The Fissure King

by Rachel Pollack

  The men with the whips were bulkier than the dupes, more like the bartender, and Jack wondered for a moment if they too were exiled cheetahs. It didn't matter, he had no more antelope charms, and besides they'd already turned to face him and raised their whips. Jack reached down towards his right leg, and his knife jumped into his hand. With two quick slashes he cut off the thongs. To his surprise, what he'd assumed were just leather sinews writhed along the floor, and the guards doubled over in pain, their whip hands held tight against their bellies. Tentacles, Jack realized, but he didn't care. The man on the wall raised his head to look at Jack with hope. "Please," he whispered, "you don't know how long they've held me." What had been whip marks now moved in swirls around the body. Within them, the onyx ring flared as Jack stepped forward.

  Still on his knees, one of the guards said "Shade, stop!" and the other added "You don't know what you're doing."

  Jack ignored them as he moved towards the figure on the wall. The whips were gone, but he still needed a way to break through the swirling lines. As he looked the man became a girl in a torn red dress, her body covered in angry slashes and what looked like dirt and pieces of stone. "Hurry," she begged. He held up the knife. Would it cut through the lines?

  As Jack was about to try, one of the guards gestured with his good hand. Jack braced himself for an attack, but to his surprise the swirls and lines vanished. Amazed, he rushed forward to free the prisoner, only to realize that she was gone too. For a second, he saw a crude painting on a stone wall—some creature, or spirit, with whirling lines all around it. Then that too vanished, and Jack found himself falling . . .

  He crashed hard, on his side, on what turned out to be a highly polished stone floor, lit by flickers of fire. He looked up and saw a layered chandelier with as much as a hundred candles. Sconces along the equally polished walls held five more candles each.

  Strangely, Jack heard the music and saw the musicians before he noticed the dancers all around him. At the end of the room, on a low pedestal, eight men in blue velvet waistcoats and breeches, with white wigs on their heads, were playing some ornate but repetitive dance music on what today would be called "early instruments." Jack recognized the odd tinny sound from concerts he'd gone to with his wife.

  Finally, he saw the dancers, and just in time, for a line of them was coming towards him as if they'd trample him and not even notice. He rolled out of the way at the last moment. The men wore black waistcoats and breeches, with white stockings and patent leather shoes with gold buckles and one inch heels. Their wigs were shorter than the musicians, but looked more finely woven. The women also wore wigs, high elaborate concoctions apparently inspired by the chandelier. Their gowns, pale blue with small pearls and jewels sewn into them, had long sleeves, a bodice that flattened the breasts, and wide flounced skirts. Their faces were powdered white, their lips dark red.

  Safely by the wall now, Jack studied the dancers. As he'd guessed, there was only one couple, duplicated to fill the floor, which meant he could rule them out. The orchestra, too, were all the same. But when he looked at the wall opposite the musicians he saw something different. A young woman in a pale green dress that was more flowing than the dancers' gowns, was sitting in a high-backed wooden chair with her white-gloved hands folded in her lap. On either side of her stood a wide middle-aged woman in a long black dress buttoned up to the neck. With their arms crossed over their wide bosoms, and scowls on their faces, they looked more like harem guards than chaperones. Each had a long beaded purse on her arm, and Jack imagined them drawing out scimitars if he got too close.

  He stared at the girl's right hand. It was hard to see through the gloves but Jack thought he saw the rough shape of the onyx ring.

  Jack started to make his way toward the young woman. With each step, however, the dancers, seemingly oblivious to his presence, managed to step in front of him. He tried to slide through them, but more appeared in his way. Shoving them aside brought the same result. Jack wondered if they multiplied, like amoebae. When he glanced back at the orchestra he saw that their faces, impassive and calm, were all turned towards him. Now more and more dancers moved around him, in tighter and tighter rings. Soon they would trample him.

