Through the Doors of Oblivion

by Michael G. Williams

  “Your… proclamation…” Madge smiled a little.

  “Of course,” Norton replied. “That was one of the many decrees I published in my reign.”

  Iria furrowed their brow. “That one… didn’t actually make it into the history books.”

  They and Madge exchanged a look. That was trouble because that meant whatever they had summoned up was more than what they heard described in the books they used to summon him.

  “Anyway,” Madge pushed ahead, “There are certain terms to your summoning and binding, and we wish to discuss those with you now.”

  “The use of the singular ‘they,’ however, is a bit controversial. There has been substantial writing on the topic, you know.” Norton plowed on, addressing Iria. “There are a number of nonspecific pronouns that have been proposed. I believe the last I read was ou, which can be used in the singular or the plural and refer to anyone in equal regard. It is informal at best, I admit, and just as likely to grate on the tongue of the grammarian as any other solution, but we must start somewhere.”

  “They,” Iria insisted. They and Norton locked eyes in a stare down lasting a few moments. “Since when are you, the self-declared emperor of a democracy that never recognized you, a stickler for the rules?”

  “What do you like to be called?” Madge again tried to cut the tension.

  Norton broke the staring contest first and looked at Madge. “Your Imperial Majesty, or just Your Majesty. I often refer to myself as ‘the Imperial personage.’”

  “So how about if we respect your terms,” Madge said, “And you respect ours?”

  Norton doffed his cap to her, and then to Iria. “As you wish, of course. I mean nothing but respect. It is important we know where we stand with one another.”

  Iria visibly relaxed. They were accustomed only to self-conscious acquiescence or to hearing arguments against their pronouns. It wasn’t often they had someone ask questions without intending offense, and even that could be painful to accommodate. Respect isn’t the same thing as curiosity, and Iria had long realized it was up to themself to assert that they were not necessarily required to be anyone else’s teacher. After all, hadn’t the point of summoning Norton been to have a servant rather than a new kind of nosy old uncle? But at least they were getting somewhere now.

  “In your time, you issued your own currency: Norton dollars. Do you recall that?” Iria steered things back to the terms of Norton’s servitude.

  “Technically they were promissory notes,” Norton replied with a small smile. “To be redeemed - with interest! - in due time, not unlike a bond or certificate of deposit. They were a promise with the backing of the Imperial treasury, to be bought back when redeemed.” Norton raised a finger to emphasize the next point. “My reputation was so trusted,” he said, “And the love of my subjects so complete, that these notes were accepted as currency in all the most respected businesses of San Francisco. A Norton dollar was as good as any ever printed by the illegitimate governments of the United States, I can assure you, and infinitely more acceptable than anything printed by the unlawful rebellion of the Confederates, let me also assure you of that. The government in Washington may have insisted on minting its coins right here in my beloved capital - a most tiresome taunt on their part, and one clearly targeted at my noble regime - but at least I can say the citizens of San Francisco had no love in their hearts for the worthless paper of the Southern states.”

  “Your Imperial treasury,” Iria mumbled with amusement, but Madge spoke over them.

  “Right. Well. Did you ever pay out on any of those promissory notes? Did you ever actually buy any of them back?”

  Norton opened his mouth to speak but paused, his mind working. He looked this way and that, along the seams of the wood planks in the floor, then up at them. “I fear I did not.”

  “Time to make good on some promises, Your Majesty.” Iria held up a yellowed rectangle of paper with faded script and a messy signature. “I’ve got all the Norton dollars left. You’re in my service until you earn them back. You do what I ask, and I pay you for it with your own notes. Don’t worry, there aren’t many of them left so you won’t be en…” Madge realized Iria had been about to say enslaved but caught themself. “… Our service for long. But that also means each note is all the more valuable thanks to scarcity.”

