What Immortal Hand

by Johnny Worthen

  Calum had always done right by him, but to be honest, Calum had only met him after he’d donned the mask. It was easy to do right by someone who was no threat, was not in danger, and didn’t cause anyone any trouble. Still, he liked Calum Lane and trusts him now as he trusted him then, not wholeheartedly, but more than most.

  Calum had warned him to ignore his past and Michael knows there’s wisdom in that, but he also knows he can’t. It has him now, this drive, this feeling spreading through his body like the living death of cancer. He has to know.

  The mask is worn and cracking, and worse, he knows now it is a mask. His face is a reflection, an imitation of what he really is. How close it is to the truth, he cannot know until he reassembles his past.

  He spends the night in his car parked behind a strip mall. He dreams of battle, great and glorious, a battle for the world, and the world is losing.

  When dawn comes he’s hungry. Lemon drops aren’t enough. He craves meat. Rare, bloody, red meat.

  He splurges for steak and eggs minus the eggs. He savors the rare meat and chases it with syrupy soft drinks and cherry pie. He can’t remember a more satisfying meal.

  After breakfast, he finds a library and settles in to get his bearings.

  It’s not hard to find stories about Crystal Springs. Mass Grave Found by Rest Stop was the first headline. The story was mostly speculation that first day, just rumors from anonymous sources “close to the investigation.”

  As more bodies were dug up and laid in the row, the media coverage went two directions. The mainstream networks began downplaying the find toward a unified theme summed up on CNN’s website: Homicide Victim Leads to Discovery of Nineteenth Century Graveyard. Meanwhile bloggers and independent sources speculated on a cover-up and noted sudden and complete lack of access to the site and the presence of federal agencies.

  Michael finds grainy photos taken from a quarter mile away showing vans and trailers, black cars and armed guards.

  After a week, the only story coming out of Crystal Springs was that traffic was detoured around the newly discovered archaeological site on the Mormon trail.

  By the third week, even the bloggers had moved on and Crystal Springs found its way onto a few conspiracy websites. Michael found a mention of a new dedication to the lost Mormon cemetery. The LDS Church volunteered to build a monument and the state of Nevada was considering the proposal. A single travel notice, two days before Michael woke up, stated that roads around Crystal Springs were reopened, traffic was as it was, and a new blacktop parking lot for visitors had been created over the lot south of the springs.

  Eighty-seven bodies recovered before they stopped looking. Corpses stretching back at least two hundred unbroken years and they make it a parking lot. What would Joni Mitchell think of that?

  It was a slick cover-up. Impressive, chilling in its effectiveness and scope. Michael wonders at the need for it. The country is not any more jumpy than usual. This isn’t an election year. What are they so afraid of? The rabid media would have fed on this for months.

  Politically, it would have been excellent cover to pass a gun-ban, health care reform, or pork soaked appropriations bill without anyone taking notice. There was political muscle behind the cover up, that much he was sure. The reporters were salivating in those first days, sure they were on a huge story. They were. How much pressure at how many levels had to be applied to bury it?

  Eighty-seven bodies.

  He counts twenty people in the library; kids, scholars, a homeless man. He imagines each one four times and dead. Who’d notice?

  How lucky for them they found some with old Mormon handcarts. Of course, they were on the wrong side of the Rockies, wrong side of Salt Lake City, but no bother. If they hadn’t found the carts, they’d have invented something else. For all he knows, they had invented the Mormon trail cemetery from whole cloth. They might have. All he can be sure of is that on that first day at least, bodies were coming out like the ground was a grotesque clown car.

  A librarian hovers behind him, looking over his shoulder clandestinely. He looks at her, sees her plain unpainted face go white and panicked, her eyes dart around his head and shoulders as if he’s beset by spirits. She quickly turns and disappears among the shelves of philosophy and religion.

  What did she see?

  His screen is a grainy telescopic picture of Crystal Springs taken from some distance away. Black body bags lie like parked cars on the yet to be poured lot.

