by Erron Adams
***
Chapter 5
Knock And Enter
From his bunk bed Bowman surveyed his new environment. Vertical bars sliced his vision of the far brick wall. A door, also of bars, with a steel lock. Two side walls of brick and another behind him. A concrete floor.
Outside the cell block he heard officers of the law shuffling papers, scraping back chairs and banging accustomed doors and drawers; the things people separate things out in, the things to keep things locked away in.
A small steel tray entered his world, and a cop who’d spoken maybe five words since Bowman’s arrest said, “Food.”
Bowman pushed himself upright and walked the cramped space to the tray. As he did, the sense of loss hit with renewed force. Only hours earlier freedom had been morning-new, delicious, fresh and abundant. He'd been returning to a place of peace and surety, borne on invincible legs; nothing could go wrong. He was going home. Home to the house he’d lived and slept and sweated and worked and swore and fought and cried and fucked and ate and most importantly grown to know the edges, at least, of the thing people called love, in. He knew it by nail, tile, flake of paint, every minute detail. The memory of it fitted him like skin. In his suddenly turbulent existence, it was the one object he prayed would present itself intact.
But when he’d arrived at the house, shock had piled on shock. The changes here went deeper than the surface; they were personal.
A much-loved tree, whose ancient roots had lifted the front gate and pitched the mailbox at a comical angle, had been removed, its magnificent roots grubbed out. The letter slot ran parallel to the ground once more.
Everywhere, lawn had replaced unkempt grass, and trimmed shrubs had been set out in patterns. Order had been imposed on anarchy.
Walking down a new path he passed under a new verandah, struggling to keep pace with the growing list of transformations. Like imps, they leapt out from behind every surface, beaming malicious triumph.
Reassuringly, it was the same old door he came to, in the same place he'd left it, years ago-yesterday. He remembered when Caylen and he had bought it, haggling with the crusty old house wrecker. Laughing, entreating, pleading poverty and outrage by turns, Bowman had poured every known strategy in but the wrecker had seemed more intent on dealing with her. And when the deal was finally struck, at a price he and she later rose from packing crate furniture to toast with imitation champagne, both knew it had been her breasts that sealed the deal. They’d been the downfall of a man who couldn't take his eyes off his need. Crusty indeed.
He lifted the lion-head knocker, wincing at the new paint. Blue! How could they? Anger surged in him. He wanted everything returned that had been taken away; he was on a crusade of restoration, which the echoing hall of this house would announce. The metal lion pounded his arrival in the new world.
Beyond the door, footsteps sounded.
She was old. He was older. Both shifted about as they spoke, looking from each other to Bowman’s clothes, fleetingly his face, back to their own feet. The old man did most of the talking.
They'd moved in seventeen years ago. Bought the old place - phew, what a mess - did it up for retirement. Young woman owned it then, a widow. That who you're after? Yeah, young. Well, youngish. Pretty too. But crazy. Oh come on Elaine, you know what I mean, touched, then. Mumbled a lot. Lost her husband in a tragedy. Fire. Couldn't seem to keep the place up after that. I think she'd lost the heart for it. Never came to terms with his death. Believed he was still alive. Crazy with the grief, I guess. Yeah, touched by it. Said she was selling the house to go look for him. Think they locked her up for a while. For her own good, probably would have killed herself or at least gone completely bonkers otherwise.
All the time he was talking, Bowman scrutinized the woman. Her eyes, when he caught them, burned with an intensity he couldn't place. Fear. Or hate. Probably both. After all, he couldn't expect to inspire trust, dressed as he was, coming out of nowhere to knock so early, asking how long they'd lived there; if they knew the previous owners.
They were a traditional, conservative couple. She with her secretive reserve, he and his protective bluster of conversation. In different circumstances he may have even warmed to them, eventually.
Some part of him wanted to kill them.
