I figured I’d keep the mustache and goatee, at least. A happy medium between the old and the new Christopher Ruby.
But I didn’t know if I would call Saleet, though she had given me her number, and I had traded her mine. I didn’t know if I’d take her up on her suggestion that we see a movie sometime.
So why was I growing my hair back?
I’d told her where I had worked, as though confessing to her in an interrogation room. But I had lied and said I was laid off. I had lied and said my girlfriend had dumped me. Well, not a lie. But leaving out the real conclusion of our relationship was a lie.
I didn’t have time for an infatuation with a new woman. I had to avenge the corruption and destruction of my ex-girlfriend. I had to find out about the mysteries that might corrupt and destroy many, many other people.
But Saleet knew about some of these mysteries, superficially at least, didn’t she? It couldn’t be a coincidence, about the Kalian god of creation and destruction. Who was both god and temple to that god...
My hair grew back overnight, and in the morning I shaped it with obsessive precision, until it was short and neat. I trimmed my goatee. I looked less feral than I had, of late. I was glad I hadn’t gotten tattoos, after all. Didn’t want to look like a thug to my new forcer friend. But I still looked haggard. My cheeks were sunken and my eyes dark and puffy. I’d been having bad dreams; I knew this though I could almost never remember them in the morning.
But last night, it had been something about a pod of whales, swimming closer, closer from the horizon. Only they weren’t swimming on massive fins, but flying with slow-flapping immense bat-like wings. And as they began to drift nearer, leaving shadows like clouds across the city they dwarfed, I saw that they were much, much larger than whales. And though they were shaped rather like sperm whales, I saw as they approached across a purple sky that they had no jaws, and no eyes, and their great faceless heads terrified me, because it made them seem all the more implacable, and immune to my sobbing prayers and chants for mercy.
***
I HAD SETTLED on the belief that I must murder Mr. Dove.
I had gone upground for the day, hoping the sun and the change of scene would bring clarity. I needed a firm destination. A decisive course of action. Disembarking from my tube, however, I found myself too close to Paxton University, where my father taught art history, and so I wandered from the campus toward the oldest part of Paxton, which was actually what remained of the Choom city that had occupied this spot before it had been buried under millions of tons of colonist city. I had to pass by Oval Square, and this was where my father had an apartment with a girlfriend, so I walked briskly and kept my head down and I wore dark glasses. After I had left cobblestoned Oval Square behind I felt more comfortable, and I allowed myself to enjoy the cool of the autumn air, the bright blue of the sky as filtered through my lenses. The buildings were shorter here, opened up to more of that sky; the sunlight could actually fall all the way to the streets.
The streets were narrow, in this area, many of them still cobblestoned. The crowded rows of smallish buildings were largely faced in brick and stone. Expensive gift and antique shops, quiet little book stores and coffee shops occupied the ground levels. There were even small trees growing at intervals along some of the sidewalks. Coffee in hand, I stared through a window into a tiny art gallery. I wandered on. There was one central lane, Salem Street as it was now called, again cobblestoned, where vehicles were not permitted to pass even though it was fairly wide and long. It was almost an open mall, lined with the greatest concentration of shops in the area, and bustling with people on their lunch break. Somewhere ahead a small group performed live music. Water splashed in a fountain, and children went barefoot in its pool. There was a good museum on this street; I’d been in it before. I saw no derelict passed out across the sidewalk. No skeletal teen slunk up to beg me for a munit. There were still some unsavory people I passed, but this was as nice a spot as you would find in Punktown. There were, of course, isolated Choom structures still scattered here and there throughout the city, but this was the largest single concentration of such buildings. It felt like the calm eye of a hurricane. A pearl lodged in the bile-filled stomach of the whale that had swallowed it.
Clarity. I could think. I thought about burning Mr. Dove’s store...all those potentially dangerous volumes on scientific magic and magical science. But I couldn’t endanger the prosties who also lived in that building, or anyone in neighboring buildings. I envisioned myself, instead, going into the bookstore and firing hungry plasma capsules at the shelves...watching the glowing corrosion quickly spread.
