Somehow, I knew where I was: Deeper, so deep in time now that it was near eternity. This was where the prophets go, or where the poets go to go mad.
On the good side, my torn back no longer hurt, or, at least, that little one note of torture was lost amid the symphony of cuts, lacerations, burns, shocks, traumas, broken bones, torn nerves, shattered organs, melted eyeballs, and various other pains, aches, smarts, sufferings, and vexations. It was an orchestra of agony, with rafts of new anguish and distress crashing in crescendos each time I thought to move, or even thought at all.
I was lucky to be alive! Or whatever.
Maybe I was still angry. Who in their right might leaves absurdly powerful supernatural nonhuman beings just following people around like guard dogs? What kind of crazy universe was this?
In the war, there were soldiers who lost a limb, but could still feel itches and throbs and burns. Ghost pains, they call it. Now my whole body was suffering ghost pains. Who designs a universe were a man can lose not just one limb, or even four, but every part of his body altogether, and it still hurts?
Remember those pains of Hell I was supposed to dread? I began to wonder how my life as a dead guy was going to go. I thought I was going to be free from all the pains that flesh is heir to.
But instead I found my new and imaginary body could suffer pain greater than what killed me. More pain. How much more? Who said there was an upper limit?
Why not infinite pain? Why not eternal?
I could not sweat with fear, because my entire body, head to toe, was one third-degree burn from looking like the surface of a dead lava flow. But I could shake. It was a trembling I could not stop, like the shakes a rummy in the gutter gets in the last cold hour before dawn.
You would think a dead guy would worry about this kind of stuff first thing, right off the bat, but I had been kind of distracted. Being dead is a bit like being drunk. It kind of plays tricks on you.
Only then did I really start to wonder, and start to dread. I had known about the twilight creatures my whole life, ever since I was a little child. Many children can see ghosts, or remember things that have not happened yet, but usually they grow out of it when they start to get good at talking. We twilight folk, or anyone who has Otherworldly blood in their ancestry, from selkies or sea-faeries or swan-maidens wed against their will when their coats were hid, don’t grow out of it so fast. The world’s time has not so strong a hold on us.
You would think it would make it easier for a man like me to believe what saints and martyrs said in old books nobody reads, or droning homilies everyone snoozes through, wondering how the Sunday game turned out.
But somehow, knowing it, seeing it, somehow made the whole thing seem unexceptional. Like it was an everyday business. Let me give a f’rinstance. Father Aretino was a gray- haired old Tuscan priest with tired eyes, who drank too much. In one of our first cases after Flint and Steel Investigations was opened for business—this was before the war—I saw Father Aretino destroy a four thousand year old blood-drinking Pharaoh. This was a February midnight in the middle of a frozen white stream the Iroquois worshiped as a god. The Father stood there with no one around him, and the Pharaoh, surrounded with a cloud of darkness and a cloud of locusts, was advancing over the stream. Father Aretino destroyed the mummy with no more than dogeared Bible, a candle-stub, a cowbell and his naked faith. He had started the evening with a nice silver bell made by a Roman artisan and blessed by the bishop, but a nighthawk carried it off, laughing. Sly managed to find and swipe a bell from a sleeping milk-cow to replace it. I saw the ice crack open, and the river leap as if with joy and reach with watery fingers white as foam to drown the scowling Egyptian king, who shouted in rage as ghosts of jackals howled, unable and unwilling to believe the God of the Hebrew slaves could fell him.
You would think I would believe in God all the more, seeing what His servants could do. But in my line of work, I just sort of thought our God was like Gunnodoyah the Thunder Boy, whom the Iroquois once danced before in times of drought and beat the tabor to adore, just a power at large in the world.
A little sneaking thought, no bigger than a worm, snaked into my brain. It was a simple thought: If there is a Hell, Sylvester can go there.
