by IGMS
It started within hours of the Fourth Speaking: Many confessed and pleaded for mercy, some died in peculiar ways imitated from the currently most popular sitcom, Killer Mom, but most were beaten savagely or to death or simply stabbed.
Walter saw the whole thing was getting out of hand. Channel 614 had a ribbon at the bottom that tallied the numbers of the apprehended for each category Sylvia had identified in her various Speakings: pale woman named Alice who hit an old woman in a crosswalk -- 17. Three brothers in Santa Miranda who killed neighbors' pets -- 15. A well-dressed Hispanic man who argued . . .. Etc.
In the news: Relatives turned on each other; teenagers identified their parents as fitting certain categories of Sylvian criminals. Different branches of police eyed each other with suspicion. People bought tiny booklets that listed those Sylvia had identified so they could ID criminals that might still walk among them. Every day Walter heard shouts on the street as another suspect was run down. Now people were seeing Sylvia everywhere, looking out at them from reflections on buildings or stains on walls or in cheap food.
Hotel Minérve, Paris. Initially ecstatic at seeing her, his joy drained away by the hour. Sylvia didn't go out, she didn't laugh, her eyes opened more widely on the world yet seemed to register little. Usually cold and always tired, her conversation was disjointed, her responses vague. She often stared at him without speaking, but this was not uncomfortable.
She did say, "Do you still know me?"
And he said, "Always." This pleased her.
Meals were difficult to classify, either in content or conversation. She slept next to him (spiking to a 99.5% rating) like a dead person.
Walter's second day there, Garith Glone suaved into the room. Sylvia drew herself up. To Glone, Walter was failed existence.
"Ms. Romilar, Sylvia, I'm sorry to intrude unexpectedly." He seemed more sedate than before, but his teeth still flashed through the nervous smile.
She looked at him.
"I'm sure you can understand why some people would be concerned about your identification of alleged wrong-doers. The government of France has expressed concern. St. Helena won't let us return."
Walter wondered if she weighed Glone's life as she gazed at him.
"Please consider: We will pay you a million dollars a day for the rest of your life and permanently remove you from ICU! programming. You can have privacy again."
"No."
"A million five, a day."
"No."
"Two million."
"No. My salad is wilting."
"Ms. Romilar, it's a thing we're asking for the sake of the public good. You're --" His eyes searched for the words in the upper corners of the room. He seemed to go off-script. "You're becoming very expensive, Miss Romilar. The crime rate is rising, and some of the crimes are troubling to authorities."
"Then everybody needs a gun."
The world took note of that.
Glone almost dropped his jaw. "No, no they don't. Give us your conditions, Ms. Romilar, please."
"For the fifth time, the answer is No."
"Ms. Romilar, there are people out there who are advocating serious measures, but PulseCorp wants to do this the right way, if it is at all possible. Miss Romilar, I beg you."
"ICU! is depraved," she said. "You are depraved. Appreciate your moments."
He caught his breath. The swarmers showed his face parsing her words and then settling between fear and confusion. He backed away; he hurried away.
"Stirring the chaff," she said to Walter, the world attending. "Sylvia is holding a mirror up to nature, to their exciting plans and the unintended consequences. They build excellent snares."
She took his hand and stood against him. "Walter, talk to me sometimes. I won't be there, but you'll be able to hear me." He had feared this moment and it happened very quickly. "Do one thing for me."
Her hollow eyes stared into his as swarmers spun around them, seeing it all, almost.
"I will." Between their clasping hands, he felt a tiny object press between his fingers.
"Now we'll just say goodbye, Walter, and you'll walk away." She gave him a simple kiss on the lips. "Do one thing for me."
He couldn't speak. He nodded again, wishing he had more time to look into her face. But he did rise, and he did walk away.
Out the door, down the wide hall. "Do one thing do one thing do one thing . . .," down a half dozen floors and far enough away that only one or two swarmers haphazardly circled him, he took the BB-sized thing -- a knot of paper -- from between his fingers and carefully uncompressed it. It was three tiny pieces of torn newsprint, three individual words: tell, location, and my.
