The Shibboleth

by John Hornor Jacobs

  Then there was the ruinous night. I had been away on assignment. A storm delayed my train. I arrived in the small hours of the morning, and when I returned, wanting nothing more than the comfort of bed, I found the old Society building an inferno. The few Society members left alive in the conflagration were gibbering and witless. Including poor Lucius. And it was then that the leadership of the Society of Extranaturals fell to me.

  “The dragon …” Lucius whispered when I found him disheveled and soot-stained and bleeding in the hidden arbor behind the Society building. “The elder …”

  My spirit detached from the sum of my parts and tried to settle upon him, to calm him and give his soul succor, but his spirit bucked and thrashed. I could no more calm him than a boat could moor in a storm-tossed sea. I felt massive forces warring within him, prodigious psychic energies shifting and settling like the tidal energies of stars. Looking at me, he blinked, and the thing that looked out of his eyes was no longer him, not anything I had ever sensed in my three lifetimes. I found myself shivering and cold at the darkness contained therein, and Lucius collapsed to a coma, never to regain any sort of measurable consciousness.

  His body was very young too, at that time, though the personality that propelled it was not. When the ambulances came, and had I made sure that Lucius and the few other survivors were well taken care of, it was then time to deal with our shadow, the US government. I was closeted with them for weeks, it seems, and it was then we hashed out our current arrangement. Afterward, when I attempted to find the last members of the Society, though mad or comatose, I could not. The agents of this country, the noble United States of America, had obscured their whereabouts such that even I could not suss it out. And why? Secrecy becomes a habit and requires no more reason than “we have always done so.” Yet I think worries over the ascendancy of the mó fâ spurred their actions.

  But now, looking out at the deteriorating remains of such a beautiful old campus, I can almost taste the ashes in my mouth once more, smell the acrid and ruin-perfumed smoke. It is all just rubble; long ago scavengers picked over every bit of salvage there was to be had from the Society. Now there’s a pile of tires lolling there, and the burnt-out husk of a car, surely torched in some spat of gangland warfare or exuberant youth.

  I walk forward, into the tall, oily grasses that grow in clumps, snaring and snagging at my slacks. That once I called this spot home is unimaginable.

  Behind me the car still rumbles.

  I can remember his laugh. Despite changing bodies, always the same laugh. He was the best of us, and ever since then, we have fallen so low…

  I turn away from the sight of all that once was, turn back to the car waiting for me.

  Out of Sparrow’s Point we drive, into the clutter and bustle of the withered city, and eventually, when I am composed enough to probe the ether, I send out that part of me that will never die, the incorruptible spirit, to sense what it can. To find the source of the impenetrables.

  Killette makes sounds with his mouth, and in the ether, it is hard to assign meaning to any of his talk. I don’t even try, and eventually, the man falls silent.

  There is something here. It shivers in the invisible starlight of the void, and I can feel a tugging on the tendons and connective tissues of the ether. It’s strange, but it feels as if I’m on a gentle slope and gravity pulls on me to go one way or, as the car turns, another. It leads me, inexorably, like the events in a dream. A nightmare in which I know all that is to happen, yet cannot change the outcome.

  My gods, I need a cigarette. Bother this and all vibrations of the ether. I need a cigarette.

  I withdraw from the void like a hasty lover withdrawing midstroke, and say, “Driver, do you smoke?”

  “No, sir. Quit almost ten ye—”

  “That is no matter to me. Take me to the nearest store.”

  It’s only a few moments before he finds one. In the parking lot, I shuck my jacket and unbutton my shirt so that I might have access to the patch burning itself into my skin. I rip it away and rebutton my shirt. I buy two packs of Pall Malls. I will need to find a tobacco shop soon, to locate my old friend Peter Stuyvesant.

  The hot, perfumed smoke fills my lungs even before reaching the idling hired car. Killette smiles at me with his window down.

  “Sorry, the boss don’t allow no smoking in the ride.”

