by John Langan
After two steps, the temperature began to drop. Three, and my skin was rigid. Four, and I exhaled white clouds. Halfway across the room, the air was as cold as I'd ever known, the kind of cold you feel on a February day when the wind chill takes the mercury down to minus fifteen or twenty. My face was numb—my fingers, too. Each time I inhaled, it seared my lungs. By the time I was at the window, I couldn't feel the clothes on me. Tears welled up in my eyes, freezing on the lashes. Why keep going, right? Because it got colder—that meant there was something to see. Through tiny icicles, I gazed out windows thickened by frost.
The moon was full, casting light over the scene in front of me from high in the sky. The moon—there was something wrong with it, beyond its being full. The patterns on it—the dark areas that give the Man in the Moon his face—were different—rearranged into an image I couldn't distinguish but that hurt my eyes to look at. The landscape the moon shone on was dominated by a river, its near shore maybe ten yards from the house, its far side at least a mile away. I thought I could make out buildings on that other shore, but the river was bright as mercury—it caught the moonlight and flung it back up, clouding the air with white light like a fog. I could hear the river, rasping as it slid through its banks—like the biggest snake ever, miles long. In the far distance, blocking the sky under the moon, there might have been mountains, which might have shared the outline of the peaks that had towered over the house yesterday—
But it was too much. The cold was too intense for me to stay where I was a minute—a second more. I was shivering madly, every square inch of skin stiff, legs wobbling, teeth not even chattering—my jaw was clenched shut, my entire head shaking. Wherever—whatever this was a view of, I had to leave. Feet numb, I stumbled towards the door to the hall, crashing into the couch on the way. I caromed off it and stumbled out the door.
To find myself, not in the hall, but a new room. It wasn't much more than an oversized wood crate. Walls, ceiling, floor consisted of unfinished wood planks stacked, hung, and laid side by side. They were gray, weather-beaten, held in place by rusted nails and rife with splinters. From the ceiling, half a dozen primitive mobiles hung at the ends of as many lengths of frayed rope—each mobile a large metal hanger from which a trio of smaller ones dangled. From the smaller hangers, four or five figures swung from pieces of thread. The figures had been scissored from newspaper. Some were silhouettes of the moon, sun, and stars. Others were the shapes of adults and children. A few of the newspaper shapes appeared to have been cut on the lines of machine guns, knives, and—I swear—Belvedere House. There were no windows in the place, but beams of sunlight stole into the room through gaps between the planks. There were no doors, either, except the one that had admitted me here—which, a glance back showed, was now blocked by a badly fitted door that looked as if it formerly had opened on a better room. The space was hot, stifling with the smells of sawdust and rot—the reek of a dead deer left lying on the side of the road for days. Even as my still-aching stomach threatened to find more to bring up out of itself, the rest of me soaked in the heat like a sponge. The inside of this place might as well have been an oven someone had turned up to 450. In a matter of minutes, I'd be unable to stand it. After the living room, however, I could not only tolerate it, I was grateful for it.
A sound tickled my ear, so soft I barely picked it up. A voice—Roger's voice?—speaking in the whisper of a whisper. "Ted!"
The voice that answered was the air shattering itself into thunder, a 747 roaring directly overhead. "THIS IS ABOUT YOU LEAVING MY MOTHER FOR SOME TEENAGED SLUT. THIS IS ABOUT YOU BREAKING UP A THIRTY-EIGHT-YEAR MARRIAGE SO YOU COULD GET YOUR DICK WET. THIS IS ABOUT YOU SPITTING IN THE FACE OF THE WOMAN WHO GAVE HER LIFE TO YOU."
Ted's voice seemed to come from everywhere, as if a ring of concert-sized speakers had been set around the outside of the room and the volume on every one turned all the way up. The room shook with the force of it. The mobiles swung wildly. The beams of sunlight trembled. Fine dust lifted from the walls. An assortment of insects—mostly centipedes and beetles—lost their grip on the ceiling and walls and rained down. I covered my ears, crouching as if making myself smaller would help. My ears were ringing, so I almost missed what the first voice said, "I didn't mean—"
Ted's voice cracked the air open. "ARE YOU DISHONORING YOUR FATHER? ARE YOU BREAKING ONE OF THE COMMANDMENTS THAT GOD HIMSELF CARVED IN FIRE?"
