Devil in the Wires

by Tim Lees

  “How’s it going?” I tipped an imaginary hat, and the shadows flickered in response. The words echoed—­it seemed that other voices took them up, twisted them around, till they were scarcely more than animal sounds, grunts and growls and low, threatening reverberations.

  “Is this the way it used to be, back in the old days? Being worshipped? This what you’re used to?”

  Something hissed inside my ear.

  I said, “What’s the link? Your ­people and mine? What connects us, then?”

  The noises started up again, muttering and whispering. After a time, a figure rose before me. It was like an animal, twisted up into the shape of a man. Its shoulders flexed. Its legs grew long and stilt-­like, stretching skin and sinew with an ugly ripping sound. Club-­like paws articulated strangely human gestures, complex movements like the words of sign language. Sharp claws scraped the air. The head seemed much too large, and its black lips peeled back over row on row of teeth, regressing endlessly, as in some twisted fairground mirror.

  I remembered Dayling in that dim-­lit Paris church, staring at something in the air, something I couldn’t see. What I saw now, I was fairly sure, must be illusory, the product of a direct stimulation of the brain. The thing looked solid down to the shins; then it trailed away in ghosts and shadows, its feet invisible.

  It pantomimed. It posed. It made a curious, imploring gesture.

  It wouldn’t show up on the monitors or TV screens. The night staff, if they were watching, would see me standing here talking to myself.

  If they could see me. If I was still there, really there . . . I had a sudden, frightening doubt about that, but I shelved it, nervously . . .

  “Chris.”

  This, too, was illusion, the sound of my own name, pulled from the tangled sounds, the glossolalia.

  I remembered the Colonel: Who else is here?

  It answered, as if listening to my thoughts: “I’m here, Chris. You know I’m here.”

  The animal figure disappeared. No: someone stepped in front of it, usurped the place it took up in my vision. This was someone new, someone I recognized. The shadow of Assur still moved behind him, folding and unfolding, trapped in the containment fields, but the newcomer was unrestrained. He strolled across the compound, stopped before me, put his head on one side, and he smiled. “You guessed, Chris, didn’t you? You knew that I was here. I must say, I’m impressed.”

  Chapter 59

  Talking with God

  Once, he’d looked like me—­exactly like me. A mirror image, literally. In the years between, I had grown older, and, although he hadn’t aged, he’d changed in other ways, his features growing somehow more harmonious, until there was a kind of otherworldly beauty there. This was a fragment of a god, when all was said and done, and while the parent had been vast and brutal and half animal, it seemed the creature who now stood before me had absorbed a far more human view of godhood, a notion of perfection taken, as it may be, from my own unconscious mind. This god-­man, this Christ, this Dionysus, this Hercules . . . this killer, who sustained himself on death, who drained the life from living things, leaving just a husk behind . . .

  “I thought it might be you,” I said.

  “You heard us, didn’t you? You heard us talking.”

  “That’s one thing did it, yeah.”

  “Careless of me. Foolish, even. Yet I so much wanted to see you, Chris, to spend a little time there, in your presence. Is that strange? Sentimental? But you must have known I’d be involved here, didn’t you? You must have guessed.”

  “Is it you who’s killing ­people?”

  “Oh no. The agent for that, I think you’ll find to be entirely human.” He smiled, and leaned back as if against a wall; but there was no wall there. His body simply hung at this bizarre angle, untouched by gravity. “Look to yourselves, therefore,” he said.

  I let that go. I said, “You’re Shailer’s ‘expert.’ His consultant.”

  “Better than that. Shailer believes in me. He’s utterly sincere. You can’t imagine that, can you? That Shailer has the power to believe? He’s always had it. He knows this phase of human life is passing. The rest of you fear change, and yet he welcomes it. Without change he’ll be no one, and he’ll go on being no one . . .”

  “He’s not exactly no one.”

  “No? You want to know how Shailer sees the world?”

