Seven Shoes

by Mark Davis

  “Are you Karl Pedersen?”

  Freya laughed.

  “I am exactly who you see. I am always who you need me to be.”

  The image of the goddess pulsed with electric vitality. Her head turned and she cast a soft and gentle smile.

  “But enough about me, dear, let’s get down to brass tacks. I want to talk to you about taking the next step on our journey. Please open your envelope.”

  “Before I do, why the indoor skydiving?”

  “We discussed this before. To help you conquer your biggest foe, the fear that holds you back. By floating, we disconnect ourselves from the fatal pull of gravity, the ground truths that have been gripping us, holding us fast to the earth.”

  “And you think I am afraid?”

  “I have been with you my dear Elizabeth when you were overcome like a little girl. I so wanted to hold your hand and stroke your hair. I just want to help.”

  “And what do you think I am afraid of?”

  The smile dropped. The goddess receded slightly. The corners of her eyes and mouth drooped.

  “Oh darling, why do you make me state the obvious? You are afraid of the Edge itself … that you will follow the others, just as your father and your brother did.”

  “I want no such thing.”

  “Of course not. I don’t believe that you would want that, not for a minute. But it is all the worse for the fact that you might do something you do not want to do.”

  Elizabeth wanted to scream at her. Instead, she turned away and focused on her breathing.

  “And so what is this?” she said, holding up the envelope.

  “Please see for yourself.”

  Elizabeth ripped the envelope’s seal, held it upside down and tapped it. A pill in a plastic bag fell into her lap.

  “Another trip?”

  “Another journey.”

  “Why? What are you trying to show me?”

  Freyja paused, strands of hair roiling in the light wind of her digital paradise.

  “I am trying to show you, Elizabeth, that what you take for reality is but a screen, that there are deeper realities not in some other mystical or supernatural realm, but right here, just underneath what we usually touch and perceive. It is all around you, now, and you can choose many paths to open it up and use it to go wherever you want to go.”

  “By leaping to my death?”

  “Only if you believe in death. If you do, then you will die. If you don’t you can find the truth of your existence in that. But there are other ways. Through meditation. Or prayer. Or by taking this pill and letting your inner eye open to the truth that is all around you throughout the day as you work, eat, drink, make love and sleep.”

  Elizabeth again wanted to tell her that she believed in the reality of death. She had seen it many times on metal tables with runnels. It stank.

  “You want me to kill myself for you, just like the others. That would be your ultimate sick joke, wouldn’t it?”

  “Is what I am talking about really so outlandish? Science today talks about quantum consciousness, multiverses, near death experiences. No, Elizabeth, you don’t have to take extreme measures to see what I am talking about. But if you take this pill, I promise that you will finally see where I live … and if you still believe I should be brought to justice, well, then I shall turn myself in.”

  Elizabeth took the pill out of the bag and held it up in a vise between her thumb and index finger.

  “Is this the same pill as before?”

  “The very same chemical.”

  “And you will turn yourself in if I come across the rainbow bridge and still cry ‘bullshit?’”

  A long pause.

  “Elizabeth, I am confident you will come to see the value of what I am doing. But if not, I will end all my contacts now.”

  “So you are still doing this, with others?”

  “Many. All around the world.”

  “And you promise to stop?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you promise to turn yourself in?”

  “Yes.”

  Elizabeth put the pill on her tongue.

  It was a small pill, after all. She swallowed it without water.

  ___________

  Elizabeth closed the shell of her computer and turned off the power. She turned off her smartphone as well. She did not want Freyja messing with her head while she tripped. She read for a good twenty minutes and then set her book down.

  Nothing yet.

  She thought about calling George, but couldn’t bring herself to do it. He would be upset that she had taken the pill and she didn’t want to have to endure his disapproval. Besides, she could handle this. And if taking the pill succeeded in unmasking Freyja, or at least getting her to lay off a fresh round of victims, it would be well worth it.

  Elizabeth poured herself a water and used the bathroom. She looked up from the washbasin to regard herself in the bathroom mirror.

  The surface of the bathroom mirror shimmered, as if she were looking down at it through an inch of water. She poked an index finger in the water and made quicksilver ripples. She turned off the bathroom light and looked around her hotel room.

  Everything was in place, the bed, the furniture, the lamps, her computer. But something was different, a flattening of reality, as if she had just realized that all the dimensions between these objects was an illusion, a whole world projected on a screen. She was living in a hologram that was really a flat world, one that hid a greater, more numinous world underneath the surface of things, just like Freyja had said.

  Elizabeth went to the window to look down at the street. More flat world illusion. People and cars and street lights and stores. All projected on a screen, a movie she had mistaken for reality.

  The pedestrians and the traffic sped up and slowed down, sped up and slowed down. She could will them to do that. She willed them to stop. And they did.

