The City of Mirrors

by Justin Cronin

  What they needed was a god.

  Nine and one, I commanded them, in my best god voice. Nine are yours but one is mine, as you are mine. Into the tenth shall be planted the seed so that we will be Many, millions-fold.

  A reasonable person might ask, Why did you do it? If I possessed the power to lead them, surely I could have put a stop to everything. The rage was part of it, yes. All that I loved had been taken from me, and that which I did not love as well, which was my human life. So, too, did the biological imperatives of my remanufactured self; could you ask a hungry lion to ignore the bounty of the veldt? I do not note these things to seek the pardon of any person, because my actions are unpardonable, nor to say I’m sorry, although I am. (Does that surprise you to hear? That Timothy Fanning, called Zero, is sorry? It’s true: I’m sorry about everything.) I merely wish to set the stage, to place my mental contours in their proper context. What did I desire? To make the world a wasteland; to bring upon it the mirrored image of my wretched self; to punish Lear, my friend, my enemy, who believed he could save a world that was not savable, that never deserved saving in the first place.

  Such was my wrath in those early days. Yet I could not ignore the metaphysical aspects of my condition indefinitely. As I boy, I spoke often to the Almighty. My prayers were shallow and childish, as if I were speaking to Santa Claus: spaghetti for dinner, a new bike at my birthday, a day of snow and no school. “If, Lord, in your infinite mercy, it would not be too much trouble …” How ironic! We are born faithful and afraid, when it should be the opposite; it is life that teaches us how much we stand to lose. As a grown man, I mislaid the impulse, like many people. I would not say I was a nonbeliever; rather, that I gave little if any thought to celestial concerns. It did not seem to me that God, whoever he was, would be the sort of god to take an interest in the minutiae of human affairs, or that this fact released us from the duty to go about our lives in a spirit of decency to others. It is true that the events of my life brought me into a state of nihilistic despair, yet even in the darkest hours of my human life—the hours that, to this day, I dwell in—I blamed no one but myself.

  But as love turns to grief, and grief becomes anger, so must anger yield to thought, in order to know itself. My symbolic properties were inarguable. Made by science, I was a perfect industrial product, the very embodiment of mankind’s indefatigable faith in itself. Since our first, furry ancestor scraped flint on stone and banished night with fire, we have climbed heavenward on a ladder made of our own arrogance. But was that all? Was I the final proof that humanity dwelled in an unwatched cosmos of no purpose, or was I something more?

  Thus did I contemplate my existence. In due course, these ruminations led me to but one conclusion. I had been made for a purpose. I was not the author of destruction; I was its instrument, forged in heaven’s workshop by a god of horrors.

  What could I do but play the part?

  As to my present, more human-seeming incarnation: all I can say is that Jonas was right about one thing after all, though the bastard never knew it. The events I am about to describe occurred just a few days after my emancipation, in a certain benighted prairie hamlet by the name (I was later to learn) of Sewanee, Kansas. To this day my recollections of that early period are drowned in joy. What soaring liberty! What bountiful slaking of my appetites! The world of night seemed a glorious banquet to my senses, an infinite buffet. Yet I moved with a certain caution. No roadhouse-tavern massacres. No families slaughtered whole in their beds. No fast-food emporia painted red, patrons strewn willy-nilly in bloody dismemberment. These things would come eventually; but for the time being, I sought to leave a lighter footprint. Each night, as I made my way east, I dined upon only a handful, and only in situations in which I could do so at my ease, and swiftly dispose of the remains.

  Thus my heart sang an aria of delight at the sight of the truck.