  He hadn’t moved, but all at once I could have reached out and touched him, he was so close. I shrank back, remembering the trail of corpses that he’d left, the withered and deformed remains . . .

  “His life is small, Chris. Very small. He never left the schoolyard. In his head, the world around him is a child’s world, full of bigger boys, pushing and squabbling, noisy and threatening. Boys who use him. Boys who taunt him. Adults who fail to notice him at all, which is altogether worse. Imagine that, Chris. If you could peel away the layers, peel away the talk and the sophistication, that’s what you’d find. A little boy, scared, and clamoring for somebody’s attention. He’s no longer sure quite whose.”

  It made a kind of sense to me. It even made me smile a little, too. “So what then? He pals up with the school bully?”

  The figure smiled, mirroring me, with my lips, and my face. But the smile was slyer, knowing and superior.

  “Little lives,” he said. “You never even have the time to grow up, do you? You don’t live long enough.” The smile was gone now. “To Shailer, the world exists only to thwart his plans. His needs for wealth, for power, for the company and admiration of his fellows . . . The world must be subdued, forced to give what Adam Shailer needs. And here is one more matter: the more he gains the things he wants, the more he sees hostility around him, the more defensive he becomes. But in a different system, a system that he might control . . . he could be someone special. Someone he’s only dreamed about . . .”

  I stepped back, putting distance between us. He merely smiled again, held out his hands.

  “I’ve used no influence on him, Chris. Nothing more than argument. A business proposal. He saw the sense of it immediately.” He glanced up. “It’s almost dark now. Walk with me, will you? Walk with me.”

  “Tell me. Your ‘consultancy.’ What does it involve?”

  “He sought me out. You know that? I set him tasks. I outlined goals over the coming years. I wanted this,” he gestured about him, “and I wanted you here, Chris. I wanted you tied in to what will happen, to be part of it. Isn’t that good? Isn’t that special?”

  “Are you really here? Or am I just imagining?”

  “Here? I’m here. Hiding in the shadows, in the nimbus of the Old One. Feel—­I’ll touch you in your head—­”

  I jumped, caught by a sudden—­I can’t describe it: an intimacy almost too painful to endure.

  Behind him now, the deeper shadows rose up, wings unfolding into patterns that went on and on. A kaleidoscope of darkness, endlessly opening, endlessly changing.

  I looked away.

  “He’s woken. Your doing. He’s older than the rest of us. He was here when your kind lived in trees, Chris. When you were little rats, scurrying back and forth . . . Old Bone Eater, Old Gut Chewer . . .”

  The darkness surged behind him, breaking into wild, fantastic shapes. I caught a scent of dung and urine, a scent of animal sweat, so strong it almost made me gag. I saw the throat lined with teeth. Its innards were a void, a vastness, and to be swallowed there would be to lose oneself forever.

  It reared, a throat without a head, a worm that stretched itself through history, from one end to the other.

  I could hear my pulse beat in my ears. My hands were shaking and I jammed them in my pockets. I tried to make my voice sound calm and measured when I spoke again.

  “Now what? We collaborate? We’re pals, or something?”

  “It’s happening already.” He leaned back. “I saved you
r friend, Chris. She cried out to me, thinking I was you. And so I saved her.”

  “As I heard it, the dog did the job, not you.”

  “The dog wouldn’t have reached her. The dog was going . . . slowly. Very, very slowly. It would have taken him a thousand years to get to her.” As if in imitation, he, too, put his hands into his pockets. “I mean that literally, Chris. In her terms—­a thousand years. Time isn’t constant, and the god will bless the hunters when they do his will . . .”

  “All right, all right. Let’s have some names, then, shall we? Who’s doing the killing? And why?”

  “Names, I can’t give you. As for why—­because they like it. Because it makes them feel good. Because it fills the emptiness. They kill, and they have access to a god. They kill, and he will raise them from the flesh, out of the long slow grind of days, the death-­trap of their lives. You understand? No? But you need to understand, Chris. You need to.”

