Niko puts the pack in a jacket pocket and watches the receding taillights until the engine sound has faded out and the ensuing silence makes him feel despairing and marooned.
Alone now Niko feels the tension in and past the marble walls, a carnival charge in the whipcrack air. It’s more than just the presence of the monstrous dog. It’s a quality of the walls themselves. As if the living stone has absorbed the pain and fear and tyranny of all that they surround.
A small metallic ping gives Niko’s heart a little kick. Not Auguste and his irregular hammering. A distinctive sound that he’d know anywhere. The crackle of a cooling engine.
BEFORE THE WALL’S pale marble the Black Taxi looks like a shadow of itself. As if abandoned by the thing that cast it.
Niko sets the hardcase on the ground, which seems to be a flat expanse of ochre stone, and walks around the huge sedan.
It truly is magnificent. Lacquered and curved and pristine like something poured or grown. Niko looks but does not touch. Not yet, not yet. The dog behind him watching. Niko cannot help but wonder if the car itself knows he is here.
There’s barely room to sidle between the Franklin and the wall. Niko doesn’t want to touch either one. The stone wall crowded with huddled figures beautifully rendered in marble agony, damned souls locked in stone who huddle and teem and yearn toward the unfelt space denied them, groping from their anhedonic orgy for some dimly conceived paradise of emptiness. Though motionless they suggest motion, a surging wave of sculpted humanity impeccably rendered. The alabaster snarl carved on one wide-eyed face with crooked teeth. The flaring nostrils on one reaching figure always at the onset of a scream. Tension in the tendons of a reaching wrist. Niko remembers viewing Rodin sculptures at the Louvre and at the Norton Simon and remembers thinking that the figures did not look like sculpture at all but like human beings made of stone, moments frozen by a loving hand. He starts to turn away from the beautiful horrible wall, then stops.
Rodin. Auguste Rodin.
He shrugs and turns away from the basilisk stares, certain they are aware of him. As the Black Taxi seems aware of him. He cannot help but feel the car holds some kind of awful coiled potential waiting to be sprung like a warhead silent in its housing.
Something grabs his jacket when he tries to move on. He jumps back and whirls, raising an elbow against whatever holds him. A faint rip as his jacket tears.
It’s an arm. A lifesized alabaster-muscled arm, marble fingers clutching frozen, leading toward a rounded shoulder eclipsed by a contorted blindeyed face halfdrowned in unformed stone.
Niko nearly laughs. You just snagged it, buddy pal, that’s all.
Still. He didn’t remember that arm being there when he’d started walking round the car.
Niko crabwalks out from between the wall and the monolithic car. Thinking as he looks upon the Franklin’s dreaded form, What are you?
Impulsively he grips the gleaming doorhandle and then jerks away as if shocked, though he hasn’t been. The handle is unblemished. He grabs again more firmly but the door is locked.
From behind him comes a growl so deep he feels it through his shoes. Niko glances back at the gate. The dog is up on all fours now and bristling. No question it could stop a truck.
Niko tries to ignore the dog as he bends and hoods his eyes and peers into the driver’s window. The mason jar’s not there of course, but how utterly damned he truly deserved to be if it had been and he hadn’t looked.
Now the growl is multiple and Niko feels it in his chest. He straightens. Okay, we’re in for the long haul, buddy pal.
He glances again at the gate. Takes a deep breath. Turns from the dark car to face the foaming dog strangling itself as it strains forward, restrained by that divided anchor chain attached to three humanleather collars big as weightlifter’s belts. Chainlinks thick as Niko’s thumb but Niko doesn’t trust them. They’ve been there a long time. And it’s a really big dog.
Past the dog the bearded sculptor on the ladder does not heed the monster’s histrionics but continues working, mallet tapping chisel, the tinking sound subsumed now by the worldconsuming frenzy of the guardian and multiform dog.
Niko pats his jacket pocket.
The dog barks in threepart discord and trembles before Niko like a bowstring drawn and held too long. No limb of him is still. The creature angles forward at the rusted leash’s limit, struggling, bulge-eyed, straining.
Niko says Nice doggy.
