The City of Mirrors

by Justin Cronin

  He’d had some time to think on that. He’d thought about a lot of things. Such as, what this place exactly was. The best he could come up with was that it was a kind of waiting room, like at a doctor’s office. You bided your time, maybe flipping through a magazine, and then when your turn came, a voice would call your name and you’d go on to the next place, whatever that was. Amy called the garden “the world behind the world,” and that seemed right to Carter.

  How the day got on, he thought. He’d have to get back to work soon; there was a sprinkler head needed replacing, and the pool to skim, and all that edging to do. He liked to keep the yard just so for the day when Mrs. Wood would return. Mr. Carter, what a beautiful job you’ve done taking care of the place. You’re a godsend. I don’t know what I ever did without you. He liked to think of the things they’d say to each other when that day came. The two of them would have a good talk, just like they used to, sitting on the patio the way any two friends would do.

  But for the moment, Carter was content to settle in a spell while the edge came off the heat. He unlaced his boots and closed his eyes. The garden was a place for thinking your thoughts, and that was what he did now. He remembered Wolgast coming to him in Terrell, which was the death house, and then a ride in a van with deep cold and snowy mountains all around, and then the doctors giving him a shot. It made him sick something awful, but that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was the voices in his head. I am Babcock. I am Morrison. I am Chávez Baffes Turrell Winston Sosa Echols Lambright Martínez Reinhardt … He saw pictures too, horrible things, people dying and such, like he was dreaming someone else’s dreams. He’d been to school for a bit, and they’d read a book by Mr. William Shakespeare. Carter hadn’t actually read much of it himself. The words in the book were like something chopped up in a blender, that’s how confusing it was. But the teacher, Mrs. Coe, a pretty white lady who decorated the walls of her classroom with posters of animals and mountain climbers and sayings like “Reach for the stars” and “Be a friend to make a friend,” had showed the class a video. Carter liked it, how everybody was always getting in swordfights and dressed like a pirate, and Mrs. Coe explained that the main guy, who was named Hamlet, and was also a prince, was going crazy because somebody had killed his daddy by pouring poison in his ear. There was more to the story, but Carter remembered that part, because that’s what the voices reminded him of. Like poison poured in his ear.

  Things had gone on like that for a while, Carter wasn’t sure how long. The others were whispering away, saying various things, ugly things, but mostly what they said was their names, over and over, like they couldn’t get enough of themselves. Then they fell quiet like the air before a storm and that was when Carter heard him: Zero. “Heard” wasn’t exactly the word. Zero could make you think with his own mind. Zero came into his head and it was like taking a step that wasn’t there and tumbling down a lightless hole and at the bottom of the hole was a train station. Folks were hurrying in winter coats, and the voice over the loudspeaker was calling out the numbers of the tracks and what was going where. New Haven. Larchmont. Katonah. New Rochelle. Carter didn’t know those places. It was cold. The floor was slick with melted snow. He was standing at the kiosk, the one with the four-faced clock. He was waiting for someone, someone important. One train arrived and then another. Where was she? Had something happened? Why hadn’t she called, why did she fail to answer? Train after train, the anticipation intense, then, as the last passengers hurried by, the cruelest dashing of his hopes. His heart was shattering, yet he couldn’t make himself move. The hands of the clock mocked him with their turning. She said she would be here, where was she, how he longed to hold her in his arms, Liz you are the only thing that ever mattered, let me be the one to hold you as you slip away …

  After that, Carter had gone plain crazy. It was like one long bad dream in which he was watching himself do the worst kinds of things and couldn’t stop. Eating folks. Tearing them to bits. Some he didn’t kill but only tasted, no rhyme or reason to it, it was just a thing he did because that’s what Zero wanted. He remembered a couple in a car. They were driving somewhere in a hurry and Carter had come down on them from the trees. Leave those people be, he was telling himself, what they ever done to you, but the hungry part of him paid this no mind, it did what it liked, and what it liked was killing folks. He landed hard on the hood and gave them a good long look at him, his teeth and claws and what he was about to do. The two of them were young. There was the man at the wheel and the woman beside him who Carter guessed was his wife. She had short blond hair and eyes that were wide and staring. The car began to fishtail. They were sliding all over the place. The man with yelling, Holy shit! and What the fuck! but the woman barely reacted. Her eyes slid right through Carter, her face as blank as paper, like the sight of a monster on the hood was nothing her brain knew what to do with, and it stopped Carter flat, that’s how weird it was, and that was when he noticed the gun—a big shiny pistol with a barrel you could fit your finger in, which the man was trying to aim over the steering wheel. Now, don’t be pointing that, the one part of him, the still-Carter part, was thinking; you don’t ever point at gun at no one, Anthony; and maybe it was the memory of his mama’s voice or else the way the car was swerving in long looping arcs like a kid on a swing pumping higher and higher and faster and faster, but for a second Carter froze, and as the car began to roll the gun went off in a blast of noise and light and Carter felt a sharp little sting in his shoulder, not much more than a bee might do, and the next thing Carter knew, he was rolling on the pavement.