Kill them for their incursion, their usurpation of his sanctuary. Kill them for their comfort and security and contentment, even for the diffidence they showed, standing at the threshold of a world which looked and smelt and felt and sounded of Home. Kill them and repatriate his plundered peace. But above all, kill them for the love between them. Love that had replaced love. Love that was the inverse of his own ache. Some part of him wanted to kill them, but their unwitting theft of his life left him somehow powerless and unable to act. He mumbled thanks and reasons, then went.
The old man caught him at the gate.
“Just a minute,” he said, then looked back at the house, to where the woman stood at the edge of the verandah. She folded her arms and glared at them across the ordered garden.
The old man looked back to Bowman, wincing. “Not sure how to say this. Not sure if I should, even. She was here this morning - the woman you're looking for. Completely threw us, actually, Elaine's still upset. Well, you know - not seeing her for so long and then out of the blue... hardly recognized her at first, though the years have been kind to her, I'll say that. But stranger than ever, you'd better be prepared for it.”
Bowman looked at him, head bursting with the obvious question, hoping he wouldn't have to ask it. He didn't.
“She went into town, same way you're going, the river path. Said she'd maybe try the library first. Still looking for you. It is you, isn't it? You're supposed to be dead, you know, it's not safe to play tricks like that any more, son! I really hope you meet up before something happens.” Another glance at the verandah and the old man's voice became urgent; the woman was no longer there. He gripped Bowman's arm as his eyes searched the windows of the house.
“Look, you'd better go. It was all I could do to stop Elaine calling the officers after your wife left.” He looked up at Bowman. “We're a very ordered town here. Strangers aren't welcome, even the tourists have to show ID.” He pushed Bowman in the direction of town. “I better go and stop her doing something. Good luck!” He turned and scampered down the path on bowed legs.
Bowman ran until his breath gave out. Then he shuffled along, panting. He thought of Caylen and the seventeen-year wall between them. They both crept along that wall, it seemed, and pressed to it and listened, hearing the hard secrets of stone those thrown into a dungeon might hear. If they had the heart to listen.
He hadn’t gone far when a police car pulled alongside. Bowman glanced at the peaked cap of the cop sitting nearest him, and smiled before quickly looking away. The cop’s window wound silently down. Bowman heard a radio crackling and the driver speaking. Hippie-looking, red shirt, was all Bowman caught of the conversation.
“Good morning sir, could I see your license?” the closest cop asked.
“Didn't know you needed one to walk.”
The cops exchanged mystified looks; the car accelerated and pulled to a sharp stop in front of Bowman. Both officers got out, one adjusting his belt and its attachments, the other holding a gun. It was time to talk.
The same officer spoke again, this time with the merest film of civility over malice, his words hissed through showing teeth.
“License. Please!”
Bowman opened his mouth to reply, but no sound came out. There was nothing to say. Since he didn’t have what they wanted, whatever he said wouldn’t alter his immediate fortunes. Out of the corner of one eye he could see the neat black hole of a gun barrel pointing his way. It reached across the gap between man and cop and imprinted a twitching circle on his chest.
“I don't have one,” he said.
***
The cops drove Bowman in silence to the small jail in one of Dyall's Ford’s back streets. Bowman had driven by
it many times in the past, had even gone in for hunting and fishing licences and other mundane stuff. But he’d never taken close notice of the nondescript building before - outside or in - and now he couldn’t really tell if it had changed much since he last saw it.
They pushed him into a small cell with a single barred window. There was a rudimentary bunk of steel, a blanket, a bucket in the corner. Bowman couldn’t believe how cliched the small space appeared, he half expected manacles and a floor of strewn straw.
They left him a long time. It felt like he was slowly circling an eddy beside life's current. The jailers' muffled conversations and sounds of the street were all he heard of the stream that had once carried him, the life from whose edge he'd slipped.
Once, he'd found that life annoying, a pushy thing he couldn't really connect with. Even so, the world made sense back then; and there was only one world.