  Amid the stopped cars and frozen people, a blue SUV tore up the middle of the road and came to a screeching halt. A naked man stepped out from the driver’s seat onto the pavement. Jeremy looked up at her, the top of his head flattened and his face crushed by the fall.

  “Oh dear Jesus.”

  Elizabeth turned from the window and fell into a crouch.

  That was too much. She had not expected anything like that.

  She should call George. He would be angry, but she needed him. Where was her phone? She heard someone in the bathroom, calling out to her.

  “George?”

  She could hear someone, a man.

  “George?”

  She turned on the bathroom light.

  It wasn’t George. It was Mike, her brother. He rested on the lip of the large bathtub of the shower stall with a small razor in his lap. Mike’s cheeks glistened with tears as bright red blood spurt from his wrists, pumping into to a large, black clot coagulating in the basin.

  Elizabeth’s scream welled up in her gut and rushed out of her like a gale. She fell to her knees and drew in a breath as if someone had punched her in the stomach. Mike couldn’t speak either. All he could do is look at her and sob, eyes brimming with tears and regret and shame and horror.

  She wanted to hold him, grasp him and pull him back.

  But there was no approaching Mike, no saving him from the invisible boundary that separates the damned in hell from their loved ones.

  So Elizabeth squatted in front of Mike on her knees, keeping faith, brother and sister sobbing together.

  The bedside phone rang.

  Elizabeth went down on all fours, still sobbing, and looked up.

  Mike was gone.

  She pulled herself up, went to the table and lifted the receiver. The voice on the phone sounded tinny, a man in a bathysphere who said he was the assistant manager and that there had been reports of noise from her room.

  “I’ll turn down the television,” Elizabeth said and hung up.

  The room
was too small. It brought things too close to her. The phone rang again and Elizabeth ran out of the room, down the stairwell and through the lobby.

  It was dark and cool outside. It felt better. It had to be better to be outside.

  She passed a curio shop, the front window with a shelf full of cute plastic trolls for tourists. The plastic trolls watched her, their blue heads turning as she passed them by, keeping track of her so she could be followed by their kin.

  Elizabeth stepped up her gait.

  The people on the street seemed bothered by her. Sometimes they stared, sometimes they looked away. An attendant at a petrol station glared at Elizabeth as she walked by, his head also turning with her as she passed.

  She looked away from him.

  Mustn’t look into people’s eyes.

  The colors of fabrics, sweaters and scarfs, snow equipment and candy in the shop windows were vivid, as if she realized that apparently solid objects were no more than the solid manifestations of colors. It was color that was real, not the world. The edges of the stone buildings seemed sharper, almost like gray razors. The bright lights of the store fronts guttered like candle flames, announcing the transience of material existence, a vibratory reality behind this one, a juddering skull beneath the placid face of the apparent world.

  Then there were the things, the nisse, little people in the shadows. They tracked her in perfect silence, always staying on the periphery of her vision, darting behind trash cans and cars whenever she dared to look directly at them.

  “My lover is the sun, golden and warm,” she said to a passerby, an older man who started walking faster to get away. “But get too close to the sun and he will burn you.”

  Elizabeth was unable to feel her legs moving and feet connecting with the sidewalk. She was floating smoothly above the concrete, riding on a current that flowed along the street to lead her into the park.

  “My lover is the moon, cool and beautiful,” she said to an elderly woman who looked startled. “But get too close to the moon and she will freeze you.”

  She came to the park entrance and went inside, following the well-lit walkway to the place where the statues writhed, while the little people slithered and bunched like weasels in the dark recesses of the park. The talk between the statues was almost overwhelming, a din of cackles, laughter, moans, cries and whispers coming from all directions.

  Elizabeth walked up to her father hanging from a bronze tree.

  “Are you happy now? Is this what you wanted?”

  Asshole. Selfish fucker. Look at what you did to Michael you fucking fuck with the earphones and the silly haircut for a dad you asshole, look at what you’ve done to us … all because mom died …

  Look at what you did to us.

  “Look.”

  Someone was screaming. Maybe it was her.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The holes in the ceiling tiles were tiny pores in the epidermis of a giant that dripped a mist of humid sweat throughout the night. The pores themselves were nothing. And nothing has a way of expanding and meeting until it transcends and engulfs all dimensions.

  If she could float upward, Elizabeth could enter through one of those holes to coast in cool, liberated space. But she couldn’t float. The restraints on her wrists kept her firmly anchored to the metal bars of a hospital bed.

  This left her at the mercy of the nurses. She watched them, the way they looked at her, the knowing looks they exchanged when they passed by her room. The nurses were telepaths who shared thoughts about her, to trick Elizabeth, to keep her here and contained, to keep her from discovering the truth about Freyja.

  Elizabeth read the little tag on the plastic bag of her IV.

  Thorazine.

  That explained the dryness in the back of her mouth, the slight pounding headache. Of course they would give her that, the prescribed anti-psychotic administered around the world. Another one of their clichés.