At the sound of Niko’s voice the dog goes absolutely mental. Three wet snarls reveal huge fangs of yellowed ivory rotting at the gumline. Three spiked humanleather collars each a handspan wide stretch creaking.
“Got a present for you, Sparky.” From his jacket pocket Niko pulls the jumbo milkbone taken from the kitchen of his worldgone home. He waggles it chest-high, eye-level with the furious bristling dog. “You want this, boy? Huh? You like that?”
The dog’s mad eyes glaze over and foam runs down its muzzles thick as the head on a beer. It rears up on muscled hindlegs now, thrashing and gnashing like something sleeping a thousand years on the ocean floor snagged on some hapless fisherman’s marlinhook.
“Come get it, sport.” Niko fakes an underhand. “Cmon, come get it, Rex.” The dog is fighting amongst itself as if contending for the chance to rage into Niko first. The wasp-nest tension, the rising note on the vibrating air.
Six wormveined eyes bulge as the insane dog’s straining grates the massive iron plate. Above the basso profundo chorus of snarls Niko can hear metal creaking.
He underhands the jumbo milkbone to the berserk dog and white foam flies as feral jaws snap it from the heated air. Two more sets of beartrap teeth clamp on the central massive neck from either side. The hot air boils with snarls and thickens with a tang of copper.
Niko grips his hardcase and broadly rounds the brawling mass of dog to hurry to the massive gate. The moment he touches it the ancient iron grows hot in his grip. Insomniac rust smears his callused palm. There is no lock upon the gate, no handle. Niko simply pushes and it moves. No creak of hinge or metal groan. Hell’s gate opens inward.
Niko looks up at the flickering neon glow above the archway. Red-edged against it that carven figure perches smirking, pointed chin on taloned fist and exulting in its outspread wings. Horned and smiling.
Niko shifts the case to his left hand and puts his shoulder to the gate and plants his heels and puts his weight into it and the iron gate shudders wide enough to admit a man. In patches of red light the ground across the threshold looks just like the ground out here, flat and baked and cracked. What difference had he expected?
Behind him now the snarling grows to yowls. Niko slides into the opening and his hiking shoe descends upon the undisputed floor of Hell.
Niko dodges as the massive gate slams shut. He tries not to think of the dull boom of its certain closure as omenous, or apocalyptic, or containing any note of doom.
VIII.
WALKING AFTER MIDNIGHT
IT’S DARK OUT there. The crashing echo of the gate’s decisive closure is all that fills the silent void surrounding Niko. Somehow the closing of the grated gate has cut off the intermittent neon light and all is starless and bible black. Before him might be a wall or a crevasse or an endless plain for all Niko can see. For all he knows horned cartoon demons leer and taunt with pitchforks just beyond his reach.
The air is sweatshop hot.
Niko takes a tentative step forward. He can sense the wall behind him, feel its mass and presence. Horrible as the wall is, he feels a strange security knowing it is there, the only certain solid thing between himself and utter isolation in a world that’s never known a sunrise, never felt a drop of rain. Endless uncarved marble the boundary between damnation and mere mortality.
Niko turns his hand before his face as if motion might make visible what is not seen when still. He shuts his eyes then opens them and cannot tell if they are open or shut. He stands there feeling foolish and observed and tells himself he’s mer
ely acclimating, waiting for his eyes to adjust and his kinesthetic sense to absorb the notion that his universe might as well end at his skin.
The sudden churning fear. Jesus on a snipehunt Niko what the fuck are you doing down here?
He breathes in deep and summons up an image of a weightless feather in a mason jar.
All right. Okay.
He rubs gooseflesh beneath his coatsleeved arms despite the fact that there’s no wind, no sound, no light, no sense of here or there.
Niko spent a night once in a sensory deprivation tank. A large plastic coffin sealed away from light and sound, holding amniotic saltwater on which he lay suspended and unfeeling. It was easy to believe he was the only thing in the universe, that he was himself a universe and beyond his reach lay untenanted infinity. He had lain still and waited. For what he did not know but that was the sense of it. Waiting. A sense of imminence, of always arriving. Floating soulless in the briny dark.
