The Shibboleth

by John Hornor Jacobs

  I do. I nod.

  “Good. We have an understanding. Miss Montgomery, you may remove your glasses now and speak with Mr. Cannon.”

  Sarah looks at me, still with her glasses on, and says, “He’s gonna hurt himself against those restraints, y’all. Why don’t you just mark his chart and let me go back to the damned bunker?”

  Her skin is pale. She’s got a tattoo crawling up one arm—a very nice tattoo of a Chinese dragon. Her fingernails are nubbin short. She’s a chewer like Rollie, but she’s better fed.

  “Please proceed, Miss Montgomery,” Ruark says.

  Sarah looks at me, still behind sunglasses, and says, “This is gonna hurt you more than it’s gonna hurt me, buddy.” She takes off her glasses and stares at me. I can see her eyes, one green, one blue. She says, “Hi, little fella.”

  It’s worse than being Tased, really, because looking at her feels so good. My body thrums with excitement, and immediately I have a raging erection that is so painfully hot and inactive that I twist in the chair. These damned restraints. If only I could be free of them, I could be joined in the flesh with her. Her body, her eyes, her breasts and hair call for me, like some siren in wine-dark seas, and I will do anything to reach her. I am meant to be hers and she is meant to be mine and my body sings that electric song. I strain against the tethers, twisting, thrashing. My back pops with an audible crack and then after a moment cracks twice more. Every part of me is alive and thwarted.

  “Y’all. He’s looking pretty bad here. He’s bleeding,” she says, and the sound of her voice is the most erotic thing I’ve ever heard. I would murder a million people to hear it again and not feel a moment’s remorse.

  These damned straps. I twist and feel a bit of slicked looseness in my right arm. I bend all my energies and strength there at that weakness so that I might be free. To join her.

  My hand pops free, slinging a fine arc of blood droplets to spatter on the wall of the room. I scratch and grapple at my other hand, to free it.

  “Okay, that’s enough,” Sarah says, and her voice is like fire. She puts her glasses back on and turns away from the chair, once again with her arms crossed on her chest, her back hunched. “God, you people really suck, you know that?”

  It takes a while for my body to stop its thrashing. I can’t understand where the woman I wanted so badly has gone. My wrists and carcass howl in outrage.

  And I’ve still got a painfully exquisite boner.

  The women soldiers grin at me, looking over my body. Something about the situation seems extraordinarily funny to them.

  “Miss Montgomery, please exit the testing area with your escorts. Mr. Cannon, remain still. Mr. Negata will join you once the room is clear.”

  Sarah glances at me behind her sunglasses as she’s walking out. “Sorry, dude. Just FYI, in case you’re one of the ones who gets some crazy idea … I’m not into guys, okay?” She stops, as if waiting for some acknowledgement from me. “Even without all this,” she waves her hands at her face, indicating her glasses or her power or whatever, “you’re all too desperate and I’m just not geared that way,” she says and walks out of the room, followed by her smiling guards.

  In a few moments, when the room is clear and the door where Sarah and her guards exited is firmly shut, Negata reenters. Before he unstraps me, he returns to the oversized medicine cabinet and retrieves some gauze and disinfectant and treats my wrist. It’s not too mangled, just scraped bloody across the meat of my thumb and knuckles. It stings as he applies the disinfectant.

  Once I’m unstrapped and able to stand, I realize the extent of the damage straining against my tethers did to my body. My back feels ripped and tenderized; my arms and legs feel like I’ve been fighting an army of ravenous monkeys in a bare-knuckled cage match. My dick is chafed and raw. My jaw aches terribly. I nearly bit the dental guard in half.

  “This concludes your testing for today,” Ruark says. The speaker goes silent. Mr. Negata gestures to the door.

  TWENTY-SIX

  In the van again, trundling over the mountain, back to my bunker and the hole in which I sleep. I’ve made friends with the dark. We’re old pals now.

  Davies watches me blankly. I rifle through his memory, despite the van’s small Helmholtz field. He didn’t sleep last night at all. And he’s started his search for Booth. Before duty this morning, he used a computer in a command center.

