Through the Doors of Oblivion

by Michael G. Williams

  Mammon did not speak, or move, or laugh. He studied Hitesh very carefully, then Jefferson, then each of the others in turn. When Mammon spoke it was with disappointment, maybe a little resignation, and maybe also a little relish. “Well,” he said, “I do agree with one thing: killing off the competition is usually a pretty good move.”

  The rest of Riley’s life, it turned out, didn’t take very long.

  San Francisco has a Main Street, though few probably even know where it is. For such a prominent name, it is unremarkable in almost every way: a few blocks of asphalt, a hub for mass transit buses, and a handful of shockingly expensive apartments. Otherwise, it mostly serves as a connector between the interstate and the street that is San Francisco’s true main thoroughfare: Market Street.

  Laid out by a civil engineer named O’Farrell shortly after the United States Army gained control of the city in 1847, Market reigned as San Francisco’s widest and longest street for decades. Almost every neighborhood in San Francisco has had some direct connection to Market ever since. The neighborhood known as the Twin Peaks has always anchored one end and the Embarcadero has anchored the other, and the miles of Market Street between have been the throbbing, pulsing, 24/7 heart of the city.

  The Tenderloin, defiantly gritty while the city around it had been gentrified and regentrified every generation for its entire history, emptied onto Market Street at its eastern end and there, after he walked out of Iria’s and Madge’s apartment, is where Norton took himself.

  Norton stared at the cityscape for long minutes, watching the patterns before him: self-driving carriages, pedestrians, a horse-drawn streetcar with no horses, all moving to and fro, each seeming to get its turn. Market Street had changed.

  This was radically less chaotic than the Market Street he remembered.

  The Market Street of his time operated without lights or lanterns controlling the flow. His Market Street had no instructional signage. People routinely died walking on or across it. There were no rules about pedestrians, no rules about driving a carriage, no rules at all. Generally speaking, carriages stuck to their side of the street, but they crisscrossed and flowed in and out of one another’s paths with abandon. None showed any regard for how their own actions impacted another, whether on foot or on wheels. The Market Street of today seemed more a lion pacing its cage. It was tense, it was constantly busy, but it was more or less controlled. Its patterns pulsed in a manner he could learn and predict, and Norton always excelled at working a system given time enough to observe.

  Ten minutes later, Norton crossed with the light in a crowd of others. No one even gave the small man, his bushy beard, or his tall befeathered hat a second glance.

  Norton found himself transfixed by the chirps of the walk signals, the neon, the squeal of the streetcar brakes, the huge, glowing clock on the face of the Ferry Building. He wondered why they had built it, lovely though it might be. Had the city finished filling in the old docks? Completed the seawall?

  Norton saw himself as a traveler in time, not resurrected from the dead but transported from the moment of his expiration. He couldn’t quite accept that he was deceased, not in his innermost self. Instead, he was relocated from the then to the now. Where another such emigre might find themselves overwhelmed, Norton readily flexed his old instinct for getting by. He didn’t allow himself the self-satisfied smile threatening to violate the terms of his dignified bearing, but he did quietly add a mark to the tally on some private and internalized score sheet. Being kidnapped across time didn’t absolve him of his responsibility to maintain a respectable bearing or his wits. Entirely the opposite, he thought. If anything, this was a situation that would only be solved by exhibiting his penchant for adjustment and effectiveness. Who had seen to it the Chinese were allowed to testify in courts of law and their religions were respected? Who had called for desegregation of the rail lines? Who had stood for the rights and safety of the city’s lowest citizens, not out of kinship but out of the kindness required of any ruler worth his crown? If Norton could navigate the social and political labyrinths comprising that divided and hardscrabble world of old, he would best this one in no time at all.

  Ahead of him, after several blocks of this sort of walking and thinking, Norton saw two things he recognized, and to which he had entirely different reactions.