  He stepped across the courtyard, graceful as a dancer. He wore black now—­a black shirt, black pants—­and I couldn’t remember if that’s how he’d been dressed from the start, or if he’d first appeared nude, or what—­as if the details of his looks just wouldn’t stay clear in my mind.

  “This is a dream,” I said. But I could feel the tiles under my feet, the moist air on my skin.

  I followed him towards the exit, and the door came open without tripping the alarm, and we stepped outside. I saw cars sweep by, I heard the roar of engines. I saw the lights of an apartment block, just peeping through the trees. I saw the red glow of a late-­night barbecue from the campers in the park.

  And then he raised his hand, inscribed a sign onto the air. And everything was gone.

  The road was gone. The parking lot was gone. The lights of the city, winked out in an instant.

  Some kind of night bird called, over and over, and a second answered it from much further away. Their cries were unfamiliar to me.

  A big, yellow moon slid from behind a cloud, and I was looking at a landscape ancient beyond words. Mist pooled before me, shining in the moonlight. Reeds and bushes broke its surface. I couldn’t hear the traffic noise. I couldn’t hear the ­people in the park, or see the city lights. Even the air was different—­the scents, the taste of it. There was a sudden sound, a distance off; some large animal passing through the underbrush. I heard it snort. Then that, too, was silent.

  “Walk with me Chris. Walk on the old land. Be free, for once . . .”

  I shook my head. I stood there, on the steps of the Beach House; but when I looked behind me, there were no lights, no signs of habitation. The place might have been empty now for years, a shell of masonry, slowly crumbling in the dark.

  “You think technology is somehow an inevitable thing, don’t you? All life moving forwards, to the world that now exists. Only it’s not like that. Yours is a world consumed by fads. Soon it will tumble back to what it’s always been, your little sciences forgotten, and all that will be left will be the two of us again, your kind and mine, revolving round each other, on and on. Forever.

  “You asked about the links between us. They’re simple. We raise you to Eternity. Your little lives. We complete you. We take your fragility, your emptiness. The ache of your being. We stop that. Without us, you—­all of you—­are creatures of a season, here and gone. You feel that, don’t you? The shortness of your lives. You feel it . . .”

  “That’s not why Shailer wants you.”

  “That’s not why he believes he wants us.”

  “Shailer’s doing what we’ve always done. He wants your power. To run our cars, drive our trains, light our cities. He wants to drain you. The same way you drain us.”

  “I don’t see any cities.”

  I took a step. I felt the ground ooze underfoot. Once more, I turned around, for reassurance. The Beach House, with its ivy covered walls, looked like an old cliff. I couldn’t even see the door.

  “The Old One knows the old earth. You put him in one place, Chris, not one time. He reaches back and forwards. The past, the future. The axel around which we spin. See—­over there.”

  He pointed. In the moonlight I saw boulders, rising up over the bushes; a nest of them. I heard a rustle of breath. Little clouds of steam rose up between the rocks. The rocks were breathing, swaying gently in their sleep.

  “Elephants—­”

  “If you like.” He was at my shoulder, whispering. “See how the adults gather round? The young in the center, safe. They sleep standing. A wall. A fortress made of flesh. Is there a god of elephants, Chris? Do you think? A god of trees and cable cars and seashells and—­is there a god in everything? Everything, Chris, except for you. You and all mankind, exiled, cut off from the universe. Every living creature, every plant, every single object, animate and otherwise, connected. Except for you.”

  “This is a dream.”

  “This is the past. And the future.”

  One of the big beasts huffed, snuffled in its sleep. The sound reverberated.

  “Let me tell you about your killers.”

  I could smell them now, a warm, earthy smell, dry and somehow reassuring.

  Can you smell in dreams? In visions?

  “The gods do what they have to do. The gods obey their nature. But you, ­people—­you have no nature to obey. You don’t know who you are. And so you do whatever you believe will give you meaning. Whatever gives you a few moments’ peace.”

