Mortality Bridge

by Steven R. Boyett

  “Okay.”

  “Luck, Niko.”

  Niko runs.

  A hundred yards later and with fifty yards to go he hears demoniac laughter above and behind him and he puts on a burst of speed. The guitar case is a liability. He considers dropping it to recover later but suppose they take it? Suppose a seventy ton block lands on it? What good will all his journeying do him then?

  Niko reaches the block and presses his back against a side and brings the case in close.

  One demon yells Tim-berrrrr! and the other whistles a long descending note like the swan song of a diving bomb. They let go the block they hold impossibly aloft and Niko sees a patch of sky swell toward him like a gaping maw. His face tightens and it’s a great effort not to close his eyes and turn away.

  The granite block hits. One edge strikes the top of the block Niko presses against. The bottom edge hits ground and the block tumbles away. The sound is deafening. And more than sound is the concussive push inside his chest. Niko’s knees buckle. Granite shrapnel stings his cheek. By the time his knees touch the plain all is as impossibly still and quiet as it was before the block was dropped. Niko is afraid to move.

  “Get him?” Purring voice from on high.

  “Think so.” Gruff voice. “Did you see? Monkey son had my poker.”

  “We’ll get—” This last fades into incomprehensibility as they fly away.

  Niko doesn’t realize he’s been holding his breath until he lets it out. His heart is playing thirtysecond notes. He relaxes against the protective block and relishes the relief he knows is fleeting.

  He hears faint noise. A dim and distant screaming coming from behind him. He frowns and turns but there is only solid granite. He sets his ear against it. Yes, faintly through the stone: screaming.

  HOW GOOD IT feels to see Sam’s body in the distance on the plain. Niko waves and Sam waves back. Niko picks up his pace. The guitar case feels good in his hand. For the first time since this whole affair began he feels not merely purposeful but confident. He’s gonna beat this thing, he really is. He’s high on epinephrine of course but that’s okay. Believing in yourself is half the battle. Hasn’t he told a couple dozen interviewers that?

  Sam’s still waving. Niko grins. Glad to see me back, huh, Sam? Didn’t think I’d make it. Or maybe you thought I wouldn’t come back for you if I did.

  Niko frowns. Isn’t that why Sam is waving?

  He stops and looks behind him just as they flap overhead, frightening humanoid bats they seem in the dim vast trembling air, holding between them a huge chunk broken from the block that nearly crushed him. Reflexively he ducks and ludicrously clamps his arms around his head as if that will protect him from the piledriver blow of falling granite. But they pass low overhead and shriek and laugh. All in a day’s work. One of them pisses with an armsized penis and the urine scatters in the windless air and splashes Niko’s jacket and his guitar case and his hair, and where it splashes hisses and smokes and burns. Reek of sewage and spoiled milk. Niko runs again, runs fullout, runs for—

  “Sam!”

  They’re over Sam now, flapping rapidly to hover, stretching out the moment.

  “Pilot to bombardier, pilot to bombardier,” one demon calls. “Bomb bay open.”

  “Bombardier to pilot, bombardier to pilot, roger that. Bombs away.”

  The slab descends like an outcast angel. Niko runs, uselessly runs. Just before the impact he sees something he will not grasp the meaning of till later. Right now he just records it. The slab hurtling down. Sam’s arm up as if to ward it off. Fingers not outspread but in a fist, no not a fist but clenched with just the middle finger out and stabbing upward like a steeple.

  HE’S STILL STARING at the chunk of granite flat against the ground when they land in front of him. They’re eight or nine feet tall, muscular and clawed at hand and foot. One has the elongated head of a skinless rat, the other is a grinning nightmare from a parapet of Notre Dame. Both have needle teeth and amber eyes with knife edge pupils. Rat Face has a Buddha’s potbelly. Those absurd Beardsley penises waver clublike as they move.

  Rat Face wraps his mottled and membranous wings around himself like a cloak and hunches his head down to peer at Niko with one wide and leering eye. He moves toward Niko in a loopy caricatured sashay. He stops ten feet away and surveys Niko with that cartoonish eye. In a burlesque Hungarian accent he says, “Vee are cheeldren of de night. Donnn’t be afraid.”