  He tries to assemble the players in the deceit. There’d been state and local officials the first day. The FBI showed up that first afternoon. When had Homeland Security shown up and who knew the Department of Transportation and Commerce had an investigative arm? It was a web of cover-up, deceit, and lies. It went straight to the federal level with a nice long stay over with at the Nevada Governor’s mansion.

  It’s not that Michael wants to go public. He doesn’t. Nor does he feel an obligation to warn anyone and spill the beans, go all Woodward and Bernstein, or embarrass interstate commerce. It doesn’t matter.

  Truth is only a lie believed.

  He regrets one thing, however. He wishes Hall didn’t know about the girl and her two accomplices. Hall had only a grainy picture of them and the cold leads from Reno, but that might be enough to find them.

  Clenching his eyelids Michael shakes his head like there were spiders on it. It’s like there are two people in his head. One he knows, Michael Oswald. The other one, the stranger who’s trespassed since St. George, is someone alien, someone who knows where bodies are buried and thinks murderers should go free.

  He becomes aware of other patrons looking at him. His head shake was too violent, his sigh too loud for a library.

  He stares each one down in turn until they go back to their books and computers, then he searches the name: Rebecca Brennan, California. About 3,710,000 results in 0.34 seconds. Well, isn’t that swell? He plays with his keywords: foster care, child services, mental health, and juvenile detention. He starts a Boolean string to search for age groups and spends an hour going through California online records.

  He finds a likely match in the Alameda County archives. Oakland. Across the bay from San Francisco.

  His phone rings in his pocket.

  He waits for it to ring again. It does. He puts his hand on it and feels for vibration. It obliges.

  Librarians cast scornful looks at him as he pulls his phone out and places it on the desk in front of him.

  They stare at him, waiting for him to silence it or answer it at least. He does neither. He stares at it like it’s a reanimated monster. His phone service is cut off. This should not be happening. The call finally rolls to message.

  After the message waiting beep, he looks at the phone and sees full bars. He goes to the message expecting to hear the phone company issuing threats for outstanding unpaid balances. Instead he hears a man’s shaking voice.

  “Mr. Oswald. My name is Oliver Tagget. I need to talk to you. It’s very important. Please call me back at this number right away. I went ahead and paid your phone bill for the rest of the year. For that, you could at least call me back.”

  A guilt trip from a stranger. That’s a new one.

  He plays it back several times and notes the number. The area code is Connecticut. He’s never been east of Denver. The accent was blue blood, as was the tone. He could tell just from the few words that the man at the other end expected Michael to do as he was told because he was used to people doing as he told them.

  He checks his phone billing status. He’s paid up through the end of the year with unlimited data. Now there’s a new way to make a bribe.

  Michael plugs the name Oliver Tagget into his search engine and gets him on the first hit. He sees the professionally posed head shot of a distinguished silver-haired retired CEO of several holding companies. He has a secretary and a publicist. He can be booked for speaking engagements.

  The voice on the message fits easily to the face on the computer scre
en. He stares at his phone, his thumb hovering over the call back button. He doesn’t press it. Instead he slides it into his pocket and turns his computer toward Oakland.

  Rebecca Brennan is retired. She has no social media.

  Michael makes a list of possible residences and phone numbers as a voice comes out of the ceiling: “The library will be closing in fifteen minutes.”

  Michael collects his things and follows the exiting procession into the parking lot. His eyes are spent. The computer LED’s have etched tracers on his retinas. He sees halos and auras as if he’s had too much caffeine. He blinks them away as best he can but in the dim light of a Utah sunset he can’t find anything true to focus on.

  A group of eager children nearly trip him, their arms overflowing with picture books, falling over each other to scramble into a van. A group of high school students he noticed inside collecting information on The Reconstruction, pass him on the sidewalk arguing dinner plans—pizza or burgers. Each bright face draws tracers in the orange light and he rubs his eyes harder.

  He turns to his car and sees shadows rush under it. He smells ashes. Not fire. Not smoke. Ashes.