  The vehicle, a preposterously bloated and overappointed quad cab pickup—smokestacks, duallies, lights on the roll bar, Confederate-flag decal on the bumper—was parked nose-in at the lip of a flooded quarry. Its isolation was ideal, as was the distracted state of its occupants: a man and a woman in full passionate flagrante, enjoying each other as much as I was about to enjoy them. For a time, I merely watched. My gaze was not carnal; rather, I observed with the curiosity of the scientist. Why this crummy place to do the deed? Why the awkward confines of a pickup (the man was practically crushing his beloved against the dashboard) to unleash their animal splendor? Surely there were enough beds in the world to go around. They were not young, far from it—he bald and rather portly, she scrawny and loose-skinned, the two of them a spectacle of aging flesh. What about this place had called out to them? Was it nostalgia? Had they come here when they were young? Was I witnessing a reenacted glory of youth? Then it came to me. They were married. They just weren’t married to each other.

  I took the woman first. Astride her companion on the wide bench seat, so wildly was she pumping upon his anatomy—fists gripping the headrest, skirt bunched around her waist and underpants swinging from a bony ankle, her face angled toward the ceiling like a supplicant—that as I yanked open the door she seemed more irritated than alarmed, as if I had interrupted her in the midst of a particularly important train of thought. This, of course, did not last long, no more than a couple of seconds. It is an interesting truth that the human body, liberated from its head, is in essence a bag of blood with a built-in straw. Holding her headless torso upright, I positioned my mouth around this jetting orifice and gave it a long, muscular suck. I wasn’t expecting anything much. It seemed likely that her small-town diet, rich in preservatives, would give her blood a chemical taste. But this turned out not to be the case. The woman was, in fact, delicious. Her blood was a veritable bouquet of complex flavors, like a well-aged wine.

  Two more robust sucks and I cast her aside. By this time her associate, pants puddled around his ankles, gleaming penis in rapid deflation, had gathered the wherewithal to shimmy toward the driver’s side of the cab, where he was frantically attempting to isolate the truck’s key from a ring of them. The ring was enormous. It was positively janitorial. Fingers trembling, he jammed one key into the slot and then another, all to no avail, muttering a chain of “oh God”s and “holy fuck”s that were only a lightly retooled rendition of the ecstatic sounds and filthy encouragements he’d been breathing into his companion’s ear mere seconds ago.

  The comedy was exquisite. Speaking frankly, I couldn’t get enough of it.

  Which was my grand mistake. Had I killed him more quickly, not pausing to savor this risible display, the world we know would be a different place. As it was, my delay gave him time to locate the correct key, shove it into the ignition, turn the engine over, and reach for the gearshift before I shot into the cab, grabbed his head, tipped it to the side, and crushed his windpipe under my jaws with a gristly crunch. So enraptured was I with the bloody feast of my hapless victim that I failed to notice what was happening—that he had put the truck in gear.

  Our species’ aversion to water is well known; water is death to us. We sink like stones, our bodies lacking the buoyancy of adipose tissue. Of my plunge into the quarry I possess only a fractured recollection. The truck’s slow progress to the lip of the abyss; the snatch of gravity and the inevitable plunge; water all around me, a cocoon of cold death, engulfing my eyes and nose and lungs. From small mistakes come great catastrophes; invincible in most other aspects, I had found the quickest way to die. As the truck touched down with a soft thump upon the quarry’s watery floor, I extricated myself from the cab and began to crawl along the bottom. Even in my panicked state, the irony was not lost on me. Subject Zero, World Destroyer, scuttling like a crab! My only hope was to feel my way to the edge of the pit and scale my way to freedom. Time was my enemy; I had but one bottled breath with which to save myself. A wall of rock met my desperate grasp; I began to climb. Hand over hand I made my ascent. My vision swirled with darkness, the end was closing in …
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br />   How I came in due course to find myself on hands and knees—pink-fleshed, inarguably human-looking hands and knees—whilst gagging out great volumes of boggy vomitus is a question I shall leave to the theologians. For die I surely did; the body remembers these things. Having freed myself from the quarry’s waters, I had yet succumbed and for some period of time lain as a drowned corpse upon the rocks, only to be shot back into existence.

  Death’s doorway, it seemed, was not marked EXIT ONLY after all.

