by A. W. Hill
The women arrived at the overlook and took their places along the rocky wall like soldiers on a parapet, while the men descended into the canyon, singing their grim alabados, marking time with the stroke of stalk against torn skin. From a distance too great to see blood or feel empathy, their procession was as fiercely erotic as an El Greco canvas, but eroticism is what distance from violence allows.
Raszer saw Ruthie brace her left arm on a boulder and lean hard into the canyon, shading her eyes from the midday glare of the sun. She turned abruptly to her mother and shouted something urgently. Then she pivoted about and, for a few moments, scanned the massive slope behind her. Raszer knew she was looking for him. One by one, the older women fell to their knees and crossed themselves, followed by the younger ones. Only Ruthie remained standing, and suddenly she bolted, following the men down into the arroyo.
Raszer began to run, too, and his heart was again in his throat. He swung wide of the women, to the side of the overlook opposite Ruthie, where a steep trail spilled rock debris down the walls of the canyon. The far side of the chasm rose in steppes, one of them a small butte of soft stone, pink as flesh. On the butte, a stake had been erected, and on the stake hung a naked man, his bearded chin fallen to his chest, his bald head crisscrossed with lacerations. Ruthie raced ahead of the men, who had slowed their pace to gape at the sight. When she was within thirty feet, she began to scream.
“Shaaaaaams! Shaaaaams!”
Raszer scrambled down the nearly vertical rockfall, tumbling twice and tearing open the skin on his wrist and elbow. He raced the perimeter of the butte to the only clear path up, the path that Ruthie had taken, and the closer he got, the more wind was pulled from his lungs.
Ruthie tried frantically to shinny and claw her way up, to reach her friend’s feet, as if she imagined she might pull the nail from his flesh and set him free. By the time Raszer reached her side, her hands and bare feet were full of splinters, but she would not stop climbing, and she would not stop screaming.
They had crucified him on a stauros, a single, massive upright at least fourteen feet high, and Ruthie must have known they’d done it for her sake. This was the way the Witnesses claimed it had been done to Jesus. There was no true cross, only this profane axle joining heaven and hell. Shams’ arms had been extended above his head, his wrists bound to the stake, and the rope looped around his neck so that when he tired, strangulation would follow. A single spike had been driven through his feet. The high sun and the wind’s hot breath had already dried the river of blood that had coursed down his thighs from the wound left when they’d cut off his genitals.
Raszer pulled Ruthie down into his arms and collapsed to the pink dust, crushing her into a fetal ball, rolling her to and fro. When the screaming stopped, she began to moan, and he moaned with her. He said nothing. Nothing would have done.
The hermanos slowly gathered round, hands clasped in front, eyes down. Angel had been relieved of his cross and came forward, falling to his knees, still carrying a whisper of the song on his breath. He looked up, then at Raszer and Ruthie, and reached his hand forward to touch her trembling shoulder.
Raszer nodded to Angel and said quietly, “Her friend. A good friend.” Then, just as quietly, he cursed. Nothing ever changed. Herod and Pilate still ran the show.
“¿Porque, amigo?” Angel asked. “¿Porque?”
“No se,” Raszer said. “No se.”
After a few minutes, Ruthie’s mother arrived and knelt at Ruthie’s side, and Raszer gingerly handed the girl over.
“Who did this?” asked Constance Endicott, her throat tight with fear.
Raszer thought he had better not answer. Instead, he stumbled to his feet,
opened his pack, and hammered a piton into the stake at a height of about three feet. He took a step up and pounded in another one, and that brought his shoulders to the level of Shams’ head. He took the rope from around his neck, and as Shams’ jaw slackened slightly, Raszer noticed that a small paper scroll had been inserted into his mouth. Upon removal, it appeared to be a plain white business envelope, sealed with an extravagant amount of old-fashioned, red sealing wax.
On closer inspection, Raszer discovered embedded in the glob of wax the severed front half of Shams’ tongue.
