The Edge of Everything

by Jeff Giles

  “You ain’t beautiful, but you sure as shit ain’t ugly,” he told Marianna. “Why don’t you come sit on Santa’s lap?”

  He reached out blindly to grope her, but she sidestepped him like a bullfighter.

  X gestured for Marianna to stay silent. He drew close to Stan, disgusted and furious and raked with pain.

  He grasped Stan’s throat.

  Marianna gasped. The other women fled, half of them in smocks, their wet hair flying. But Marianna seemed too shocked to move.

  Stan tore the towel from his face. He saw X in the mirror. He began kicking and punching wildly at the air.

  X laughed darkly.

  “It was my dearest wish that you would fight,” he said.

  “Yeah, well, I sure as hell will, superfreak,” said Stan. “And, by the way, nice shirt, cowboy. Tight enough?”

  Stan cast his eyes around as X closed his grip around his throat. There was a pair of scissors glinting on the counter.

  He jabbed them into X’s thigh and twisted them viciously.

  X cried out, more in annoyance than pain. He pulled the scissors from his leg, and sent them clattering across the floor. He did not let go of Stan’s skinny neck even when blood began to soak through his pants.

  He turned to Marianna.

  “You would be safer elsewhere,” he said, as gently as he could. He gazed around the salon, and saw his reflection multiplied endlessly in the mirrors, like he was the front line of an army.

  “What are you gonna do to him?” said Marianna.

  “I am going to propel him through the wall,” said X.

  Marianna rushed out of the salon now, too.

  Stan continued to struggle. He didn’t seem to realize that the more he lashed out, the harder X squeezed his windpipe.

  “You ain’t taking me with you, superfreak,” he rasped. “You’ll have to kill me first.”

  “Yes,” said X. “I will.”

  Stan grabbed things from the counter and hurled them at X: spray cans, bottles, a brush, a hair dryer. X pushed him hard against the chair. He regarded Stan pityingly, as one would look at a child having a tantrum. When Stan had run out of projectiles, X pulled him out of the chair and dashed him to the floor.

  Stan tried to scramble to his feet, but X raised his boot and brought it crashing down on his back. They remained motionless for a time. Then, breaking the silence, came a terrible new sound.

  Stan was crying.

  X had no pity.

  “Has your courage fled so soon?” he said.

  He took a step backward. Stan rolled onto his back, and cradled his enormous head in his hands, sobbing dismally. X loathed the man so much that the noise had no effect on him. It might have been the screeching of a scavenger bird.

  Soon, Stan was listing the many reasons he did not deserve to die. X had heard such speeches from many men. (Banger was the only exception: he’d simply asked X if he’d be able to get cell service where they were going.) Stan moaned, lied, and made excuses for himself so vehemently that spittle flew from his lips. X only half-listened.

  Finally, Stan quieted. X stood and removed both the purple shirt and the threadbare one beneath it.

  “Oh, come on,” said Stan. “Again with the damn strip show?”

  X stretched out his arms, and felt Stan’s sins gathering force within him. Images began to bloom on his back:

  A car was stalled by the side of an unlit highway. An old man with a friendly, open face had pulled over to help, and was shuffling toward the car. He was wearing flip-flops, a pink Izod shirt, and khaki shorts. His legs were knobby and white as an uncooked chicken.

  He rapped his knuckles on the driver’s window.

  The driver was Stan.

  He’d been lying in wait for a Good Samaritan. He thrust open his door, knocking the old man onto the road. The man looked up in confusion. He reached up a hand for help. Stan kicked him in the ribs.

  The old man crawled into the highway to get away. Stan followed, laughing and kicking, until the man lay in the middle of the road, the double yellow lines under his back.

  Cowering in the salon, Stan turned away from the images. He could not bear to watch.

  X extended a palm toward a mirror, and the mirror jumped to life. The movie now played there, too. In an instant, it jumped to the next mirror and then the next and so on around the room, as if the mirrors were catching fire one by one.

  X pulled Stan’s head up high and forced him to watch.