  The first was Lotta’s Fountain. It looked different now - a pillar emerged from the center which did not exist in his era - but otherwise it resisted the vicissitudes of time. Lotta wanted to thank the city where she started her entertainment career, so she gave it a fountain anyone could use. Norton’s heart swelled at such generosity to his people. He wrote to Lotta once, back then, naming her a cultural ambassador of his government. She responded with a few kind words. Norton treasured that exchange. And here was that very gift.

  The large fountain’s four sides each bore the face of a lion with a spigot in its open mouth and a bowl protruding underneath. The fountain invited the whole city to enjoy the most basic of refreshments. The richest man in San Francisco and the poorest of its urchins might stand a few feet from one another and slake their thirst together. They need not speak; they need not befriend one another or forge an alliance; they might well stand in silent judgment of one another the entire time…

  But stand they would, together in a vast city forever changed and forever changing, never able to rest long enough to catch its breath. San Francisco had always been a place too busy becoming its next self, and mourning its past self, to enjoy its present. Lotta’s Fountain had been one of the precious few anchors of human experience in the now of this city. It was one of the places where a city built on empowering people to go – to the mines, to the sea, to a place more welcoming than their homes – could take a moment and stop.

  Norton stepped up to the fountain, noting the small ways in which it was different now. For one thing, the spigots were not running. There was no water coming out.

  The tin cups were gone.

  There was no drink to be had for the thirsty.

  There was no place for the city to stop.

  The other sight Norton recognized was the Palace Hotel, across from the fountain.

  Norton’s fists tightened reflexively, and he screwed up his face in anger.

  Norton hated the Palace Hotel.

  Norton felt heat in his cheeks as he looked at the Palace from the other side of the street. To think he had been carried forward across the centuries only to discover his city destroyed and remade and this of all places would survive? His blood boiled at the offense.

  Norton did not wait for lights or crowds. He marched right into the street in the old way. Car horns blared, like ships in the fog, and one of these MUNI train-car devices was among them, but he did not care. Norton crossed without taking his eyes off the front door of the Palace’s lobby.

  A man in a uniform swung wide the door at his approach. “Oh ho!” The man’s tone was jovial. “Emperor Norton, I presume?”

  Norton stopped short. “So you know of me?” Norton’s eyes narrowed, and he wore the scowl of one about to speak some very stern words. “Has your fine institution,” his voice dripped with sarcasm, “seen fit at long last to recognize my station? Hmm?” Norton shook a cane at the doorman. “I will speak to the management of this high and mighty flophouse, this coddlesome nursery for the city’s rich, this stone-faced fleece factory, and I will do so immediately. There are offenses to be addressed, and it has been entirely long enough since they occurred. I will not cross the borders of two centuries to see this place still standing without seeking redress. I will have an apology and I will have it immediately and I will brook no argument, young man, for I once swore I would never again step foot in this ermine-draped outhouse, never, not even to empty the Imperial bedpan, until such time as amends have been properly made. Now, go and summon the barbarian who controls this frilly camp that he may behold the fury of an emperor whose anger has been displaced for generations!”

  The doorman didn�
��t skip a beat. He lifted the lapel of his long coat and said into it one word: “Security.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Iria said from behind Norton. They were breathing hard. Madge was still catching up to them. Iria put a hand on Norton’s shoulder and gripped it tightly. “My friend here is just kidding.”

  The doorman eyed both of them, his lapel still held to his mouth.

  “Wha…” Madge ran up, clutching her side, breathing too hard to speak. “Whatever…” She pointed at Norton with her other hand. “Whatever he said…”

  Iria cut her off. “Seriously. We’re just going to get a drink at the bar and leave. Promise. My uncle is just… really enthusiastic about his cosplay.” Iria then dug into their pocket, produced a wallet, and started to withdraw a bill.

  The doorman looked offended at the idea of taking a bribe. “Try to tone it down inside,” the doorman said to Norton. Then, with a very tight smile, “Enjoy your drink.”

  Norton’s face was a wrestling match between confusion and offense, but Iria pushed his shoulder and thus drove him into the lobby. “You’re welcome.” Their voice growled in his ear, like a parent dragging a screaming child from the store.