  Behind him Notre Dame leans on his trident like a Roman centurion on his spear and cracks up laughing.

  Rat Face circles Niko, keeping a shoulder toward him and staying hunched into his cape of wings. Niko circles with him. “Vee vant to know how is it you haff come by...mortal things.”

  “I’m mortal.”

  At this Rat Face straightens and drops the Lugosi act. His wings curl back behind him and then furl to rest there quivering. His claws come up with fingers spread in a gesture of melodramatic surprise. “Mortal?” His ridiculous penis wilts and drools a thin yellowish pus.

  “Come on, Maurice,” calls Notre Dame, still laughing. “Gack him and let’s go.”

  “He says he’s mortal.”

  Notre Dame stops laughing. “What’s he doing in the Park if he ain’t a guest?”

  Rat Face draws up to his full towering height. “What you doing in the Park if you ain’t a guest?”

  “I want to be taken down.”

  “Taken down?”

  “I command it.”

  “You command it?” Rat Face gives a sawmill grin. “Mortal boy I’m gonna peel you like a roasted pepper.”

  “You have no jurisdiction over me. Your business is tormenting the damned.” Niko moves his right hand as if writing in the air. “I abjure thee by all the ancient names—”

  Rat Face hollers Shit and backs off and spreads his wings to their full and sail-like width. “This monkey son knows the old keys.”

  “I’m wingin out,” says Notre Dame. He turns and leaps into the air.

  Rat Face turns to regard Niko once more with a look of seething hatred.

  “Take me down,” says Niko. “This has been willed where what is willed must—”

  Rat Face stabs clawed fingers inches into his own tapered ears and shouts La la la la. And so singing jumps and flaps away.

  Niko stops the incantation and watches them dwindle as they fly toward where the intermittent orange light originates.

  NIKO WALKS AROUND the dropped stone fragment. From one edge a huge fan of blood has sprayed the ground. Niko glimpses motion at the base of the stone in the bloody patch’s midst and hurries to it. Unbelievably Sam’s hand sticks out beneath the stone. It is grossly swollen and once more blood has spurted from the fingernails. The fingers twitch as Niko approaches, wriggle frantically as he bends toward them.

  Niko clasps Sam’s hand. The blood-drenched fingers clench. “Sam.”

  The grip tightens.

  “Can you hear me Sam?”

  Relaxes and tightens again.

  “One for yes, two for no, okay?”

  One squeeze.

  “I’m sorry, Sam.”

  One.

  “I can’t get you out this time. I’ve got to go.”

  Two.

  Niko glances about at the air, at the quiescent plain. Spies an object. “Hold on a second, Sam. I’ll be right back.”

  Two.

  “I’m coming right back, I promise. I’m just going to get something.” A hard squeeze and a release.

  Five feet away is the trident Niko used to dig Sam from his former prison, a freedom Sam enjoyed for what, an hour? Niko drags the trident back.

  Sam’s fingers drum with exaggerated impatience as Niko bends down again and says Aw Sam. He touches the hand and the bloody fingers slide around his.

  “This is the best I can do. Here” He sets Sam’s fingers on the head of the trident and traces their contours so that Sam knows what he’s holding. “It’s not much but it ought to speed things up. Better than fing
ernails anyway.”

  One squeeze.

  “All right Sam. I have to go.”

  Two.

  “Come on Sam. Don’t make this harder on me.”

  The hand bears down.

  “Sam. You have to let me go.”

  The hand holds tight and then lets go.

  Niko straightens. “Good luck, Sam.”

  The hand gives a thumbsup and Niko barks a sort of crying laugh. He says Okay and turns away. Even as he picks up his case the hand behind him grasps the trident and begins to dig.

  X.

  LAST FAIR DEAL GONE DOWN

  NIKO STUBS A toe and jerks awake. He slept? Walking? How far has he come, how long did he sleep?

  He looks around and wonders if he isn’t still asleep and wandering the province of a nightmare. The plain has grown more crowded and the crowd is more tormented. The air around him throbs with cries and sobs of voices flattened by the diseased wind.