  “I gave you your freedom on the lake,” he shouted. “I gave you your life! And this is what you squandered it on!”

  In the movie, Stan was hooting with happiness as he slid into the old man’s car and peeled away.

  His victim lay stranded in the middle of the highway. He tried crawling and rolling. He tried pulling himself across the blacktop with his fingernails. His flip-flops had fallen off and lay behind him in the road.

  Now a truck could be heard coming around the curve. Its headlights were high. Its brakes were screaming.

  Not even X could watch the rest.

  He clenched his fist, and the movie vanished. Outside the salon, he heard police sirens, howling like cats. They were half a mile away and growing louder.

  X looked at Stan with a glimmer of compassion. It was then that Stan knew he was truly about to die. He was so scared he could barely bleat out a word.

  “Now?” he said.

  “Now,” said X.

  “Don’t you gotta take me back to that lake?” said Stan.

  “No,” said X. “We can reach our destination from anywhere. We can reach it from here.”

  X dressed slowly. When he had finished, he closed his eyes for a moment and the room instantly went dark.

  “Why’d you turn out the lights?” said Stan.

  He was stalling.

  “Respect for the dead,” said X. When Stan gave him a puzzled look, he added simply, “You.”

  He picked up Stan. He threw him over his shoulder.

  He turned to the great round mirror at Marianna’s station.

  “Will it—will it hurt?” said Stan.

  “Only forever,” said X.

  He leaped at the mirror. The glass exploded as he and Stan passed through it. The shards, rather than raining onto the floor, were pulled in after them. X left the shell of Stan’s body behind—a worn and ugly casing for the police to find—as he pulled his soul down into the dark.

  ten

  They fell into a half-lit void. The air rushed past them so fiercely that it obliterated all sound. X was accustomed to it, but he knew Stan would feel a crushing pressure on his eyeballs, a hammering in his ears. He saw Stan panic and resist the fall. He watched as Stan clawed at the air with his hands, as if he could climb back to the surface. As if there was a surface. The wind thrashed them in every direction.

  X fell faster than Stan. He had tucked himself into a ball, like a diver. When he saw Stan struggling, he unfurled his body, reached up, and grabbed ahold of Stan’s ankle to steady him. Stan kicked ferociously, but gave up after one last pathetic spasm. X suspected his senses were so overwhelmed that they had stopped functioning. Stan let his arms drift over his head. He let X drag him down.

  After they had fallen for a time, Stan recovered some of his equilibrium. X knew what would happen next. He could predict it almost to the second: Stan would be hit with a sadness so severe it was nearly blinding. Regret, remorse, and rage would overtake him, as they overtook all new souls. It was always at this moment that they realized they were not traveling down a holy tunnel toward a shimmering light but rather falling down a shaft to oblivion.

  Stan began crying again, right on schedule. X was grateful that he couldn’t hear it this time. Just the distorted, wailing look on Stan’s face was enough to turn his stomach. All freshly plucked souls wept—never for their victims, only for themselves—and X found the self-pity galling. They all believed they were innocent, no matter what they had done. As the wind howled around them, Stan
cried voluminously. His tears flew upward, like bubbles.

  The air grew cold. It was the breath of the river rising up to greet them. The journey, X knew, was nearly over.

  He looked down and saw the river that cut through his hive in the Lowlands. It was just a pale thread at first, but it came at them fast. There were only 1,000 feet left to fall. Then 500. Stan must have seen the roiling current, too. He shut his eyes, filled his cheeks with air, and clutched his nose like a child jumping into a pool. X closed his own eyes and pictured Zoe’s face, soft and welcoming. He promised himself again that he would return to her, that he would take that face carefully in his hands—that he would say, I forgot my coat.

  The water hit them like a wall.

  The river in the Lowlands raged as always, but X reached the banks with ease, even without the powers he enjoyed in the Overworld. He had delivered Stan so the Trembling had vanished. Along with his powers went his pain. For a brief time, his body would feel relieved and renewed.