A cloud passed over the sun, and the butte fell into shadow. Over the crest of the front range was the faintest purple penumbra: an approaching spring cloudburst. As the ropes binding his wrists fell away, Shams’ arms dropped, but slowly, like a bird folding its wings. With the envelope in his hand and Shams’ torso laid over his right shoulder, Raszer carefully descended and laid the corpse on the soft rock. He stripped off his topshirt and laid it over Shams’ midsection, covering the wound. He did not want anyone but the coroner to see that the killers—in the fashion of barbarians from time immemorial—had stuffed the severed organs into the hole.
As if they had been rehearsing it for centuries, the women set about tending to the body. From the top of the butte, there was an unimpeded view of Pima Road and two other fire roads ascending the range from the southeast. Dust rose in small cyclones from all three roads, and from the dust emerged three long black cars.
Raszer registered each car, then dropped his gaze and carefully peeled open the envelope, working his fingers around Shams’ tongue. The note was written in Arabic, and it took Raszer three or four readings before he had it.
The man who plays at both sides in the same game
defeats only himself. This is the end to which all
duplicity leads. Fear the name with two faces.
It was a warning, of course—but one he wouldn’t heed. Raszer took one more look at Shams and realized that he no longer felt for him the thing known as pity—only a kind of kinship.
So be it.
That meant he was ready for them. The protagonists of ancient myth sometimes seemed absent of feelings. He thought it more likely that they allowed themselves to feel only what they could afford to feel.
TWENTY-TWO
When it was all over, when all procedures had been attended to, all reports filed, and the body of Shams of Taos lay still and cold in the mortuary, Raszer returned to his room to pack his bag. The day had turned overcast and gusty, and as it dropped into evening, cold enough to light a small fire in the kiva. He wanted a drink—the only outward sign that he was unsettled—but denied himself that anesthesia, knowing he had one more New Mexican night to get through on his wits before departure.
Departure for where, exactly, and by what mode of travel were undetermined. He’d counted on one last dispatch from Shams. All he had was a direction to show up before sunrise at the Rio Grande Gorge—like being told to go to the Sonoran desert and wait for the saucers. It was so murky that he could not even bring himself to brief Monica. She’d immediately suspect a set-up and make him question his instinct, which was that he should be there, no matter what.
The local cops were out chasing banshees in black limos, and had by now undoubtedly called in the state police and the FBI. Raszer wasn’t expecting any arrests. The killers weren’t out cruising old Route 66, waiting to be caught in the snares of an APB. It was beginning to seem as if they could materialize anywhere at any time. As if their black wings were beating the still air in a dead space between two worlds.
Shams’ death, like Harry Wolfe’s, was on him. It had already begun to merge with the larger stain on his soul, the one that spread like red wine on a tablecloth—a disease of his psychic skin. He was going to have a lot to answer for when he faced his maker, but the more pressing question was what he’d have to show. Was the world safer for these deaths? Were the spiritual predators and soul thieves any less likely to prey? It wouldn’t do to agonize. That was what they wanted.
The Devil’s goal was to make sure that you thought of no one else but him. Jealous, like a lover. Soul by soul, the ancient, protective magic was being snuffed out in the world by the ardor of evil.
It was impossible to know what sort of informa
tion they might have extracted from Shams under torture, but Raszer guessed they had gotten an earful of artful bullshit and nothing more. Shams had been a soldier long before and long after his tours of duty. And, as the old Indian had said, he’d left his body behind. The thing to do now was to follow his ghost, and that meant following his directions.
Finding Ruthie, and finding an ally in Shams, had briefly reignited Raszer’s passion for the mission. That fire, and its warmth, were gone now. Ruthie had gone back to the trailer with her mother, pale and voiceless, too shaken to say goodbye. He reminded himself as he stuffed the last article into his pack that the surest sign that the endgame had commenced was that comfort had fled. A certain chill made itself felt, and a loss of equilibrium that he felt in his gut and associated with going too high on the swing set as a child. Colors bled from the world. It was the sensory experience of an animal.