  Norton held his hat in place as they pushed him. “I’ll have you know I do not consume alcohol. It is a point of pride as well as an obligation. Duties of state require a clear mind, and I never know when I might be called upon to -”

  “We’re not getting a drink.” Iria gritted their teeth hard. “I’m showing you something.”

  Norton kept babbling as he was dragged along. “Besides which, this place had the gall to throw me out for vagrancy once upon a time. They claimed they were concerned I couldn’t pay the bill for a cup of coffee. A cup of coffee! They would bill me for something so small? When I had been so generous in overlooking their repeated failures to pay taxes?”

  Iria kept dragging Norton down a hallway, toward the back of the hotel, through a door over which the words PIED PIPER were emblazoned. Norton beheld a long bar and a large room full of intimate tables and high-backed booths. He heard the sounds and smelled the aromas of expensive liquor being consumed by people who didn’t have to think about the prices they paid. Glasses clinked, ice rattled, music played, voices burbled -

  - And everywhere he looked, he saw the damned.

  People dressed for a night downtown packed the room, but most of them bore a hanger-on of whom they seemed entirely unaware: a little creature, with skin crisp green, or bright gold, or shining silver, or gleaming copper, or any conceivable combination thereof.

  Each had a unique shape and attached itself to its victim in a different way. One would be a tiny man on the shoulder of its host; next to it, another appeared in the shape of a toad; across from them, one covered its victim’s head and shoulders like a burial shroud; beside her, yet another coiled like a serpent around a person’s neck and shoulders, its tail piercing their heart.

  Norton gasped aloud and began to tremble. “God’s bluster,” he swore quietly. “What is this? Why have you brought me to this awful place?”

  Iria gripped Norton’s shoulder again, but less tightly. This time they meant the touch as a comfort. “So you can see how pervasive this problem is.” Iria caught Norton’s eye and then nodded all around them. “The Palace Hotel isn’t especially demonic. Plenty of places in San Francisco would look like this to us. At least, right now, while the spell is active.”

  Madge had almost caught her breath and finally spoke again, gasping between fragments. “We did a little ritual… after you left… to make it possible for you to see them.” She wheezed and patted her chest. “Don’t pretend you can just… walk away… now that you see what threatens… the city.” She put her other hand on the small of Norton’s back, almost maternal. “Your city, Your Majesty.”

  Norton’s eyes swept the room. “Is this everywhere?”

  “Yes.” Iria’s voice weighed heavy, carrying years of their battle. “Pretty much.”

  Norton’s eyes watered again. “My people.” His voice caught. “My city.” He started to lift his eyes but stalled out, staring at the floor. “But they aren’t anymore, are they? This is no longer my city. It has some of the same features, as anyone might resemble their grandfather after a fashion, but they are not literally the same.” He nodded in the direction they came. “This very hotel, which gave me my greatest offense, does not remember me. The streets are filled with machines I do not recognize. The people are surrounded by demons.” Norton’s eyes got lower with each statement. By the end, he was fidgeting with his cane and staring at the floor.

  Iria shook their head. “This city’s never been static, never whatever it was the day before. That’s the only consistently true thing about San Francisco: it’s never what it used to be. But that doesn’t mean there’s no place for you. Up there.” They pointed at the wall, high over the bar, and Norton’s eyes turned to where they indicated.

  A massive mural was painted there. It featured an assembly of renowned persons from San Francisco’s history. Norton recognized some of them; others he did not.

  Front and center, however, stood the Emperor himself.

  “There are portraits of you all over the city.” Madge’s voice was almost a whisper. “Some of them are prominent, like this one. Some are more obscure. But they’re here. You’re everywhere, Your Majesty. San Francisco has never forgotten you. And now it needs you more than it ever did before.”

  Norton glanced quickly around the room one more time, then from Madge to Iria. “I grant your petition.” His voice was low and serious. “I will get the keys to the city of San Francisco. No more disagreement. No more explanations. Guide me in doing what I can to save my people from…” His voice faltered. “From whatever evil this is.” They each felt something snap into place when Norton spoke that third affirmation.