  Behind him, Stan screamed at the arctic cold of the current. He scrambled for the banks, but the river kept sucking him under. A handful of guards crowded the water’s edge, laughing at him. When Stan finally made it to the riverside, his lungs were heaving. He bent over and vomited water (and ice cream) into the dirt. A guard approached him with a kindly expression, picked him up—and threw him back in.

  The others roared with delight. Stan began to make for the other side of the river, but there were guards waiting there, too.

  X sat in the dirt and waited for someone to bring him a blanket and a wedge of bread, as they always did when he returned with a soul. He noticed, with a shiver of dread, that Dervish stood preening nearby. X wished again that it was Regent instead.

  He drew in a deep breath and steeled himself for a confrontation. He would be humble, hang his head, beg forgiveness a hundred times. He would endure whatever humiliation Dervish could devise. Sooner or later, his crime would be forgotten—carried away as if by the river. He would be sent back to the Overworld to collect the next soul, and he would steal away to see Zoe. An hour with her would sustain him for a year.

  But Dervish did not so much as glance in X’s direction. He clapped when Stan stumbled. He whistled and hooted when the current dragged his big, fuzzy head under the water. Dervish was draped in gaudy necklaces and bracelets, all of them stolen from the souls of the Lowlands. The jewelry shimmered and clattered as he hopped around.

  “Well done, guardsmen!” he shouted. “Well done!”

  X stared openly at Dervish now, anxious for his punishment to begin. He knew the lord would still be boiling with rage. Yet the creature continued to ignore him. X had not expected this reception and it worried him.

  The light had left his body now. The reality of the Lowlands—the way it sucked all the hope and happiness out of you, the way it stank like the mouth of some enormous beast—flooded into him instead. His anxiety deepened. Still no blanket. Still no bread.

  X stood and waded into the river.

  Stan continued to battle the current. He was red-faced and panting, wailing about the cramps in his legs. X grabbed him around the waist and hoisted him over his shoulder yet again. Even without supernatural powers, he had no trouble lifting a knot of wire like Stan.

  He carried him to the side of the river.

  “Thank you, superfreak,” said Stan, shouting to be heard over the rushing water. “I don’t like anyone here so far.”

  The guards jeered when they saw that there was no more fun to be had. But even this was a comfort to X because it meant that life, such as it was in the Lowlands, would lurch back into motion.

  He laid Stan on the ground, and waited for the guards to descend on the terrified new prisoner.

  At last, Dervish sliced the air with his long, taloned forefinger and screamed, “SEIZE HIM!”

  But something was different.

  Something was wrong.

  The lord was pointing at him.

  The guards raced at X from all sides, like lions on a fallen deer. Their merriment at the river had been a ruse. They had been waiting for the lord’s signal all along.

  They stripped X of his purple shirt. He saw it pass through many hands. He saw it fought over, bartered for, and, finally, carried off triumphantly like a newly captured flag.

  Dervish instructed the guards to carry X to the tree on the plain. There was some grumbling at this—the men were as small and round as hobbits and unaccustomed to true labor—but they did as they were told.

  X did not resist. At least now his punishment had begun, which meant that someday it would end.

  It was a long march through foul, humid air. The guards groaned angrily under their burden—why had this traitor’s punishment become their own?—while Dervish strutted in front of them. The guards pinched and poked X as they bore him along. When they saw that the lord not only did not object to X’s mistreatment but rather whooped with pleasure at it, they accidentally dropped him to the ground and dragged him a dozen feet at a time.

  The souls in the lowest ring of cells sensed something was afoot. They could see from the tattoos decorating X’s arms and from the bruises on his face that he was a bounty hunter. It was unusual to see one punished—and thrilling. Word was passed up to the top ring of cells and out to the farthest edges. Soon, the great black wall seemed to shake as prisoners hollered in the tongues of a hundred countries and thousands of years. All X heard as he passed was a storm of hate and anger. Occasionally, one voice could be heard above the others: “What the hell have you done, boy?”

  Ripper and Banger recognized X as he was carried across the plain. Ripper was so upset she twirled manically in her cell. She wept and spat, and cursed her fingernails for not yet being long enough to tear out. Banger suggested that she take a “chill pill,” which only confused her, and tried to shout down the souls who surrounded them, calling them haters and tools.