  He snapped his fingers. Something changed. It was like the world swiveled around. The god Assur was no longer behind me, no longer held in by the walls of the containment fields. It was here, in the open air, with me. There was a hiss like breath from something that had never drawn a breath, a stink of rot, of filth accumulated through millennia, decaying in its wake. The thing was here, in the landscape, undulating slowly through the trees, the grass, the water. A worm, infinitely long, a throat that swallowed endlessly, gulping down the minutes of my life, sucking in the hours, the days . . . destroying me, instant by instant, breath by breath.

  I understood immediately that this was not a metaphor, not an illusion; that in some way, it was real, a force as ancient and significant as time itself.

  I looked quickly left and right. I took one step, then another. And I ran.

  The stench seemed to steal up around me. My lungs pulled it in, and when I looked back I saw only that enormous, gaping mouth, that endless throat lined full of teeth, row on row on row, and I felt the heat of it against my back, the wind of it touching my hair—­

  Chapter 60

  Shailer’s Return

  I was cold. My hands moved and I hugged myself, pressing against the damp, chilled fabric of my shirt. I was wet. My clothes were wet. My hair was wet. Had I been asleep? I stretched my legs out. I was stiff. I opened my eyes . . .

  Grass. Trees. A bleak, anemic predawn sky. I tried to stand. Partway, my calf cramped and I dropped down, thrashing helplessly until it eased. By then, though, I’d seen the domes of the museum, and heard the cars on Lake Shore, the sound of voices somewhere close by . . .

  I looked up and saw Shailer about ten yards off, quarreling with someone I could not make out, a dark, shadowed figure partway hidden by a grove of trees.

  Something was missing. I could sense it, an emptiness where there had once been . . . what? Some special element, or some vibration in the air, a feeling I had grown so used to that its absence grated on me like a bad tooth, or the come-­down from some subtle but immensely powerful drug. I looked up at the sky, I scanned the treetops . . .

  The city’s here, I told myself. The city’s back.

  I looked at Shailer.

  He wore a pale pink shirt and his collar was up at the back. His tie was half undone. A travel bag lay on the grass a few yards from him. His hand was raised and he was speaking very earnestly, but I was too far off to hear what he was saying. The other figure stepped
back, until the trees no longer stood between us, and I saw him clearly.

  Shailer was arguing with me.

  I—­this other I—­stood tall and very still, dressed in a suit and shirt of charcoal gray. I watched without expression as Shailer ranted, his shoulders hunched, his feet doing an angry little dance upon the lawn. I, as the other I, reached for him, just moved my arm a little, held out my hand, and Shailer skipped back, terrified. He shook his head. I took a step towards him. He took a step back. I raised my other hand. He dodged. I feinted with the one hand, lashed out with the other, still not quite touching him. I put my head down, thrust my face at him, pulled back my lips, and snarled like a leopard. Shailer jumped, tripped, and fell onto the ground. I bent as if to help him up. He crawled away. I lost interest. I turned my back, watching the first arc of the sun peep over the horizon, and I didn’t move, and all expression drained out of my face, and—­

  No. Not me.

  Seven B. Steven Benedict.

  Not me.

  Shailer, aware that he’d been made a fool of, pulled himself to his feet. He brushed fussily at his pants; attempted to tuck his shirttail in. Then he saw the real me. He was talking manically again; his arms made wild gestures. I grew aware of others round about, odd, silent figures standing under trees or on the lawns. Some had been visitors here, but one or two, I recognized as Registry. They seemed lost, somehow, drifting, like ghosts caught in the light.

  “What happened, Chris? What did he do?”

  I could hear Shailer calling to me, long before he came close.

  Seven B still stared across the lake, shut off to any human sensibility.

  Shailer was yelling. “Or was it you, Chris? Was it you?”

  “Was what me?”

  He was here now; close enough that I could see the stubble on his upper lip, the sweat on his forehead.

  “You were here, weren’t you? Exactly what I told you not to do. But you did it, didn’t you? You did it anyway.”