"Now wait just a minute—"
"RESPECT? LIKE THE RESPECT YOU AND YOUR WHORE SHOWED MY MOTHER?"
"Swear to God—"
"YOU THINK CAREFULLY, NOW. YOU THINK ABOUT WHETHER YOU WANT THE USE OF THOSE HANDS, HOW PRECIOUS BEING ABLE TO SEE OUT OF BOTH THOSE EYES IS TO YOU. YOU THINK ABOUT WHAT GIRL'S EVER GONNA WANT TO LOOK AT YOU SMILING THROUGH A MOUTH OF BROKEN TEETH. BECAUSE I'LL DO ALL THAT, BOY; AS SURE AS GOD'S IN HIS HEAVEN AND THE DEVIL'S IN HIS HELL, I'LL DO ALL THAT AND MORE. IT'S MY RIGHT, AND I HAVE NO TROUBLE EXERCISING IT. IT'S YOUR DECISION. DO YOU WANT TO TAKE THOSE FEELINGS, PUT THEM IN A BOTTLE, AND PUT A CORK IN THAT BOTTLE, OR WOULD YOU RATHER GET DOWN TO BUSINESS?"
The room shuddered as if it were in the middle of an earthquake. The walls swayed and creaked. The mobiles danced and jangled against one another. Nails gave up their hold on the planks and popped free. A plank in the wall to my left came loose and tumbled to the floor. Sunlight poured through the gap.
Roger's voice said, "That is enough!"
"THIS IS ABOUT YOU BRINGING DISHONOR TO OUR FAMILY. I WILL BEAT YOU DOWN. THIS IS ABOUT YOU MAKING YOURSELF A LAUGHING STOCK. YOU WILL SHUT YOUR MOUTH, OR I WILL PUT YOUR FACE THROUGH THAT WALL."
"I didn't—"
"IT'S TOO LATE FOR SORRY. I WAS HAPPY TO LET YOU RUIN YOUR LIFE. BOY, THE DEVIL HAS GOTTEN INTO YOU AND TAKEN HOLD SOMETHING POWERFUL. BUT YOU COULDN'T LEAVE WELL-ENOUGH ALONE, COULD YOU?"
Another plank—this one in the wall across from me—tore itself free and flopped to the floor; I raised my hand against the sunlight that raged against my eyes. A pair of mobiles tangled together and plummeted from the ceiling like the metal abstraction of a bird. A third plank, also from the wall to my left, wrenched itself loose and joined its fellows below. As it separated from the wall, its nails tore away with such force that they flew across the room in all directions, including mine—I ducked and a nail struck my head anyway, hard enough to sting. It was past time for me to leave this place. I stood, managed the two steps to the misfit door—which was rocking from side to side—and had it open and was through before Ted's voice had completed its last crashing syllable.
For the third time, a hallway opened in front of me. My eyes, still sun-dazzled, took their time adjusting to the dimness. The strong, antiseptic smell of industrial cleaner—and, underneath it, the unlovely stink of urine—and another odor I couldn't name right away, something rich, metallic—pushed themselves into my nose and I sneezed. Roger's voice—was back. Only, it wasn't in my ear. It was ahead, down the corridor on the left. There were metal bars to either side of me and, for once, I knew where I was, the Huguenot holding cells. I walked forward, past empty cell after cell—more, I was sure, than made up the actual jail—Roger's voice becoming clearer as I proceeded. "This," I heard him saying. "Here—you want pain—take it."
There he was, his back to me, standing beside his bunk, facing the far corner of his cell. That corner—I had a hard time seeing it past Roger, but there was someone standing there, deep in the shadows. Roger swayed like a drunk. I saw his right hand raised—pressed over the heart that was dying in his chest, as he tried to fight it long enough to complete his deal. To the right, Ted slumbered on—
No, he didn't. I spared a glance in his direction, then, when I understood what I'd seen, did a double-take. While events in Roger's cell were playing out essentially as I'd seen them in the pavilion on the Vineyard, the scene across the hall was something out of a Renaissance painting of Hell. Ted was in there, but—where do I begin?