  “Understandable,” I say, taking the smoke into my lungs, so deep it feels like drowning. “Give me a moment,” I say. “A few moments.”

  He nods and the sedan window rises, cutting him off from view.

  I smoke and lean against the back wheel well of the car, looking at the lowering daylight filtering through the wires and packed-tight brownstones and cheap apartment complexes of Baltimore. There are thousands of souls here, living on top of one another. In some chamber of my mind, the reality of this future I never imagined or considered crashes in, cacophonous and frenetic. I was born so many years ago in the morning of the world; I see that now only in retrospect. When I was a boy, the forest in which I was born stretched from leafy New Haven to the far edges of Pennsylvania and beyond, though we didn’t know it then. The world was flat, and I could test the unknown edges of it with this strange ability I had, ethereal and full of ghostlight. Now the sun-hammered world feels as old as I do, the surface of the earth spackled with concrete and tenements and desperate, near-illiterate serfs who don’t even understand the depth of their own servitude.

  I hesitate to touch the void. Something is amiss. It is a feeling I’ve had over and over again since I’ve touched down, but only now as I smoke and let the deleterious and woozy effect of the nicotine and tar swim in my bloodstream, only now when I’m sated and calm enough, can I recognize the feeling.

  Something is wrong here.

  Only after I’ve smoked three cigarettes, jump-starting each from the butt of the previous, am I ready to reenter the sedan and begin once more to probe the ruinous ether.

  Killette drives slowly, allowing me to find my own bit of comfort in the rear seat as the tenements and strip malls pass us slowly by.

  I am terrified. The dark gravity teases at my superattuned etheric sense. It’s like the miniscule pitch and yaw of an airplane midflight—you’re not consciously aware of it, but your body knows and reacts. It’s the gravity well of a black hole, tugging with tidal forces.

  We drive on interminably, hours pacing and stalking up and down streets full of cheap housing mashed together like blocks of clay, cars lining the streets. Whores and crackheads and dealers toddle about, desperately gesturing toward the sedan, and then we’re out of that neighborhood and prowling through more industrial areas full of short, extruded-metal buildings and cinder-block reliquaries of the failing American business. The only balm is progress, for the wasted streets of America and for me. We are nearing our goal, unknown though it is. Yet I know, feel in my bones, that it approaches.

  I tell Killette to stop.

  Outside I sniff, I probe at the ether, even while my hands work steadily to ferret the cigarette from the packet, bring it to my mouth, and light. The Kwik-E-Marts and mercados and Pep Boys seem beaten down in the vapored, humid air. The smoke is a noxious blossom, a cancerous flower blooming in the dark capillary dusk of my lungs, and its scent is heady and sweet and foul.

  It is there. Just beyond that line of buildings. I know it.

  After I smoke the cigarette, and then another, and then another, I get back in the car.

  “Go over there,” I say, leaning forward into the driver’s area, pointing toward the source of my unease. “That’s where we’re going.”

  He muscles the sedan into traffic—which is, all things considered, quite light—and we find our way over two blocks to a row of antique-looking buildings.

  A sign reads TOWSON VETERANS HOSPITAL. It’s a massive, five-storied structure that looks as if it could fall at any moment, rain- and snow-streaked, paint scaling, beaten by the elements. It looks like it was built at the same time as
our Society’s Montana campus, a WPA project. But where the buildings in Montana are prime—preserved through a natural environmental blessing or the diligence of man—this hospital bears the brunt of the ruinous energies of entropy and decay. Annihilation always comes more slowly than we’d like, but faster than imaginable.

  “Stop!” I’m nearly screaming. My composure is like a loose tooth, dangling on its last fiber.

  He slides the car to a stop, and I lurch from its dark confines to stagger up the main steps of the Towson Veterans Hospital. At the dullard receptionist’s alarmed look, I fumble at my pants and withdraw the NSA badge I’d been given for just these sorts of emergencies. And it does enough to preclude her from calling whatever negligent security this shabby hospital might have. None, I’m guessing.

