“For what?”
“As soon as the map closes, we’re back on their time.”
The window into the fiber-optic cityscape of the soul map is closing like water going down a drain. As it spins away, time catches up with itself. And then, with an audible pop, the commercial break is over.
And the agents scream.
They scream louder than Bennet does, because they know the bell is gone, and they see that my bed is empty, which can only mean one thing. They missed their chance.
“Where is he?” Douglas screams, frothing. He forgets about Joey entirely and runs to my bed, ripping up the sheets. He passes right through me as he throws the monitoring equipment aside. Joey looks at him with his hands still out, stunned and panting.
“You know where he is,” Parsons says, his gun still trained on Caroline. I snarl, helpless to intervene. “He’s right here. But he’s beyond us, now.”
Douglas takes a mad swipe around the room. I can’t even feel the wind of his passing. The code alarm is blaring and people are running into the room and then out of the room at the same time, once they see the gun. Douglas tilts his head, sniffing, as if chasing the noise. Parsons turns the gun on Joey, then on Bennet, keeping all of them at bay.
“I can still smell it,” Douglas says. “The bell. But it’s fading.”
“Better than nothing,” Parsons says.
Without another word, Douglas snaps out of mortal view, and a shade of him flits by me, only this time I think I can feel a touch of wind. Then he’s out of the room, and then out of the hallway, and soon out of the building entirely. On the trail of the bell.
Parsons looks around at the mess and then turns briefly towards where Caroline has run to Bennet, who’s bleeding on the floor. My mother is screaming in her madness. Joey watches him carefully, his hands still out, waiting for Parsons to shoot, but instead Parsons spits in disgust. He holsters his weapon, and I breathe a sigh of relief. Then he speaks to me.
“I know you’re here, Mr. Dejooli. I know about the bell, not everything, but enough to find it again, no matter where it is. I know about the map, too. Is it beautiful? I can almost picture it. And one day it will be mine, with all of the power that comes with it. So don’t get used to it. You may have rung the bell, but you’re still a two-bit cop to me.”
His flat, vanilla gaze melts slowly into a wicked smile. “The bell is out there. I can feel it. When I find it, I’m coming for you.”
In a flash, he’s gone. But I can watch him still. When he flits out of his realm, he’s a shadow in mine, but he cannot see me. He is passing between our realms when he grabs the crow totem. He is neither here nor there. Soon enough, he’s gone too.
The big crow is tapping his beak against the metal of the bed in mocking applause. “Hear that? He’s gonna getcha! What a dick, am I right?”
He’s joking, and I smile, but I’m still unnerved. Parsons and Douglas know more about where I am and who I am than I do, and it bothers me. Those two aren’t just going to go away.
All around me the room has exploded into action again. Police and doctors and nurses swarm about, treating Bennet and shuffling my mother and Caroline out and under blankets and into locked rooms.
Joey becomes a shadow, and I know he’s holding his crow and is invisible to those around him, but I can see him.
“Ben! Are you there?” he yells, but his voice is muffled and whipped, like he’s screaming into a gale force wind. I can also tell that it’s hurting him, flitting between realities like this, and suddenly I know why he was taking the drugs. They help with the pain of phasing out. Allow him to walk in shadows for longer than he should.
“Go, Joey! You’ll kill yourself!” I scream, but he can’t hear me, or see me. His crow shines like the sun in his hand.
“I’ll watch over the doc and the girl! Don’t worry! Those fuckers won’t touch them!”
I can’t help but smile at his bravado. Old school Joey, right there. The first flicker of it I’ve seen since this whole mess started years and years ago. As if he can sense me, he smiles too.
“I’m glad it’s you, buddy. I hope you said goodbye to Ana.”
I nod to him. He was right. He found her after all, even if he couldn’t see her.
Then he’s out of the room in a flash, and it’s just me and the crows. I’m surrounded by people, but I can’t touch them. I can’t speak to them. I feel terribly alone. It’s like the first soft pressure of a crushing weight that threatens to drown me, but then the big crow is there. He flies to my shoulder and settles there as if born to it, and I feel instantly better.