But first, I’d shoot a plasma capsule into Mr. Dove. I couldn’t entirely blame him for Gabrielle – she had innocently, half-playfully embarked on her own destruction before meeting up with him. But they had interacted somehow, and he had furthered her poisoning. And he was a priest. He was a threat to other innocent Gabrielles. And I wanted one single flesh and blood face I could confront. And shoot.
I was an underworld dweller, now. Morpha Street and its tributaries were my neighborhood. I was nervous about killing a person so near to where I lived. Afraid to burn his books despite my fantasies, that shop being so close to my apartment. And now there was Saleet living and working down there, close by as well. Saleet the enforcer...
If I could arrange to meet Dove elsewhere. Lure him away...
On what pretext?
Well, I wanted to see more of the books he offered, anyway. Specifically, the ones he had mentioned to me which furthered certain ideas found in the Necronomicon. One by a Choom author, the other by a Tikkihotto. I’d tell him I wanted to buy them, after all. Ask him to meet me for lunch somewhere. Somewhere nonthreatening, where violence was less expected. Like this quaint little district I was in right now. What more innocuous a setting could one choose in Punktown? Here, one hated even to say Punktown. It became Paxton again...its real name. The Town of Peace.
I’m turning psychopathic, I thought, milling with others in front of a Choom trio who played that live folk music I’d been hearing. What will I gain from killing this man? I should forget him. Forget Gabrielle. Saleet liked me. Saleet was a door to another direction.
But I was already a murderer. Even if it had been in self defense. I had fled, disposed of the body. I had changed forever, regrown hair notwithstanding. Saleet was a door to law and order and sanity that would ultimately not open to my hand, I told myself. She was attracted to me, that was plain. But if she only knew the truth...would she go so far as to arrest me, or only be repulsed by me? Either was equally horrible to me. Better not to see her again at all. Better to let myself continue the descent I’d already begun...
Besides, those whales were coming on great, black wings. Maybe not looking like that. And coming from where I didn’t know. But I felt the beat of their wings in my every cell. I heard their soundless sonar calls, a static in my veins. Gabrielle had opened a doorway, and given Dove the means to do the same by handing him the Necronomicon. He must not be allowed to open any more – any larger – doorways for these beings that some worshiped as gods.
I listened to the crisp tinkling of instruments, the soft peaceful voices of the singers, the laughter and shouts of the children like live cherubs in the fountain behind me. So brittle. Fragile. Why must I be the one to know how endangered they were? Why must I be the one to defend them? I couldn’t even fare better in life than a customer service job. I couldn’t even save my own girlfriend.
Look at me behind my dark glasses, like a celebrity, I silently invited the performers. I am the salvation and the way.
I must kill Mr. Dove.
I neared PU again on my way back to the tube station. The sun was lowering and slanted golden across the green park of the campus. I gazed off at the university’s buildings rising above the park. Saleet had studied to be a police officer there. Law and order and sanity were preached in there. But they didn’t have the Necronomicon on their shelves, did they? In
their med classes, they didn’t dissect immensely bloated mutant corpses to get at the floating jellyfish-like beings inside...
I felt utterly alone in my knowledge. It was for the best, in a way.
***
TODAY DURING MY excursion I had worn a backpack slung over my shoulder. In it were my pistol and my palmcomp. Riding the tube back home, I opened the palmcomp on my lap and did another search on the Necronomicon.
I found stray references, scanty mentions, even a couple of the more well-known passages (much as anything from its pages could be considered well-known), but again, it was not available in its entirety on the net, nor did any listed book seller offer it for sale. But glancing at several articles, I saw how the few copies of the book that existed had been hunted down and destroyed over the years, usually by religious fanatics or at least disturbed individuals. One scholar who had been given permission to handle the tome in the rare books room of a college library had set himself on fire, and clutched the book to his chest while he sat on the floor and burned.