  What they didn’t realize is that sanity is relative. The DMT pill she had taken had accelerated Elizabeth closer to the speed of light, making all her motions and words appear bizarre and distorted only to those left behind in the slow world. The nurses could not understand that in Elizabeth’s frame of reference, everything was proportional, everything made sense.

  And so the nurses conspired, sending each other telepathic messages to keep the charade going, moving up and down the hall outside her room with tennis shoes that squeaked on the tile floor.

  Nice touch, that, the tennis shoes. Keeping it real.

  The Thorazine made her sleepy. Elizabeth patted down pine needles and leaves around her nest, scrunched her arms as close to her body as her restraints would allow, and curled up and went to sleep like a momma bear.

  Hibernation.

  ___________

  George was walrus faced again, his large blue eyes intent with walrus concerns, his grey mustache drooping with walrus worries.

  “Elizabeth, how are you doing now?”

  “The Thorazine is drying me out. A nap did me good. Still a bit trippy.”

  “You seem to be better than you were even just an hour ago.”

  “You were here an hour ago?”

  “Elizabeth, I have been with you practically all night.”

  She had no idea.

  “I guess you want to know why.”

  George said nothing, his body stiff and erect, expression stern, eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep.

  “Freyja promised me that if I took her pill, she would terminate her communication with any other potential victim.”

  “You cannot know what promises Freyja will or will not honor,” George said. “She is the soul of deceit.”

  “I guess in the back of my mind I am still worried about Max, and that if I took the pill it would encourage Freyja to keep her word to stay away from my son.”

  George’s posture and expression softened.

  “I suppose I can understand that.”

  Powerful emotions welled up in her chest. Elizabeth gave into a brief cry. She knew her face and voice were distorted, making her ugly, but she was not embarrassed to cry in front of George. As she moved in her bed, her hands pulled against the restraints, which did embarrass her.

  “I’m sorry … I’m so sorry, George, I should have trusted you.”

  “You sure should have, Elizabeth.”

  George leaned over the rail and dabbed her eyes with a tissue.

  “I’ll get them to take these damned things off you,” he said gently.

  The cry had passed through her like a sudden squall that left a clear sky. Elizabeth felt all business now.

  “George, she had to have upped the dose,” she said.

  “Based on what I saw, I’d say by three times.”

  “So let’s get back to work. It’s not Karl, you know that. We’re close, I know it, let’s catch this bitch once and for all.”

  George leaned back and stiffened again.

  “Elizabeth, once you are released, I am to settle you in for the night in your hotel. Tomorrow morning, Charlie Bowie will escort you to the airport for your return home.”

  It should not have come as a surprise, but it did.

  “And Lars?”

  “He is beside himself with anger at you. He refuses to come see you. Possession of DMT is a Schedule I drug violation in Norway, a major felony. His superiors are all over him. He had to disclose your relationship. He told me he feels that you made him out to be a fool.”

  “Is it really that bad?”

  “Elizabeth, by the time they came for you, you were in the park shaking your fist in rage at statues and screaming at them.”

  ___________

  Elizabeth felt empty and groggy, the DMT burned out of her system, dopamine wrung out from her traumatized brain. A good night’s sleep would do her wonders. Then she could sleep some more on the plane.

  George checked her out of the hospital. She had to endure a lecture about the
dangers of psychedelics from a young physician who could have been one of her graduate students. George promised to watch over her.

  They took a cab to her hotel. As the driver maneuvered through late afternoon traffic, Elizabeth leaned over and rested her head on George’s shoulder.

  “Screaming in the park where the bronze trees are?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I was berating my father,” she said.

  “I would suppose so.”

  “Vigeland’s bronze trees?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think I remember. I was reasoning with my father. Trying to make him understand.”

  “I know that, Elizabeth.”

  “So you will carry on here, with PIG?”

  “Until we catch Freyja. In the meantime, I will Skype with you and keep you apprised of developments.”

  “Is that wise?”

  Any digital communications could be picked up by Freyja.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head, “I suppose not, now that you mention it. But at the correct time, at least we can begin to share notes on the case. For our paper.”

  Elizabeth watched the storefronts slide by. She no longer cared about the paper.

  “You do it, George. It’s yours.”

  “Don’t make any hasty decisions. Think it over.”

  “I’ve got a lot to think over.”

  ___________

  George helped Elizabeth pack most of her things. He offered to sleep on the couch and keep an eye on her, but Elizabeth declined. Satisfied that she was in for the night, he gave her a hug, kissed her on the forehead, made her promise to call as soon as she was stateside and left.

  Elizabeth appreciated all that George had done, but she didn’t need him hovering. She was fine. And besides, he had suffered a mostly sleepless night. He deserved better than to sleep on a couch.

  An hour later, there was a soft knock on the door. Elizabeth looked out the peephole and saw Nasrin standing in the hallway.

  “Come in,” she said.

  Nasrin entered. She looked crisp and prepared for anything in one of her dark business suits.