“It’s not so bad,” he says. “Ana was a good Walker, very good. But I don’t think she was the one we need now. It’s good that you let her go.”
I turn to him, puzzled. “What makes a good Walker?”
“All in good time. We’ll start simple.”
“I can already feel that I need to be in places.”
“People die,” says the crow, shrugging his shoulders. “It’s the one constant on this plane.”
“Then I will go to them,” I say.
The crow nods. It’s a sort of excited bob that makes me smile again.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
“Don’t know. I’ve had countless names.”
“What did Ana call you?”
“Well, she called me a lot of things. Flappy, Blackie, Birdie, Dummy, mostly Birdie. When she got lonely and reached for me sometimes she’d call me Ben,” he says quietly. “Or Chaco.”
“Chaco,” I say. “I like that one.”
“Chaco it is then, chief.”
The lights are calling me, they are fading, and they need me to tend to their end. I know I can do this. It’s what I am meant to do.
“Well, Chaco. I think my time is done here.”
“For now…” Chaco says.
“Then let’s get going. We have work to do.”
I reach out my black-veined hand and press through the air. A pinprick of darkness appears, and I swirl the matter that makes up this plane like I’m spinning batter in a bowl. The soul map whorls into view, bigger, bigger, until it is all that is in front of me, staggering and infinite.
“I like the swirl move,” Chaco says. “Nice touch.”
I gaze flatly at him. “Try to keep up,” I say, grinning.
Then I’m off.
Chapter 19
The Walker
When I was dying, I spoke of life as a book, of our experiences as a series of pages fluttering to an eventual close. Now that I’m on the other side of it I can tell you that’s not true. Not exactly, anyway. The idea that each of us has a book to write, and then once it’s done we shelve it in the great library of existence, that’s ludicrous. No story is separate. If you could see this map, this beautiful, glowing map, you’d understand that.
I’ve walked the map a bit by now, and I often catch myself thinking about how I could explain this to you, or to Caroline, or to anyone. The best I can come up with right now is this: you know those huge fiber optic cables that span the oceans like enormous ropes? Imagine one as wide as the sun, and cut it in half so you see the countless individual fibers pulsing with light. That’s about as close as I can get to describing it. Your life isn’t a book: your life is a string of light, wrapped up with every other string into infinity.
I walk these strings. I walk the rope. Sometimes Chaco joins me, but mostly I do what I do alone. When a thread is breaking, I’m called to it. The life it belongs to can see me then, although I don’t know what they see when their eyes are opened in death. Sometimes they call me the names of people they knew, or loved. Sometimes they weep. Sometimes they cheer. The old are happier than the young. The old often cheer. The young are often heartbroken. I can understand. It’s hard to let go of life. Even if it sucks, it’s hard to let go.
I do not frighten them, for the most part. Perhaps they expect the cowl and scythe. They get me, instead. Or whatever their impression of me is. On a h
andful of occasions so far I have had people run. The first guy I actually chased, too. The old cop instincts kicked in, and I ended up running down a beach after the guy for half a mile before I remembered I could slow time. Good thing, too, because he was a young guy and I hadn’t used my lungs for quite a while by then and was out of shape. In a footrace he would have kicked my ass. As it was, I pulled the fabric of time down a notch and walked right up to him. He screamed the whole time, screamed bloody murder with nobody to hear but me. These runners are the only people that I’ve seen so far that are truly afraid when I come for them. Everyone’s afraid of death until they die, then the hard part is over. The ones who are still afraid when I come are the ones that know that whatever lies beyond me won’t be good to them.
What lies beyond me? Wish I could tell you. I walk the rope, and I can’t drop off the sides. But something does lie beyond me. I get whispers of it when I work. Rustlings from beyond the veil, and not all of them are good.
