Everville

  “Either that, or I was lucky.”

  “I don’t believe in luck,” Norma said. “I believe in destiny.” She made the word sound almost sexy, the way she shaped it.

  “So it was Ted’s destiny to end up dead tonight?” Harry said. “I don’t buy that.”

  “So don’t,” Norma said, without a trace of irritation. “It’s a free country.”

  Harry sipped on the brandy. “Maybe it’s time I got some serious help,” he said.

  “Are you talking therapy? ’Cause if you are, I’m telling you right now I’ve had Freud through here—least he said he was Freud—and that man was so fucked up—”

  “I’m not talking about Freud. I’m talking about the Church, or maybe the FBI. I don’t know. Somebody’s got to be told what’s going on.”

  “If they’re inclined to believe you, then they’ve already been recruited by the enemy,” Norma said. “You can be certain of that.”

  Harry sighed. He knew what she said was true. There were people out there wearing uniforms and cassocks and badges of office whose daily agenda was the suppressing of information about the miraculous. If he chose the wrong ear in which to whisper what he knew he was dead.

  “So we choose carefully,” Harry said.

  “Or we let it be.”

  “The door’s not supposed to be open, Norma.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “That’s a damn stupid question,” Harry replied. “Of course I’m sure.”

  “Well that’s comforting,” Norma said. “Do you remember when you first decided this?”

  “I didn’t decide it. I was told.”

  “By whom?”

  “I don’t know. Hess maybe. You.”

  “Me? Don’t listen to me!”

  “Then who the hell should I listen to?”

  “You could start with yourself,” Norma replied. “Remember what you said to me a few days ago?”

  “No.”

  “You were talking about how maybe it was time to stop being human?”

  “Oh that—”

  “Yes, that.”

  “That was just talk.”

  “It’s all just talk till we make it true, Harry.”

  “I’m not following this.”

  “Maybe the door’s supposed to be open,” Norma said. “Maybe we have to start looking at what’s in our dreams, only with our eyes open.”

  “We’re back to Freud.”

  “No we’re not,” she said softly. “Not remotely.”

  “Suppose you’re wrong?” Harry said. “Suppose leaving the door open is some kind of catastrophe, and if I don’t do something about it—”

  “Then the world comes to an end?”

  “Right.”

  “It won’t. It can’t. It can change, but it can’t end.”

  “I have to take your word for that, I suppose?”

  “No. You could ask your cells. They’d tell you.”

  “We don’t talk much these days, me and my cells,” Harry said.

  “Maybe you’re not listening carefully enough,” Norma replied. “The point is: So what if the world changes? Is it so dandy the way it is?”

  “It could be a damn sight worse.”

  “Says who?”

  “Me! I say so!”

  Norma raised her arm, reaching out for Harry. “Let’s go up onto the roof,” she said.

  “Now?”

  “Now. I need some air.”

  Up they went, Norma wrapped in her shawl, onto the roof nine floors above Seventy-fifth. Dawn was still a while away, but the city was already gearing up for another day. Norma looped her arm through Harry’s, and they stood together in silence for perhaps five minutes, while the traffic murmured below, and sirens wailed, and the wind gusted off the river, grimy and cold. It was Norma who broke the silence.

  “We’re so powerful,” Norma said, “and so frail.”

  “Us?”

  “Everybody. Powerful.”

  “I don’t think that’s the way most people feel,” Harry said.

  “That’s because they can’t feel the connections. They think they’re alone. In their heads. In the world. I hear them all the time. Spirits come through, carryin’ on about how alone they feel, how terribly alone. And I say to them, let go of what you are—”

  “And they don’t want to do that?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I don’t like the sound of it either,” Harry said. “I’m all I’ve got. I don’t want to give it up.”

  “I said let go of it, not give it up,” Norma said. “They’re not the same thing.”

  “But when you’re dead—”

  “What’s dead?” Norma shrugged. “Things change but they don’t end. I told you.”