The cell was different. Instead of bare concrete and metal bars, it
s walls were tall bookcases, each of them hung with an assortment of maps. At the center of the room was a heavy table, to which Ted had been chained by the wrists and ankles. He was naked, and his chest—his chest, his hips, his thighs—they had been—I don't know what the technical term is—flayed, I guess. The skin hung off them in long, ragged strips that looked like bloody crepe paper. What had been exposed—red muscle, shockingly white bone—bore the marks of further abuse. In some places, cut back until you could see what lay wet and shining beneath it. In others, pierced by long, white needles that quivered as Ted—still alive—moved on the table. In a couple of spots, what should have been inside had been lifted outside. A gray-purple coil of what I realized was intestine had been heaped on Ted's belly and fixed there by a pair of the needles. One eyeball had been extracted from its socket and left on Ted's cheek, a needle inserted into the emptied cavity. This close, the smell I'd been unable to identify was obvious. It was the copper stench of the blood that ran from Ted's wounds in bright runnels, that had spattered the maps in Pollock loops and swirls. Ted's mouth opened and closed, but the needle fixed in his throat prevented anything more than a meaningless croak from escaping.
As if that wasn't bad enough, Ted wasn't alone. He was in there, too—I mean, there were two of him. Seated on the chair Roger kept at the table, dressed in the desert fatigues he'd had on the last time I'd seen him—alive—this other Ted rested his chin on his steepled fingers and stared at himself spread out on the table. They were—the two of them were Ted—or, not exactly—not like the Ted who was pursuing me through the house, the Ted whose rage burned somewhere too close. They weren't that—I don't know—intense—although the one who'd been tortured on the table wasn't too far from it—but they were more—say substantial than any of the other Teds I'd encountered so far.
Behind me, Roger said, "Anything—take whatever you need. Whatever you need."
I was close enough to see past him to the figure he was addressing. Standing in the shadows, his features frozen in a wide, idiot grin, Roger heard the promise he made to himself, nodded, and collapsed into a cloud of rubble and dust, like a skyscraper falling in on itself. Within that swirl of debris, I thought I saw something—a patch of skin covered in scales the size of my hand—but I wouldn't swear to it. Roger—the real Roger, the Roger who'd just struck the deal that would cost us all so much, everything—fell onto his bunk.
A hand touched my shoulder.
"Veronica?" I was on the floor, hands over my head, cursing myself for having been so distracted, before I realized who was standing behind—over me. "Roger?"
"Yes," he said, "it's me."
To be safe, I peeked at his feet. There were the frayed edges of his favorite jeans lying over the tops of his new loafers. I stood, Roger catching my arm as I did and helping me to steady myself. I must have looked—you can imagine: soaked in sweat from all the fleeing, my face with the thousand-yard stare of someone who's seen way too much. We were—I was no longer in the jail. It had been replaced by the front hallway. Moonlight burned on the windows. His hand still on my arm, Roger said, "What happened? What's happening?"
To my surprise, I could speak. "The end." Melodramatic, maybe, but otherwise true.
"I didn't find him," Roger said. "I kept thinking Ted was just ahead of me—that I had caught a glimpse of him going from the foot of the stairs to the parlor, then from the parlor to the dining room, and so on through the house. It was—it was as if we were back playing one of the games he'd loved when he was a child, a kind of hide-and-seek, the goal of which was for him to stay a little in front of me. He would laugh merrily as I chased him, until the suspense became too much, at which point he'd turn around and rush into my arms. This time, though, that didn't happen. The pursuit went on and on and on. I—you're going to think I've suffered a breakdown, but I followed him through rooms I've never seen. There wasn't time for me to stop and examine them, but I swear I ran through an art gallery—a room the size of the library that was hung with paintings. I don't know why this should sound any stranger than what I've told you already, but they were all the work of Thomas Belvedere. Another room was some kind of museum, full of glass cases and glassed-in tables I almost crashed into. I couldn't get a good look at their contents. It seems to me—I left my watch upstairs, but it seems to me that I was a long time doing this. Look—the moon's up."