It came naturally, what I do. In a nutshell I clip the fading string of light and pack it away into the rope. Sort of like cosmic sewing. Left alone, the string will fade and weaken, but it will hold on. Like I said, life is pretty tenacious that way. Thing is, it’s not supposed to linger once it’s faded past a certain point. It’s bad if strings linger. It upsets the order of things. It’s unnatural, and its unnaturalness calls to me, tugs at me until I walk the rope and find it and clip it.
No scythe, either. Not even a pair of store-bought scissors. I use my fingers. Pointer and middle, I tease it out of them, and I snip it. There is no pain. It actually feels quite tremendous for the both of us, like finally sneezing after waiting what seems like a lifetime. After I clip a string, a seam opens in space, not unlike when I open the soul map, but it’s red and it billows like a curtain. I can’t walk through. I tried. Something stops me. All I can do is usher them through. Sometimes I hold their hand and send them off. Sometimes I just point. Sometimes I have to shove. But they all go through the veil eventually.
I’m getting better at it. The first couple of snips were disasters. There was the runner, and then there was this young kid who wept and wept and wouldn’t go through the curtain. The longer you wait, the bigger the curtain gets, until it takes up everything. This only scared the kid more, and I’m not ashamed to admit I panicked a little myself. I started getting pressed back, and the kid screamed until I basically tossed him in. Just kind of picked him up under the armpits and chucked him through. Not my proudest moment, but it worked. And like I said, the veil gets you in the end. It’s just a matter of how you go through it.
At first I got backed up. Way backed up. Think about it. People die every second on earth, but there’s just one Walker. It took me a while to figure out how to split myself. To be in many places at once. The key is to not think about it. Just let it happen, smooth your mind. The stoners we used to bust out by the Arroyo were closer to transcendence than I gave them credit for, because that’s what it is I do. When I stop thinking of myself as being in one place, I allow myself to be in every place. I sucked at it for a while, still sort of do, but I’m getting better, thanks to Chaco.
Chaco’s a strange thing. I’m learning about him just like I’m learning about everything else. Slowly, but surely. First, he’s not a bird. Not exactly. There is only one creature like him, just like there’s only one creature like me. I think the best way to describe him would be as a ‘thinning.’ There are animals on the earth that are ‘thinner’ than others. Animals that are just more aware of what is beyond the earth plane. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. Cats are probably the best example. When they sit and stare at walls, do you really think they’re staring at walls? Nope. Crows are another. Sloths also, believe it or not. Elephants have some capacity for it, and wolves. There are others, too. Many of them. Chaco can take on any of their forms. He just likes the crow the best.
He’s been helping me when he can, but mostly he’s been looking for the bell. Or rather, waiting for someone to find the bell and become the new Keeper. Chaco watches over the Keeper, just like Gam’s iteration of Chaco watched over her and gave its life for her in the end, to protect her from Danny Ninepoint and allow her to pass the bell to Caroline. I was a little disappointed to hear that Chaco served the bell, not me, because I thought he was like my sidekick, sort of like every wizard has an owl. He put a short end to that line of thought though, by laughing his ass off when I tried to give him an order.
I asked him how all the crows killed Danny Ninepoint, if they weren’t ordered to do something like that. He said they killed him because they loved Ana, and Ana loved me, and they knew Danny meant me harm. He said this like he was explaining that the sky was blue. Good enough for me. They came in in the clutch, and Chaco does the same. He almost always comes when I call for him, but I try not to call him unless I need him. But right now I need him. I need his help to get the crow totems back from the agents.
See, it turns out that just like there are thin creatures, there are also thin things. The crow totems are one of these thin things: they exist on more than one plane. In the case of the crows, they’re on the earth plane most of the time, and on my plane when they’re activated, but only briefly. We’re talking seconds. And seconds I can’t slow down. Chaco had always known it could be done, he just hadn’t seen it, and it’s no wonder, because it’s hard as hell to get the timing right.
