1987 - Swan Song v4

by Robert McCammon

  And, if anything, he wanted to live to see what remained of the world beyond Earth House. One day at a time, he thought—and if he’d lived through the first day, he could make it through the second and the third. He’d always been a survivor—that was part of being a King’s Knight—and now he’d do whatever it took to keep himself alive.

  The old game’s over, he thought. The new game’s about to begin! And it might be the greatest game of King’s Knight he’d ever experienced, because it was going to be real.

  Roland cradled the holy axe and waited for the one-eyed hunchback to return, and he imagined he heard the sound of dice rattling in a cup of bleached bone.

  Sixteen

  Come a cropper

  “Lady, I sure as hell wouldn’t drink that if I was you.”

  Startled by the voice, Sister Creep looked up from the puddle of black water she’d been crouching over.

  Standing a few yards away was a short, rotund man wearing the tattered, burned rags of a mink coat. Beneath the rags were red silk pajamas; his birdlike legs were bare, but he had a pair of black wingtips on his feet. His round, pale moon of a face was cratered with burns, and all his hair had been scorched away except for his gray sideburns and eyebrows. His face was badly swollen, his large nose and jowls ballooned up as if he were holding his breath and the blue threads of broken blood vessels were showing. In the slits of his eye sockets, his dark brown eyes moved from Sister Creep’s face to the puddle of water and back again. “That shit’s poison,” he said, pronouncing it pizzen. “Kill you right off.”

  Sister Creep stayed crouched over the puddle like a beast protecting a water hole. She’d found shelter from the pouring rain in the hulk of a taxi and had tried to sleep there through the long and miserable night, but her few minutes of rest had been disturbed by hallucinations of the thing with the melting face in the theater. As soon as the black sky had lightened to the color of river mud, she’d left her shelter—trying very hard not to look at the corpse in the front seat—and gone in search of food and water. The rain had slowed to an occasional drizzle of needles, but the air was getting colder; the chill felt like early November, and she was shivering in her drenched rags. The puddle of rainwater beneath her face smelled like ashes and brimstone, but she was so dried out and thirsty that she’d been about to plunge her face in and open her mouth.

  “Busted water main’s shootin’ up a geyser back that way,” the man said, and he motioned toward what Sister Creep thought was north. “Looks like Old Faithful.”

  She leaned back from the contaminated puddle. Thunder growled in the distance like a passing freight train, and there was no way to see the sun through the low, muddy clouds. “You find anything to eat?” she asked him through swollen lips.

  “A couple of onion rolls, in what was a bakery, I guess. Couldn’t keep ’em down, though. My wife says I’m the world’s champion upchucker.” He put a blistered hand on his belly. “Got ulcers and a nervous stomach.”

  Sister Creep stood up. She was about three inches taller than he. “I’m thirsty,” she said. “Will you take me to the water?”

  He looked up at the sky, cocking his head toward the sound of thunder, then stood dumbly regarding the ruins around them. “I’m tryin’ to find a phone or a policeman,” he said. “I been lookin’ all night. Can’t find either one when you need ’em, right?”

  “Something terrible’s happened,” Sister Creep told him. “I don’t think there are any phones or cops anymore.”

  “I gotta find a phone!” the man said urgently. “See, my wife’s gonna wonder what happened to me! I gotta call her and let her know… I’m… okay…” His voice trailed off, and he stared at a pair of legs that protruded stiffly from a pile of twisted iron and concrete slabs. “Oh,” he whispered, and Sister Creep saw his eyes glaze over like fog on window glass. He’s crazy as hell, she thought, and she started walking north, climbing up a high ridge of rubble.

  In a few minutes she heard the fat little man breathing heavily as he caught up with her. “See,” he said, “I’m not from around here. I’m from Detroit. Got a shoe store at Eastland Shopping Center. I’m here for a convention, see? If my wife hears about this on the radio, she’s gonna worry herself sick!”

  Sister Creep grunted in reply. Her mind was on finding water.