  The shadows shimmer and move, surge and coalesce. There are dozens of them around him, stepping out of the air as if formed there by gas. Hands spring from the ends of spindly arms that slither like serpent tongues from their sides. Their faces are human but cruel and alike. Three eyes each, angry and hateful, stare at him, the superfluous third set square in their foreheads. They are congealing smoke except the eyes which glow certain and steady with intense ferocity, vengeful for ancient wrongs.

  All at once they stop, and to a one, fix their gaze upon Michael.

  Adrenal floods his veins and spins his head. Fight or flight, but nowhere and no how. Paralyzed and electric, he stumbles backward onto a concrete bench and sits.

  They advance and Michael tries to rise but he cannot. He is frozen. Everyone is frozen mid-stride as if time itself is arrested and only his eyes and these demons are immune to the stoppage.

  The demons step into the open, sooty thin monkeys, rat-tailed and broken-fanged, scabby beneath matted and mangy fur. A drum beat, low and resonant coincides with their step. Then another, and again. It is a dance. They move to the drum, hiss and struggle like animals performing under a whip, but they obey. In front of Michael is a choreographed scene of shadows converging on a grass parking strip, green and moist, bathed in a sickly mixture of halogen street light and sky-reflected sunset.

  The shadow things cackle and spit at Michael. The sound becomes a drone, a soft rain upon leaves, but a chorus nonetheless. The demons move like mist now, black and inky pools, shifting and swaying, slaves to the melody that has lost all semblance to human music.

  The ground beneath them fades away as do the people around him. Then the darkness and time.

  Michael finds himself alone with his cruel companions in a shifting background of colors and shapes, the memory of smoke. A love of ashes.

  They are transported to an ancient city. Cobblestone streets crammed with camels and donkeys, dust robed merchants tired beneath their failing mustaches, servants, masters, soldier and prince. Beggars, dark and caste-born scrape brass cups along the stones for alms, watching warily.

  The demons don flesh and clothes and different faces. Costumes. They are human now, green-veiled women and upright men, farmers, craftsmen, sons and neighbors, travelers all.

  Michael sits on a rug. He smells the smoke of sandalwood and the sweat of man and animal mixed in the air. The sky burns in a crimson twilight, scarlet clouds aglow against and deepening azure sky. The wind settles and rests. Stars prepare to shine, waiting only for their moment.

  Before him are stretched two white sheets. They glow from backlight. The air erupts with the sound of laughter. He sits among a crowd of children watching a shadow puppet show. There are two stages—two scrims, showing the same shadow-play in synchronized stereo.

  “The boat has sailed,” says the narrator describing a ship, an ancient trireme moving over an undulating shadow sea on both screens. “There is nowhere to run. Death to everyone if any dare step off now.”

  “It is too late!” chant the children. “Sail on! Sail on!”

  The boats sail on upon undulating fabric.

  A drum, a tambourine, a horn. The narrator cries, “The tigers are let loose upon the rich merchants!”

  “The tigers!” scream the crowd. “The tigers! The tigers!”

  Tigers chasing men, men falling under tigers. Shadow blood portrayed by red silks pulled from puppets. The rapt audience watches and hears screams, clashes of steel, roars and trumpets and the demonic drumbeat from before.

  Michael senses a difference in the two plays. At first a different timing, then wholly different action. The one on the right shows the tigers winning, on the left, they are losing.

  The play is over. He’d blinked and missed it.

  The crowd wanders away, the demons in flesh glare at him behind their human eyes and hate him. The lights behind the scrims fade. Before the last of it is gone, he sees on one screen a new dawn with a majestic tiger, the gods raining blessings down. On the other, another dawn, gods again raining blessings, but no tiger.

  Michael is smothered.

  It is a miasma of smoke, the ashes of a pyre, burning his lungs, locking them out. Suffocating him. He spits and kicks and fights for air.

  “Hold it buddy,” someone says. “It’s okay. You passed out. You weren’t breathing.”