  He came up in time to see the car banging down on its side. It spun in a 360 and crashed down on its roof with an explosion of glass and a shriek of tearing metal. It began to roll down the asphalt like a log, over and over, bright bits of things hurling away, until it flopped one last time onto its roof and came, at last, to rest.

  Everything was very still; they were deep in the country, miles from any town. Debris littered the roadway in a wide, glittering plume. He smelled gasoline, and something hot and sharp, like melted plastic. He knew he should feel something but didn’t know what. His thoughts were all mixed up inside him like single frames from a movie he couldn’t put in order. He scuttled his way to the car and crouched to look. The two of them were hanging upside down from their seatbelts, the dashboard crunched up against their waists. The man was dead, on account of the big piece of metal in his head, but the woman was alive. She was staring forward, wide-eyed, blood all over her—her face and shirt, her hands and hair, her lips and tongue and teeth. Black smoke was coiling from under the dash. A piece of glass crunched under Carter’s foot and her face swiveled toward him, slowly, no other part of her moving, tracing the source of the sound.

  “Is somebody there?” Bubbles of blood formed at her lips as they curved around the words. “Please. Is … any … body … there?”

  She was looking right at him. That was when Carter realized she couldn’t see. The woman was blind. With a soft whump the first flames appeared, licking under the dash.

  “Oh, God,” she moaned. “I can hear you breathing. For the love of God, please answer me.”

  Something was happening to him, something strange. Like the woman’s sightless eyes were a mirror, and what he saw in them was himself—not the monster they’d made him into but the man he used to be. As if he were waking up and remembering who he was. He tried to answer. I’m here, he wanted to say. You’re not alone. I’m sorry about what I done. But his mouth would not make words. The flames were spreading, the cabin filling with smoke.

  “Oh God, I’m burning, please, oh God, oh God …”

  The woman was reaching for him. Not for him, he realized. To him. Something was clutched in her hand. A hard spasm shook her; she had begun to choke on the blood that was pouring from her mouth. Her fingers opened and the object fell to the ground.

  It was a pacifier.

  The baby was in the backseat, still strapped in its carrier upside down. An
y second the car was going to blow. Carter dropped to the ground and slithered through the back window. The baby was awake and crying now. The carrier would never fit—he’d have to take the baby out of it. He released the buckle, guided the child’s shoulders through the straps, and just like that the soft crying weight of a baby filled his arms. A little girl, wearing pink pajamas. Holding her tight to his chest, Carter wriggled free of the car and began to run.

  But that was all he remembered. The story ended there. He never did know what became of that baby girl. For Anthony Carter, Twelfth of Twelve, made it all of three steps before the flames found what they were looking for, the gas in the tank ignited, and that car was blown to smithereens.

  He never took another one.

  Oh, he ate. Rats, possums, raccoons. Now and again a dog, which he always felt sorry about. But it wasn’t long before the world went quiet, and there weren’t so many people around to tempt him, and then one day after more time had passed, he realized there weren’t any people at all.

  He’d closed himself to Zero, too—closed it to all of them. Carter wanted no part in what they were about. He built a wall in his mind, Zero and the others on one side and him on the other; and though the wall was thin and Carter could hear them if he chose to, he never sent anything back.

  It was a lonely time.

  He watched his city drown. He’d made a place for himself in that building, One Allen Center, on account of it was high and at night he could stand on the rooftop, among the stars, and feel close to them for company. Year by year the waters rose around the bases of the buildings, and then one night a great wind came barreling down. Carter had been through a hurricane or two in his day, but this wasn’t like any storm he’d ever seen. It set the skyscraper swaying like a drunk. Walls were cracking, windows popping from their frames, everything was in an uproar. He wondered if the end of the world was coming, if God had just grown sick and tired of it all. As the waters rose and the building rocked and the heavens howled, he took to praying, telling God to take him if that’s what he wanted, saying he was sorry over and over about the things he’d done, and if there was a better place to go to, he knew he didn’t deserve it any but hoped he’d get a chance to see it, assuming God could forgive him, which Carter didn’t think he could.

  Then he heard a sound. A terrifying, heart-rending, inhuman sound, as if the gates of hell had opened and released a million screaming souls into the whirlwind. From out of the blackness a great dark shape emerged. It grew and grew and then the lightning flashed and Carter saw what it was, though he could not believe it. A ship. In downtown Houston. She was headed straight for him, her great keel dragging along the street, bearing down upon the towers of the Allen Center like God’s own bowling ball and the buildings were the pins.

  Carter dropped to the floor and covered his head, bracing for the impact.

  Nothing happened. Suddenly, everything went quiet; even the wind had stopped. He wondered how this could be so, the sky so furious one minute and still the next. He rose and peered out the window. Above him, the clouds had opened like a porthole. The eye, Carter thought, that’s what this was; he was in the eye of the storm. He looked down. The ship had come to rest against the side of the tower, parked like a cab at the curb.

  He climbed down the face of the building. How much time he had before the storm returned, Carter couldn’t say. All he knew was that the ship being there felt like a message. At length he found himself in the bowels of the vessel, its maze of passages and pipes. Yet he did not feel lost; it was as if an unseen influence was guiding his every action. Oily seawater sloshed around his feet. He chose a direction, then another, drawn by this mysterious presence. A door appeared at the end of the corridor—heavy steel, like the door of a bank vault. T1, it was marked: Tank No. 1

  The water will protect you, Anthony.