  He took out his bone flute and began to play a simple five note tune, over and over. The musicians scowled, the dancers hesitated, even stumbled. As he continued to play the tune, Jack began to beat out a counter-rhythm against his thigh with his free hand, as complex as the tune was simple, but in a completely different pattern. What he'd said to Carol was true, that he had no natural rhythm—he suspected nobody did—but he'd once spent a year studying with a master drummer in Burkina-Faso.

  The effect was immediate. The dancers fell to their knees and pressed their palms against their ears. The musicians played louder, but off-key, the violins and violas sounding like cats in an alley fight. Jack moved in and out of the stricken dancers as he made his way to the girl and her chaperone guards. When he got closer, however, something changed. The music became smoother and harmonious once more, though not the same melody. Jack glanced back at the orchestra. They still looked in pain as they compulsively tortured their instruments. The music here must be coming from the air or the walls, Jack thought. It swirled around and around itself, and as Jack stared at the young woman the music became visible, that same cage of spiraling wind that had trapped the man in the leather bar. Jack wondered how the hell he could cut through music.

  He moved forward, and as he did so, the two women stepped towards him. Jack braced himself. They opened their purses, but instead of swords they took out large hand mirrors, one backed with gold, the other with silver. When they lifted them light poured out from the glass like a great wave. Jack's black clothes, and the charcoal on his skin, would protect his body, but he had only a few seconds to save his eyes. And more, for he knew that "baby starshine," as Travelers called the light, would go straight for his brain. He could already feel the fire through his closed eyes as he fumbled in his pockets for the polished coins from the Shadow Roman Empire. He pressed them tight against his eyelids. The chaperones cried out, and a moment later Jack heard the thud of the mirrors hitting the floor.

  He removed the coins and opened his eyes just enough to check that they weren't faking it. Their eyes looked completely blacked out, almost gouged from their heads. In a high quavery voice one of them said "Shade, no. You don't know what you're doing."

  Fuck, Jack thought. I'm getting sick of hearing that from people who've just tried to kill me. He looked past them to the girl. She seemed unable to get up from her seat, but her eyes were wet and her voice tight as she said "Please. You don't know what they do to me. Every night when the music stops . . . " Her voice trailed off into sobs.

  Jack made himself look not at the girl but at the energy that swirled around her. In the leather bar it had been whiplashes. Now it was sound. Circular melodies and harmonies impossible to decode moved all around her to form a spiral prison. Jack took out his bone flute again. It was such a simple instrument, just five notes, but maybe if he found the right pattern . . . He began to play, tentatively at first, but then he let his instrument lead him. Like a skeleton key, it weaved through the harmonies, finding places to unlock, the way a master thief can open a set of tumblers, one by one.

  The lines began to drop away. "Hurry!" the girl called to him. "You don't know how long I've been here, what they do to me." He thought of his daughter, trapped in the Forest of Souls. For him, years had passed, but for her it could be decades, maybe longer . . .

  Any moment, Jack thought. Just a little more open passage. Now. He braced himself and leaped for her, but even as he moved, one of the women called out some words in a language that almost cracked Jack's head open. And then, just as with the man on the X, the girl turned into a rough painting on a stone wall. Jack crashed into it—and through it—

  —and fell onto a wooden floor, in a dark room that smelled of old sweat,
older books, and whiskey. He saw a plain wooden table with ten old chairs around it. There were ten shot glasses on the table, along with a bottle of Schnapps, and a plate of small cakes that looked much older than the liquor.

  Jack heard a murmur of voices in some language he couldn't quite catch. When he glanced around he saw a half-open door, with light and what he realized now was chanting on the other side. He walked through into what looked like a small makeshift synagogue, with a few benches, a plain wooden ark on the far wall, and ten old men who swayed and sang in Hebrew. They had come in suits but had taken off their jackets and rolled up their right sleeves of their white shirts so they could wrap the leather cords of tefillin around their arms. The small leather box attached to the cords gleamed slightly on their biceps, as did the matching box on their foreheads. There were ten of them, the number for a minyan that would allow a service to take place. And of course they were all the same person. Jack wondered if that counted for a prayer session.

