The Journeyman

  At the bottom, she seized up when she found nothing but wall to the front and sides. Then she realized she was on a landing and needed to hook around.

  Up above, paintings sizzled as they went up, one by one. Good. They deserved it.

  Two landings later, the smoke was gone. She got to her feet in total darkness and brought up the flashlight app on her phone.

  She was in a basement, surrounded by stacks of even more paintings. These were covered in dusty drop cloths. She let them be.

  Her phone buzzed.

  “Straight through to the doors,” the screen said. “Don’t dawdle. You’re not alone.”

  She didn’t.

  At the far end of the basement, stone steps strewn with filth led to a pair of overhead wooden doors. Those were barred with a heavy piece of wood jammed into the doors’ rusty holders—jammed so tight that she wasn’t sure she’d be able to move it.

  A dry, low cough came from the blackness behind her, followed by the dragging rustle of shifting weight. Someone or something was rousing itself.

  A number of good, hard yanks brought God-knows-what raining down into her hair and collar, but she was amply motivated by the sounds of her unseen roommate.

  She worked the big piece of wood free. Her knee complained. Her lower back joined in.

  With a few pushes, she was able to heave one of the heavy doors up and over. It landed with a rotten thud. A sky full of stars greeted her.

  Another cough from behind and more dragging—closer now—propelled her up the steps and into the night. She struggled with the weight of the door again, but was able to heft it back over and closed. It slammed shut, belching out dead leaves and moths.

  For good measure, she grabbed a rusty chain lying nearby, looped it through the doors’ big steel pull-rings a few times, and knotted it as well as she could. The doors didn’t move.

  Whatever was down there wasn’t trying to follow. For now.

  She thumbed her phone’s screen, its light illuminating her hands, which were now brown with oxidation. “Thank you, June,” she typed, her dirty pads making an impressionist work of the glass.

  The reply came in short order. “Not June.”

  A brief stomach-squeeze of fear. Maybe she’d followed the directions of someone who meant her harm or who, at best, was toying with her.

  The screen refreshed. “Char.”

  24

  The Dinuhos Tree

  “They killed in bookends,” Porter told Paul. He had trouble lifting his head from the seat back. Ken wanted him to rest, but the Envoy needed to talk after the encounter with Leery. “Death in the beginning, death at the end. What came in between was the lion’s share of the Corps’ disappearance. Many quit after the first slaughter, but not all of us. We had heart.”

  The bus had rolled straight through the night and into morning. Daylight brought a carnival of billboards for roadside attractions.

  Porter paused, gathering strength. A faded sign for a sasquatch farm failed to make it clear whether the creatures worked the land or were grown on it. Another, partly hidden by vines, advised travelers that they shouldn’t miss the dragon egg that was as big as a car. Not far down the road sat the foundations of three charred structures. Had the egg hatched, or did mama come looking for it?

  Po, in particular, seemed interested in the signs. He read each carefully.

  “Brill promised efficiency, and no one thought enough about what that meant,” Porter said. “Why wait for the Envoys to lead Journeys on a one-on-one basis? He made sense to some—not to us, but to those who didn’t question him the way they should have. The Envoys let him build his strength because we thought he was too preposterous to be taken seriously. Then it was because we were afraid. In the end, there was no fighting him. He made examples of the best of us, and that scared most of the rest away from the job. Then he and the Ravager death squads picked off those who wouldn’t leave.”

  “Why did Leery say his hat used to be alive?” Paul asked.

  “He meant the abilities it gave him, but Leery was never one for detail.” Porter closed his eyes and kept them shut. “The power comes from the person, not the object,” he said, just as Paul thought he was dozing again. “The object is a focal point—a tool. My staff is only more than that in my hands. For a time, like Leery, my power was gone. I was just a lonely man at a desk. I think that’s why Brill never bothered with me. He didn’t know I was there. And when my talent was needed, it returned.”

  “How did you know you had it back?”