  He started. Who was speaking to him? The voice seemed to come from everywhere: from the air he breathed, the water sloshing at his feet, the metal of the ship. It enfolded him like a blanket of perfect softness.

  He cannot find you here. Abide here in safety, and she will come to you.

  That was when he felt her: Amy. Not dark, like the others; her soul was made of light. A great sob racked his body. His loneliness was leaving him. It lifted from his spirit like a veil, and what lay behind it was a sorrow of a different kind—a beautiful, holy kind of sorrow for the world and all its woes. He was holding the wheel. Slowly it turned under his hands. Outside, beyond the walls of the ship, the wind was howling again. The rain lashed, the sky rolled, the seas tore through the streets of the drowned city.

  Come inside, Anthony.

  The door opened; Carter stepped through. His body was in the ship, the Chevron Mariner, but Carter was in that place no more. He was falling and falling and falling, and when the falling stopped he knew just where he was, even before he opened his eyes, because he could smell the flowers.

  Carter realized he’d finished his tea. Amy’s was done with the cosmos and was tidying up the beds. Carter thought to tell her to rest a spell, he’d get to the weeds directly, but he knew that she’d refuse; when there was work to do, she did it.

  The waiting was hard for her. Not just because of the things she’d have to face, but for what she’d given up. She never said a word about it, that wasn’t Amy’s way, but Carter could tell. He knew what it was like to love a person and lose them in this life.

  Because Zero would come calling. That was a fact. Carter knew that man, knew he wouldn’t rest until the whole world was a mirror to his grief. Thing was, Carter couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for him. Carter had been in that station himself. Weren’t the question the man had wrong, it was his way of asking it.

  Carter got up from his chair, put on his hat, and went to where Amy was kneeling in the dirt.

  “Have a good nap?” she asked, looking up.

  “Was I sleeping?”

  She tossed a weed onto the pile. “You should have heard yourself snoring.”

  Now, that was news to Carter. Although, come to think of it, he might have rested his eyes there for a second.

  Amy rocked back on her heels and held her arms wide over the newly planted beds. “What do you think?”

  He stepped back to look. Everything was neat as a pin. “Those cosmos is pretty. Mrs. Wood will like ’em. Miss Haley, too.”

  “They’ll need water.”

  “I’ll see to it. You should get out of the sun for a bit. Tea’s still there you want it.”

  He was hooking the hose to the spigot near the gate when he heard the soft pressure of tires on asphalt and saw the Denali coming down the street. It halted at the corner, then crept forward. Carter could just make out the shape of Mrs. Wood’s face through the darkly tinted windows. The car cruised slowly by the house, barely moving but never stopping either, the way a ghost might do, then accelerated and sped away.

  Amy appeared beside him. “I heard the girls playing earlier.” She, too, was looking down the street, though the Denali was long gone. “I brought you this.”

  Amy was holding a wand. For a second Carter was unable to connect the idea of it to anything else. But it was for the cosmos, of course.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  Carter responded with a shrug. He threaded the wand to the end of the hose and opened the spigot. Amy returned to the patio while Carter dragged the hose to the beds and began to water them down. It hardly mattered, he knew; autumn would be here soon. The leaves would pale and fall, the garden fade, the wind grow raw. Frost would wick the tips of the grass, and the body of Mrs. Wood would rise. All things found their ends. But still Carter went on with it, passing his wand over the flowers, back and forth, back and forth, his heart always believing that even the smallest things could make a difference.

  44

  All day long the rain poured down. Everyone was antsy, trapped in the house. Caleb could tell that Pim’s patience with her sister was wearing thin, and he felt a row coming
. A few days ago, he might have welcomed such a development, if only to get it over with.

  Dusk was near when the clouds broke. A radiant sun streamed low across the fields, everything sopping and glinting in the light. Caleb scanned the ground around the house for ants; finding none, he declared that they could go out to enjoy the last of the day. All that remained of the mounds were ovals of depressed mud barely distinguishable from the surrounding earth. Relax, he told himself. You’re letting the isolation get to you, that’s all.

  Kate and Pim supervised the children making mud pies while Caleb went to check on the horses. He’d built an open-sided shelter on the far side of the paddock to give them cover from the weather, and that was where he found them now. Handsome seemed none the worse for wear, but Jeb was breathing hard and showing the whites of his eyes. He was also holding his left rear hoof off the ground. The horse let him bend the joint long enough for Caleb to see a small puncture wound in the raised central structure of the horse’s hoof. Something long and sharp was stuck in there. He walked to the shed and returned with a halter, needle-nosed pliers, and a rope. He was fixing Jeb’s halter when he saw Kate coming his way.

  “He doesn’t look so happy.”

  “Got a pricker in his hoof.”

  “Could you use an extra set of hands?”

  He was fine on his own, but the woman’s sudden interest in helping out wasn’t anything he was going to say no to. “The ropes should hold him. Just keep a hand on his halter.”