  The catalog of woe he’s seen thus far has now become a circus of debasement. To Niko’s right a raised wood platform twelve feet high and several miles long swarms with legions of the naked dead. Mostly men but a scattering of women. Surrounding the platform a picket of wooden spikes impales the damned. Speared like cocktail sausages atop each other and writhing like babies. Convulsive shudders, feeble grasping, useless mewling. Hopeless eyes track Niko as he walks their skewered picket.

  Alternating with the spikes are taller, rough-hewn logs driven firm into the plain and slathered with black grease.

  A demon with black horns, one jaggedly broken, towers above the platform’s milling dead. Grinning and hermaphroditic, pendulous baglike breasts and clublike penis. “Who’s next then?” Its voice oddly effeminate. It grabs a pale fat man with doughy skin and a bald spot large enough to make him look tonsured like a monk and hoists him by the throat. “Have a seat, my sweet meat pie.” The demon slobberingly kisses Tonsured Monk then hoists him over the platform’s edge. The man holds to the demon’s arm, his hands barely encircling the thick black wrist. His face gleams with the demon’s spittle. His struggles listless as he’s set onto a greased pole above a spike. Perhaps because the dead are fatalistic. Perhaps because the dead are dead. When he’s pushed against the slippery pole he lets go the demon’s wrist and wraps his arms and legs around it. He begins a slow slide down toward the ragged spikepoint just below his buttocks. He clutches and digs and undulates and scrapes splinters into his forearms and thighs but lowers nonetheless until the spike tip spears his naked anus.

  On the ground a demon with a feathered head and blackbird wings inspects the picket of alternating poles and pikes. Casually it bangs a massive club against the shaft of one pike topped by a frail old man impaled and hanging motionless. The pikeshaft quivers and the old man gives a soft grunt that is worse than any scream.

  The birdhead demon doesn’t even glance at him but continues down the spitted line, whacking skewers like a child with a branch against a picket fence. He trails a wake of cries and moans. “Well well well,” he calls. Whack whack whack. “And how are we fine pederasts today?” Whack whack whack. “Like being up on a pedestal do we?” Whack. “Want the kiddies to look up to us, yes?” Whack whack whack whack. “What’s the matter, meat pie? Got a stick up your ass?”

  One man has managed to pull himself partway off his spike. The wood beneath him slathered with gleaming gore. Below that struggle half a dozen spitted damned. The broadshouldered man is powerfully built, Nordic with pale skin and long cornyellow hair. Thick legs braced against the thick greased pole in front of him and arms encircling. Incrementally he jacks himself up like a logger up a tree. One inch at a time and every fraction of it agony. Yellow Hair pulls himself off the spike—to escape to where, Niko can’t imagine—but just as his face flushes with a ghost of triumph the gigantic keening hermaphroditic demon jumps up from the platform and lands both birdlike feet atop his shoulders and drives him down until his naked ass impacts the dead impaled below him. A yard of gory spike protrudes now from his larynx. The demon grins and bends and kisses Yellow Hair’s forehead and then sucks the tip of the spike and jumps back to the platform with a farewell push. Yellow Hair screams an obstructed gargling shredding scream. He screams until cords stand cobralike from his neck, until the corners of his mouth tear back toward his jaw and his head flops backward on the ripped hinge until the back of it touches the nape of his neck and still his scream trumps wetly from his fleshy windpipe, ululated by the flopping meat of tongue. And still he screams.

  Niko turns from the platform.

  A line of several dozen children is being led by a demon Niko’s height but proportioned like a dwarf. This demon has a long raven beak and bloodred eyes set in a narrow wedge of head. Raven pulls the naked crying children merrily along, then stops abruptly. The children bump and scream.

  “Shuddup ya babies,” Raven yells. “Whassamadda widjoo? You wanna find you twin, doncha? The one you murdered inside mommy?”

  The children blubber louder and the demon puts his hands on his bladed hips and looks disgusted. “Crybabies make me sick.” To prove it he opens his beak and spews a chunky yellow bile that hisses where it strikes the children. The children in front jump back and all begin to scream fullout. But they remain standing in a perfectly straight line.

  “Maybe you twins is over there.” Raven indicates the lengthy barricade of spitted damned. “Maybe you mommies and daddies is over there. Let’s go see.” He raises a metal whistle from a leather lanyard round his neck and puts it to his dripping beak and blows it even though he has no lips. “Ready, march. Hup two, hup two, hup two.”