  “The name’s Wisco,” he told her. “Arthur Wisco. Artie for short. I gotta find a phone! See, I lost my wallet and my clothes and every damned thing! Me and some of the boys stayed out late the night before it happened. I was upchuckin’ all over the place that mornin’. Missed my first two sales meetings and stayed in bed. I had the covers over my head, and all of a sudden there was a godawful light and a roarin’, and my bed fell right through the floor! Hell, the whole hotel started shakin’ to pieces, and I crashed through a hole in the lobby and ended up in the basement, still in my bed! When I dug myself out of there, the hotel was gone.” He gave a crazy little giggle. “Jesus, the whole block was gone!”

  “A lot of blocks are gone.”

  “Yeah. Well, my feet were cut up pretty bad. How ’bout that? Me, Artie Wisco, with no shoes on my feet! So I had to take a pair of shoes off a…” He trailed off again. They climbed nearer to the top of the ridge. “Bastards are way too small,” he said. “But my feet are swollen up, too. I tell you, shoes are important! Where would people be without shoes? Now, take those sneakers you got on. They’re cheap, and they ain’t gonna last you very—”

  Sister Creep turned toward him. “Will you shut up?” she demanded, and then she kept climbing.

  He lasted about forty seconds. “My wife said I shouldn’t come on this trip. Said I’d regret spendin’ the money. I’m not a rich man. But I said, hell, it’s once a year! Once a year in the Big Apple ain’t too—”

  “Everything’s gone!” Sister Creep screamed at him. “You crazy fool! Look around!”

  Artie stood motionless, staring at her, and when he opened his mouth again his tight, strained face looked about to rip. “Please,” he whispered. “Please don’t…”

  The guy’s hanging on by his fingernails, she realized. There was no need to chop his fingers off. She shook her head. The important thing was to keep from falling to pieces. Everything was gone, but she still had a choice: she could either sit down here in the rubble and wait to die, or she could find that water. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t sleep too well last night.”

  His expression slowly began to register life again. “It’s gettin’ cold,” he observed. “Look! I can see my breath.” He exhaled ghostly air. “Here, you need this more than I do.” He started to take his mink coat off. “Listen, if my wife ever finds out I was wearin’ a mink, I’ll never get off the hook!” She waved the coat away when he offered it, but Artie persisted. “Hey, don’t worry! There’re plenty where this one came from.” Finally, just to get them moving once more, Sister Creep let him put the tattered coat on her, and she ran her hand across the scorched mink.

  “My wife says I can be a real gentleman when I wanna be,” Artie told her. “Hey, what happened to your neck?”

  Sister Creep touched her throat. “Somebody took something that belonged to me,” she replied, and then she clasped the mink coat around her shoulders to ward off the chill and continued climbing. It was the first time she’d ever worn mink. When she reached the top of the ridge she had the wild urge to shout, “Hey, all you poor, dead sinners! Roll over and take a look at a lady!”

  The decimated city stretched out in all directions. Sister Creep started down the other side of the ridge, with Artie Wisco following close behind. He was still jabbering about Detroit and shoes and finding a phone, but Sister Creep tuned him out. “Show me the water,” she told him when they reached the bottom. He stood looking around for a minute, as if trying to decide where to grab a bus. “This way,” he finally said, and they had to climb again over the rough terrain of broken masonry, smashed cars and twisted metal. So many corpses, in varying degrees of disfigurement, lay underfoot th
at Sister Creep stopped flinching when she stepped on one.

  At the top, Artie pointed. “There it is.” Down in the valley of wreckage below was a fountain of water spewing up from a fissure in the concrete. In the sky to the east, a network of red lightning streaks shot through the clouds, followed by a dull, reverberating explosion.

  They descended into the valley and walked over piles of what had been civilization’s treasures two days before: burned paintings still in their gilded frames; half-melted television sets and stereos; the mangled remains of sterling silver and gold punchbowls, cups, knives and forks, candelabras, music boxes, and champagne buckets; shards of what had been priceless pottery, antique vases, Art Deco statues, African sculpture and Waterford crystal.