  The thing was, there was no one else. None of the dupes could be Carol, so where was someone different, with an onyx ring and trapped behind swirls of energy? Swirls. He looked again at the tefillin straps and realized they wrapped around the men's fingers and up their arms in a spiral. Was Carol's soul trapped in one of those little boxes? In all of them? Would he have to rip them off each man's arm, take them apart, and put all the pieces together, a jigsaw soul? Or search for the ring, like a prize in an old crackerjack box?

  Then he looked again at the front of the room and realized there was a larger box. The ark. Usually an ark held one or more Torah scrolls, which made them big enough to hold a child, or even a small woman. He stared at the wooden structure. Unlike the ones he'd seen in richer congregations, it was unadorned beyond a peaked cornice at the top. No carvings, no velvet curtain, just two doors that opened from the center. As he continued to examine it Jack thought he could see faint lines, swirls like the leather on the men's arms, but thinner. And alive. They moved all by themselves, round and round the ark, like chains.

  He took a breath of the stale, sweaty air and stepped forward. Without a break in their prayers, or even a turn of the head, the congregants moved to block him. He shifted in a different direction and they followed. This is getting seriously old, Jack thought, and tried to shove them aside. Instantly the tefillin straps sprang off their bodies and wound around Jack's arms and legs so he couldn't move. They held him so tightly he couldn't even strain or push against them. If he could reach his knife—useless. Same with his charms and tricks and whistles.

  Now what? Would they dismember him? Would the straps get tighter and crush his lungs? Instead, the men began to argue. It was in Yiddish, of course, Hebrew being only for prayers, and it took Jack a moment to catch what they were saying. It was about someone they called the Rescuer, and ancient texts detailing what to do to this person if he ever showed up. Kill him? Let him live but never release him? It didn't take Jack long to realize the Rescuer was himself.

  One said the Rescuer was innocent because he did not understand his crime. Another claimed that only actions matter, not knowledge or intent. A couple then said they themselves were the guilty ones, for they did not try to correct him. But still another said to tell was useless. "As it is written," he said, " ‘You shall hide your treasure from the stranger, for the stranger will come with eyes painted over, and ears filled with stone.' "

  Enough of this bullshit, Jack thought. The treasure they were holding was a woman's soul. He couldn't reach any of his weapons or tricks, but he didn't need to. He had something better. Jack had once met an old-fashioned golem, the kind made out of dirt by some rabbi. The thing is, the rabbi got so excited, or maybe guilty, that he fell down dead of a heart attack just after the creature came to life. With no master to obey, and stuck in a room full of books, the golem began to study. There were Talmudic texts, but also books on magic. By the time Jack had met him, the golem had become a world famous scholar. Kabbalists, Sufis, and others would travel thousands of miles to study with him.

  Jack had come for something simpler. Names. Jewish magic was based on the secret names of God, and just knowing one or two could give you great power. Jack served the golem for twenty-eight days. The idea of a human taking orders from a golem amused the creature so much he kept thinking of new commands just to watch Jack obey them. Finally, the Mud Rabbi, as some called him, gave Jack three names. One to create, one to destroy—and one to escape.

  Jack called out the escape name. To his surprise, it hurt his throat, but the effect on the men was more extreme. They cried out and fell to their knees, hands over their ears and yelling curses at him. "Schwartze sorcerer!" he heard, but ignored them as the leather straps fell from his body. He weaved his way through the men to the ark.

  Finally he opened it. At first it looked empty, and Jack felt ready to smash something. Then he looked again and saw a small figure, a girl about three inches high. She sat on what looked like a stone chair, with her hands folded in the lap of a shapeless dress that might have been made from animal skin. Despite her tiny size the onyx ring shone brightly on her finger. "Please help me," she said. "They've kept me here so long." Jack could hear the tears rather than see them. Once again, he thought of Genie.

  "It's all right," Jack said, "I've come to take you home."

  "Hurry," the girl said.

  But before Jack could reach for her, a strong woman's voice called out, "Shade. You don't know what you're doing."