More importantly, back then, Love could save him. Propelled through life, he could only watch things whip past, blurred and torn out of shape in a slipstream at the eye's corner. He couldn’t hold life's moments long enough for senses to settle, with such an engine at his back. Yet SHE had only to hold him and the headlong rush stopped long enough for understanding, its disconnected energies swirled round to enfold them.
Now the world and Caylen had swept on.
“Not hungry, then. Suit yourself.” the hutch flap clanged and the tray of undisturbed food withdrew. Bowman said nothing. What was there to say?
He looked around, trying to decide what to do. If there was something that could be done. He felt each breath stretch and contract; autonomous blood ticked under skin. His mind began to drift. He noted how the cold of the prison cell rivalled that of the Cave of Origins, or at least the outer meanderings of the labyrinth.
In the dead stillness of his cell, he noted how his mind wandered. The deathly cold and silence thew its aimless paths in stark relief like a shadow play.
It struck him as being even weirder when Argilan materialized before him. Bowman reeled at the apparition, and he struggled to find words of welcome.
“Y... you!”
“Yes,” said Argilan. “I’m glad to have found you, John Bowman. I’ve come to help you return to Animarl.”
“Return?... Get serious, Argilan! I only just got here. My business is here. You have to understand, this is my home, I've come home!”
“And what of your woman? She is in Animarl; you are here.”
“Don’t give me that crap, Argilan. I’ve seen the girl, Caylen. Same name maybe, and I can’t account for that, but she’s not my wife. And I know what you want me back there for, Oyen showed me the Soul Gate. Not a snowball’s chance in Hell, mate!”
Argilan’s face set hard. He came up to Bowman. “What do you think all this is about, hmm?” he said, waving his arms around. He pointed a finger at Bowman’s head. “This place is what your mind constructs, it’s how you make sense of what’s happened. No matter, the Truth is coming. When you sleep, it’s gaining on you. Each time you wake you’ll be more tired, more within its grasp. Run as you might, it will never rest until you’re claimed.”
Bowman's gut cramped. After a morning of reality, the dream was back. And Argilan was right, he was tired. He wasn’t sure how long he could fend off the old man’s advances. Desperate, he turned to the one thing that had always worked for him. He lied.
“Yes, alright. I will return,” he said. But even as he lied, in one of those moments of insight that can be brought on by extreme exhaustion, something flashed across his mind’s darkened landscape, briefly illuminating monsters that had crept closer than he thought possible. He trembled, realizing for the first time, the true importance of spoken words.
There was no telling what might happen to him, and no way of stopping it. But everything he ever did, started with thinking, and whatever he affirmed formed his future as surely as a script. It could, he saw, be put to good effect, if properly commanded. But up to now, his undisciplined mouth had sent thoughtless words - harsh, reckless, mercenary words - into tomorrow's innocent landscape, so that when he arrived there he never met with victory or accomplishment; he was crowned instead with the smoky wreath of smouldering remains.
Even the argument that had led to the loss of Caylen started with a moment, and blew his life apart with the moment that had closed that scene. The moment he had chosen. The argument had started with the usual righteous passion and built towards the inevitable crossroad. Once there, it only took a moment for him to choose bitter words over retreat.
Later, shuffling down the dingy hallway that smelt of their last shared meal, her perfume, her skin, her hair, of her, he’d broken down crying. First time in years. That transformation also took but a moment.
Every moment has power and purpose, Bowman realised. Every moment that fails to affirm life, tips the scales into dark. Every moment gives me the choice to either get up and move into the future or slip into the past. I have slept too long!
Something simple happened then. Something deep inside him shuttled into place, something that had waited an eternity for light to swing round on this insight.
I’ll end this, he thought, and formed a new resolve.