  Black and orange—flame, smoke—fur. The visions of his strangled brain.

  He is between times and places.

  And he is falling between.

  He lands with a jerk of spasming muscles and summer air fills his chest. There is ground beneath him.

  He’s on the sidewalk in front of the library. A ring of people gawk at him as if he lies in a grave, their faces concerned and friendly. A little afraid. He searches their eyes looking for the three-eyed demons. He does not see them, but he knows they are there.

  Someone helps him sit up.

  “Did you hit your head?” someone asks.

  “Should I call an ambulance?” says someone else.

  He is helped onto the concrete bench.

  “I’m okay,” he lies. “No need for an ambulance. I stood up too quick. I’ll be fine. Happens all the time. I’m fine.”

  He wants these people to leave him alone. He knows what they are, even if they don’t. Their kindness is misplaced. He is not one of them.

  Slowly, they filter away, get into their cars, drive off, and put the little tragedy behind them.

  The man who helped Michael up remains behind pretending to text on his phone but watching him.

  Michael takes out his phone and pretends to make a call.

  “Hey hon,” he says to the dead line. “I’m still at the library. It’s a beautiful night. I might chill here for a while. Get some inspiration for that chapter I’ve been stuck on. Eh-huh. Love you too. Bye.”

  He stretches his arms wide over the bench, closes his eyes and inhales the warm summer air. He hears the man get in his car and finally leave. He watches his taillights disappear down the lane and then something catches his eye.

  Beyond the library, across the street, standing under a dark streetlight he sees a single figure watching him. The figure is far away and he cannot be sure in silhouette if it is a man or a woman, tall or short, dark or light. His eyes are drawn to it for one reason: the blue-black electric aura his lying eyes show him flashing around the figure. If Tesla had worked in coal dust and fog, this is what he might have done—a living shroud of ultramarine flowing around the solitary figure.

  Michael’s eyes, his tired eyes, his burned-out, over-caffeinated, deceitful, tired eyes are lying to him, so he closes them and waits. When he opens them again, he is alone in the parking lot and the figure he thought he saw is gone.

  A streetlight clicks and flickers on. Crickets in the grass chirp for lovers and a bird swoops to
snatch a moth. He follows it against the sunset-lit clouds, happy it isn’t trailing afterimages. The shadows are only darkened places now, uninhabited and nonthreatening.

  Michael stands up but finds his knees shaking and his legs uncertain. He’s in no hurry. He sits back down and waits for the shaking to pass.

  He waits long past dark.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “They told me you were fine. They said not to worry. So I didn’t.”

  “Well that’s good,” Michael says but he knows Carla is lying. Hospitals don’t give out that kind of information to anyone who isn’t a proven family member. One vase of flowers which died before he woke up hardly counts as proof of relation.

  “Don’t get your feelings hurt,” she says. “We’re busy. We knew you’d be alright.”

  She’s changing her story; subtle and guilty. Closer to the truth though.

  His feelings had been a little hurt, at first, but it didn’t last. By the time he woke up in Cedar City and went to see Calum Lane, Carla’s inattention and disinterest were curious footnotes to his life and nothing more.

  “I tried to call you but your phone was dead,” she says defensively. “Why didn’t you call me? Hm? Why didn’t you call us when you got out of the hospital?”

  He smiles at the indignity in her voice, the sudden guilt and worry that grew more exaggerated by the syllable. Michael does not know the woman on the other end of the phone. She is not the same woman he married. Or maybe she is, and he never really knew her. A bit of all that, he decides. You can never step into the same river twice. The current pushes him ever onward.

  “I lost my job,” he says. “My phone was turned off when I didn’t pay the bill.”

  “What? That’s awful,” she says. “Don’t you have savings? Why didn’t you pay it?”

  “I was in a coma.”

  “You should have planned better. Automatic payments are the smart way. If your phone had been working we’d have called you. Or left you message, anyway, you being in a coma.”