All of his provisions went into a collapsible mountain pack with a light aluminum frame. It could be carried like a duffel or worn like a trekker’s backpack. He carried three full changes of clothing and the standard survival gear for an extended pack-in to a wilderness area. Along with these, Raszer had his climbing kit; his combat knife; the gunmetal case containing his paralytic darts; a store of antibiotics and disinfectants; ephedra for staving off sleep and keeping his head clear; a selection of garden-grown herbs for teas, unguents, and purgatives; and numerous sources of instant protein. The only electronics he carried—aside from the tracer chip—was a wireless device dubbed the Ionophone, custom-designed by a spyware company in Copenhagen. It served as cell phone, web terminal, camera, GPS mapper, and general lifeline. This, however, would be left behind at some point, because what oriented him also exposed him.
Raszer dropped off the Jeep at the Enterprise lot in Taos, leaving the keys and a note on the front seat, and hired an all-night taxi service to take him to the Rio Grande Gorge. It didn’t take the look on the driver’s face to tell Raszer it was an odd destination: Who but a suicide plotter heads to a four-hundred-foot gorge in the last bleak hour of night? Raszer had set off for stranger places, but never with so little orientation.
It was predawn when he pulled his pack from the taxi. They were on the bridge that spanned the gorge, and the dark gave no hint of the vastness of the place. Only the wind, roaring down the great gash of the Continental Divide, informed him that he was in the midst of something biblically large. The wind masked even the rumble of rushing water five hundred feet below. It tore at the skirts of his duster and lifted his close-cropped hair. It filled his ears with the seashell sound of a limitless ocean and chilled him to the bone. He was on top of the world, on a suspension bridge, and he was alone with the alone.
This is it, Raszer, he said to himself, and laughed darkly. This is what you live for. It occurred to him that he might actually be some sort of exotic idiot. Who the hell lives for the frisson of holy terror?
The feeling was on him as soon as the taxi’s taillights had vanished. Vertigo, body and soul. Exacerbated by the darkness and the ever-shifting wind. He couldn’t find his center, and he dropped to his knees, fearing that otherwise he might get sucked over the rail. It was low here, a perfect place for jumpers. The desert West was proceed-at-your-own-risk country. It swallowed up victims without offering so much as a burp.
In his mind’s eye, Raszer saw Shams on the stake and instinctively reached for his own groin. My cross will come, he thought. I won’t come out whole. He crouched, clutching his belly like a World War I grunt on the Marne with a bayonet wound in his gut. He heard Ruthie screaming in the back of his head and took another hit. Not so tough, are you, Raszer? Not so intrepid. The world at its blackest is a shade too black for you. Evil takes great pains to keep up with the times, while good recedes into a paradisiacal past. Can’t go back. Can only go on to the end, and hope that the end is also a better beginning. C’mon, he whispered to the wind. Amaze me. Show me something I haven’t seen before.
The wind began to have a pulse, the cyclical throb of a truck engine laboring to turn over after weeks of subzero . He saw the pulse as well as felt it: As first light broke over the eastern foothills, he perceived the wind and the mineral grit it carried as incandescent and wavelike, as if the giant trough of the Rio Grande Gorge had filled with a primeval ocean of dust and he was about to drown. Wave after wave hit him, and it was all he could do to pull himself upright to the rail. The pulse grew more rapid, ricocheting off the canyon walls, deafening, and then suddenly the surging stopped. A curtain of sunlit dust hung across the gorge like a veil, and through it he saw a moving form: a black, avian form coming toward him with its talons extended.
The skin of the helicopter was as black and sleek as a licorice jellybean, its hull as broad as a small gunship. It was clearly of military origin, but had been stripped of any sort of emblem or identifying mark. It was a transport chopper, but hardly utilitarian in design. It had the look of an exotic prototype, probably commissioned by the Pentagon for a few hundred million and then pawned off on the private sector. It was also a right-wing paranoid’s nightmare, down to the dreadlocked pilot with the toffee skin and oversize sunglasses, who set the ship down on the bridge so gently that the resulting thump felt like a giant cat’s paw.