  Raven pulls the children along and Niko sees now that a rod runs through their bellies to connect them in a single line. A shish-kebab of little boys and girls. Raven tugs the rod to urge along the naked children who must either march in step or jostle one another and increase their pain. The demon slows and speeds up and stops altogether and jerks randomly on the rod, all the while exhorting them like some gungho camp counselor. “Cmon cmon. Calvin, getchoo thumb outta you mouth or I make you eat it again. Mei Lin, izzat you daddy over there? Whaddayoo mean you dunno? What iffiz eyes was inniz head, wouldjoo recognize him then? Oh stop you bawling. Trina wouldn’t cry if she saw her daddy, wouldja Trina? Whatsat? It’s not you daddy? Well wave to him anyway you little fetus eater.” And pulls them along toward the next stop on their eternal and demented tour.

  Niko’s face heats with the shame of his inability to help. Even children then. No one is spared, no one is spared.

  Now he sees a crowd of meandering adults carrying their frowning perplexed and severed heads before them like Diogenes with a jackolantern. They bump into one another and stumble and fall over themselves and drop their heads. The bodies grope blindly about, watched by their own helpless rocking heads that cannot call instructions because they have no lungs. Eventually bodies encounter heads and lift them up and an obscene charade ensues as rightful heads and bodies try to reunite.

  Niko wants to ask the demons about the tormented. Ask the damned about their deeds. He wants to know the reasons for such punishments, for like everyone who wants to believe there is somewhere a cosmic balance sheet dispensing justice Niko can accept the meting of the cruelest torment if the punishment fits the crime. But though he knows old phrases and keys and abjurations, dark geographies inlaid along a chromosomal tunnel untold generations long, unlike Dante Niko has no Sherpa to conduct his harrowing and much of what he meets with here will remain a mystery.

  The undiscovered country. I have awakened inside Bosch’s sleep.

  MILES LATER THE platform and its suffering scarecrows yields to a vast and lightening plain bestrewn with casual atrocities and manifest ironies. A molten glow in the distance eventually becomes an enormous banked bonfire attended by demons who stir the sluggish coals with their tridents. The demons squat before the bonfire like cowhands at the end of a long day, heating their irons and joking and laughing and punching each other on the arm
until they withdraw their makeshift brands and lazily press the whitehot points against the carefully exposed wet muscle of thousands of flensed men nailed to the plain with iron spikes. When muscle takes the kiss of hissing brand the sickly air becomes a cauldron of screams.

  A wooden rack stands by each man and on each rack is fixed the outspread leather of his tanning skin stretched taut and drumming in the fire’s breeze. A barbecue smell hangs on the air. A constant snow of ash descends.

  Several demons sit on thickframed chairs and read thick books by the glow of tall white candelabra oddly necessary in the angry shifting light. The bonfire’s constant crackle an enormous beast charging through a dry and brittle forest. Even a hundred yards away Niko’s forehead grows wet from the heat.

  He means to give the bonfire a wide berth but a voice behind him stops him in his tracks. “Guten Abend, Herr Doktor. Sind Sie deutsch?”

  Niko turns to see a demon standing near him, black and saillike wings outspread and drumming in the bonfire’s wind. She would look carved from onyx if not for her pendulous breasts.

  “£um Beide, nein,” he replies. “Kein doktor bin ich, auch kein deutscher.”

  The demon looks surprised. “Nein? Sind sie nicht Herr Doktor Faust aus Heidelberg?”

  “Nope,” says Niko, “I’m a musician. An American.”

  “Ah, the mortal. We heard about you.”

  “News travels fast.”

  She grins. “You know what they say about idle hands.” Her dagger teeth are obsidian as the rest of her. Her eyes are black and have no color but what they reflect.

  “Why did you think—” and realizes as he says the next three words that he has just spoken that language “—I was German?”

  “Most everybody in this section is.” She indicates men staked beside their drumhead skins. “The guests, I mean.”

  “Why are these men here?”

  “Well. They were bad.”

  “But why this torture? What was their crime?”