Then the hatch yanked open and light slammed in and there was Gus’s drunken silhouette to deliver him slapped into the world and saying Hey was that a trip or what?
Like a disembarking argonaut Niko climbed out from the tank, wet and blinking at the alien world where he had beached, beckoning oblivion abandoned.
And there was Jemma naked on the sauna bench and keeping watch outside his little world, a faint worry crease between her eyebrows as she looked at him emerging, a curling paperback book-marked by her thigh, and Niko had smiled remembering why he’d come back to the world and why he always would.
Now in sultry darkness with his back against the wall to end all walls he blinks and catlike shakes his head. It had been so real. Jemma had been sitting right there in front of him on the redwood bench, turbaned in a bluestriped towel, paperback dampened by her sweating hands.
“Stop.” Startled by his own voice in this pregnant dark, as if whispered close beside him by some unexpected other.
A world unto himself he walks.
AS HE PASSES on into the unconstellated night there grows around him a persistent murmur. The cumulation of untold millions in torment giving voice to their despair, wailing their pain, howling their rage, sobbing their unalloyed separation from all the sanguine world. A ceaseless threnody of anguish that constitutes a white noise of the suffering world, the hubbub of Hell. Its collective growl and purr the endless operation of a factory of misery, churning mindless yet somehow alive. It will be with him always here, and he will never get used to it.
Bring up chorus as the Greek approaches stage front.
VOICES HE HEARS voices.
“Oh hey thanks for leaving the gate open, asshole.”
“What’s he got in his hand?”
“They let him in with something?”
All is so amazing dark.
“Shit, they let him in with clothes.”
Dimly as he walks he starts to sense their outlines in the faint infected light. The total darkness giving way to intermittent sickly orange light from somewhere high and far away. Beyond him in the blind world waiting is a sound of shifting figures, murmured voices flattened by enormous open space. How do they see him in this fetid gloom?
“Whose ass you be kissin fuh to get in here like this, mon?” The ground crunches and crackles beneath him as he walks. “You deef, son?” another voice calls. “Boy done ast how come you rate.”
“Now Judge mon. Ah tell you bout callin me boy, hey.”
“You kin tell me all you wont, porch monkey. I’m still gonna—”
“Ah don take yuh shit no more Judge, hey. You don’t be remembrin how long it take yuh to pull yuhself back together after Gombe take you apart like fresh bread mon? How much it hurt? Yuh scream like the woman, Judge. It sound like the old work whistle an yuh know it true. Yeh an it take you longer ta heal every time too.”
“Fuck you nigger. I hung more a you Ubanges than Carter’s got pills, an I taken enough a yo big fat lip to—”
A sudden scream pierces the gloom. Terrified, highpitched, cracking. It does in fact sound very like a work whistle. It goes on longer than any living being could possibly scream.
Niko heads off to one side, aware that those ahead of him have been down here so long their eyes can detect him, aware too that down here the dark at times will be his friend. His instinct is to see why the man is screaming. To help someone in pain. But this is not the country for Samaritans and the dead lie well beyond his aid.
The screaming stops.
“Always save the troat fuh last,” comes Gombe’s voice. “Here yuh go mon. Catch.” Something lands close by with a soggy sound of wet mop slapping concrete. “Now yuh tell old Gombe,” the voice says, closer now, “who are yuh that come here before yuh time?”
So much for stealth. Niko takes a long deep breath, releases it slowly. Readies himself for the violence he hears in the man’s tone.
Again pale orange smears the distant starless air. Niko makes out human shapes again, dozens of them, closer than he’d realized. The closest is dreadlocked and only a few yards away.
“He’s wearing shoes,” an Englishwoman says.
Someone screams at him in Cantonese.
“Is that a guitar?” a husky voice.
Gombe laughs long and loud. The orange light fades and the shapes coalesce with the heated dark. “Yuh don belong here fuh certain. What happen mon? Yuh dig yuh swimmin pool too deep?”
Laughter all around him not quite sane.
“On yuh way to a gig maybe? They be trowin a righteous party all the time down along dat way I hear. Righteous party fuh true.”
“That’s right,” says Niko, his own voice flat and thin and airless. “I’m on my way to a gig.” He’s stopped walking now.