She was going to excite one of ICU!'s greatest fears, that people would find out how to get to her. Without a clear exit and prearranged transportation, all elements of the situation would quickly become provisional, and then ICU! security, fully armed and fully infiltrated by Sylvia-lovers, would, in truth, do whatever they individually felt like doing.
He had promised. He would do this one thing. He would postpone the anguish.
Now Walter wanted to be seen and the purple hand-print birthmark on his left cheek made him recognizable to millions. In the lobby he moved among the larger groups, turning his left cheek for the widest view. Several men tagged him within seconds, growing to a cluster as he passed out onto the sidewalk.
In front of the Hotel Minérve, a fleet of fifteen-foot tall aluminum tour buses crept down the street. Tourist faces looked down on purple-blotched Walter who was circled by questioners with recorders held toward him.
More swarmers arrived. Vehicular movement ceased.
Surrounded, shouted at, his stomach knotted, he said, "Yes, I've seen Sylvia. She's in there, twenty-second floor."
Garith Glone
didn't understand himself. In his darkened temporary office, same floor as Sylvia, the trivid glowed to life with Sylvia's hands, the light off the curves of her cheeks . . . . "I loved you, and you left me," he said at Sylvia's images and to the woman from his memory. The knot in his throat was swallowed with growing anger. The woman had left him on New Year's, by message. Till this moment, he'd never realized what a self-absorbed low-grade she had been -- stupid with a mirror. And Sylvia was just like her. She was. And if that first one was here, he knew exactly what he would do. He'd do this:
Glone headed out of his office, toward Sylvia's rooms. His skin vibrated with agitated rage and he didn't have a thought in his head.
Tourists
watched Walter out the windows and on their portables. Within seconds, a dozen bus doors hissed open, and within minutes, the sidewalks filled to impassibility. People squeezed tighter, heading for the twenty-second floor. Walter pulled his collar over his left cheek and left unobserved.
Paris leaped to its feet, the world held its breath. After sporadic resistance, security was overwhelmed by this multinational wave of believers who longed for just a touch, a glimpse, of Sylvia Romilar, or only to be in the same building with her.
Sylvia opened her doors and waited. With her Mona Lisa smile, she stood in the middle of the room, wordless, surrounded in minutes by a press of reverential followers. Admirers, idolizers, supplicants and suitors pushed up the stairways till every room and hallway of the twenty-second floor was packed tight, shoulder-to-shoulder, then even more pressed in. Adjacent floors filled, the building creaked.
Garith Glone had got a good start on those people, but still he had to squirm and pry the last yards to stagger into her room like some exudate of her worshipers. He gathered himself and stalked forward.
The swarmers saw it all; the world saw it over and over in replays:
"Garith," she said like a lover, "I expected you sooner."
"You," he said, "have deserved this for years." No one had ever seen Garith Glone's face ugly and flushed. His brilliant teeth gleamed between drawn, down-turned lips.
He moved on her, grabbing for her neck and crotch, and he almost got his feel, but Sylvia slick
ly thrust one of her thinner knitting needles into his chest, just below his sternum, at an upward angle, but missing the heart, because he did not die then. Into his surprise, she said wistfully, "I thought of you every hook, every loop, and now we are all gone."
Glone was seized by the crowd and with surprising rapidity passed overhead on their hands and thrown off a balcony without ceremony. (Months later, grab-it groups did music to accompany a swarmer video of the dive, inevitably with a big ending at the instant Glone's brilliant teeth did their slow-motion impact on concrete and disintegrated into sprays of tissue-smeared porcelain.)
And then the inevitable crowd disturbance spread from the south balcony, where someone had been trampled as Glone was tossed. The agitation moved across the room, down the corridor, toward Sylvia.
In her room, where the air had grown dense, with six bodies firm against her, her adherents, after a minute of tolerant civility, broke. Most of the swarmers were knocked down as bodies filled to the ceilings, so most of the recording was two-dimensional, but it was an instant collectible: Never to be forgotten was Sylvia Romilar's faintly sly smile and her wide-eyed expectation as she disappeared behind screaming, climbing people who fought not to be buried. The last-seen living piece of her was her small right hand, finally blotted from sight by an anonymous flailing body.
