Jack didn't listen. If the memory of all those bodies hadn't been enough, if he might have weakened, the Holy Fire of the Djinn kept him strong. It wasn't just Archie, it was all of them, they were one being, one flame. Armed with that Fire, Jack Shade bore down on the crumpled, bleeding woman.
And then something lifted out of her. It wasn't really a creature, though it appeared to take the form of a squat beast with thick legs and arms and a narrow triangular head. Whatever it may have been originally it was so old and ferocious that it couldn't really hold its shape but kept twisting and stretching as it tried to fight its way free of the swirls of energy from the two guns, and the eternal Fire of the Djinn that pushed it back, back to the wall—until finally there was only one escape. With an agonized cry it retreated into the rock.
Light still filled the cave, and a scream of rage and pain, and in that moment two figures suddenly appeared, causing a puff of wind as they displaced the air around them. One was a bearded woman in a long white robe, and the other was an old man wearing a black shirt, black pants, and black shoes. They looked at each other and smiled, and the light and the fading scream of the beast filled their bodies. They became radiant, younger, more upright, and their eyes—their eyes were filled with love.
The two brothers looked frozen, unable to move or speak as their guns fell to the floor. Jack held the stone in front of him, the way he'd done with Carol Acker, but all the energy had gone from it. He threw it at the Old Man and the Rebbe, only to watch it break up in the air before it could touch them. He tried to use the Fire but that was gone too, and he realized he'd only asked for power against the creature, and that was done. Wish granted.
Der Wisser Rebbe and the Old Man of the Woods held hands and smiled at each other. Jack half-expected them to start necking, like teenagers in the back of a car, but instead the Rebbe smiled and said something in Yiddish—Jack couldn't make it out, but he was pretty sure it was something like "See you next time"—and then she was gone.
The Old Man turned towards Jack now, his face serene.
"You sonofabitch," Jack said. "You used me."
"Of course," the Old Man said. "That time you rescued the Queen of Eyes—what was it she said about you?"
Jack stared at him a moment, confused, then he made himself remember. Softly he said, "She told me ‘I knew I could count on you.'"
"Exactly."
"So she was part of this too?" Nausea rose up in him at the thought.
"Not at all," the Old Man said.
"Then why didn't she warn me? She didn't say anything about you."
"You didn't ask. The Queen only answers questions. Indeed, she cannot do anything else. She cannot see anything but answers. All you asked about was the creature."
"And the Rebbe—her attempts to stop me—that was all for show?"
The Old Man smiled. "Child psychology. You're stubborn, Jack. Your best incentive is to tell you no."
Suddenly, Benny Pope lunged at his master, arms out as if to strangle him. He never made it. The Old Man gestured and Benny was flung back against the wall, landing not far from Carol Acker's unconscious body. Frank bent down to put his arm around his brother, but he kept his eyes on the Old Man.
"All those people," Jack said. "That whole town."
"Seriously, Jack? You would complain to me about a few hundred dead? When you've lived as long as I have—do you know that fifty-five million people died in World War Two? And poor little Willowtown was nothing compared to Haarlindam."
"You were there," Jack said. "You staged it, just like you staged this. You and your bearded girlfriend."
"Of course. But seriously, Jack, you did a good thing today. If you hadn't stopped it, if the creature had truly reached full strength, I assure you, a great many more would have perished."
"If we'd stopped it right away—if Carol hadn't come to me with my card—no one at all would have died."
"Ah, but then there would have been no benefit."
"Benefit?" Jack said, his voice almost a whisper.
The Old Man sighed. "You have done me a great service, John Shade. And now I will make you a promise. Neither I, not any of my followers, will ever come to you bearing your card. You will never be compelled to serve La Societé de la Matin."
"Right," Jack said. "You'll just use another Carol Acker."
"No. My vow extends to any third parties. I know you have feared this, Jack. That fear is over."
"Go to Hell," Jack said.