  “I didn’t. I’d had false alarms over the years—feeling it when it wasn’t there, like a phantom limb. I didn’t know I’d be able to get to you until I did. Up to that point, it was like taking an umbrella with no idea whether it would open. I was never so happy”—his voice began to fade—“than when I realized it was back.”

  With that, his breath slowed and deepened. He was sound asleep.

  “Essence chooses him,” Ken said, watching Porter’s chest rise and fall. “It returned to a good man.”

  “Essence gives him his powers?”

  “It gives all of us everything. Power, life, lightning, fire. Essence makes a heart beat, keeps fear alive, falls as water, burns a forest in the dark, ignites an idea.”

  “You’re saying it’s all the same thing.”

  They passed a billboard that had no words on it, just a simple image like a wood-cut stamp: a tree with a door in its trunk. Below the tree was the number five.

  Seeing that, Po signed excitedly to Ken.

  Ken nodded to his friend. “Essence fuels it all. Real, imagined. It’s Essence.”

  Farther down the road, another tree billboard had the number one beneath it. Others on the bus pointed and woke their napping friends.

  Two rows up, a woman with a long bandage tied around her eyes turned toward the billboard as the bus passed it. “Would you look at that?” she said. “The Dinuhos Tree.”

  The driver exited the highway without any prodding, eager as any of his passengers to see the tree. He pulled into an expansive parking lot and opened the door. The bus emptied out.

  Po signed to Ken.

  “They don’t know that,” the mummy replied.

  The tree had been well represented by its billboard rendition. Bereft of grandeur, it was squat, with a thick, knobby trunk and widespread branches, like something from a board game or a book of Brothers Grimm tales.

  “Ficus religiosa,” said Porter. The sight seemed to invigorate him.

  Chain-draped poles bordered a plank walkway leading to the tree. The approach was just wide enough for a single-file line and just long enough to hold the bus’s queue of riders.

  The burned-in letters of a fissured wooden sign identified the attraction as the Dinuhos Tree. A smaller sign behind it read: “Give. Receive.”

  The line crept along. Each passenger stepped up alone to open a small, arched door in the base of the tree that looked to be made of the same wood as the Dinuhos itself. In fact, the door didn’t appear to be an addition so much as an anomaly in the trunk that the tree allowed to be opened.

  Paul took a closer look at the sign and the planks under his feet. The walkway ran all the way up to the tree, touching it, while a raised stretch of roots under the ground connected the sign to it as well. The planks and the sign were living extensions of the Dinuhos.

  When it was time for those in line to take their turn, they placed an offering inside the little door, closed it, and waited. Then they opened it again to see what the tree gave them in return.

  Not everyone liked what they got. Some received nothing and walked away griping or cursing. One man, whose feet would have fit someone five times his size, kicked the tree in frustration, to no effect.

  The woman with the cloth over her eyes didn’t show anyone what she gave or received. But she strode with purpose back to the bus, a grin on her face and tears spilling from beneath her bandage.

  The driver gave up his keys and got them back, only
cleaner and shinier, with a new silver fob. He took that as a sign that he should keep his job, he said.

  By the time Paul drew close to the Dinuhos, several people had opened the door to find their own offering inside. Several complained that those who went first had used up the tree’s generosity.

  “The kindness received is that given,” Ken told Rain and Paul.

  When their turns came, Porter, Ken, and Po stepped out of the line. The Envoy said he was on the job. Ken explained that he and Po had no offerings and no wants.

  Rain stepped up for her turn, pausing to think. Paul started to ask her what was wrong. Porter silenced him with a gentle hand to the shoulder.

  “Five minutes!” the bus driver shouted.

  Biting her lip, Rain took a scarred and dirty coin from her pocket. She held it with her fingertips—careful, as if it were a hornet—and put it inside the tree. She closed the door, opened it again, and claimed her gift.

