go and see it if you want. Probably still there. In Northside. Many rings in Northside."
"Do you know who's making them?"
She shook her head, and stopped rocking.
"Can't see his face. His face is all shadows and twisting, like it's really two faces running together, or trying to. Maybe trying to twist apart."
"I need to find him," said Hollister.
"Find him? But he's on his way out."
"Out of town?"
The old woman frowned, and muttered something that Hollister didn't catch. She stood up with difficulty, and picked her way amongst the piles of trash to the opposite corner. She clicked her tongue on the roof of her mouth in frustration, tossing aside a number of bags until she found what she was looking for.
"Here it is," she said, and held up a rock. To Hollister it looked like a common stone, the same that could be found anywhere along the river, except for a slight, orange discolouration, as if it was covered in a layer of rust. The old woman sat down with the stone in her lap and reached into another bag for a plastic bottle, half-filled with what Hollister guessed was water. She opened the lid and began to pick at the stone with the end of her nail. It came apart easily, a number of good-sized flakes dropping one after the other into the mouth of the bottle. When she was satisfied, she shook the mixture and handed it to Hollister.
"What is it?" he asked.
"It'll help you see where he's going," she replied. He looked dubiously at the orange flakes drifting in the liquid, but she urged him to go on, making sipping motions and laughing until he drank from it. Then he coughed, choking, and nearly sprayed it back at her; it was some kind of moonshine.
"A little warning next time," he said, and she laughed again, standing up. She motioned him to follow her.
Outside a light snow was falling. A mass of clouds the colour of dead skin stretched across the sky, and the drab riverside and small collection of shacks stood very heavy in the gloom, like monuments from some forgotten graveyard. Hollister spat darkly onto the ground; his throat still burned from the alcohol, and there was an odd taste of metal in his mouth, and a trace of rotten meat.
Carefully, the old woman made her way from the river, stepping around rough patches in the ground, shards of broken glass and frozen clumps of shit that may or may not have been left there by cats, or feral dogs.
"You see a lot of strange things now, so close to the end," she remarked. "Saw a boy come round earlier and dump a ferret out of a box. Thing looked like he'd beat it half to death, its back legs both broken, and he just comes out here and dumps it. So you tell me where that comes from, what's the sense in that."
"I don't know," said Hollister.
"And it's worse with the rings," she continued. "Much, much worse."
She guided him into Northside, turning onto a deserted street that ran parallel to the tenements. She knelt down by the curb and busied herself brushing a space clear of snow. When she was finished she leaned forward to gaze at the cracks in the pavement. She traced one with the tip of a trembling finger, muttering to herself in a hushed, brittle voice. Hollister felt himself growing tired, numbed by the cold perhaps, and the wide, empty street that seemed to him somehow unreal, as if all of the buildings were only facades and behind them were men with cameras who stood filming them from the windows. He watched the old woman at her work, and listened to her, although he couldn't catch any of the words. His eyes grew heavy, and he was about to nod-off when she suddenly stopped speaking. Hollister blinked, trying to rouse himself, and saw that Maria's finger was hovering over the pavement at a point where two cracks intersected each other.
"Hard to see," she said at last, looking up at him. She lifted her arm and he helped her get to her feet. "Very hard to see anything. The rings make holes where the future should be."
"You can't find him?" he asked.
"You can find him. Don't know what you'll be able to do with him. Probably nothing."
"Where?"
"The rings are never in the same place twice. Remember that. It means you can't find him where he's been. Only where he's going."
"What do you mean?" he pressed her, but that was all she could, or would tell him, and at last he helped her back to the shack. Hollister asked if she needed anything but she simply waved him away. He left her then and walked on his own into Northside. He found his head was spinning slightly from the drink she'd given him, and he stopped at the first coffee stand he came to, paying for a cup with the loose change in his pocket. The boy working the stand was kind, and asked him if he wanted toast with the coffee, explaining that it was on the house. Hollister thanked him, and as he waited for the toast to brown over the gas flame he thought about what Maria had told him, and the only part that seemed useful was the fact that there'd been a lot of rings in Northside.
