The Journeyman

by Michael Alan Peck

  “Sorry.”

  “Why not? You can always jump more out of some poor sucker’s wallet.”

  The Envoy stopped to face him.

  “Hiya, Porter.” The man proudly flashed his sorry dental state.

  “Hello, Leery.” Porter’s tone was flat.

  They all paid attention to the dirty man now. He returned the favor, studying each of them before settling on Paul.

  “What are you doing here?” Porter asked him.

  “Not Envoying. That’s for certain. And I’ll bet right about now, you’re wishing you weren’t, either.”

  “My last Journey was back when dates still counted. You know that.”

  “And I haven’t had a smoke today.” Leery spat on the floor of the bus. It disappeared with a hiss. “You know who this is?” he asked Paul. “Hardest-working Envoy in The Commons. The only working Envoy in The Commons. Mister Persister. Never give up, even if it means other people get killed.”

  Paul looked to Porter for his lead. The Envoy had ice in his eyes as he weighed his options.

  Po stared at the dirty man as if he’d already decided how to proceed. Whatever it was, it would mean picking more teeth off his robe.

  “Thing is,” Leery said, turning in his seat toward Paul, “he’d better be persistent, ‘cause if I’m hearing things, then Brill is, too.” He leaned forward. “And persistence might not be enough for an old man who’s out of practice and out of his mind if he thinks he’s what he used to be.”

  “That’s enough, Leery.”

  “Oh, come on, Porter. We go back. You and your staff, me and my lid.” He grabbed his rotting hat and straightened it, nearly separating the crown from the brim in the process. “Back when it was still alive. You don’t have to listen to me, of course. It’s just talk.” He lowered his stubbly chin until his eyes just barely peered out at Paul from under his hat and flashed a black grin. “Thing is, now it’s talk.”

  At the bottom of the exit ramp, the bus turned and entered a roadhouse parking lot. Only one of the lot’s four pole lamps worked, and the bulb in that one didn’t have much time left.

  Leery struggled down the steps into the murk, cursing the bus for refusing to lower itself the way it had for others. The steps tilted down abruptly, spilling him out onto the pavement. He picked himself up and cursed even harder as the doors shut behind him.

  The bus pulled away. Leery watched the windows pass until the one with Porter’s stripling came into view. He whacked the glass.

  Even though the effort nearly threw him off his feet again, he enjoyed a laugh at how startled the boy looked. “Good luck, kid!” he said. “We all need it—but none more than you!”

  In the bus’s rear-door window, Porter regarded him with an expression of pity. The breeze of the departing bus pulled the hat from Leery’s head. He caught it, but the brim tore almost all the way off.

  The cell phone in Leery’s pocket trilled. Not his phone, but the one he’d been given—the one with the ringtone that sounded like wrath and couldn’t be changed.

  “Yeah?” he said with a bravado he didn’t feel. “Yes. But you already knew that. Well, you know where I am, so you know where they are. That squares us, doesn’t it?”

  The call dropped. He threw the phone to the ground and stomped on it. It broke with a wet crunch, like a fat roach, and spattered his shoes and pant cuffs with dark eggs and ichor.

  Leery spewed profanity for the umpteenth time that day. Inky liquid sprung from the phone and formed a puddle, which stopped him from stomping it again. Too much blood for something so small.

  He retreated from the puddle and headed for the bar.

  An hour later, the bus approached a wall of spotlight beams that crossed the highway. Behind the trucks holding the lights, three Black Hawks blocked the road, the gap between two of them just large enough for one vehicle to pass through at a time.

  The bus rolled up to the checkpoint, which was manned by a squad of Ravagers. Three of them boarded, the latter two covering the passengers with their assault rifles while the first walked the aisle. He took a visual inventory of the riders, eyes unseen behind his face-plate.

  Porter lay stretched out across a seat in the back—alone, sweating, shivering. Rain, in Leery’s old seat now, gave the Ravager a disinterested glance as he headed for the Envoy.