  What the fuck now? Jack thought. He wanted to grab the girl and run, but didn't dare, so he turned and saw what he first thought was an old man in a white robe of heavy wool, with a long white beard, and white hair down his back. Then he looked closer and saw it was a woman. He thought for a second of Abby, the Bearded Lady at the carnival where Jack had worked long ago. Jack had dated her for a while, and when they kissed, Jack sometimes felt like Abby was the man, and Jack the woman, a sensation he found oddly exciting.

  In the room, the dupes, still on their knees, called out "Der Wisser Rebbe! Der Wisser Rebbe!"

  Jack looked at this "White master" and wondered if he could ignore her, or shove her aside if she tried to stop him. Probably not a great idea, he decided. He had a vial of Vatican holy water in his tunic, maybe he should douse her and announce her baptized in the name of Christ. Instead, he said "I know exactly what I'm doing. Bringing back a soul that was taken a long time ago."

  In the ark, the girl pleaded "Don't listen to her. She's crazy! She holds me and hurts me."

  The Rebbe said "Mr. Shade, this is your last chance. Please. Turn back."

  "Tell me why I should do that," Jack said.

  Sadness, and maybe fear, clouded her face a moment, then she said "I cannot. The Ancient of Winds has ordered silence."

  "Well, that's fucking convenient."

  The Rebbe closed her eyes and began to sway, as if in prayer. Suddenly, images, sounds, smells swept through Jack's senses. They came and went so quickly he couldn't really identify anything, but there was a great wind somehow smashing into a stone wall, and blood, and burnt meat. And laughter. Then it was all gone, and Jack found himself staggering back from the Bearded Lady. "What the hell was that?" he said. "What did you do to me?"

  "More than I should have. More than I'm allowed."

  Jack glanced at the miniature child on her chair in the Ark. Why didn't he just take her and run? As if she could sense his confusion the small voice pleaded "We have to go. Now! She's trying to take over your mind. Please. No one's ever come this far before."

  Jack shook his head a moment. No one—had Carol Acker hired someone before Jack? Did cousin Jerry actually try before he gave Carol Jack's card? Something was wrong—he looked at the White Rebbe. Her eyes stared at him, unblinking. Of course. The girl was right, the old woman was trying to hypnotize him.

  He closed his eyes and grimaced, then shook his head. When he looked again, the Rebbe seemed
to have shrunk slightly, her gaze more sad than dangerous. Jack said, "Actually, it doesn't matter if I believe you or not. I have a kind of curse. It's called a Guest. I cannot refuse anyone who brings me a special token. A woman hired me to find her missing soul and bring it back to her."

  "Her soul?" the Rebbe said. "That's the word she used?" She inclined her head towards the ark. "For that?"

  "Yes. And it doesn't matter if she got it right or wrong. I have no choice."

  The woman said something in Hebrew. Then, "So. You took a vow, and now it holds you prisoner."

  "That's pretty much it."

  She glanced at Jack's right boot. "You have a knife. If you cut your throat your Guest would have to leave."

  "Don't bet on it."

  "Ah, but even if your curse torments you beyond death you would no longer be able to do what should never be done."

  And no longer able to bring back my daughter, imprisoned in the Forest Of Souls. Jack moved his eyes from the Rebbe's stare, and suddenly he was sick of all this. These creatures, or Powers, or whatever they were, had taken part of a girl's soul and locked it away behind layers and layers of illusion. It was time to take her home.

  He took a golden needle from his survival tunic and moved it across the doorway, conscious all the time of the Rebbe standing motionless alongside him, the dupes behind them. If the end of the needle turned to iron Jack would have to identify whatever was dangerous before he could reach inside. With a smugness that made Jack want to slap her, the Rebbe said, "Don't worry, your Dialectical Needle will stay pure. It's not the ark that threatens you."

  Jack finished his examination then put the needle away. Finally he reached inside the box. He didn't realize he was holding his breath until his arm didn't burn up or turn to stone. "Hurry" the girl said. "You don't know what they do."