  It was a single shotgun shell, which she held up to the light of the sky to examine, half-smiling. She pocketed it and walked back to stand by Ken and Po.

  Paul wanted to ask her about the exchange, but Porter nudged him forward for his turn. Once he was at the door, Paul had no idea what to offer. His mother’s ring? No way.

  It came to him. He reached into his pocket and scooped out the cat’s-eye marble Zach had insisted he take when they met in Port Authority. He placed it in the tree and shut the door. “Give it back,” he said.

  He pictured the kid in his mind, pushing aside the vision of the small form dead in the hillside snow, imagining instead the surprised little boy finding his marble again. He concentrated until he remembered to breathe, then opened the door and looked inside. A flat piece of laminated safety glass sat in the marble’s place.

  Paul took the glass, careful not to cut himself, and examined it. It was from the window of his seat on the bus. Scratched into it was the tag that had glowed red: “IMUURS.”

  Vertigo struck him; his vision blurred, and he breathed deep to clear his head. His hands closed into fists, his mother’s ring clicking against the piece of glass.

  The ring grew hot—too hot, burning. He opened his fist to drop the searing glass, but it was gone, its work complete. The sizzling ring felt like it was melting into his finger, and he tried to yank it off.

  At the edge of Paul’s foggy vision, Porter moved in to help. Po stopped the Envoy—an easy task, given Porter’s weakened state.

  The burning ring held fast. Then, just as abruptly as it arrived, the heat faded.

  Paul pulled the ring off. His finger no longer hurt. There wasn’t even a mark on it.

  That was not true of the ring, which now wasn’t even warm. He turned it in the sunlight. Engraved on the inside, in serifed capital letters, was the tag from the window.

  25

  Jerry's Records

  A smart boy. A brave boy.

  Zach hugged the tape recorder to his chest, even when he wasn’t listening to it. He’d refused to do that with the stuffed bear, the stuffed rabbit, or the stuffed monkey Zach’s mother had given him, though she’d tried so hard to show him how. But the tape recorder made him feel less scared in a way the animals never could.

  He knew now that what he’d whispered into the recorder while sitting in front of the mirror may have been in his voice, but it didn’t come from him. He wasn’t sure who it came from, just as he couldn’t say why Zach’s mother thought of that apartment as home while they were there.

  Zach suspected it was because she swallowed so much of the pink medicine, which made her sick. That made him sad—but not as sad as it used to.

  Along with the voice of Zach’s mother came thoughts that weren’t in the recorded words, but instead flew between them. Those thoughts told him not to worry: Zach’s mother wasn’t taking the pink medicine anymore.

  As he walked, some in-between words also came in the voice of another woman—a stranger. They were so faint that they sounded like whispers, and Zach couldn’t hear what the words said. But he knew that was because the woman wasn’t yet close enough, and that he was going toward her.

  Zach's mother's voice was no longer saying only the things he himself had recorded. She was also repeating what the in-between woman said.

  Zach walked along a wide road with a dotted yellow line in the middle. Empty stores and restaurants stood on either side. There wouldn’t be cars coming. The weeds, grass, and bushes growing out of the big cracks in the road meant they couldn’t—and didn’t—use it anymore.

  Still, he’d always been told to stay out of the street. So he walked on the sidewalk when there was one and balanced on the curb when there wasn’t.

  He stopped at every corner. He’d never been allowed to cross the street on his own, but that didn’t matter now.

  The traffic lights at the corners were broken and dark, staring at him with big blind eyes. But he was very careful just the same.

  Where Zach was going wasn’t safe. He had no control over that, so he used the control he did have. He looked both ways.

  Eyes watched him from the empty stores and restaurants. Sometimes the sun hit the windows a certain way, and he could see people’s heads behind the glass. Other times he could see that they weren’t people at all.

  He didn’t look long enough to see what they were. That would be a mistake.

  Zach never stopped moving. Having Zach’s mother’s voice with him kept the watchers away, but that wouldn’t work with all of them.