Now, I was in pain, more pain than a living man can understand, when I thought this, so maybe that explains why I did not trample that thought and throw it away. I petted it and fed it by telling myself that she would not have shot me if he had not seduced her. She had always been sweet on him. Girls are drawn to weak men, men they can geld and domesticate, especially smart girls. She had never cheated on me, except—now I found out—in her heart. With him.
He had her in his arms right now. They were whispering and giggling about me, and she was telling him how much better he was, now that business was picking up, a better provider, a better man, able to buy her whatever she wanted, furs and jewels and empty vanities, trips to Broadway shows. And all that money came from my corpse, from that insurance she insisted I buy.
If I were a poltergeist, a spirit of rage, a spirit of death—and there was no use denying it now—then I could still touch the physical world. That meant I could drop a pill into a drink, cut a brake line in a moving car, pull a trigger, throw a knife. Hell! I could bash in his skull with a brick while he slept.
I felt the mortal world pulling me again. It was strong, insistent. I was like a game fish caught on a line. Why tug against the hook? I rose up in a wash of sudden motion.
At first, I was not sure where or when I was. It was a darkened room, with shelves and tables covered with bric-a-brac. The floor was covered with butcher paper and old newspapers.
It might have been a cluttered museum closed for repair, or maybe an abandoned antique shop. Here were masks on the wall of long-nosed creatures with spiked chins, or bat-eared creatures with curving fangs, or albino foxes smiling sweetly; next to the masks were braided whips on hooks with bits of bone and metal woven into the lash; next were staples in the walls from which dangled chains with manacles and gyves.
A wall niche held a blue-faced idol of a many-armed goddess. One leg was raised in a dance-step, each of her hands was holding a bloody weapon or severed head, while a necklace of skulls was draped across the outrageous metal balloons of her breasts. She was stepping on a kowtowing dwarf.
On one shelf were knives with serrated brass-knuckles built into the guards; other shelves held Coptic jars, or bottles filled with pickled meats or eyes or organs; in the back corner loomed an iron maiden, gently smiling, complete with channels in the base for the blood to run into a water bowl for the cat.
Hanging from the ceiling was more ghastly clutter: medallions of pentagrams and St. Peter Crosses, mummified hands with painted fingernails; wooden puppets with exaggerated carved groins poised to engage in various unnatural acts; an alligator body with the head of a dead man attached to its neck, stuffed and tanned with eyes replaced by glass beads. The real alligator head was in a corner by the door, its open jaws being used as an umbrella stand.
Snakes and scorpions hung by their tails among shrunken heads. In a fish-tank hanging by chains in the center of the roof writhed groups of luminous and transparent eels whose eyes had been gored out, and the sockets sewn shut. It was good to see something alive.
The walls were covered with mosaics showing overweight Aztec priestesses bearing and flaying children and proffering them to gods with goggling eyes and protruding tongues. On a wooden music stand a black leather volume, bigger than a phonebook, was chained and padlocked.
The candelabrum was a dead man’s hand, with wax candles burning on each finger and thumb. On a rack next to it was a wand cut with Viking runes, a black knife made of volcanic glass, a cup of green copper, a ball of dark brown crystal with a red glow at its heart.
On a throne made of iron rib cages and steel skulls someone had propped the corpse of a Franciscan friar, complete with rope belt and tall hood, and had propped a pair of sunglasses on his nose, like an actress
from California might wear. The mouth of the corpse had been stitched open into a grin, and all his teeth were black iron.
All this gear was throbbing, not with the living heat that comes from men, but with a sucking, terrible cold. I was pierced with numbness through to my broken bones, which brought such a relief, that, for a moment, I did not see how morbid and grotesque the litter of the crowded chamber was.
I saw a window, and a red neon sign in it, but the abnormal letters were from some language I did not recognize.
There was a looking glass in a frame carved like a snake eating its own tail standing directly opposite the window. I looked at myself, now that the pain was numbed, and tried to imagine myself looking human again.