  “And I don’t believe you. I want to, but I don’t.”

  “Then I can’t convince you,” Norma said. “You’ll have to find out for yourself, one way or another.” She drew a little closer to Harry. “How long have we known each other?” she said.

  “You asked me that.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “Eleven years.”

  “That long, huh?” She lapsed into silence again, for a minute or so. Then she said, “Are you happy, Harry?”

  “Christ, no. Are you?”

  “You know what? I am,” Norma said, her voice tinged with surprise. “I like your company, Harry. Another time, another place, we would have made quite a pair, you and me. Maybe we did.” She laughed, softly. “Maybe that’s why it feels like I’ve known you longer than eleven years.” She shuddered. “I’m getting a little chilly,” she said. “Will you take me back downstairs?”

  “Of course.”

  “You sound so tired, Harry. You should sleep for a few hours. I’ve got a mattress in the spare room.”

  “It’s okay, thanks. I’ll go home. I just needed somebody to talk to.”

  “I wasn’t much use, was I? You want plain answers and I don’t have any.”

  “There was something I didn’t tell you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I almost stepped through.”

  “Through the door?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And why didn’t you?”

  “I couldn’t leave Ted, for one thing. And—I don’t know—I guess I was afraid there’d be no way back.”

  “Oh, maybe the best journeys are the ones with no return ticket, Harry,” Norma said, with yearning in her voice. “Tell me what it was like.”

  “The shore? It was beautiful.” He conjured it in his mind’s eye now and could not help but sigh.

  “Go back, then,” Norma said.

  Harry didn’t reply for a moment, but instead scanned the glittering panorama before him. It too was beautiful, after its fashion, but only from this angle, and only at night.

  “Maybe I should,” he said.

  “If you’re thinking about me, don’t,” Norma said. “I’ll miss you, but I’ll be fine. Who knows, maybe I’ll come after you one of these days.”

  * * *

  III

  He went back to his apartment to clean up (his shirt was glued to his chest with Ted’s blood) and gather a few items for the journey. It was an absurd procedure, of course, given that he had no clue as to what lay on the other side, beyond sea, sky, and stones.

  He pocketed his wallet, though he doubted they traded in dollars. He put on his watch, though surely time was redundant there. He slipped on his crucifix, despite the fact that he’d heard the tale of Christ had been fashioned to distract attention from the very mystery he was about to enter. Then, with the new day barely dawning, he made his way back to the building between Thirteenth and Fourteenth.

  The door he’d opened using the prodigile, less than a dozen hours before, was open. With the steady beam of a flashlight to precede him he made his way to the top of the stairs. There he paused, listening for any sound from below. He’d escaped the prophet’s murderous ways once; twice was tempting fate. There was no
noise, however; not a moan. Extinguishing the flashlight, he made his way down the stairs by what little illumination came from the door above. It had given out by the time he reached the bottom of the flight, but there was a second source below, this far stronger. The blood of one of the murdered celebrants, spilled liberally from head and heart, threw up a lilac light from its pools, like the phosphorescence of something rotted.

  Harry halted at the bottom of the step until his eyes had become properly accustomed to the illumination. After a time, it showed him a scene he had prepared himself for as best he could, but which still raised the hairs on the nape of his neck.

  He’d seen death arrayed before, of course, all too many times, and seldom neatly. Bodies carved and corroded, their limbs broken, their faces erased. But here was something stranger than that; twice stranger. Here were creatures he’d thought unholy—worshippers of the Anti-Christ, he’d thought—whose flesh was not the stuff of any simple biology. He had a primal suspicion of things that looked as different from himself as these beasts had. Such forms had in his experience housed malice and lunacy. But surveying this scene he could not bring himself to rejoice at their dispatch. Perhaps they’d been innocents, perhaps not. He would never know. What he did know was that in the past week he’d spoken of moving beyond what he’d once assumed were the limits of his species. He could no longer afford to scorn any form, however unlikely, for fear in time it might turn out to be his own. Anything was possible. Perhaps, like a fetus which resembled a reptile and a bird before it came to its humanity, he would revisit those states as he moved on. In which case he had siblings here, in the darkness.