"Oh, not yet. And not for some time. Thanks to you. Goodbye, Jack." And then he was gone.
Jack just stood there, staring at the space where the Old Man had been, feeling suddenly how cold the cave was. He might have simply done nothing for a long time if Carol Acker hadn't moaned to his left. He turned and she said, "Jack, where am I?" She tried to get up but winced, and leaned against the cave wall, underneath the "painting." Jack glanced at Frank and Benny, saw that Benny was still dazed and Frank was staying with him. He went over to squat beside Carol.
"It's okay," he told her, "I'm going to take you home. Unconsciously her left hand covered the ring on her right, as if to protect it. Jack wondered if it was true that she'd found it in a thrift shop. For all he knew, Carol Acker hadn't existed before the ring. Maybe it grew her, the way those night plants in Bolivia grew pseudo-human beings to defend them. He decided it didn't matter. It wasn't Carol who killed all those people, it was that thing now back safely in the wall. The Whirlwind Enigma.
"Jack," Carol said, "did I—I dreamed—did I hurt Jerry? And Marjorie—and—" She began to shake.
Jack put his arm around her. "No, no," he said, "that wasn't you. It's okay." Behind him he could hear Frank and Benny getting to their feet. He said to Carol, "I'm taking you home, remember?" She nodded against his shoulder. "But first, you have to do something for me, okay?" Another nod. "I need you to give me that black ring."
Carol scrambled back away from him. Again her left hand covered her right, which now was a fist. "No!" she said. "I can't."
Jack said, "It's just a ring, Carol. Just something you found in a thrift shop."
She shook her head. "It's mine. I've always had it."
And it's always had you, Jack thought, but he said, "Tell you what. You give it to me, and I promise to take care of it."
Carol just shook her head.
Frank Pope touched Jack's shoulder. When Jack turned his head, Frank said, "I need to tell you something."
Jack looked from Frank to Carol. "It's okay," he told the shaking woman. "I'll be right back. Nothing's going to happen."
He stood, and moved to where Frank was waiting for him, a few feet from Carol, alongside the cave painting. Benny stood behind his brother. Frank said, "Jack, look at the creature. Do you see the way it's pulsing?"
It took Jack a moment to see it, but Frank was right. A faint energy, like an old light bulb, was pulsing on and off behind the swirling lines.
"Now look at the host," Frank said. "Look at its hand." Jack stared at Carol. Every few seconds a faint flash of red showed between the fingers of her left hand, which still covered the right. Frank said, "The connection's still alive. If we destroy the ring, right now, we might break the connection for good. No more host."
"She won't give it up," Jack said.
"So we cut off its hand. Who the fuck cares?"
"None of this was her fault. Look, I can watch over her, catch her just before she dies, and get the ring before it has a chance to find a new host."
Frank made a noise. "Give me a fucking break, Shade. You watch over someone? Seen your daughter recently?"
Later, Jack wondered what he might have done if nothing else had happened. Would he have tried to kill Frank Pope? And if he had, what would he have felt? Shame? Satisfaction? But he would never know, for it was right then that Benny Pope shot Carol Acker in the face.
The light was yellow and blue, and so hot Jack had to move away from it. Carol tried to scream but before any sound could come out, the skin on her face peeled back, and then the muscles, and in a second her face was on fire, a napalm-like flame that poured down her body, burning clothes, skin, organs, even the bones. The onyx ring didn't so much slip from her hand as the hand disappeared from inside it. It fell to the floor among Carol's ashes and almost immediately began to fade, seeking escape, seeking a new host. Benny fired again, at the ring now, a blast of dark purple light. The ring lifted off the ground and spun in the air so fast Jack could hardly see it. His breath stopped as he feared for a moment it would escape. But then it fell to the stone floor, dull and gray. Benny stamped on it, and when he lifted his boot there was nothing but dust.
The creature in the wall made no noise but rage vibrated through Jack's body. He doubled over in pain, and when he looked up again the Whirlwind Enigma had become an old worn painting, the swirls of energy mostly gone, the twisted face dull and chipped away.