The passenger side of the bubble slipped open silently; the pilot turned and spread his lips to flash a wide, brilliant smile.
Raszer lifted his pack and walked slowly toward the chopper, one fingertip skimming the railing. The giant propeller thrummed its oscillating, dragonfly tremolo, beating the still air into sun-gilded froth. The pilot kept on beaming. Was it a welcoming smile or a we got you, fucker smile? No way to tell, not even with his antennae up. No frame of reference for something this bizarre. Here was the black chariot, comin’ for to carry him home.
Inside his skull, the land around him unrolled, its features flattening into shapes on a gameboard. And it hit him that from this moment on, he was in the game, and that this was the only way to gauge things. In the game, he would, of course, step into the black helicopter.
Shams had made it so.
It was written.
It was a game but not a game. Just the sort of cognitive displacement the architects of alternate reality gaming had aimed for. A mindfuck. And the only way to play it was to leave himself behind. If he thought about what else he might be leaving—if he thought about his daughter, or Monica, or Ruthie—he would not be able to play. And so he put them all off the gameboard and proceeded alone.
The pilot rose to help Raszer stow the heavy pack in the rear. Then he took his seat, motioned for Raszer to buckle up, and prepared to ascend. He wore a white cotton shirt and shorts, and sandals. He looked like Ziggy Marley at twenty-four. How he’d come to fly a bird like this was anybody’s guess. There was no sign of a weapon, but the instrument panel gave evidence of military application. After a few minutes, the radio crackled into life, but the pilot squelched the signal and moved instead to slip in a John Coltrane CD. They flew straight up the gorge, skirting the pink canyon walls, riding so low that the runners occasionally sliced through the crest of the Rio Grande’s waves.
In a manner of speaking, they had already entered another country.
They were headed north into Colorado. A private airfield was Raszer’s guess, but who knew? He didn’t ask the pilot; he offered only the opinion that Coltrane’s modal soprano sax and flying went well together.
“Nothin’ like the ’Trane to put ya head up in the air,” the pilot agreed. It occurred to Raszer that the pilot might be good and stoned, an impression reinforced by the faint perfume of hashish in the cabin.
Raszer recalled The Gauntlet’s initiatory greeting, and inquired of his pilot whether he knew of anyone who could make use of “a keen mind and a steady heart.”
“Matter of fact, now,” the pilot replied, grinning, “I do.”
When the southern Rockies appeared, they were like a levee of stone scooped into place by giant hands, a massive dike to hold back the
inland sea. There was snow on the peaks, but not much. It had been dry again this year. After another twenty minutes or so, the pilot turned to Raszer and said, “Almost home.”
Raszer looked at the pilot and asked simply, “Will I be with friends?”
The pilot lowered his glasses. “Unless I’m mistaken,” he replied. “You’re not here to make friends.” He grinned. “But you might find some along the way.”
“Did you know Shams?”
“Ev’rybody who was in Babylon knew Shams,” the pilot answered. “Or knew about him. Nobody ever went native like Shams. Shit, you could put me down naked with my ancestors’ people in Ghana, and I couldn’t go as native as that motherfucker. Some guys just got to see it from the other side. He hated what we were doin’ over there, but there wasn’t anybody you’d rather be next to when the bullets flew.”
“I would’ve guessed that,” said Raszer.
“Hang on,” said the pilot. “I’m takin’ you down.”
Raszer took one look outside the bubble and felt his pulse rise. In the space of their brief conversation, the chopper had descended dramatically, and the serrated edges of at least a dozen peaks were within shaving distance of the runners. How that had happened, he couldn’t guess. “Down where?” Raszer asked, seeing only steep runs caked with hard, perennial snow. “Are we going to slalom into the airfield?”