He ate his toast in silence and when he was finished he thanked the boy again and started walking. Northside was not large, just a few square blocks of small roads and alleys centered on the tenements, but even so the streets were busy, crowded with people shopping at open air stalls, young mothers with fat babies strapped to their bellies and off-duty miners standing in loose groups in front of bars, laughing and spitting onto the snow. The buildings were all old, and the roads looked like they'd been bombed or gouged with pick-axes. Most of the heating pipes were faulty, leaking tendrils of steam that blurred the edges of things, so that the streets took on the quality of shaky, digital photos.
Hollister came upon a group of kids painting a mural in the narrow laneway between two tenements. They worked quietly, making a series of hastily sprayed images that at first appeared to be people, but which were later revealed to be corpses, an army of the undead with their mouths agape, and hollow, staring eyes. As they added more detail, Hollister saw that each of the bodies was dressed in clothes exactly like the ones the boys themselves were wearing, as if what they were really engaged in was some kind of morbid group portrait.
On another street he saw a middle-aged woman pushing a head of cabbage in a baby carriage, and a man in a wheelchair dressed in a homemade uniform, complete with medals crafted out of tin foil. He nearly tripped over a stray dog, bone thin and mangy, lying in the snow with what looked like a human hand in its mouth. Later, he watched as two men in suits and dark glasses stepped out of a black sedan. They were both tall, with broad shoulders, and he thought they might have been members of a private security force, secret service agents charged with safeguarding the life of a career politician or visiting foreign dignitary, but all they did was walk into a butcher shop and return ten minutes later laden with bags of meat.
"It's like a dream," he whispered, and he wondered again about what was in the drink the old woman had given him. He found he no longer trusted his eyes, although he'd been in Northside many times before and had seen any number of strange and inexplicable things, but at this moment they refused to come together, a series of equations adding up to nothing.
He thought of finding a place where he could sleep off the effects of whatever it was he was on, but then he noticed a tall, thin man with a rough sack slung over his shoulder; the sack was writhing, as if there was something living inside it, and the cuffs of the man's jacket were stained with blood. He entered an alley and Hollister sprang after him, catching up just as the man was removing a bird from the sack.
The man's face was lost in the gloom, and he held himself very still. All at once he made a quick, jerking motion with his hand, and ripped the bird's head from its body.
Hollister shouted and started forward, but the man pressed the bleeding wound to the ground and scrawled first one line, and then another across it. Hollister froze, his body lost to him, cut off by a thin, gauze curtain. He watched as the man stood and walked toward him.
He was around Hollister's age, dressed in a gray suit that at one time must have been fashionable, but was now tattered and dirty, and spattered with old blood stains along the sleeves. His face was gaunt, and there was a month's gro
wth of beard on his cheeks. Despite that, his eyes were clear, and they gazed at Hollister with something like compassion.
"I know how you feel," he said. "Believe me I sympathize. You can't just go around killing innocent birds. It's not done. Moreover, it's not right, not on any scale of morality. I believe in right and wrong, or at least that actions have consequences. That's a given. But I can't allow you to stop this. I can't allow it. It's not something I can permit."
"Why?" came a voice, possibly Hollister's - there was no one else in the alley so it must have been his, logically he knew that, although he wouldn't have been able to say for sure, and he wondered who else it could have been, who besides him would have cared to ask.
"Why, why, why," mused the man, as he drifted away from Hollister, calmly beginning to write on the wall with what was left of the bird's blood. His hand moved fluidly, the way Hollister imagined an artist's hand must move, painting.
"There is no why. Or not much. The world is bigger than all of us, and we don't get a say in it. I'm not talking about a political voice you understand, voting rights. None of that matters. It's just a game. Because all of this was already here before we arrived. None of us have a say about the world we're born into, what it is or what it entails. I didn't choose this, and neither did you.