I could not do it. I could not remember what a human looked like. First I was a headless dwarf with oversized arms and legs, with eyeballs at my nipples and a mouth at my navel; then I was a horror with a red funnel for a head, with an eyeball on my tongue, and the mouth was a circle of teeth; then my head was on backward, and my legs were coming from my arm pits. The sensation of sick horror ebbed a bit, and I finally ended up looking like a hooded and crooked thing with dangling arms and the head of a hairless vulture. My knees bent the wrong way, like a dog leg, but at least I was upright and almost humanoid.
Then I noticed the window. I could see it in the mirror. _PEN! We Sell Go_d! We Fix It!
Of course. The neon letters from inside the pawn shop were backward because I was looking at their backsides. The mirror image restored them.
I walked on my backward feet toward this window. I saw no door, but there was a tapestry with an image of the Great God Pan hanging in the right spot to hide one. I looked out the window.
I was right outside the street where Lorelei had called me, earlier. Saint street. My earlier. I did not know where in mortal time this was.
I could see now that the alley was abutting a hotel, one I recognized. It was a hot-sheet joint, one where lovers met for a bottle of wine and an hour of privacy. The Saint Valentine Comfort, it was called.
I tried to put my hand through the window like a moonbeam, to avoid breaking it, but found that it was solid to me. Something was keeping me here.
Bending my vulture head down, I made the floor-litter transparent to my eyes. Beneath the layer of newspaper were the Oriental trigrams and isosceles triangles, a circle inscribed with a pentacle. A calling circle.
That meant that Lorelei had not called me up that first time. I had been being pulled toward this pawn shop here, and my memories of her and hers for me had blown me off course like a ship snatched by a gale as it was about to enter the harbor. But then why had she been here?
As I put my hand down, a sense of warmth, of pleasure tingled through my claw-fingers. I had accidentally brushed against a small golden tray of wafers, each one small as a silver dollar, resting on the sill right under the We Sell Go_d! sign.
All numbness was gone. My imaginary bones were straight. My body stopped hurting, just like that. The pain was gone. I could no longer envision nor imagine myself as wounded.
In fact, looking at my hands, they seemed like a young man’s hands, like I remember them back when I played football in school, or toted a rifle in Normandy. Strong hands. No nicotine stains in the fingers. No scars on the knuckles.
I was nude without being naked, for I was clothed in a warm light that shined from my pores. But then I pulled my clothing, shoes and fedora and trenchcoat out of my memory, and found myself dressed in that.
What had I touched? Before I recalled that I could not touch anything, I picked up a little disk of bread and held it up to the light from the window. It was a communion wafer. There was a little cross in the surface and the letters INRI. I never did know who Inri was, or why his or her name was written over images of Christ on the cross. Must have been some early disciple or something.
One moment, I was holding the wafer and looking at it, and the next, when I remembered that I was a shade, it slipped through my fingers—and I mean through my fingers—and it floated for a moment, and fell against the window as if caught by a freak gust, laying flat, and sliding downward. At the same moment, the neon sign it brushed against flickered and went dark, and the streetlamp outside burned out.
The only light now was inside, from the candles on the dead man’s fingers and the glow-in-the-dark blind eels trapped in the ceiling tank. It made the window into an impromptu mirror.
In that mirror, I could see the hooded friar on the throne of iron bones behind me. His sunglasses were now turned toward me, and the sutured-open grin had widened. He was alive. Or, at least, able to move.
I turned. The real one in the room with me seemed dead enough.
I looked back at the reflection. He smiled and nodded in a genial fashion, like he was my favorite uncle, and he opened his glove. In the palm was a little white dot of silver light that I somehow knew, the way you know things in dreams you cannot possibly know, that the planet Venus was in his hand. He was holding the Morning Star.
“Neat trick,” I said.
I was not sure which way to face. I decided on facing the motionless corpse. I figured that if something was going to hurt me, that was the direction it would come from.