  Ken, Po, and Paul were gone.

  “Hey!” Rain said to the soldier as he was about to prod Porter with his baton. “Could you do something about the old man? He’s been like that since he got on. What if it’s catching? We don’t know it’s not, right?”

  The Ravager decided not to poke him after all. He watched him hug himself, the hollow of Porter’s throat running with sweat.

  “Hey, seriously?” Rain said.

  Long minutes later, the Ravagers left the bus, the driver closing the door behind them. Two other soldiers waved the bus on.

  Inside, Porter sat up, hunched and shaking harder than ever. He flicked his staff, and Ken, Po, and Paul reappeared in their seats.

  Rain stood to lay a hand on his shoulder. He’d done it.

  He looked up at her, tried to smile, and passed out.

  Well after midnight, Leery left the roadhouse with the help of the bartender and some patrons who didn’t appreciate his observations on bona fides and scraps. One of the men and his family had evaded Brill and the Ravagers for two decades. His wife had zebra stripes and a tail, and the man’s assistance consisted of opening the door before the others jettisoned the former Envoy out into the night.

  Leery had long ago made peace with indignities, whether self-imposed or introduced by others. Thus, when his shadow grew larger on the asphalt in the rectangle of light cast by the doorway, and he found yet again that he didn’t bounce very well, he took none of it personally. He simply peeled himself off the ground and set about finding a quiet spot in which to pass out.

  Another shadow crossed his, broad and thick. Some rival drunk.

  He made his unsteady way around the side of the tavern to where there wasn’t as much light. No need to let the competition get the best bed first.

  Behind him, someone sniffed, testing the air—a large man from the sound of it—and Leery knew he had him beat. Anyone who balked at the smell of garbage didn’t deserve a place to sleep.

  He turned to sneer at his fellow vagrant. No one was there.

  Rounding the corner, he grabbed at the building for support and missed. He fell into a corral of trash cans, knocking a few lids off and catching a coat of fragrant slime on his arm.

  The sniffing again. Closer.

  A shadow on the wall—a moving shadow.

  The trash cans toppled in a symphony of rattling metal and splitting bags. Someone big jumped him from behind.

  Leery tumbled into a pile of garbage bags, breaking one open with his face. The weight on his back couldn’t have been just one guy.

  He couldn’t breathe, but whoever was on top of him had no such problem. The panting in his ears filled his skull.

  His insides became acid, burning their way out through his spine. He screamed, but the trash muffled it. Then he regretted squandering that breath. The weight prevented him from getting any of it back.

  Leery’s life bled out.

  His uncle, showing him how to row a boat. That neighbor girl who watched him when his parents went out—the nice one. Her name was gone before he could come up with it.

  He found the wind to scream into the garbage again. Then his throat closed, and he shriveled like an empty bag, its wet insides stuck together.

  Whatever was on his back liked it.

  His father tried to help him fly the kite he’d gotten as a giveaway. There was no wind.

  He watched a school filmstrip about building your own ant farm.

  His sister counted dead ants in a slow ticking of numbers. It was vital to her to get the tally right.

  The counting stopped.

  23

  Dead Leaves and Moths

&nb
sp; Leaving the broken mirror of the bedroom behind, Annie followed the directions given by her memory of the tape recordings. Which worked fine until she ignored the advice it repeated most often: to keep passing the doors.

  Just as the hallway she walked for hours was a repeating copy of the hall in the apartment she’d escaped, every door here looked like that hall’s bedroom doors. And something behind those doors—a whole collection of somethings—wanted her to open one. Needed it.

  The voice in the remembered tape recordings—a woman’s voice that sounded familiar, though a hair or two removed from one she could name—kept urging her to hurry. Breaking the mirror risked exposing those who’d helped her, the voice said, and her pursuers would repair and use it in short order if they thought they had a shot at catching her.

  When she asked who’d taken a risk for her, she got no answer. The memory voice was an audio tour, not a living guide.