  The last of the quarry’s waters expelled, I managed, in a state of dazed astonishment, to rise. Where was I? When was I? What was I? Such was my disorientation that it seemed that I might have dreamed it all—then, conversely, that I was dreaming this. I held up a hand before the moon. It was, in every visible aspect, the hand of a human being—the hand of Timothy Fanning, holder of the Eloise Armstrong Chair, et cetera. I looked down upon the rest of me; with tremulous digits I probed my face, my chest and stomach, my pale legs; naked by moonlight, I investigated each feature of my physical person like a blind man reading braille.

  I’ll be goddamned, I thought.

  I had come to rest on a rocky shelf jutting from the quarry wall; a narrow switchback led me to the top, where I emerged into an area of rusted machinery half-buried by weeds. The hour was unknown to me. Save for the moon, no lights burned anywhere. The landscape was one of such uninhabited desolation the world might have ended already.

  The quarry’s waters would conceal my second victim, but there was the woman to consider; the last thing I wanted was a police manhunt to complicate matters. I circled the quarry to the parking area. The sight of her aroused no remorse, just the sort of perfunctory, quickly dispatched pity one might feel reading a newspaper account of some distant catastrophe over one’s second slice of morning toast. Two distant splashes—body, head—and into the watery deep she went.

  None of which did anything to solve the problem of being a naked, full-grown man at large in an unknown countryside. I needed clothes, shelter, a story. Also, a certain mental agitation, like an inaudible siren in my brain, told me that, should daybreak find me in the open, nothing happy would ensue.

  The main highway was too risky. I headed for the woods, hoping that I might eventually come to some lesser-traveled thoroughfare. At length I emerged into a landscape of freshly planted fields bisected by a dirt road. In the distance I saw a light and headed toward it. A small, rather dilapidated one-story house of nondescript design, little more than a box in which to store a human life: the light I’d seen was a lamp in one of the two front windows. There was no car in the driveway, suggesting that the house was unoccupied, the light left burning in anticipation of its owner’s return.

  The door obediently opened onto a living room of particleboard furniture, country-themed bric-a-brac, and a television the size of a Jumbotron. A quick survey of the interior—four rooms and a kitchen—confirmed my impression that no one was home. My inspection further revealed that the occupant was a woman, had attended nursing school at Wichita State, was in her late forties, possessed a soft, moonlike face and gray hair she didn’t do much with, wore a size twenty, was frequently photographed in a state of rosy-cheeked inebriation in ethnic-themed restaurants (wearing a plastic lei, flirting shamelessly with the mariachis, holding up a flaming fondue spike), and that she lived alone. From her wardrobe I selected the most neutral things I could find—a pair of sweatpants, voluminous on my midsized masculine frame, a hooded sweatshirt, likewise huge, and a pair of flip-flops—and entered the bathroom.

  The sight that greeted me in the mirror was not wholly unexpected. By this time it had become apparent to me that the physical act of drowning had not wholly restored me to my human state but wrought upon my person something more like costumery. The virus remained; my death had merely excited it into some new interaction with its host. Many attributes had been preserved. Vision, hearing, smell: all had retained their supercharged acuteness. Though I had yet to put them to a proper test, my limbs—indeed, my entire physical carriage, bones to blood—hummed with bestial strength.

  Yet these things hardly prepared me for what I saw. My complexion was unnaturally pale, almost cadaverous. My hair, which had miraculously grown back, triangulated at my forehead to a comically perfect widow’s peak. My eyes possessed the alien rosiness of an albino’s. But the final detail was the one that stopped me flat. At first I thought it was a joke. Behind the corners of my upper lip, amidst otherwise ordinary dentition, two white points dripped like icicles—or, more precisely, fangs.

  Dracula. Nosferatu. Vampyre. I can barely utter the names without a roll of the eyes. Yet here I was, Jonas Lear’s fantasy incarnate, a legend come to life.