I couldn’t tell you how long I followed those two agents. I stepped out of time for quite a while, practicing my grab while they crisscrossed the globe looking for the bell. Chaco tells me it’s almost impossible to find the bell on its own, but once it presents itself to a Keeper, the race is on. For now, though, it’s sort of dormant. He tells me they’d literally have to stumble across it.
Still, I can’t even chance a stumble. Even a blind squirrel has a shot at a nut, and the more I follow them, the more it becomes clear to me that I have to keep the bell from them at all costs. They have strange ideas. Unnatural ideas. They have a sense of the map, and the veil, although I’m not sure how. They speak of forcing the veil. Of bending the map to their will. Cutting strings that aren’t fading and sewing fading strings back to strength. I haven’t been on the job long, but even I know that stuff would spell disaster.
Chaco assures me these things can’t be done. But I’m not so sure. He’s the thinning. He doesn’t deal with the strings or the veil or the map. I’m the Walker; I do. I learn new things every day. Just because I can’t do something now, like cut a healthy string, doesn’t mean it can’t be done. It’s just that I have the good sense not to try it.
I know if I can take their totems, it will at least slow them down. There are others on earth, as many as twenty that I know of, but most likely more, so the agents could theoretically get another pair. But it won’t be easy. I know a little bit about who carries these crows. They call themselves the Circle of the Crow, and they’re sworn to protect the bell. Joey is one of them, but there are others, and some of them make Joey look like a punk. Safe to say, the crows won’t be easy to replace, even by a couple of lunatics like the agents. So I practice the timing, and I learn to find the subtle signs that the two of them are jumping. I learn to read the fabric of their plane so I’ll know when the crow begins to part it. And I wait. I know I’ll get one shot at this. I’m guessing there are ways to protect the crow even during the phasing. I don’t want to tip them off.
When the agents meet up together to sniff out New York City, a big task that requires both of them at once, I know my time has come. They are walking down the street—prowling down the street, is more like it—and even the hard-eyed New Yorkers know to move out of their way. Humans have a sense of when not to mess with people that could get them in trouble. More than I give them credit for. They range from dull to Caroline-status, but everyone has at least something of what you might call a sixth sense. Everyone knows to leave the agents alone to their dark work.
Everyone except me.
I
keep pace with them. Walking backward, keeping a measured distance. They know nothing of me. Not until they phase out, that is. Then they see me there for half a heartbeat. I know they see me there because they pause, but that is all it takes. It’s like a baton passing gone wrong. They try to jump forward in space, but I snatch the crows from their hands. One in my left, one in my right. Their bodies pass through me, untouchable, but the crow totems are thin, and for that one moment, they’re as real on my plane as they are on theirs. I pluck them from their hands like flowers, and the agents tumble back to the New York City sidewalk in a heap. Parsons knows immediately what has happened, and I see the hate burn silent within him as he scans the empty air in front of him. Douglas screams and swipes madly at the air, and an entire sidewalk full of people crosses to the other side of the street immediately. But all the spitting and swearing and raving in the world can’t help him now. Once I bring the crows to my side, they’re lost to him. I couldn’t bring them across again even if I wanted to. I and everything with me walk the rope. I can observe their world. Nothing more. Unless the bell rings.
Parsons quiets Douglas and says, “Patience, patience.” He looks around at the empty air, passing blindly over as I pump my fists in the air.
“There are other crows,” he says quietly. “Other ways.”
“I’ll be ready!” I scream, right into his face, but he can’t hear me, and eventually they turn away. I know that’s not the last I’ll see of the agents. I have the feeling that Parsons in particular is the kind of guy who only gets more pissed off when you needle him. I remember his golem stare, and I shudder as I watch them walk away, side by side.
Now. What do I do with these two crows?
I call Chaco. I use the two-fingered whistle he taught me, but I think he’s just messing with me. I think he knows when I need him, he just wants to make me spit through my fingers. I’m not a good whistler. I can hear him careening through time even before I take a breath. He blows through the soul map and pops out in New York City. He flares his wings and settles on my shoulder.
Follow the Crow Page 22