  Norton looked worried for the first time in their conversation. He had never once asked about the electric lights. He had never asked about their shabby abode: a room in an old building, with a double bed and a sink on one wall and a hot plate on top of a miniature refrigerator. He had never asked about the lights outside, or the sounds of the cars in the street, or when or how he died, or what year it was, or anything. He seemed completely impervious to the facts at hand as if they were inconvenient.

  Madge felt a little envious, and a little annoyed, if she were perfectly frank with herself.

  “How many…” Norton paused, cleared his throat, and asked again. “How many of my Imperial notes still exist?”

  “A dozen.” Iria held up the whole stack. “You are bound to these, Norton. Work to earn them back and when you’re paid the last one you’ll be free. Until then… Well…” Iria nodded at the poster. Norton followed their glance and looked at the likeness of himself.

  “Until then I am your servant.” Norton sounded tired. No, more than that, Madge thought: exhausted.

  “Don’t think of it as an obligation,” Madge said. “Think of it as an opportunity.”

  “What shall be my tasks? Shall I be made to clean your home?” Norton gestured around without verve. “To sweep the streets of horse manure? To clean stables? To do the washing up? What task can you require of me that befits my station?”

  Iria surprised Madge with their good grace as they responded. “Your Majesty, your sense of humor is as grand as was said of you.” Norton’s eyes lit up with a touch of something more hopeful. “We’re going to send you back in time, across the history of San Francisco, to bring us the keys to the city itself.”

  Norton lifted his face and considered Iria carefully, appraisingly, before speaking. “And what shall you do to my city once you have them?”

  “We aim to save it.” They raised both eyebrows at him in an expression of pure mischief.

  “From what?” Norton looked concerned.

  Madge addressed Norton, hands open. “Evil forces infest San Francisco,” she said. “It’s going to be tough to explain, but we need to save the city from a demon. And we need four keys to the city to do that.”

  “Then,” Norton squared his shoulders, “spare me no details. It sounds like this is serious business, my good…” Norton struggled, and then gathered himself. “My good persons.”

  Iria smiled a little. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

  Mammon slicked back his already-perfect hair one last time, then rang the doorbell on the old rowhouse. Irving Street straddled the nebulous area where Inner Sunset and Outer Sunset overlapped. Maybe Doelgar City? It was hard to pin down precisely what neighborhood a place was in, sometimes.

  The house itself was just close enough to UC San Francisco to be student housing but near enough to Golden Gate Park to lure in a tourist with a special desire to be able to walk there if they didn’t object to having to take a Drivr literally anywhere else. The buses here ran every 10 minutes, but it took a couple of connections and a good three-quarters of an hour to reach the places worth going in most tourists’ minds. It was perfect. This whole street sat ripe for the picking.

  A young woman answered through the door, not opening it. “What?”

  Mammon adjusted the silver and gold lapels of his green jacket and flourished a business card in front of the peephole. “Hi,” he said, smiling widely. “My name is Steve. I’m with Cuckoo? I was wondering if I could interest you in listing your apartment with us for short-term rental by visitors.” Mammon smiled at her over his card. It was a winning smile, he knew. He practiced it regularly.

  Mammon didn’t
look like a salesman. He didn’t look like much, actually, insofar as people tended to remember the emotional experience of seeing what they wanted to see but not what they actually saw. For most people, he looked young: most people had fantasies of being younger and richer. Sometimes he looked older because some people saw wealth in terms of inheritances or sugar daddies or the like.

  Mammon had no preferences, himself. He was glad to give people what they thought they wanted as long as they gave him what he wanted.

  “Short-term rental? Like, you know, that site where people rent out their apartments to strangers?”

  “Exactly,” Mammon said. “Though I note we provide insurance coverage to protect against damages and we vigorously remove any renters should our clients provide a documented complaint against them. We do not permit renters to destroy your property, and we replace it if they do.”

  The woman said nothing from her side of the door. Mammon imagined her researching Cuckoo on her phone to confirm that part.

  “How much would I get?”

  Gotcha, Mammon thought. “30% of the daily rate. And the rate is only going to go up in this neighborhood.”