"There," Frank Pope said. "It's done."
"Archie!" Jack called out. "Get me out of here!"
He discovered himself on all fours in the NYTAS meadow, a few feet from his car. As he stood up he saw the Djinni, a polite distance in front of him. "Thank you," he said. "I just—" He couldn't seem to finish.
Archie inclined his head towards him. "It has been an honor to serve you, Jack."
"So that's it, right? Three wishes, three grantings?"
"I'm afraid so, yes." His eyes darted to the car.
"What?" Jack said, then, "Oh, right." He went over and took out the metal flask and cap. "Not allowed to hang around, huh? Go for a drink?"
"Sadly, no. And now, if I might make a suggestion, you might want to set the flask on the ground and stand back."
"Just one thing," Jack said.
"Quickly, please," the Djinni said. He looked in pain.
"If I'd saved a wish—that was my plan, you know."
Archie nodded. "Yes."
"And I'd asked you to bring back my daughter from the Forest of Souls—could you have done it?"
"No, effendi. We are not permitted there."
"Yeah," Jack said. "That's what I thought." He put the flask on the grass, the top alongside it, and moved away.
The Djinni's form wavered and flickered, like some primitive movie, and then gave way entirely to a stream of fire that poured into the flask. Jack wondered if he was supposed to screw on the cap but the thing lifted off the grass and settled on the opening, where it turned swiftly until it locked into place. Jack walked over and touched the flask gingerly to see if it was hot, but if anything it was a little cold. He picked it up in both hands and brought it to the car, where he set it down upright on the front passenger seat. Then he got in and began the long short journey to Suleiman International.
Epilogue
If Jack looked carefully from the end of the cemetery he could just make out the top of the George Washington Bridge. He was glad the place was quiet on this chilly cloudy afternoon, and that the grave he sought was at the edge of the grassy necropolis. He had no desire to glam any curious mourners who'd strayed from a boring funeral. He reached in his car, parked at the end of the lane, and pulled out the small flat drum and deer antler.
It had taken him three days to make the drum, following an instruction video he'd found on a Facebook shaman group. He'd gotten the wooden frame, deerskin, and antler stick from a shop on East 9th Street. They sold readymade drums, of course, but he'd wanted to do it himself, and without any Traveler shortcuts. Briefly, he'd considered going out and hunting a deer, skinning it, drying the hide, the whole deal. But besides the time it would take he remembered how much Genie had loved seeing deer, and how upset she'd gotten when she found out there were men who waited all year for the chance to kill one.
Now he squatted by the double grave with the simple headstone. "Jerome Acker," the left side said, and "Marjorie Acker" on the right, with "Beloved Husband/Wife, Father/Mother" as the only epitaphs. So they had kids, Jack thought. He wondered how old the children were. Full grown, he hoped. Like Carol Acker's children.
There were no religious symbols on the stone, no five-pointed star, no lunar crescent on its side to resemble cow's horns. Maybe not all urban shamans were Pagans, he thought. What the hell did he know?
With as much reverence as he could muster, he laid the drum on the grassy grave, with the antler stick on top of it. "I'm sorry, Jerry," he said. "You didn't deserve what happened to you, you and Marjorie. I was an asshole and you suffered for it. Like Carol." He sighed and stood up. He took a moment to set a long-standing glamour on the drum so that no one would notice it and take it away. And then he walked back to his car.
5
The Fissure King
Part One—The Past
Jack Shade, Runaway Jack as someone later called him when she heard the story, was sixteen when he did that thing lots of people talked about but never did—he left home and joined the circus. To be exact it was a carny outfit, Green's Midway, and it would be another couple of years before he found himself part of a real (dis)honest-to-God circus, complete with clowns, a trapeze act, and in particular a lion tamer.