  In the elevator, I press all the buttons. As we rise, the doors open and shut. Fourth floor feels right.

  I don’t know what my body’s doing. My avaricious desire for tobacco and nicotine is gone, and all I can do is keep my heart from going into tachycardia before reaching the end of this particular rabbit hole. I feel like a ship on the edge of the maelstrom, a satellite on the cusp of falling into the beginnings of a new star.

  There are doors passing on my left and right. I pull one open to reveal a hollow-eyed man, a soldier most likely, with an obvious missing leg. He’s emaciated and bruised.

  I release the door and move onward, down the hall, until finally … finally … I stand in front of the entrance.

  It is here. I feel it in all the ways I can feel. Beyond the capacity of my fellow man. In all my years. I feel it.

  I push the door open. I move my body into the small, antiseptic-smelling room. There’s the huff and hiss of a breathing apparatus, the soft dings of a pulse fed through a machine. I stand by the bed, looking down.

  The ruin of years has not been kind to Lucius, languishing in this hospital. My old friend. He looks like a bundle of sticks with a white mop for a head. Wasted and liver-marked.

  My mentor. Or what is left of him.

  Or what is in him.

  I feel something moving, something obscene stirring, coiling and uncoiling in its strength, hinting toward massiveness that makes it hard to comprehend.

  Before me lies Armstead Lucius Priest, my old friend, and inside him now stirs all of our destruction. The dragon reborn into the world. The star-spanning darkness that will find us all.

  Something in me, some receptive lone particle, quivers and thrums in the ether, and the dragon answers. The darkness swells.

  And his eyes open.

  He sees me.

  It sees me.

  It stirs, and I can feel the gaping maw of its awareness. The compulsion to throw myself into the abyss pricks itself up and into my consciousness, and most of it is not me. Most of it. The great necessity of death spreads itself like a lover beneath me.

  I stumble out. I stumble away, heedless and sightless, like a beggar in a desert, blinded by the sight of a black sun.

  I stumble. I fall.

  Darkness covers me.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Quincrux removes his hand, withdraws his mind from my own. There was no fighting him, when it happened. With his touch—his proximity—he was inside me and moving. Showing me his own mind. It happened so fast. The clock says it’s only been moments.

  “So, it’s …” I need to order my thoughts. “What? What is it?”

  “You know as much as I. The insomnia, the dark emanations from the East … it is stirring.”

  “What happens if it wakes? That’s what the Riders were warning me of. To rejoin Jack—and I guess you—before the ‘elder awakens.’” That’s a stinker of a thought, like a turd in the punch bowl. It has the whiff of prophecy. “But it seemed to me the Riders wanted me to go gallivanting off to face down the damned thing by myself.”

  Something clicks in my mind, my memory.

  “What is it, Shreve?” Quincrux asks. Weird how we’re just sitting here, chatting.

  “It used the word ember. It said, ‘These embers …’”

  “And you are thinking it meant Ember Schultz?”

  “Her name is Schultz? Who gives their kid the name Ember knowing it’ll always be tagged with Schultz?”

  “Dead parents,” he says, humorlessly. He pushes back, away from me. He takes another cigarette from the package of Peter Stuyvesants.

  “All of my clothes, I mean, every piece of clothing I have, is gonna stink of that. I’m wearing everything I got.”

  “Amy, please requisition more clothing for Mr. Cannon. It seems he’ll be staying with us for the duration.”

  “And the thing in the East?” I ask, glancing at Ruark. I’m still uncomfortable talking about it in front of people. “People are dying from lack of sleep. We’ve got to do something. We should do what the Riders say …” The thought terrifies me, but it seems like the only alternative. “Send me and Jack.”

  He shakes his head. “No. That is simply folly. You are so green as to be useless, and your partner Jack requires a burr under his saddle to function at levels becoming a member of our Society.” He looks thoughtful. “And we already have plans in motion to neutralize the entity.”

  “How?”

  “It is not a matter of concern for you.”

