaven, because she suggested—no, she practically confirmed—that life here was not a test. A good person was an end in him or herself, and that even in failure, Nature wasted nothing. There was redemption and a reward past these humble molecules and cells and fluids: knowledge itself, the promise of existence different than before and stimulating enough to last whatever duration of “life” was given the next time.

  It occurred him just then why the Booth had rejected Limonov.

  I know what you want with the Booth victims, thought Tim.

  He didn’t know how or why he knew. He just felt the truth of it. The precious insight she had complimented him on was working. He hoped, he almost prayed, he was right this time.

  Maria Gigliotti slept. Exhausted after her traumatic return to the dark, stinking closet, her body simply gave up on sobbing, sweating, shaking, dreading what was to come. And so another hour must have passed, and then the closet door was rudely yanked open with a creak, and the big man was there. He’d decided it was time to amuse himself with his new toy. His meaty fist grabbed hold of her ankles, and as he dragged her out, Maria yelled through the tape because of the rug burn searing into her back and shoulder.

  Oh, God, this is it, she thought. No, no, no, and she could understand him now, just as she had understood the strange brunette girl, though she had never taken any lessons in English. Perversely, she wondered in spite of her mounting terror: How can I understand him? Talking, muttering crude things to her: “Going to sink into you, mmm, yeah…”

  Impossibly, suddenly fluent in English, just as she had understood the brunette girl’s words.

  And she knew his name was Emmett Nickelbaum, and she knew now what he had done to the girl, Mary Ash, and a box-cutter blade in his hand slit the electrician’s tape binding her ankles so that he could pry her legs apart and start doing the same terrible things to her. It made it so much worse, the knowing.

  “Yeah, you squirm!” growled Nickelbaum. “Squirm for me, go on!”

  And then something happened that Maria didn’t understand. It was as if her whole trembling body had become a searchlight, its beam pouring out of her at an impossible wattage. Blinding in its beam, driving Nickelbaum back so that he flung his arms instinctively in front of his face.

  “Ahhhrrrrggghhhh!”

  The light dimmed, fading, and Nickelbaum jumped up in a feral rage, staring at her, then turning and rushing to the doorways leading to other rooms in the decrepit slum apartment. Satisfied that no one else was here, that it was a trick of the light or his imagination, he panted with renewed sadistic lust and dropped to his knees, grabbing Maria’s legs again. She screamed through her gag, and he didn’t care—

  Then there was another volcanic burst of light, forcing him away. Only as the light faded this time, he kept on screaming, now grabbing his temples.

  The light has gone into his head, thought Maria Gigliotti. And something else, too. Strangling his consciousness, like so many cluster migraines, piled on top of each other.

  The strange brunette girl with the two bloody stumps for fingers sat on the floor in a corner. She wasn’t there before but now she was. Mary Ash. Watching him. Watching him suffer.

  “Splinters,” she said softly.

  She stood up and walked carefully over to Nickelbaum.

  With a hideous strength, he opened his eyes, staring in terror at his former victim. It was a sensation he hadn’t shown since he was pushed into the Karma Booth. “You…”

  “Me.”

  Maria Gigliotti lay on her side, hands still bound behind her back, mouth taped, but her own fear was beginning to subside. Instead, she was captivated by the unfolding spectacle. She couldn’t help but watch, but something told her a reckoning was coming for Emmett Nickelbaum as horrific as the tortures he had planned for her.

  “Splinters,” Mary Ash repeated, her voice still gentle as she spoke to him. “It was, like, so obvious when you think about it. It’s how he’s going to lose, too. I mean I can’t predict, but I’m pretty sure.” Dreamily, she looked towards Maria Gigliotti cowering on the floor and commented, “Her, yeah… That wasn’t me who took her away. I mean it was, but it wasn’t. It was something I borrowed.”

  Emmett Nickelbaum shook on his patch of molding carpet. His eyes rolled up in the back of his head, and then he suddenly, explosively vomited. Sweat poured down his massive skull, drool and specks of leftover vomit on his chin stubble, and he tried to rise. Couldn’t. His eyes squeezed tight, and he gritted his teeth in agony. And Maria thought once more: The light—whatever it is, whatever it means—has gone into his mind.

  She was still talking. Mary Ash. In her singsong, ethereal way. Taking the time and courtesy to explain.

  “They moved Geoff Shackleton after you killed the boy,” she said. “I knew that wasn’t good enough. So I got away from those agent guys and reached out to him today. Little thoughts, but they did the trick. He heard me. He brought me right to him, and I made him understand, and he got it. He’s pretty cool… He got right away what had to be done. He didn’t loan me the power—he gave it to me. ‘Here, go ahead.’ I mean wow. Isn’t that nice? Wish I had a teacher like him in school.”

  Nickelbaum crawled. If nothing else, he could die with his hands around a throat. It didn’t matter if it belonged to Mary Ash or t
he Italian girl. Maria Gigliotti, staring, gagged, understood this and whimpered a warning, but Mary Ash was serene.

  “Don’t worry.”

  Nickelbaum screamed as another psychic bolt made him give up the attempt.

  Mary Ash took a step closer to him. “I want you to know ’cause of what we had—I mean, it was so intimate—that I think you’ll appreciate this. The teacher gave me his ability so I could go and get her—”

  She turned slightly, indicating Maria bound on the floor, as if Nickelbaum was paying attention and not clutching his skull, dry-heaving and moaning.

  “So that’s where that comes from. That’s him. He gave it to me. Moving people around like Monopoly pieces. We can do stuff like that, but I guess you already know, huh? I mean that little boy—he made Mr. Cale taste music. That’s where I got the idea from… the borrowing.” She pursed her lips together, suddenly remembering something and added, “Oh, right, I guess you haven’t met him! Well, you get it, I’m sure. So my point is: what you’re feeling? All of what you’re feeling? That’s me.”

  She crouched down and savagely yanked his greasy long hair, pulling his head up, forcing him to look at her.

  But her voice was still quiet. “That’s all me. My idea, all mine. I knew ever since I came back I could be in you, but that wouldn’t be good enough. Then I thought, okay, why be selfish?”

  Nickelbaum stared. He was still drooling, eyes shining and reflecting and bouncing with the light trapped now behind his pupils, and in every reflection was a scream. He gibbered and shook and stared and stared and stared at Mary Ash. Two fingers and a thumb and two bloody stumps gripped a lock of his filthy hair as she grinned wide and asked:

  “How is it in there now?”

  No answer.

  She leaned in even closer and dropped her voice to a whisper. But Maria Gigliotti could still make out the words as she told him: “I found a secret! You’ll go on and on and on, thanks to this. Isn’t that great? What do you think? Hey, Nickelbaum… Are you hard?”