Young Jack didn't run away because of any particular trauma, or crime. Mostly he just felt like he didn't belong. Actually, he'd felt that way all his life, though as an infant he had no way to explain that to himself, all he could do was stare at these two big people who hovered around him, making noises and feeding and cleaning him. As a kid, he learned to move through the rules and patterns of his urban neighborhood, school, and the other kids, though still it never felt like it had anything to do with him. It all got a lot worse when some wannabe gang took shape on Jack's street, and Jack's parents panicked and uprooted them all to the suburbs. Some other new kid from the city might have put together a gangsta act and taken over the local scene. But Jack Shade just felt out of place. Or maybe in the wrong place, for there was always the feeling he was supposed to be somewhere else.
The funny thing was, he knew how easy it would have been to do some street routine and rule the high school. At times he even wanted to and made some half-hearted attempt. But he couldn't bring himself to follow through with it. He told himself it was too easy, these suburban jerks weren't worth it. But the fact is, he was Johnny Lonesome even back then, though nobody would call him that for a very long time.
His parents loved their new home. They would go on and on about how quiet it was, no car horns all night, no shouting and fighting. To Jack the neighborhood seemed like a funeral home after hours. About the only noise ever heard was a dog barking.
One night, late, he got so bored he himself started barking out his bedroom window. To his surprise, all the neighborhood dogs joined in. Then he switched to howling, and all the dogs followed that, too. Jack figured his parents would storm in at any moment and yell at him to stop making trouble and go to sleep, but they didn't, so he decided to step out the back door in his pajamas and see if he could push things to an even higher level. But when he opened the door he just stopped. There on the lawn, just past the concrete steps, sat a pair of dogs, huge, with thick shoulders and narrow heads, the jaws slightly open, the eyes bright as the full moon. All the neighborhood dogs were still howling away, but these two just stared at Jack. Shaking, and holding his breath, he backed into the kitchen and closed the door as quickly as he could without slamming it.
He made his way upstairs to his bedroom, where he lay on his bed, breathing hard. The howling stopped, but Jack lay there for an hour before he dared to turn off his reading lamp and try to sleep. He knew, it wasn't a question or a guess, that his little game with the neighborhood pets had summoned those two great beasts, and more, that this summoning was something you really really didn't want to do. When morning came—he'd only slept a couple of hours—he got dressed for school and nervously
made his way downstairs, where his mother was making French toast, while his father drank coffee from his "World's Best Golfer" mug. Jack managed to act natural as he went to the back door and looked out. The dogs were gone, though he thought he spotted paw prints in the grass.
Years later, Jack would learn that the great dogs were named Lily and Sam, and that they went back a very long way, possibly Before the Beginning. He also would learn how lucky he was that he didn't speak to them, not so much as a "Shoo," or a "Good doggie," for then he never would have made it back into his house. Some people thought the dogs were blind, and needed your voice to find you, but most thought that anything you said, even a "By all the Powers, I command thee, begone!" came across to them as "Hey, you hungry? Here's dinner."
Once, a long time ago, there was a man named Joseph of the Waters who tried to force the world to change. He didn't do it for himself, this was not some World Emperor thing. Instead, he wanted to end pain and suffering, which apparently had gotten even worse than usual in Joseph's time. There is, in fact, a way to do this, every Traveler learns about it, just as they all learn what a bad idea it is to try. But Joseph of the Waters was a proud man. People around him said he was different, and wiser, and stronger than everyone else. Joseph thought so, too.
Instead, Sam and Lily got him. They tore him apart, yet somehow he didn't die. Instead, he became stranded between life and death, a creature of borders, and cracks in the world.
Jack never tried that trick with the dogs again, and for a month he did his homework and watched TV with his parents and went to bed early. He even went to some asshole school dance and made out with Becky Coonan, a girl he knew from geometry class. Jack was good at geometry, so good that it annoyed him other kids didn't just get it. Later, he would learn that that was an "indicator," but back then it just added to his feeling that he didn't belong, or rather that he belonged somewhere else, he just didn't know where.
The Fissure King Page 26