Then he spoke in a voice like a silver violin and the music of his words came from the reflection in the dark glass. I spun back that direction, startled.
“You are come to us because you are broken,” he said. “We fix all things.”
“What are you?”
“As we said. We fix things. Did you not see the signs?”
“What is your name?”
“It was blotted from the book of life. There is no name to say.”
“If I can’t say your name, what the hell am I supposed to call you?”
Again with the iron-toothy grin. “Fixer.”
I stood there, thunderstruck. Sly had been right about that, all along.
I moved and put my imaginary back to the iron maiden, where I could keep both the dead Friar and his reflection in my angle of view. He was not just cold, he was like the South Pole. The cold was coming both from the corpse and the reflection, like a crosswind.
I don’t know how much, if any, heat I was giving off. I was cold compared to a human, but I was not absolute zero. I assume mine was like an echo or a memory of heat, embers from a newly-dead fire, but he was hungry for it. This cold was like something wanting to eat up all the heat in the universe. The South Pole? Maybe the South Pole of Pluto, or some smaller world with no name that wandered away from its orbit and is falling forever and ever in the unending blackness between the stars.
But this was something much worse than merely a clever Warlock running a crime ring, or some ambitious were-seal from Atlantis. Even the heavy hitters in the Big League, figures of strong and ancient dread like Baba Yaga and the Headless Horseman and the Wolf of the Mist and Gaberlunzie the King’s Beggar, all of them were small potatoes compared to this.
“Quite a collection you’ve got here,” I said.”What are you? A devil worshiper”?
“Not at all. Let others worship! We merely see things as they should be seen, and bow the knee to none. Is liberty such a vice?”
Suddenly feeling nervous, I stepped back to the window. I did not like being near the reflection, but the little wafers of bread were like a campfire in the sub-zero cold. I picked one up, but it was slippery, as if little winds too gentle to detect were trying to pluck it out of my hand. I found that it would come to rest on my right palm if I cupped my left hand beneath my right and support it. Like a two handed grip on a gun. The warmth beat on my chin and face, making me dizzy.
“This is a little out of place,” I said. “Why the communion bread? I can tell it has not been desecrated.”
This time the corpse in the real room did move. Like the reflection, he lifted his glove, and I saw he held a star in his hand. Smiling beneath his blind sunglasses, the hooded head now nodded toward the window, and part of the neon sign flickered to life
for a moment, and then died again.
“We sell god,” he said.
Of course. The act of selling the Host desecrated it. There was a special word for that. Simony? Simonism? Zionism? Thomism? Something like that.
Maybe I should have paid more attention to catechism class back when I was an altar boy. But Sly had always known about that kind of stuff. I had been the go-to guy for Romani lore, Voodoo practices, and legends from the Catskills. Maybe, thinking back, I had relied on him for a lot of things.
A worm of thought stirred in my brain again, reminding me how much I hated him.
“What is this ‘we’ stuff?” I said. “You got lice?”
The hooded moved back and forth as the figure shook its head. “You ask not rightly.”
I wondered what the ‘rightly’ way to ask was supposed to be. “How many of you are there?”
“Many. We are Legion.”
“What the hell—?”
“Indeed and well said! We are many. Many have we absorbed, and each screaming relic still trembles and suffers inside us. We are Hell. Hell is us, nor do we escape it. Numberless souls boil and burn inside us, and are consumed, and ever consumed, and none shall pluck them ever from my hungry, grisly jaws.”
He opened his mouth wide. He had no tongue, but spikes and thorns coated every inner surface of his mouth and throat. His throat was glowing as if he had swallowed a red coal.
Then his breath, which was strangely dry and warm and putrid, struck my face, and in the breath, I heard, dimly as in a nightmare, the screams and sobs and moans and cries of piercing, sad despair, men and women and children, and all voices filled with fear and cursing and purest hate. It was the children’s voices that were the worst.