  “So mote it be.” Iria’s eyes flashed. “And thank you.”

  A deep thrum of magic passed between them. Norton’s eyes widened. “What was that?”

  Madge spoke softly. “You’ve agreed three times. Now it’s real. Now you’re bound to this mission, and to us, and to completing these tasks. Magic usually requires three of something.”

  “Bound?” Norton’s eyes flashed with some combination of shock and anger.

  “It just means it’s easier for us to help you.” Iria sounded hurried in their attempt to be reassuring.

  Norton studied them carefully for a long moment, then let out a breath. “This matter is too important for me to be caught up in matters of ego.” All the same, he adjusted his jacket, brushing dust from it. “Now. How soon can you send me back to get this flag?”

  “Immediately,” Iria said. “No time like the present for traveling into the past.”

  Mammon stood at the front of the conference table, pointing at a presentation deck projected onto the wall behind him. The people around the table were dressed in the uniform of most relatively anonymous corporate board members: dark suits, men with expensive watches, women with pearls instead of diamonds. They were all wealthy beyond the average human’s capacity to imagine wealth, including their own capacities. That didn’t dissuade them from wanting more, though. Every last one of them was chosen for the board of Cuckoo because they would have sold their own grandmother for a bump in short-term gains.

  “With the Ventana Building deal fast-tracked by the city’s housing authority, and with an aggressive door-knock campaign in the Sunset, we’re poised to add five hundred units to Cuckoo’s rental inventory over the next six to nine months. Each one of those will have an average annual income of sixty to one hundred a year, putting tens of millions of new projected revenue on our books. And those are just the deals we signed this week.”

  “Tell us more about the Ventana Building.” A woman spoke from somewhere down the table, lost in the gloom. She - along with all the others - was swallowed up by the backlight effect of the projector on the far wall. Mammon saw her pearls move when she spoke. That was the only
sign he had of where to look as he responded.

  “Currently the Ventana Building has thirty housing units. Built in the 1950’s, it’s old and so are most of its tenants. Some of them moved in when it was built. Those people are paying a ridiculously low rent. They’re dragging down rents all around them. It’s a disgrace. They’re practically robbing landowners at gunpoint by sticking around for so long.” Mammon smiled a little. “All we have to do is evict them, knock the place down, build Las Ventanas in its place, and we’ll have seventy-five new efficiencies ready to be listed on Cuckoo as short-term leases. It’s a prime location, too.”

  Another voice spoke up, this time a man. “And none of the units in it will be for permanent rental as a home?”

  “Of course there will be long-term tenants.” Mammon’s smile never slipped. “Plenty of individuals want an address in San Francisco so they can vote here, or they have a permanent reservation, or they can claim asylum, or just to tuck some liquid capital away somewhere no one can count it. Who knows?”

  “But will any of them live there?”

  Mammon chuckled a little as he answered. “Oh heavens no.” His voice shifted when he spoke the word heavens. It made people’s teeth grate. “But we’ll be collecting rent from them, too.”

  “So this building will have zero homes in it.” The same man kept pushing that question.

  “Perhaps you have misunderstood.” Mammon’s voice turned very hard, but his face maintained a slightly condescending smile. “We are not in the business of providing homes. We are in the business of renting hotel rooms without hotel taxes or regulatory oversight. We are in the business of turning the quaint notion of homes into money. We aren’t in the business of hanging stockings by the fire so mom and pop can make memories. Is what we’re doing good for the community? Is what we’re doing good for the city? I think that depends on whom you ask, but I would remind you, we’re not in the business of helping any of them, either. We’re in the business of turning a profit. If that means the overpriced corner store goes under and gets replaced with a chain, so be it. If that means the schools become superfluous because there aren’t any kids around all the time anymore, so be it. If that means no one in the whole city of San Francisco knows who their neighbors are because there are no neighbors, so be it. Are there any questions, or shall we go back to the work of making money?”