  The lightning flashed again, nearer this time, and the red glow sparked off thousands of bits of jewelry scattered in the wreckage—necklaces and bracelets, rings and pins. She found a sign sticking up from the debris—and she almost laughed, but she feared that if she started she might laugh on until her brains burst. The sign said Fifth Avenue.

  “See?” Artie held up mink coats in both hands. “I told you there were more!” He was standing knee-deep in blackened finery: leopardskin cloaks, ermine robes, sealskin jackets. He chose the best coat he could find and shrugged painfully into it.

  Sister Creep paused to poke through a pile of leather bags and briefcases. She found a large bag with a good, solid strap and slipped it over her shoulder. Now she no longer felt quite as naked. She looked up at the black façade of the building that the leather items had blown out of, and she could just make out the remnants of a sign: GUCCI. It was probably the best bag she’d ever had.

  They were almost to the geyser of water when a flash of lightning made things on the ground glint like embers. Sister Creep stopped, leaned down and picked one of them up. It was a piece of glass the size of her fist; it had been melted into a lump, and imbedded in it was a scatter of small jewels—rubies, burning dark red in the gloom. She looked around herself and saw that the lumps of glass lay everywhere in the debris, all of them formed into strange shapes by the heat, as if fashioned by a maniacal glassblower. There was nothing left of the building that stood before her but a fragment of green marble wall. But she looked to the ruins of the structures that stood off to the left, and she squinted to see through the twilight. On an arch of battered marble were letters: TIF ANY.

  Tiffany’s, Sister Creep realized. And… if that was where Tiffany’s had been… then she was standing right in front of…

  “Oh, no,” she whispered as tears sprang to her eyes. “Oh, no… oh, no…”

  She was standing in front of what had been her magic place—the Steuben Glass shop—and all that remained of the beautiful, sculptured treasures were the misshapen lumps at her feet. The place where she’d come to dream at the displays of cool glass was gone, ripped from its foundations and scattered. The sight of this waste against the memory of what had been was as nerve-shattering as if the door of Heaven had been slammed shut in her face.

  She stood motionless, except for the tears crawling over her blistered cheeks.

  “Look at this!” Artie called. He picked up a deformed octagon of glass full of diamonds, rubies and sapphires. “Have you ever seen anythin’ like this before? Look! They’re all over the damned place!” He reached into the debris and brought up handfuls of melted glass studded with precious jewels. “Hey!” He laughed like the bray of a mule. “We’re rich, lady! What’re we gonna buy first?” Still laughing, he threw the pieces of glass into the air. “Anything you want, lady!” he shouted. “I’ll buy you anything you want!”

  The lightning flashed, streaked across the sky, and Sister Creep saw the entire remaining wall of the Steuben Glass shop explode in dazzling bursts of color: ruby red, deep emerald, midnight sapphire blue, smoky topaz and diamond white. She approached the wall, her shoes crunching on grit, reached out and touched it; the wall was full of jewels, and Sister Creep realized that the treasures of Tiffany’s, Fortunoff’s and Cartier’s must’ve blown out of the buildings, whirled in a fantastic hurricane of gemstones along Fifth Avenue—and mingled with the melting glass sculptures of the magic place. The hundreds of jewels in the scorched green marble wall held the light for a few seconds, and then the glow faded like multicolored lamps going out.

  Oh, the waste, she thought. Oh, the awful, awful waste…

  She stepped back, her eyes stinging with tears, and one foot slipped on loose glass. She went down on her rear end and sat there with no more will to get up again.

  “You okay?” Artie walked carefully toward her. “Did you hurt yourself, lady?”

  She didn’t answer. She was tired and used up, and she decided she was going to stay right there in the ruins of the magic place and maybe rest for a while.

  “Aren’t you gonna get up? The water’s just over there.”

  “Leave me alone,” she told him listlessly. “Go away.”

  “Go away? Lady… where the hell am I gonna go?”

  “I don’t care. I don’t give a shit. Not a single… rotten… shit.” She picked up a handful of melted glass and ashes and let the mess fall through her fingers. What was the use of taking one more step? The little man was right. There was nowhere to go. Everything was gone, burned and ruined. “No hope,” she whispered, and she dug her hand deeply into the ashes beside her. “No hope.”