  He looked beyond them now, towards the center of the chamber. Though the filaments had lost their light, a few scraps of the misty veils that had hung from them remained. But they could not conceal the absence at the heart. The opening that had led on to Quiddity’s shore was gone.

  Stumbling over corpses as he went, Harry crossed to the spot, hoping with every step that his eyes deceived him. It was a vain hope. The prophet had closed the door behind him when he’d stepped away into that other place, and left nothing to mark the place.

  “Stupid,” Harry told himself.

  He’d been so close. He’d stood on the threshold of the miraculous, where perhaps the mysteries of being might be solved, and instead of taking the opportunity while he had it, he’d let himself be distracted. He’d turned his back, and lost his opportunity.

  Was this the destiny Norma had spoken of? That he be left among the dead, while the miracle train moved off without him?

  His legs—drained of the adrenaline that had fueled him thus far—were ready to give out. It was time to go, now; time to bury his frustration and his sorrow in sleep for a few hours. Later, maybe, when he had his thoughts in better order, he’d be able to make better sense of all this.

  He made his way back across the slaughterhouse and up the stairs. As he came to the top of the flight, however, something lurched out of the shadows to block his path. The prophet’s massacre had not been completely thorough, it appeared. Here was one who’d survived, though even in the paltry light of the passageway it was plain she could not be far from death. She wore a wound from the middle of her chest to her hip, its length gummy with dried blood. Her face was as flat as an iron, her eyes gleaming gold in her noseless, lipless face.

  “I know you,” she said, her voice low and sibilant. “You were at the ceremony.”

  “Yes I was.”

  “Why did you come back?”

  “I wanted to get through the door.”

  “So did we all,” she said, leaning in Harry’s direction. Her eyes shone and fluttered eerily, as if she were reading his marrow. “You’re not one of us,” she said.

  Harry saw no reason to lie. “No, I’m not.”

  “You came with him,” she suddenly said. “Oh by the ’shu . . . ” She flung herself back away from Harry, raising her arms to protect her face.

  “It’s all right,” Harry said. “I wasn’t with him. I swear.”

  He came up the last few steps and started towards her. Too weak to outrun him, the creature sank down against the wall, her broken body wracked with sobs. “Kill me,” she said. “I don’t care. There’s nothing left.”

  Harry went down on his haunches in front of her. “Listen to me, will you? I didn’t come with whoever it was—”

  “Kissoon,” she said.

  “What?”

  She peered at him through her webbed fingers. “You do know him.”

  “The Kissoon I know’s dead,” he said. “Or at least I thought he was.”

  “He murdered our Blessedm’n and came in to our ceremonies wearing his flesh. And why?”

  Harry had an answer to that, at least. “To get into Quiddity.”

  The creature shook her head. “He didn’t leave,” she said. “He just sealed the door.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I saw it with my own eyes. That’s how I know it was Kissoon.”

  “Explain that.”

  “When it closed, at the very last moment, there was a light that went through everything—the brick, the flow, the dead—and I seemed to see their true nature, just for a little time. And I looked up at him—at the man we’d thought was our Blessedm’n—and I saw another man hidden in his flesh.”

  “How did you know it was Kissoon?”

  “He had tried to join us, once. Said he was an exile, like us, and he wanted to come home with us, back to Quiddity.” When she said the word, she shuddered, and more tears came down. “You know what’s strange?” she said with a sour little laugh. “I was never there. Most of us were never there. We’re the children of exiles, or their children’s children. We lived and died for something we only ever knew in stories.”

  “Do you know where he went?”

  “Kissoon?”

  Harry nodded.