  Clacking and typing. Quick and breathless, calling up a browser and searching the Internet. Reading. Remembering. Alone until Ruark and a smaller, mousy woman enters. “We’ll need to test the new stasis bomb prototype in Hangar D before the director returns,” Ruark says. The smaller woman nods and says something that Davies can’t hear. “What are you doing here, soldier?”

  He closes the browser’s incognito window and stands. “Checking e-mail and waiting for you.”

  “These computers are off-limits to military. Employees of the Society only.”

  “Understood, ma’am. It won’t happen again.”

  He wants to tell her something, but his tongue won’t work correctly.

  “Something to report?”

  “The night’s sensor readings of the Little Devil have been uploaded to the server, ma’am.”

  “Is that it?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Don’t you have somewhere to be? Collecting the Little Devil for his testing?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Then go.”

  Now he stares at the passing trees and wonders why he can’t sleep.

  The Little Devil.

  Fantastic.

  No shower tonight. Helmholtz on high, casting silt and poisonous waves into the etheric heights like an erupting volcano.

  Davies stares off, woolgathering, in the descent under the mountain to my cell. Gestures with his rifle for me to exit the metal box of the elevator.

  Tonight’s MRE proclaims it’s MEATLOAF WITH GRAVY. It tastes like dog food.

  When the darkness falls, I hold the matches in my hand. I feel cut off from myself. Somewhere out there, something stirs in its sleep. The dragon in Maryland.

  I am a little devil, and it is the dragon.

  For an instant, I feel it tugging at me, beckoning me to come to it. To join it. To be subsumed.

  I am you and you are me, though we always disagree … disagree…

  I wonder how Jerry is. Has the world fallen apart yet? Has the insomnia worn at the fabric of civilization enough for it to fall?

  I want to light a match. I want to reach out through the ether to Jack. To Vig. I’m so tired of being alone. To touch some mind other than my own. To feel what it’s like to know friendship again.

  But I can’t. The darkness is complete.

  In the end, I light a match. Let it burn down to my fingertips until my flesh bubbles and the fluid from the blister breaks and extinguishes the flame.

  That’s the only match I’ll light tonight.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Ruark isn’t with him this time. The van slews to a stop, the blast doors open. The van enters. I can picture it all with my eyes closed. The blast door closes.

  They get me out, frog-march me around the vehicle. Bunker H again. Negata’s standing there, looking at me with an inscrutable gaze, everything about him dark—his clothes, his hair, his eyes. He raises an olive-toned hand—it’s a small hand, the fingernails trimmed down so that each finger looks knobby and blunt—gesturing for me to accompany him. I approach and he steps backward, gracefully, and takes a few paces toward the elevator. Stops, looks toward me, waiting. I join him.

  His combat boots, burnished bright, make no noise. We enter the elevator, leaving the soldiers standing in the morning light streaming through the open blast doors. There’s just the hush and whisper of air moving through vents, the whisk of clothing rubbing against clothing. Our breath. There’s a mild scent in the air, like some organic cleanser infused with herbs, but I can’t make out what it is.

  We reach our floor and ex
it. We walk down long corridors. Eventually Negata slows, stops by a door. I’m reminded how big this bunker must be. The hallway we traveled down stretches behind us as straight as an arrow at least fifty yards. What else do they have down here? Lasers and sharks and the Frankenstein monster and the Ebola virus? What is a stasis bomb? Ruark mentioned it when I hijacked Quincrux’s body. I don’t get any warm fuzzies thinking about it.

  But now Mr. Negata stands in front of a door and enters the key code, and the door clicks loudly in the hall and swings open. All this is becoming old hat. The door reads 212a.