I also read a line or two in a couple of the articles about a group who called themselves Children of the Elders, who claimed to have destroyed three copies of the book themselves and had hacked into a net site that had presented the full text. They had obliterated the site, and even sought out the site’s owner to steal an original volume from his house. The owner of the book and of the net site in question wasn’t described or named, unfortunately.
I was under the impression that this organization was a contemporary one. What would they think of Mr. Dove, for owning that book? Or me, for that matter? Though I would hope that in me they would see an ally...
So I did a search on the Children of the Elders, but mostly it just pointed me back to the same articles I’d already seen. They seemed to be situated on Earth, only. Well...at least they had Earth covered. But I would have appreciated some assistance on my end of things.
One brief piece that did mention them noted that they hadn’t been heard from in a while, and jokingly suggested that they had been hunted down themselves and spirited away by the demons from the very spellbook they sought to erase from existence.
I tried to find out more about those two books that Mr. Dove had mentioned, but couldn’t locate anything without remembering their titles or authors. At last, as I neared my stop, I packed the palmcomp away, the red disk containing the elusive Necronomicon housed inside it.
When I stepped onto the tube platform, belowground once again, I saw that the streets were flooded with water six inches deep. Wheeled vehicles plowed through the dark liquid, hovercars skimming above the oily-looking rivers but disturbing the surface in their wake. Pedestrians ran along cursing, as if hurrying to their destinations would keep them drier. I asked a man waiting on the platform what had happened.
“A helicar hit an overhead water main,” he sneered. “A big one. Stupid kid was speeding. They think he was drunk. Killed his passenger, but he’s alive, of course – the idiot. I never feel sorry for losers who get killed drunk driving.”
I often didn’t either, though I supposed I’d feel different if it were my friend. In any case, I thought of hailing a cab, but it didn’t look favorable, as a lot of other people already had that idea. I finally just stepped off the platform into the ankle deep water – cold! – and started slogging my way toward home.
I passed an old Earth man who stood in the middle of the sidewalk staring up at the ceiling and muttering to himself. He was entirely soaked, and I imagined he was a derelict who’d been sleeping on the street when the tide washed in.
There were sirens ahead, deafening for being contained down here, and I saw colored flashing lights from around the next corner. The roar of the escaping water could now be heard, like a waterfall crashing to the street below. I gazed up at the ceiling like the derelict. Crisscrossing pipelines, conduits, a seeming chaos of conveyance. But there had to be order in it, patterns in the web. This cable had a specific starting and ending point. That main took sewerage to a certain destination. Maybe it hadn’t all been blue-printed from the start, every single pipeline charted in advance, but plans had been written upon plans, and webs woven through existing webs, and the anarchy was actually a system.
I was reminded of what a friend who studied at PU to become a doctor (he had succeeded, and I’d since lost touch with him) once told me, after he’d performed his first human dissections. Inside the body looked so – messy. The organs weren’t color coded, neatly outlined and self-contained like in text book illustrations. It was all so soft, so gray, so formless looking. Like a congealed soup of protoplasm. Instructors spoke of the glorious human machine, but this didn’t look mechanical. “It shouldn’t work!” my friend had laughed in awe. It was just this...mess. Where he had always been a staunch atheist before, he told me this experience had actually started him wondering about God. Presumably, only a god could animate such clay.
I wondered if this religious awe had grown since we’d last talked, if he still marveled, or if he were now a jaded surgeon who could clearly discern the patterns, the structure, the machine in that gray chaos.
Patterns. Structure. Order and purpose. But it could be broken. It could bleed. I heard that water gushing.
And as I stood there listening, watching the colored lights of the emergency teams flash between the buildings across the street, I felt my backpack torn off my shoulder.