  If he didn’t go fast enough—if they decided to come after him to see who and what he was—it wouldn’t matter how loud he turned the tape recorder up. It wouldn’t save him.

  So he walked.

  His feet began to hurt. Then they stopped. Then they hurt. Then they stopped again. A spot near his big toe grew hot.

  Zach’s mother’s voice and the whispering woman had told him to watch for a certain sign, and finally, he saw it. On top of a tall pole sat a ball with spikes coming out of it.

  Zach couldn’t make the letters on the sign into a word, but he recognized their lines, which hung off of the pole inside big squares, one above the other, like alphabet blocks. R-A-A-Z-A-B was the order, starting at the bottom and going up. That was where he was going.

  Behind the sign was a giant parking lot with the same kinds of cracks and plants as the street. There were cars in the lot.

  Zach could tell the cars had been sitting there a long time. Their windshields were very dirty, and some were cracked. And just as he’d had the feeling people were watching him from the buildings, he sensed that not all the cars were empty.

  In the center of the parking lot was a big, flat building that was only one floor high. It looked like a huge supermarket, though Zach knew it wasn’t that.

  Its front windows were giant rectangles of orange, red, and green. Zach couldn’t see through them. On top of the building were the letters from the pole, but now they read from left to right: B-A-Z-A-A-R.

  He didn’t know that word.

  A section of the parking lot was a chained-off Christmas-tree cemetery. It was full of brown tree skeletons with no needles on them. Next to the skeletons were circle frames holding rotten wreaths with dirty bows that had once been red. Now they were pinkish-brown.

  Zach walked around the cemetery. It didn’t feel good to think about walking through it.

  At the front of the building was a row of doors. In the window of one of the doors was an old piece of paper with a picture of a smiling man on it. “Today,” it said above the man, though it didn’t say what his name was. Everyone must have already known.

  Zach’s mother’s voice told him not to touch the door, but instead to turn and walk around to the side of the building. Her voice was almost as faint as the whispering woman’s now, and Zach feared she was leaving him.

  Making his way around the trees and wreaths again, Zach heard one of the front doors near where he’d been standing push open from the inside. He didn’t need to look to
know there was no one there. The door had opened because someone wanted him to use it, but it had tried too late to fool him.

  He walked for a long time to get to the corner of the building. The building was a lot bigger than he’d thought, probably because it was getting darker, and it was harder to see. He hoped that Zach’s mother’s voice wouldn’t go away with the light.

  Around the side, Zach had more walking to do before he got to a smaller set of doors. There were more signs. One had a big pretzel on it, but seeing it didn’t make Zach hungry. He hadn’t been hungry at all since the bus trip in the snow.

  On the other sign was a picture of a big black circle with another circle inside it and a hole inside of that. Zach wasn’t sure what that was. It looked like a target, but he didn’t think it was. There was also a picture of the tapes that went into the machine he carried.

  On the sign were stacked groups of letters that spelled R-E-C-O-R-D-S and J-E-R-R-Y-S. He didn’t know those words, either.

  The doors were metal, heavy, and orange. Zach grabbed the handle of one and tried to push yet another thumb button down. He knew it wasn’t going to move, just like all the others. It didn’t.

  Zach’s mother’s voice talked fast, but Zach couldn’t hear what she was saying.

  He used both thumbs. It didn’t work.

  Zach thought of Zach’s mother—the real one, not the tape version—and what she might say to do. She usually told him to use his big-boy powers, which meant doing it on his own instead of waiting for her to do it for him. He hit the stop button on the recorder because Zach’s mother’s voice couldn’t help him here.

  He knew that he couldn’t go anywhere else without going into the building. It was getting darker, so he needed to get in. It wouldn’t be safe outside.

  He looked around the parking lot. Nearby were a rock, a piece of wood with metal on the end of it, and an X-shaped tool hanging from the wheel of a car. He went over and grabbed the end of the X-tool. It was stuck.