“Sneakers an a coat mon.” Gombe laughs. “Yuh from California fuh certain.”
Niko’s face heats. You have got to be fucking kidding me.
“Yuh long way from home ma friend.” Gombe is getting closer. Niko hears the man’s footsteps crunching on the unseen ground.
“Maybe Gombe jus take yuh shoes an send yuh on yuh way. Yuh play yuh gig barefoot like de bluesman hah?” Gombe laughs.
Once more orange light smears the distance like a comet’s ghost and now Niko sees Gombe there before him. The man’s skin glistens with crawling shapes. He is covered head to foot with enormous roaches. Their crawling traffic on his naked body is unceasing, even about his face, but Gombe pays no mind. Now Niko hears the aggregate rustle of millions of jointed cockroach legs picking their filthy way, millions of fat and glossy cockroach bodies brushing, millions of brown thin wings beating. Gombe steps forward and the ground crunches underneath his naked feet. Niko’s mouth tightens with nausea as he realizes that for some time now he has been walking on a living carpet of the filthy creatures.
Gombe sees his face and laughs. An enormous cockroach crawls across one eye. “What the matter mon? Yuh don like how Gombe dress? Maybe soon yuh and him have the same tailor huh. Or maybe yuh give old Gombe yuh shoes an he let yuh go with the res.”
“I’m sorry,” Niko says and hears his voice’s tension, “but I think I’m gonna need them more than you.”
Gombe grins. “Now what yuh be needin fuh to wear runnin shoes here mon?”
“Watch,” says Niko. And runs. The rhythmic crush beneath him is sickening, the rapid crunch behind him spurs him on. Within a hundred yards the yelling pursuit begins to fall away, which is good because although Niko is in great shape he is no track star and certainly no spring chicken. The crushing beneath him lessens as well, gives way to hard pounding on flat stone. Niko slows to a stop, breathing heavily. Why aren’t they pursuing? Could they who do not breathe grow winded?
He feels a tickling on his ankles as he bends panting with hands on knees, a tickling climbing his shoes and calves. Suddenly he drops the hardcase and scrunches up his pantlegs and compulsively slaps at his ankles and shins and calves, goes on to his thighs, his rear, his stomach. Takes off his coat and snaps it before him like a rug. Hears sof
t bodies patter onto stone. Another shudder convulses him, and he hurries on his harried way.
NIKO WALKS DISCONSOLATE along the midnight plain. Soon the flat ground becomes cracked and broken like the parched skin of the Bonneville salt flats. Earthquake fissures run dark and jagged like frozen lightning shadows. Niko has encountered not another soul although he hears their lamentations in the distance. It’s a lot less crowded here than one would think. Then again it’s goddamn huge and he is only on the outskirts. How big, how long his traveling to come? This geography is not physical or mappable. Cartographers of this sullen abyss might light black candle and cast bone and carve rune and paint in chicken blood on parchment skin and still not fix it for the eye to read because it is not fixed. There ought to be a word for such a notion, for the cartography of Hell.
Hadeography.
From far off comes a freight train rumble. Niko peers across the dolorous distance and faintly sees a giant living thing glide stately on the cracked and broken ground. No, not living. And not gliding either. Sinuously twisting, bottomlit and lifting itself up at points like a woman in a hoopskirt stepping high across a puddle, touching down again capriciously, a tornado heaves across the tortured landscape toward him. The gloom alive with static sparkings like a plague of fireflies. The churning funnel owns the landscape like an Old Testament god, vengeful and malign and bent on wrath and thunder. The locomotive roar of its approach grows deafening as it stoops and gathers writhing clots of feckless damned to bear them up and dance them doll-like in the air around its undulating body in a hundred mile an hour waltz. Their naked skin sandblasted. Fleshy layers flense to raw and glistening muscle and white tendon band, gouting arteries spray particolored tendrils that whipstain the massive shaft before dispersing. Screaming faces filed down to glossy bone. The twister touches down again to amble toward another clump of running damned, leaving in its quiet wake a stripped debris of gleaming bone and conscious jelly.
Mortality Bridge Page 8