  Whoever or whatever wanted Annie to try a door rotated through an array of lures. It knew which buttons to push. From behind the doors came distress calls from military radios, the whimpering of a frightened dog, Stars of the Lid’s “Requiem for Dying Mothers,” and the aroma of her mom’s sauerbraten.

  All of which contributed to her falling for the meanest trick the doors could muster. She had to give them credit for the way they played her.

  After softening her up with the other bait and getting her into a state, they stopped for a while and let what she’d heard do its work. The silent time allowed her thoughts to return to Zach. How many times had she left him staring at the mirror, alone in the dark, or on his own for entire days? Why was it so easy for a pill to turn her not just into a bad mother, but into a woman who wasn’t a mother at all?

  What came from down the hall was skillfully timed. Zach crying. Her boy in pain.

  It might have been easier had she not already known the sound, rare as it was. But that would have meant that her son had never grabbed the pot of boiling pasta, had never squeezed her hand with a man’s strength in the E.R.

  She rushed the door, a chipped but ornate beauty of heavy wood. The recorded-memory voice urged her to ignore what she heard. Easy for the voice to say—it wasn’t the voice’s son crying out.

  The cut-glass knob turned, but the door was stuck, swollen as if on a humid day. Annie hit it with her shoulder while the voice in her head dropped all decorum and audio-tour pretense, shouting that it was a lie, it was a lie, it was a lie.

  On the third hit, the stuck door gave in, and she launched herself into the room. She tried to catch herself with her good leg.

  There was no floor. She fell a good foot and a half before hitting a hard surface below.

  She turned her head and saved herself a broken nose as she crash-landed, but smacked the side of her skull on solid stone. Skyrockets launched, filling her vision.

  Annie stayed where she was until the pain in her head subsided enough for the throb in her knee to reclaim its throne. Somewhere nearby, Zach’s crying became his laughter. It morphed into the malign chuckle of an adult, then faded.

  She picked herself up off the dirty marble floor, checking the inside of her mouth with her tongue. The memory voice was gone, cut off as soon as she fell through the door. She suspected it wouldn’t be back, and she could only hope that her chances of finding Zach hadn’t departed with it.

  The room was a second-floor ballroom or dining room in a long-ago abandoned mansion of some sort. Many a party beyond the former owners’ imagining had been held in the space in their absence, judging by the charred branches and crushed beer cans spilling from a large fireplace.

  Warm summer air wafted in from holes where the windows used to be. Through them was an adjacent wing, windows also missing, its walls draped with ivy.

  Beyond that, the overgrown grounds stretched. Statues guarded a murky garden pool through the trees. It was a view from a skull’s interior.

  The wall she’d fallen out of blocked any hope of return to the hall. A life-sized painting of a door—a closed and formidable-looking thing—now hung in the real one’s place. The ornate frame of the work had seen better days, but the painting itself was in even worse shape. Its canvas was stained, the paint flaked off in voids the diameter of a cymbal. Below it, outlined in missing plaster, was the ghost of one or two steps that had been removed. Had whatever force tricked her into the room taken them away as she opened the door? Given the laugh she’d heard, she couldn’t rule out such nastiness.

  There were several doorways into adjoining rooms—and no clear indication as to which she should choose. She opted for the right-hand one and wandered through what looked to be a servants’ prep room for the ballroom, complete with a hole in the wall where a dumbwaiter could be pulled up.

  She decided against investigating the hole. Inside, its cables were stretched taut, as if something heavy hung from them. She wanted to believe that was just the weight of the dumbwaiter, but the clotted smell of rotten meat—the cavity’s horrid breath—made her fear otherwise.

  A door led out into a hall that wasn’t the same one she’d entered from. It looked similar but felt like another place altogether.

  A series of what at first appeared to be identical paintings lined the walls. As Annie passed them, however, the differences became clear. Each was the same landscape—a black hillside, empty but for a building so tiny in the distance that its details couldn’t be made out beyond the dark square it presented against the plum sky of dusk.