  She considered in silence, then started turning locks. “What do you mean?” The door opened – but not the wrought iron grate over it - and Mammon found himself face to face through the bars with a tired woman in a UC SF PHILOSOPHY tee shirt.

  Mammon smiled at her. “Oh, just that houses all along this street have been getting snatched up. People pay a premium for them, too. When comparables - houses like yours - get sold at a higher price, it raises the estimated value of your own. If you’re renting, that probably means a rent increase, too. Cuckoo can be a good way to cover that gap. You just don’t get to live here all the time.”

  The woman stared into his face like she was trying to figure out from where she knew him, and whether it was a pleasant context, and then she took the card from his hand between the bars. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Take your time,” Mammon assured her. “But keep in mind the longer you wait, the less income you’ll generate. Time, as they say, is money.”

  She glanced up and down the street - lined with cars, some so new they gleamed, others beaten up and covered in stickers for colleges dotting the West Coast - then back at Mammon. “Sure. Like I said, I’ll think about it.”

  Mammon nodded at her. “Thank you for your time. I look forward to hearing from you.” Then he backed away and watched her close the door.

  Mammon first turned east and then west. Irving Street was residential, with little corner stores and on-street parking: simple, cozy but without a hint of luxury. It was a community, he realized, and the word itself made him sick. It would be so much better, he thought, when no one who lived there actually lived there.

  “Demonic forces threaten the city of San Francisco.” Iria gazed down at Norton, their expression serious. “Specifically, the personification of greed and his minions are poised to overwhelm us once and for all. They’ve been here a long time, cultivating followers, shaping the course of the city’s government and people. It’s our theory the gold rush of 1849 conjured them into being.”

  Iria stood beside a whiteboard on an easel. Norton sat in the beat-up old office chair Madge kept around for company. Madge sprawled on her side on a body pillow. Iria was speaking with the authoritarian air Madge had come to recognize as their Professor Mode. It occurred to Madge one day Iria would be a tremendously demanding mentor to whatever witches turned to them for training.

  “These demons - you do mean creatures of infernal darkness, such as are found in the works of the German occultists of my time, yes?” Norton’s ability to take all things in stride seemed capable of keeping pace with anything they could throw at him. Madge continued to marvel at his endless capacity for the new and the different.

  “Sort of.” Iria didn’t quite say yes, but they didn’t quite say no.

  Madge smiled to herself because she knew that was because Iria didn’t know enough about 19th-century demonology to be sure.

  “Suffice to say,” Madge put in, “Yes. More or less. Probably.”

  “Probably…” Norton echoed her, never looking away from Iria. “Does this demon have a name? I presume these evil forces have a chief or an executive, some organizing intelligence?”

  Madge nodded. “Its name is Mammon.”

  Norton’s eyebrows went up. “From the Social Gospel?”

  Madge and Iria shared a quick glance before Iria responded. “I’ve never heard of that.”

  “It was something beginning to appear when…” Norton looked around and cleared his throat. “Well, at the end of my time. Protestant ministers preached the importance of good works to create Christ’s kingdom on earth and to reflect spiritual devotion. Its advocates were very clear that money was a source of evil. They spoke often of Mammon, one of the Princes of Hell. They said he embodied avarice. To pursue wealth at the expense of one’s fellow man was to serve Mammon. To eschew wealth-seeking and assist those in need of a helping hand was to weaken him and to fight against his pernicious influence.”

  “You sound like a believer.” Madge tried not to sound too surprised. “I thought you were Jewish.”

  “I am of Hebrew origin, but I do not impugn the dignity or worth of any spiritual study with its moral teachings in good order. Let the Hindu do as he wishes, and the Buddhist as he wishes, and the Jew, and the Protestant, and the Catholic, and the Muslim, and everyone else. Let each better his soul as he sees fit. Mine is an earthly throne, not a religious one. I am no pope.”