  I enter the room and sense immediately that it’s much bigger than the other rooms for testing. The ceiling is twice as high as the other areas I’ve been in, maybe twenty, twenty-five feet tall. Up near the ceiling there’s a bank of mirrored windows—behind which, I can only assume, are people watching. No tiling in this room, just ductwork bolted into what looks like a painted black concrete or stone ceiling. Below is thin, industrial carpeting. Steel rings are affixed to the walls, and a large wooden contraption is pushed up against an expanse of off-white cinder blocks that looks like a collapsed bleacher. All in all, I’m in some kind of demented gymnasium.

  The door swings shut behind me as I’m looking around. In the center of the large space is a huge, bulky, dull metal bell. There’s a small ring at the top, and from where I stand I can see no seams or bolts; it’s like it was cast from one pour of molten metal into a mold. Beyond the bell are two doors, swinging open simultaneously. Out of one a small boy steps forward, looking about and blinking. An older girl steps out from the second door. She seems a little bemused at first, and then she spies me and frowns.

  The small boy walks over. The left side of his face is discolored, and his eye is swollen shut. His lips are fat and split. If we were at Casimir, he’d be titty-baby material, for sure. Slight, with a baby’s stomach.

  “What happened to you?” I ask.

  “Reindeer games,” he says, trying to sound tougher than he is. I’m familiar with that particular stripe of reindeer games, I want to tell him, but now doesn’t seem to be the time.

  “They don’t keep you alone? You know, isolated?”

  “No. Put me in a dorm with a bunch of other kids,” he says.

  I think about that for a bit. “You meet a kid named Jack?” I hold my hand up, palm down, to my nose. “Yay high?”

  “There’s a tall kid named Jack. He’s my dorm mate.”

  “He didn’t do that to you, did he?” I point at his face.

  The boy shakes his head. “They caught me in the woods.”

  “Cripes,” I say, wincing. I stick out my hand. “I’m Shreve.” He looks at it as if it’s a mousetrap or something. Eventually he takes it, pumps it once.

  Then, slowly, a weak smile tugs at the ruin of his lips. “James Hollis.”

  “What are you in for?” I ask.

  He frowns, face souring. “You asking what I can do? That’s not good form.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s personal, right?”

  “Sure, but I figure—”

  “You go first.”

  “I can read folks. Get in their heads.”

  He blinks. “You’re a bugfuck.”

  “So you know what I can do. What can you do?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “My ability deals with perception …”

  “How so?”

  “Sometimes I can stretch time.”

  “You stretch time?”

  The girl walks toward us now, just as the speaker crackles and Ruark’s voice booms overhead. “Miss Galine, Mr. Cannon, Mr. Hollis, each of you will go to the yellow markers.”

  I notice three X’s of crossed duct tape. Fluorescent yellow. Set on the carpeting in the rough outline of an equilateral triangle. Hollis takes his position.

  It’s my natural inclination to balk at stuff like this. I go to the yellow mark and look at the girl. She’s quite pretty. Full lips and lustrous dark hair. Bright, piercing eyes.

  “What the hell are you looking at, slick?” Disgust crosses her features.

  There’s no Helmholtz—that would inhibit the testing—so I go into the ether, find her and take note of her defenses. And Miss Cynthia Galine is as defenseless as a babe in the psychic woods.

  The shibboleth twists within me. So long in the hole, in the dark. And now another mind. Thing is, this life I lead, this terrible gift, I’m learning to use it. And I’m learning how not to use it. The people I tap, I don’t want to see all their secrets. I don’t want to know if their uncles touched their willies or their mothers abused them. I don’t want to know their delicious ringing moments of joy and wonder. I don’t want to know what makes them tick. All I want is to use them, to take them over and get what I need and get out. Because I don’t want to have any empathy for them. I’ve got blisters on my fingers, and I can’t worry about being a good boy anymore.

  I go in, behind her eyes. I seep into her brain stem, shooting through the corpus callosum enough to know her power, to suck from her everything I need to know about what she can do. It’s a shallow, petty gift she has. She can move things, lift them, throw them about.

  A poltergeist.

  I have her now.