  Her fingers closed around more junk glass, and she brought it up to see what kind of garbage her dreams had been twisted into.

  “What the hell is that?” Artie asked.

  In Sister Creep’s hand was a doughnut-shaped ring of glass with a hole at its center about six or seven inches around. The ring itself was about two inches thick, and maybe seven inches in diameter. Jutting up around the top of the ring at irregular intervals were five glass spikes, one ice-pick thin, a second about as wide as a knife blade, a third hooked, and the other two just plain ugly. Trapped within the glass were hundreds of various-sized dark ovals and squares. Strange, spider web lines interconnected deep within the glass.

  “It’s shit,” she muttered, and she started to toss it back on the trash heap when the lightning flashed again.

  The ring of glass suddenly exploded into fiery light, and for an instant Sister Creep thought it had burst into flame in her hand. She howled and dropped it, and Artie yelled, “Jesus!”

  The light went out.

  Sister Creep’s hand was trembling. She looked at her palm and fingers to make sure she hadn’t been burned; there’d been no heat, just that blinding flare of light. She could still see it, pulsing behind her eyeballs.

  She reached toward it, then pulled her hand back again. Artie came closer and bent down a few feet away.

  Sister Creep let her fingers graze the glass before she jerked her hand away once more. The glass was smooth, like cool velvet. She let her fingers linger on it, and then she gripped it in her hand and picked it up from the ashes.

  The circle of glass remained dark.

  Sister Creep stared at it and felt her heart pounding.

  Deep within the glass circle, there was a flicker of crimson.

  It began to grow like a flame, to spread to other points within the ring, pulsing, pulsing, getting stronger and brighter by the second.

  A ruby the size of Sister Creep’s thumbnail flared bright red; another smaller one winked with light, like a match glowing in the dark. A third ruby burned like a comet, and then a fourth and a fifth, embedded deep inside the cool glass, began to come to life. The red glow pulsed, pulsed—and Sister realized its rhythm was in time with her own heartbeat.

  More rubies glinted, flared, burned like coals. A diamond suddenly glowed a clear blue-white, and a four-carat sapphire exploded into dazzling cobalt fire. As Sister Creep’s heartbeat quickened, so did the bursting into light of the hundreds of jewels trapped within the circle of glass. An emerald glowed cool green, a pear-shaped diamond burned white hot and incandescent, a topaz pulsed a dark reddish b
rown, and now the rubies, sapphires, diamonds and emeralds by the dozen were awakening with light; the light rippled, traveling along the spider web lines that wove all through the glass. The lines were threads of precious metals—gold, silver and platinum—that had melted and been trapped as well, and as they ignited like sizzling fuses they set off still more explosions of emerald, topaz and amethyst’s deep purple.

  The entire ring of glass glowed like a multicolored circle of fire, yet there was no heat under Sister Creep’s fingers. It was pulsating rapidly now, as was her heartbeat, and the vibrant, stunning colors grew still brighter.

  She had never seen anything like this—never, not even in the display windows of any store along Fifth Avenue. Jewels of incredible color and clarity were caught within the glass, some of them upwards of five and six carats, some only tiny specks that nevertheless burned with ferocious energy. The glass circle pulsed… pulsed… pulsed…

  “Lady?” Artie whispered, his swollen eyes shining with light “Can I… hold it?”

  She was reluctant to give it up, but he stared at it with such wonder and longing that she could not refuse him.

  His burned fingers closed around it, and as it left Sister Creep’s grasp the glass circle’s pulse changed, picking up Artie Wisco’s heartbeat. The colors subtly changed as well, as more deep blues and greens swelled and the white-hot glare of diamonds and rubies faded a fraction. Artie caressed it, and its velvety surface reminded him of the way his wife’s skin had felt when she was young and they were newlyweds just starting out. He thought of how much he loved his wife, and how he longed for her. He had been wrong, he realized in that instant. There was somewhere to go. Home, he thought. I’ve got to get back home.

  After a few minutes he carefully gave the object back to Sister Creep. It changed again, and she sat holding it between her hands and peering into its beautiful depths.