  “What matters,” Iria cut in, “is Mammon feeds by drawing the contentment out of a place and the people in it. He and his forces don’t feed on the greed. They feed on the joy that greed displaces. As an individual becomes more and more obsessed with getting ahead, the joy they think they’re pursuing evaporates little by little. Eventually, it’s all gone. They think there’s such a thing as ‘enough.’ They’re wrong. All they have left is the chase.”

  “Avarice turns men into monsters, it’s true,” Norton replied. His airy demeanor was a little forced, and Madge could tell it was a cover for a deeper, stronger sentiment. “It may build a very nice mansion, but the mansion and the money that built it are in their own way a kind of prison.”

  “Exactly.” Iria was drawing as they talked: stick figures holding hands with hearts between them, then stick figures with their backs to each other as they cradled a collection of cartoon sacks of cash. “The unhappiness the wealth fosters - in the societal stratification it creates, and in the ongoing, ever-more-frustrating quest for contentment in those who thought wealth could bring that to them - turns to poison. And in the meantime, the demons feast on all that dissipating joy.”

  “I was a rich man, you know.” Norton cleared his throat. He didn’t quite meet Iria’s eyes, but he didn’t quite look away from them, either. “Very rich.”

  “I know.” Iria’s voice was softer now, less instructional and more sympathetic. “I’ve read you belonged to all the right gentlemen’s clubs and civic organizations. You were a figure in San Francisco high society at a time when the city was the most…” Iria struggled for an appropriate phrase and decided politeness mattered less than honesty. “Barbaric city in America.”

  “The gold,” Norton said, and for a moment his silence suggested those two words were explanation enough before he went on. “It drove men wild. They would do anything. Choirboys would kill for it. Landladies would smother a miner in his sleep. The city was a lawless place. It had been perhaps a thousand souls, most of them fishermen and small traders, purveyors of dry goods, a few skilled tradesmen.” Norton’s eyes unfocused as he gazed back across the long bramble-field of the history of the place where they lived, as had he. “San Francisco had twenty-five times that within a year: one thousand persons, and a year later twenty-five thousand. So much changed, and always so quickly. The economy was completely imbalanced. A single hen’s egg cost a dollar, when a skilled bl
acksmith could make maybe one and one-half dollar in a day in one of the wealthy states of New England. In San Francisco, it took a fortune to find even meager lodgings. The most expensive rented dwelling in the city when I arrived,” Norton said with a small laugh, “Was a certain well-positioned tent. People flocked to California for gold, whether they got it direct or indirect: prospectors and miners, yes, but also some of those fine Yankee blacksmiths and barmaids and horse thieves and pirates.”

  “As did you.” Madge studied Norton’s face, fascinated by the haunted memory of this un-ghost they had half-summoned, half-fabricated out of the materials provided by semi-fictitious biographies.

  “That is true.” Norton came back to the here and now just long enough to smile for the briefest moment. “I arrived shortly after, and I made my fortune not in gold mining itself but by investing in the trades and industries supporting miners’ presence here.”

  “Until you lost everything,” Iria said. It struck Madge as a particularly vicious thing to say in the middle of Norton’s rather sweet moment of reverie, but Iria’s voice was not especially cruel.

  Norton’s face fell as he sobered and then adjusted his coat. His mouth opened, but Iria cut him off to speak again.

  “…And found yourself.” Iria did not stop. “You disappeared from view for years when you went bankrupt, when you were merely Joshua Norton, former star of business and society columns. But when you marched into a newspaper and declared your ascension to the position of emperor, you became you. And so perhaps you, above all, are uniquely qualified to understand how a fortune - not even a fortune attained, but the ceaseless questing for it - can stand between a person and their soul’s true calling. Would Joshua Norton, Businessman, ever have sat in a courtroom to monitor whether the city’s legal instruments handled the poor as fairly as they did the rich? Would Joshua Norton, Businessman, have advocated for women’s suffrage? For desegregating streetcars? For the protection of Chinese immigrants?”