From behind, the fleeing thief looked like a skeleton in bulky, shabby black clothes. A hairless bony head, weirdly metallic in color. A robot, then? Tribes of runaway, rebellious robots lived in certain abandoned sections of the old subway system that had been partially buried and never repaired after the great earthquake of several decades past. But when I lunged forward in pursuit – kicking up water in great splashes – I saw the thief glance back at me, and he was of an alien species I wasn’t familiar with. He had huge black eyes that seemed to be covered in a silvery protective film or membrane, and a long pointed beak like a bird’s projected from the front of his head. His skin had a silvery sheen, but like his eyes seemed black below the surface, so that it had an odd look as though his body were an X-ray or a photographic negative.
“Hey!” I shouted after him. “Give me that back, fucker!”
A good thing he didn’t know I had a gun in the backpack. He could simply stop running, pull out the pistol, and threaten me with it. Maybe even shoot me with it. But that wasn’t the only dangerous item in the bag.
My palmcomp. With the Necronomicon still inside it...
The bird man darted into an alley. Huffing, slower, I pursued him. I splashed water on a woman as I passed her. “Die, you wanker!” she snarled at me.
I nearly lost my footing as I turned into the alley. The street level must have inclined lower here, or else the flood was getting higher (would it rise and rise until it reached the ceiling, drowning us all in a tragedy of Biblical proportions?)...the water was nearly to my knees. I waded heavily through it. A massive, graffiti-covered trash zapper blocked my view of the alley’s far end. It was no longer functioning, so it overflowed with refuse, and the stench of rotting garbage was great. Looking down, I saw the alley’s flotsam and jetsam. A dead cat without any skin brushed against my leg. It wasn’t dead, after all; its hind legs paddled weakly and its mouth opened and closed without sound. It drifted past me, flayed white, like a fetus in amniotic fluid. I wish I had my gun so I could kill it.
Blobs of decaying food – perhaps it was food – slimed the surface of the water. Sheets of cardboard were borne along like little islands. I reached the trash zapper. Beyond it, I saw a man lying on his back entirely under the water, eyes closed as if he were seeing how long he could hold his breath. A derelict, drowned in his drunken dreams.
At its end, the alley branched into two sub-alleys, to the left and the right.
“Dung!” I hissed. Looking down both these narrower, darker corridors between buildings, I couldn’t see the bird alien. One alley had a roof-like grille t
hat ran overhead. I chose this one, plunged unarmed but furious into that dimly-lit tunnel. I was desperate. I possessed one of the few surviving copies of the Necronomicon, me the reluctant one man army, and I had let it be stolen by a purse-snatcher. In that book were spells that could close the doors, if only I found out how to wield them. Formulas that could reshape the patterns of the universe. Stolen...stolen by a street punk so he could buy himself some drugs.
“I have money!” I stupidly announced to the dark tunnel as I raced along it, splashing filthy water, the pallid light from above sending the grille’s pattern across me in a flowing tight web of shadow. “I’ll give you all my money if you give me the backpack!”
I arrived at the end of the alley. It was a T, branching to the left and the right.
Looking down either alley, I saw no bird man. These alleys were narrower still, barely enough to squeeze through. I heard steam hissing from a vent in one alley, and the steam filled the passage, obscuring my view. Had the alien plunged through it? Was he even now lurking back there waiting for me to follow him, my gun in hand? I chose this path.
When the steam clouds surrounded me, when I could no longer see my hand in front of my face, I felt along the slimy-slick walls of the facing buildings more for a sense of the tangible than to guide my way. At any moment, I expected a blow to swing at me out of the fog, to crush my skull...
...but I emerged from the humid, billowing vapors into a small courtyard. It was like looking up from the bottom of a gigantic chimney, a chimney lined in rows and rows of windows. Many were boarded up. Some had been obscured entirely with graffiti, at ground level.
It was a dead end.
I lowered my forehead into cupped hands. Please, let that thief – or whoever bought the palmcomp from him – erase that red disk. Copy some stupid games onto it instead.
When I looked up, I saw a face staring out at me from one of the ground floor windows. A curtain quickly dropped back into place, hiding it. Graffiti on the window had obscured the face, but it had seemed to be a gray-fleshed, fish-like being. I had caught a glimpse of a neat white shirt showing through a dark suit.
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