First, a pledge to square all debts, freeing him for the second: to find the true path of his heart, whatever that could mean; it was, for now, some still-forming desire, the pinpoint of something that had just originated. Third, to choose that path, no matter the cost, and make no further deals with cowardice. Finally, to spend the rest of whatever life he now had, looking for Caylen. In this world or Animarl’s. It would be like a lived prayer, in that he would ask for nothing but the will to go to the end of that path, and if they never met again, he would at least die deeply committed in the endeavour.
He spoke to Argilan. “If what you say is true, then I will return, no matter how I fight it. If that’s how it’s going to be, okay. But there are things I have to do here first. One, obviously, is get out of this jail. If you really want me back in Animarl, you could help me with that!”
“If it was in my power, I would do it now. But I can only appear in your world, I cannot act here. Only those from your world can change it. At any rate, you may be released soon – what are you charged with?”
“I don't know. They won't tell me. Something about ID. They won't answer questions. I don't know how long I'm to be kept here, or what I'm supposed to have done. As far as I can make out, the only reason I'm here is because I'm a stranger.”
“Yes, as I thought. You’re too weak, yet, to create the circumstances you need to act with power. Is anything else strange?”
“Yes, damn it, everything! It's as though time has moved forward and I've stayed the same. I can barely recognize the place!”
“Yes, I don't doubt it. Yes.”
“Yes! Is that all you can say? Yes?!” Bowman was on his feet, yelling.
A chair scraped in the other room and footsteps came down the hall.
“Shhh! The Gestapo!” Bowman whispered, but Argilan had already gone.
“Everything all right in there?”
“No, I'm dead. Better let me out and I'll go bury myself.”
“Comedian huh. You'll learn. All do eventually.” The footsteps retreated.
“Argilan! Argilan?” Nothing. He closed his eyes and repeated the entreaty. No change. The old man had gone. Bowman's backside hit the bunk with a thump.
***
When the end came, it announced itself with a jangle of keys as the cell door swung open. Both jailers stood there. The one he'd spoken to earlier, spoke now.
“Okay, Mister Dead, bail's been posted. Time to get buried.”
Both cops smirked, and Argilan's face flashed in Bowman's mind a moment. Beware, John, this is a trap. Be on guard and prepare to fight.
“Come on, we haven't got all day, we've got more important things to do.”
Bowman shuffled to the door and the one who did most of the talking grabbed his arm above the elbow. “C'mon, get
moving!”
Bowman looked at the man. “Wait” he stalled. “Who posted bail?”
“What's it to you? Keep moving.”
“I have a right to know who bailed me, dammit!”
“Right? You don't have any damn rights! You don't need 'em where you're going. You're a free man!” The cops shared another laugh.
“Was it a woman?”
“Yeah. Yeah, sure it was.”
Bowman knew he was being led to execution. He didn't need Argilan's warning, the air reeked of wrongness, he could smell it on the cops, see it in their taut anticipation. They weren't letting something go; they were about to act.
He feigned leg cramps while his mind ran through possible responses, but the silent one kept prodding him with a finger that might have been the barrel of the gun he'd had no need to draw; no need because this was their element, their world, they needed no more force than their say-so to shape events here.
Near the end of the hallway, they came to a passage leading off to the left. Desperate for any action he could originate, Bowman broke away and ran into it. He expected to feel an arresting hand on his shoulder; when it didn't come he looked back and stopped.
The cops had barely followed him into the corridor before they’d halted, one looking left, the other right. Each intently scrutinized the wall. Such was their distraction Bowman could have slipped between them and tried his escape. But the way beyond was probably locked, so he stayed put. Wondering what had their attention, he felt his own eyes drift sideways. His heartbeat stopped dead a moment and his mouth dropped open. The walls were no more than opaque skin over something that glowed and thrummed as though powered by a buried motor.
If it was new to the cops, some aspect of it resonated with Bowman. This corridor was no place on earth, and it either led between the worlds, or to some unknown region: insanity perhaps, or helpless birth, maybe even death. Once again, absence of choice closed in; he turned from the Law and ran.
His sprint shook the jailers from their stupor.