  The procession finally reached the tree. It was 30 feet tall, ugly and bare and elephant gray. Its trunk consisted of a dozen tortured, intertwining strands. Its mottled branches bent and swerved in every direction, as if in search of something they would never find. Its roots sank into the dirt like veins.

  The guards thrust X against the tree and bound him to it, which brought a wave of applause from the cells. The rope sawed at X’s skin, but he knew better than to complain. When the guards had finished, they stepped away and Dervish approached.

  “Lovely to have you back among us, X!” he said brightly. “I may call you X, I hope? As all your pretty new friends do?”

  The lord circled the tree, testing his men’s work.

  “I fear this rope may not serve,” he said. “Be a dear, X, and ask the guards if they might be so kind as to tighten it. I do very much want you to feel its embrace.”

  There were four guards, but they looked like a single, multi-headed beast. They were foul and pocked. Their clothes were a bizarre patchwork for, like the lords, they dressed in whatever they could steal from the prisoners. They wore frayed vests, ruffled shirts blackened with dirt, pinstriped pants and jeans, as well as a scarf or two, despite the heat. One of the guards—he was the shortest and stoutest of them, and his nose had been broken so many times it was nearly flat against his face—appeared to be the chief. He wore a white turtleneck and a red tie.

  “Guards,” said X, “might you be so kind as to tighten my rope?”

  The men laughed, as if he had told a bawdy joke.

  “Of course, luv,” the stout one said. “’Twill be an honor!”

  The guard fussed with the rope, which, in truth, could hardly be made any tighter. Dervish tested it once more—X’s blood was beginning to leak out from under it—and nodded his approval.

  The lord faced the vast wall of souls, who were still shouting oaths at X. He motioned for silence.

  “BEHOLD A MAN WHO THINKS HIMSELF BETTER THAN YOU!” he bellowed. “BEHOLD THE BOUNTY HUNTER WHO CALLS HIMSELF X!”

  The cells began to
rumble once more.

  “Perhaps he is THE VERY ONE who ripped you out of your life and ferried you here!” the lord went on, animated by the screams. “Even if he is not, I daresay he would have done it gladly. Now, it seems, our noble bounty hunter has grown BORED of our company. He has attempted to flee—for he has FALLEN IN LOVE! What say you, souls of the Lowlands, shall I let him go?”

  Not even Dervish could have predicted the violent gust of profanity that emanated from the cells now.

  He turned to X, his eyes wild with delight.

  “My heavens!” he said. “It’s as if they don’t like you!”

  The lord looked back to the wall.

  “I believe I shall let you punish this man yourselves,” he shouted. “WOULD YOU ENJOY THAT?”

  The cells erupted yet again.

  Fear slipped its cold hands around X’s heart.

  Dervish called to the guards patrolling the wall. He ordered them to release some prisoners from their cells.

  “A hundred or so, shall we say?” he said. “Let them come down here and mete out whatever justice they see fit!”

  X could not just hear the prisoners’ bloodlust now—he could smell its sour odor drifting down from the cells. Out of nowhere, he remembered Zoe telling Jonah that “pungent” meant “someone who likes puns.” He was warmed by the memory.

  Dervish noticed.

  “Look how he smiles!” he shouted. “THE BOUNTY HUNTER DOES NOT FEAR YOU!”

  Cell doors clanged open. Prisoners thundered toward the steps. The wall was in a frenzy, chanting for X’s blood.

  “I must take my leave,” the lord told him. “I do so abhor violence.”

  The first wave of souls pounded toward him across the plain. The whole hive seemed to shudder under their feet.

  The guards hastily fled.

  “I don’t get paid enough for this shite, do I?” said the stout one with the red tie, as he ran.

  “You get paid?” said another.

  “It’s a figger o’ speech, innit?”

  The first souls to reach X merely spit at him or dealt him a single blow. He looked each of them in the eyes. He refused to so much as bow his head.