  “Yes, I know. I went after him, to his hiding place.”

  “You wanted to kill him?”

  “Of course. But once I got there I had no strength left. I knew if I faced him like this, he’d finish me. I came back here to prepare myself.”

  “Tell me where he is. Let me do the job for you.”

  “You don’t know what he can do.”

  “I’ve heard,” Harry replied. “Believe me. I’ve heard.”

  “And you think you can kill him?”

  “I don’t know,” Harry said, picturing in his mind’s eye the portrait Ted had produced. The heavens livid, the street reeling, and a black snake under his pointed heel. Kissoon was that snake, by another name. “I’ve beaten some demons in my time.”

  “He’s not a demon,” the creature said. “He’s a man.”

  “Is that good news or bad?”

  The creature eyed him gravely. “You know the answer to that,” she said.

  Bad, of course.

  Demons were simple. They believed in prayer and the potency of holy water. Thus they fled from both. But men—what did men believe?

  * * *

  IV

  The address the creature had given him was up in Morningside Heights, around 110th and Eighth Avenue: an undistinguished house in need of some cosmetic repair. There were no drapes at the lower windows. Harry peered inside. The room was empty: no pictures on the walls, no carpets on the floor, no furniture, nothing. He knew before he’d reached the front door, and found it an inch ajar, and stepped through it into the gray interior, that he’d come too late. The house was empty, or nearly so.

  A few signs of Kissoon’s occupancy remained. At the top of the stairs, lying in a pool of its own degenerating matter, was a modestly sized Lix. It raised its head at Harry’s approach, but with its maker departed, it had lost what tiny wits it had, overreached itself, and slid down the stairs, depositing cobs of sewerage on each step as it descended. Harry followed the fetid trail it had left to the room that Kissoon had lately occupied. It resembled a derelict’s hideaway. Newspapers laid in lieu of carpets; a fil
thy mattress under the grimy window; a heap of discarded cans and plates of rotted food, alongside a second pile, this of liquor bottles. In short, a squalid pit.

  There was only one piece of evidence to mark the ambition of the man who had shat and sweated here. On the wall behind the door, a map of the continental United States, upon which Kissoon had inscribed all manner of marks and notations. Harry pulled the map off the wall and took it to the window to study. The man’s hand was crabbed, and much of the vocabulary foreign to Harry’s eye, like a mismatched marriage of Latin and Russian, but it was plain that over a dozen sites around the country had been of significance to Kissoon. New York City and its environs had attracted the densest concentration of marginalia, with a region in the southwest corner of North Dakota, and another in Arizona, of no little interest to him. Harry folded up the map and pocketed it. Then he made a quick but efficient search of the rest of the room, in the hope of turning up further clues to Kissoon’s purpose and methodology. He found nothing of interest, however, excepting a pack of bizarre playing cards, plainly hand-made and much used. He flicked through them. There were perhaps twenty cards, each marked with a simple design: a circle, a fish, a hand, a window, an eye. These he also pocketed, as much for the taking as the wanting, and having done so slipped away past the decayed Lix and out into the warm, pale air.

  It was only later, when he spread the cards out on the floor of his office, that he realized what the deck represented. Tesla Bombeck had first described these symbols to him, when speaking of the medallion she’d decoded in the caves beneath Palomo Grove. There had been a human figure at its center, she’d said: a form that Kissoon the card-maker had divided into two sides of a torso, each with an outstretched arm and two legs. The rest of the images were lifted from the medallion design unchanged. Rising above the head of the figure, if Harry remembered Tesla’s account aright, had been four symbols apparently representing humanity’s ascension to oneness. Below it, another four, representing its return to the simplicity of the single cell. On its left hand, which spurted energy, or blood, symbols that led to a cloud-eclipsed circle: the Cosm. On its right, which spurted like its fellow, symbols leading to an empty circle: the mystery, or perhaps the sacred absence, of the Metacosm.