My stomach dropped. A look out a front window confirmed the worst. There was that disfigured moon—higher in the sky, now—pouring its corpse light over the yard, which was no longer the yard. It had been replaced by thirty feet of rock and sand that ran to the shore of a vast river shining pewter-bright. Of course it was the same view I'd had from the living room window, except that I wasn't freezing to death seeing it.
"What is it?" Roger asked. "What's wrong?"
There was some kind of town or city on the far shore. I could make out rows of squat buildings—the light in the air prevented me distinguishing much more. Beyond the town—I still couldn't say for sure if the shapes bulking there were the same mountains that had stunned my eyes—was it yesterday?
"Veronica?"
I felt it, too, all of it. This was no adjunct to the house, no extra, oversized room—this was the house, was continuous with it. The change I'd sensed in the house—the move from form to formlessness, from structure to sea—whatever pretensions to landscape the view outside might have, it was that seething ocean given room to stretch out.
"Veronica," Roger said, grabbing my arm. "What is it? What do you see?"
Eyes straight ahead, I said, "What do you see?"
Roger squinted. "To be honest, not much. The moon seems particularly bright. Although—the yard looks darker. There are no lights on in anyone's house, are there? Is it that late?"
The sound of the river, that scraping, was louder, clearer. A wave passed up it in a way that made me think of flesh rippling. The impression that this was one segment of an enormous snake was stronger than ever; I swear, had it hauled itself up out of its bed and sought another course, I wouldn't have been that surprised. I would have lost my mind at the sight, but it wouldn't have surprised me. I said, "You mean, you don't see anything."
"Nothing," Roger said. "Should I?"
"I don't know."
"What do you see?"
"Everything's different."
"How so?"
"To start with, there's a river."
"A river?" Roger peered out the window.
"It's big—maybe a mile wide."
"And it's out there?" He pointed.
"Yes, and you can't see it, I know."
"It's just—a river—and one so big, at that—are there any houses?"
"I can't tell on this side, but there seems to be a town or city on the far shore."
"What do the buildings look like?"
"Buildings—I don't know. I'm not sure what you're asking. None of them is especially tall. It's hard to tell with the glare from the moon, but they look kind of blocky."
"Mountains," Roger said, "do you see any mountains?"
"I think so."
"Kabul," Roger breathed. "It's Kabul. It has to be." He turned to me. "Are you sure about all of this?"
"Why would I make it up?"
"That's not an answer."
"Yes, I'm sure," I said. "I'm not sure it's Kabul, but that's what I see."
"What else could it be?"
I didn't have an answer to that one.
Roger reached for the doorknob.
"Wait!" I said. "What are you doing?"
"Opening the door."
"That's not—you can't do that—we don't know what'll happen—"
Roger turned the knob and pulled the door. It swung open, admitting a breeze that smelled of dust and cordite. Nothing had changed. There was the river, the town, the mountains, the moon presiding over it all. I knew, then—I'd already thought, This is it, when Ted had entered the house, but this was really it. However this story was going to end, this was the
stage on which it was going to do so.
"Well?" Roger asked.
I burst into tears.
Whatever he'd anticipated, it wasn't this. The expression on his face—a combination of arrogance, triumph, and fear—slid into confusion. "Veronica?"
"It's still there," I said. "Are you happy? It's still there."
"But—"
"Why can't you see it?" I said. "Why can't you see what's right there in front of you?"
"Veronica—"
"Don't you understand what this means?"
"Of course I do. It means my boy has come back to me. He's finally home."
"Goddamn you!" I shouted. "Why do you keep doing this? Why do you keep lying? Don't you get it, Roger? This is it. This is the end of the mess you made when you struck your deal with that thing in your cell. This is where your cursing of Ted has led you—us—all of us. Here—now—can't you drop the act?"