  The crunch of tires on gravel aroused me; as I emerged from the lavatory, a pair of headlights raked the room. I ducked behind a coat tree just in time for the door to fling open with a gust of spring air. The woman, whose name was Janet Duff—I’d gotten this from the framed diploma hung above the bill-cluttered desk in her bedroom—lumbered inside, wearing the flowered smock, white polyester trousers, and sensible shoes of a nurse coming off the late-night shift. Without missing a beat she deposited her ring of keys on the table by the door, kicked off her shoes, flung her overstuffed purse onto a chair, and made her way back to the kitchen, from whence ensued the sound of an opening refrigerator and the splash and glug of a tumbler being filled. A moment in which to down a soul-soothing quantity of wine (I could smell it: cheap Chablis, from a box, probably), and Nurse Duff returned to the living room bearing a glass the approximate size of a paint can, turned on the giant TV, and plopped down on the sofa, settling into its cushions like a punctured parade float.

  How she had failed to notice me behind the coat tree I couldn’t guess, except to say that my new condition had afforded me the ability to stand with a stillness that functioned as a kind of camouflage, rendering me nearly invisible to the casual, world-weary eye. I watched her flick through various programs—a cop drama, the Weather Channel, a prison documentary—until she settled on a reality show about, what else, competitive cupcake making. Her back was to me. Sip by sip, the wine went down. I guessed it wouldn’t be long before the alcohol-anesthetized Nurse Duff began to snore. But with dawn’s blade sliding toward me, and my various needs pressing down—cash, an automobile, a safe place to wait out the daylight hours—I saw no reason for delay. I emerged from my concealment and stepped behind her.

  “Ahem.”

  I did not kill her immediately. Again, I seek not pardon but patience with my tale. There was data to collect, and for that, Nurse Duff needed to be alive.

  A taste and the deed was done. At once, the woman fell into a swoon—eyes rolled back, breath expelled, every inch gone flabbily slack. Like an eager groom I picked her up and carried her to the bedroom, where I lay her on the comforter, then retreated to the bathroom and filled the tub. By the time I returned, the change had commenced. A white froth bubbled from her lips. Her fingers began to twitch, her hands. She began to moan, then grunt, then fell silent as a series of hard spasms shook her frame so violently I thought dear Nurse Duff would snap like a cracker.

  Then it happened. The closest visual approximation I can offer is a time-accelerated video of a flower breaking into blossom. With a cartilaginous crunch, her fingers commenced their elongation. Her hair suddenly detached from her skull and fell fanlike onto the pillow. As if doused by acid, her facial features blandified until no trace of personality remained. By this time her convulsions had ceased; her eyes were closed, her face almost peaceful. I sat on the bed beside her, murmuring gentle encouragements. A green light had begun to emanate from her, bathing the room in a nursery-soft glow. Her jaw unhinged; with something like a dog’s sneeze, her teeth shot from her mouth like a handful of corn kernels, making way for the barricade of lances that ascended bloodily from her gums.

  It was ghastly. It was beautiful.

  She opened her eyes. For a long moment, she stared at me. What pathos in
that gaze! We are, each of us, a character in our own story; that is how we make sense of our lives. But the woman who had been Nurse Duff—help maid to the sick and suffering, collector of quilts and butter churns, drinker of mai tais, margaritas, and Bahama Mamas; daughter, sister, dreamer, healer, spinster—had become unknown to herself. She was a part of me now, an extension of my will; had I desired, I could have made her hop on one foot while playing an invisible ukulele.

  “You don’t have to be afraid,” I said, taking her hand in mine. “It’s all for the best, you’ll see.”

  Once again, I lifted her into my arms. My strength was such that her considerable bulk seemed toylike. A memory came to me—I had carried a woman like this once. Though the circumstances were very different, she, too, had seemed to weigh almost nothing. The recollection aroused a feeling of tenderness so overwhelming that for a moment I doubted my actions. But there were things to learn, and the duty I was about to perform was, in its backhanded way, a kindness.