  “How you figure? That Rider didn’t come looking for you. Doesn’t this make you nervous?”

  He places his cigarette in the ashtray and stares at me. “It makes me very nervous. As much as we’ve shared,” he says meaningfully, “you are in a unique position to understand how seriously I take this threat. But it is only a matter of days before it will be resolved.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Suffice it to say, I am dispatching our Orange Team to deploy a new technology that will eliminate the threat.”

  “What technology?”

  “A bioelectrical technology.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  He obviously doesn’t like being questioned. I wonder why he allows me to continue doing it.

  “In the early eighties, we found a woman who could generate a stasis field. An absolutely impenetrable one. Anything inside the field was held inviolate and time did not pass. After billions of dollars of research, we’ve managed to duplicate that same effect through a combination of genome manipulation, biotechnology, and computers.”

  “You’re gonna place the body of this Priest fellow in the field.”

  “Yes. And lock it away. Forever.”

  “You’re gonna stick it in a dark hole, is that it? Didn’t work too well with me.”

  “I allowed you to leave your confinement. The entity will not have the same fate as you.”

  “Hope that stasis thingy works better than your Helmholtz fields.”

  It doesn’t faze him. “You would be amazed.”

  “You know, because I’ve been walking right through them.”

  “This is known.” He inclines his head toward Negata, lurking silently in the corner. “It is good that Mr. Negata is with us to keep you company.”

  “And you’ve put the screws to my brother.”

  He ignores that. He probably doesn’t like being reminded that he’s an extortionist and kidnapper. Being a murderer is fine; it’s so much cleaner, to deprive someone of life. But these lower crimes, these crimes of necessity, they besmirch his self-image.

  But the implications of this technology, if true, are staggering. No more wars. Colonizing other planets. Journeying to the stars. The mind boggles.

  And they want to use it to lock away a dragon.

  Oy gevalt, this guy.

  “You gonna go with it? This stasis bomb?”

  “No. My last encounter with the thing taxed me beyond all endurance. And I think whatever is left of Lucius in there, if there’s any part of him that hasn’t been replaced with the other, is sensitive to the presence of telepaths more than telekinetics.”

  “So you’re just gonna send meatheads and jocks? Good plan.” Both he an
d I know only a mind can contest another mind. And the dragon is one big throbbing, ugly awareness. A mind. “Send me.”

  “No.”

  “Send me. I can be your link to the mission. Your man on the inside.” God help me for saying this. “You can sit in the backseat.” I tap my temple.

  “Quite a generous offer, Mr. Cannon, but no.”

  “Why not?”

  “Two reasons.” He raises a tobacco-stained finger. “You haven’t proven yourself to me. You are obstinate. You aren’t a team player.”

  True. But screw this guy. I can play well with others. The goddamned world is at stake. Maybe he didn’t bring me here to make me his own toy soldier. Maybe he brought me here to take me off the battlefield.

  “Two.” He raises another finger. “The impenetrables seem to want you to come into proximity—” There’s that word again. “With the entity in Maryland. Until I know the Riders’ goals, I have no intention of doing what they want. So if they want you to encounter this thing, I will work to thwart that, if I can.”

  “I think you’re making a mistake.”

  “It is within the realm of possibility.”

  “Everything is in the realm of possibility.”

  “Not everything.”

  “Name one thing. You’ve got a stasis field. Kids can fly. I can possess people and read minds. What is impossible?”

  “You going to Maryland.” He snuffs out his cigarette. “Thank you for your time and candor, Shreve. I think this is a good step forward for you.” He turns to his laptop and pecks at the keyboard. “You are dismissed.”

  FORTY

  On my way out of Admin, the statue of Armstead Lucius Priest stares blankly out the front bay window at the dark. Ruark is nowhere to be found. I was hoping for a ride in her golf cart.

  I trudge up the slope on the northwestern path up to the male dorms, away from the manicured quad where I encountered the mountain lion. Nice night out, a bajillion stars illuminating the sky, a half-moon washing the valley in pale light.