  “Beneath that bell,” Ruark’s voice says, echoing in the large space, bouncing off the stone walls, “is a slip of paper with a key code. That key code will allow the possessor to exit this room. The bell weighs one ton. That is two thousand, two hundred and forty pounds. There are pallets in the large locker near the bleachers on which you may rest.” She pauses. “You may not use the restroom, nor may you have food or water, until this test is complete. Do not urinate or defecate in this room or you will fail the test.”

  Hollis looks at me with a blank expression. “That’s no good. Too much coffee in the canteen this morning.”

  Ruark’s voice says, “No talking. You may begin the test.”

  I close my eyes in my meatsuit and totally invest myself in the stonechucker’s. Though I don’t want to get to know her that well, I race down her hallways, looking at every way she’s used her power. Throwing darts, rocks, garbage cans, sodas, food, bricks, lumber, acorns, dogs, cats, knives, water. There, right there, on the streets of Mumbai, her sister’s leg trapped and mangled beneath a motorcycle. She snatches up the bike in a mental hand and tosses it away.

  “Stand back,” I say to Hollis, who takes a couple of paces backward. “No, no. More than that. I’ve never done this before.”

  He walks ten or fifteen feet away. “Here?”

  “Perfect.”

  I am in Galine like a virus, a fever. I spread myself out inside her, testing all the edges, sinking my tentacles and tendrils into her psyche, filling her like a poison, a smoke. I am the Helmholz itself. I can feel her power thrumming instead of the tainted ether. I hold her/my body still, heavy with inaction, every muscle tense as guitar strings, rigid and vibrating like high-tension wires.

  The bell reflects the light, dully, an inert yet massive service bell.

  I dredge Galine’s power up from the murky depths of her frame like I’m gathering myself for the mad leap into the wild blue yonder. I focus the kinesthesia, breathing in and holding the pregnant air inside Galine’s chest.

  I hold it. And hold it.

  And release. The bell makes a dull, deep, and hollow sound, like someone striking an anvil with a hammer wrapped in velvet. It tilts some, just a little, enough to see from Galine’s eyes a white rectangular object underneath. The slip of paper. But only for a second.

  “Can you do that again?” Hollis asks. I can feel the ghost of Galine fluttering at the edges of my vision, trying to get back in. Trying to resume control of her body.

  Hollis looks at my vacant body and then back to Galine. An expression of understanding crosses his features. “You weren’t kidding about getting inside their heads, were you?”

  I look at MeShreve, the original packaging that this bit of psychic leather came in, and his nose
streams blood. I can taste it on MeGaline’s lips too, bright and meaty, full of salt. Must be a gusher.

  “No,” I say.

  “Why don’t you just let her do it?”

  “I don’t know.” There’s a velocity to need. There’s an inertia to desperation. And I keep barreling forward even when I don’t need to. Jerry said they’d become pawns to me, figures to be pushed around on a board. Quincrux gave me this terrible gift, but I’m reshaping myself in his image. Like father like son. What a horrible thought.

  “Can you do it again?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never done it before.”

  I catch his shocked expression. I’ve hijacked this girl’s ability. Maybe that’s rare. Maybe if I knew it was rare, I wouldn’t have been able to do it.

  “I can shove something underneath right at the moment you tilt it up.” He shakes his head.

  “That’s a good idea.” The blood makes my words come with strange plosives, pops and bubbles.

  Hollis runs to the edges of the gymnasium, looking for something to jam under the bell if I can raise it again.

  I vacate Galine’s body for a bit, and she slumps to the floor and begins blubbering and looking at her hands like she’s lost something terribly valuable. Which she has, I guess.

  I walk over to where she sits on the carpet. She looks up when I approach.

  I hold out my hand to pull her up.

  “Screw you. Screw you, you shit.”

  The word hits too hard. It’s all too much. For an instant, the world teeters and I feel all the people I’ve been come rushing back once more. I don’t care. I don’t care.

  I do what I have to do.

  Somewhere, Jerry’s saying, We will all become pawns to you. Tools for you to use. And I have nothing to say for myself. Nothing.

  The gymnasium yields nothing except an empty trash can, the collapsed wooden bleachers, and the bell.