  In succession, the works were like still frames in a film. A lone figure holding a lantern emerged from the building, as if someone had heard her and was coming out to investigate.

  With every painting Annie passed, more figures emerged to join the first. They ventured down the hillside, lurching toward her in each—dark silhouettes whose faces couldn’t be made out in the glow of the contained flames dangling from their fists.

  When she stepped back, the process didn’t reverse itself. The figures were now closer in the earlier frames, too.

  The paintings brought no odor of threat with them the way the dumbwaiter had. But when she picked up the pace to pass them, the figures responded in kind, matching her haste. Their details and faces remained in shadows no matter how close they got or how much of the light from their lanterns filled the frames.

  She got a move-on.

  From the hallway behind came the tinkle of breaking glass and the splash of liquid. Then a rush of air—fire catching. The sounds repeated and got closer, coming up the hall to catch her. She smelled smoke.

  A wave of warmth accompanied the breaking lanterns. Now the paintings featured the dark figures against a backdrop of spreading flames.

  She moved faster.

  The hallway stretched on. More breaking glass, along with the splashing of lantern oil and the whoosh of ignition. The paintings ahead were nothing but fire and dark figures frozen in it, their arms raised.

  The hall began to fill with a gray-white haze of smoke. It grew warmer. She coughed, and the air burned when she drew it in.

  Finally, she reached a cross corridor. The smoke made it difficult to breathe and even harder to see. She hacked, tears rolling down her face. Decision time. She turned right.

  A flash of light and heat from behind. The hallway she’d just left exhaled a blast of smoke and flame, like a dragon that was a second or two off its game.

  The paint on the walls back there began to bubble and peel away from the plaster beneath. The heat rose to the point of pain.

  Ahead, through the haze, the hallway broadened out into a circular area with at least six doorways, all of them dark. On the floor, someone had spray-painted an arrow pointing toward one.

  She made for it quickly, her coughing getting worse with the heat. She couldn’t see what awaited her in the door’s blackness, but she didn’t have time to worry about that.

  Her next step was nearly her last.

  Coming through the door, she found only air. She grabbed the doorjamb and caught
herself. A dank odor rose up from the cool dark below. An elevator shaft.

  She pulled herself back from the abyss and checked the hall floor behind her. Now the out arrow pointed toward a different door. A child giggled somewhere in the smoke.

  The temperature rose. Tears and sweat met and mingled.

  The other dark doorways beckoned. The glow of the fire marching its way up the hall toward her served only to turn the smoke white, impeding her vision further.

  Which door? If she assumed the one the arrow now indicated was an obvious hazard and chose from the remaining four at random, she had a twenty-five percent chance of picking the safe one. Assuming any of them were.

  She settled on the second door from the right.

  The phone in her pocket vibrated.

  She held the screen up close in the smoke, struggling to read the text against the backlight. “Stairs left,” it said. What if whoever was moving the painted arrow was now in control of her phone?

  Coughing hard now, she chose to reject that notion. She ventured into the smoke all the way to the left of the six doors, reaching out ahead of her with her toes. Nothing but floor.

  She wondered if it really was June Medill sending her the texts and if June still wanted to help her—if she ever really had. The answer didn’t matter. She had to trust whoever it was.

  The heat seared her back, and it was anyone’s guess as to which might go up first, her clothing or her hair. Hacking louder, she dropped to hands and knees, hoping to find better air down low.

  A large “W” was set into a black-and-gold crest in the floor in an intricate tile pattern. She felt her way along, crawling, and was beginning to think she’d been tricked again when she reached a drop-off with a rounded edge—a step.

  Sure enough, there was another beneath it.

  She worked her way sideways down the steps, taking it slow to feel her way around broken bottles and other sharp-edged hazards beyond identification. Either the parties here had spanned several floors, or the stairways served as dumpsters. Most likely both.