For whatever reasons, conspiratorial or not, her body re-appeared two long hours later, in the glacial flow of the mangled dead, the unmarked dead, and the near dead, in the semi-solid ooze of bodies that slow-bumped down the stairs, through the lobby and out to the front steps of the Minérve, where they were pulled apart and sorted.
People knew they were seeing another legendary moment. As word spread, her body was at first hovered over and protected, then stepped on, pulled, stripped, damaged, and at length she was pieced away, smaller pieces cut from the larger, or torn from her corpse, as mementos of her beauty, elegance, and mystery -- preserved sometimes now in so small a thing as a few hairs in the thinnest crust of scalp. At the end, bystanders wiped the pavement of her blood with pieces of their clothing. These tatters and shreds would be handled reverently and sold for large sums.
Later that day, it rained, washing the little left of her down the drains, into the grand sewers, and out to lakes of the city's excreta, where she would be aggressively processed into a nutrient broth and spread on fields.
Sylvia became memory.
Walter
grew a beard, wore make-up, and opened another used pet store. People still organized a lot of ugliness and violence around Sylvia, with the truest believers selecting out the less-well-armed, but Walter ignored all this.
When he thought of Noreen, he remembered how she smelled of flowers when she told him to bring the tea things back. The highlight of both their lives.
In the evenings, among cast-off pets, he had tea with her and they spoke. He missed her past anything.
The Devil's Rematch
by Spencer Ellsworth
Artwork by Kevin Wasden
* * *
The Devil walked right into church one Sunday and told us he was taking the town back. Pastor Tucker was halfway through his sermon, done with damnation, working up to redemption, when the wind kicked in the back door, screeching and howling, blowing Mrs. Goodson's new hat all the way up to the choir loft. We looked back and saw him silhouetted in the doorway.
"What're you doing here?" Pastor Tucker asked.
There were some in the congregation, old Kevin Dodgson or maybe Mrs. Cook, must have recognized old Scratch from before. I'd never seen him. He was a tall fellow, handsome in a kind of untouchable way. Too good to be true, my girls would say. "I told you I would come back, Richard Tucker."
"In the middle of my sermon you show up, in my church, in my town?"
"Go on with your sermon. I can wait."
"No, we'll settle this now." The pastor raised his big index finger, like a sausage. "I threw you and your people out of this town fifty years ago, boy. I can do it again, right now."
"You beat me fair, Pastor. But don't get all unsporting just because I want a rematch. Best two of three, I say."
A rustle went through the congregation. We'd all heard the stories and I reckon we'd all started to believe them after a while, but here was the proof, before even the most skeptical of eyes. My momma said there were little pockets of Hell all over, and Wadesville'd been a mighty dangerous and dark place till Pastor Tucker rolled into town fifty years ago and threw old Scratch out.
Pastor stepped away from the pulpit and faced the Devil down the aisle. "All right, then, boy, let's have it."
Devil laughed. It was a weird sound, just a hint of a howling gale. "I'm a fair man, Richard. I didn't come back to throw down an old fellow. I'll give you one week to find a younger champion. Till then, I'll be around, just talking." He looked right around the congregation. "Your people can keep an eye on me."
Pastor Tucker was shaking with anger. "Not in my town."
"One week, Pastor." That politician grin again. "Think of it as a test of your congregation. I'm doing you a favor." He waved his hand one more time and the wind howled around the church, picking up Mrs. Goodson's hat and bringing it down to his hand. He handed it to her, smiled, and left.
"A fair man," Pastor Tucker tossed his Bible down. "A fair man?!"
There's two men I know of done wrestled an angel. One, of course, was old Jacob-Israel, who wouldn't let the angel go till he would bless him.
The other was Pastor Tucker, though in his case it was a fallen angel, and he wouldn't let Lucifer go till he agreed to split for good. Course, as we'd seen, old Scratch was the worst kind of bad penny.
Back when Pastor Tucker was young, he'd been just as gentle, but big as an ox. Full of the fire of ministry, he'd asked around, heard about Wadesville, and headed on out here to shine the Lord's light into the darkest places.
The pastor always said there weren't no problems in the world didn't have an answer in the Bible. And when he'd seen Wadesville, seen the whoredoms goingon in the street and smelled the stench of corruption and bootlegging, seen how the common folk were afraid to deal with each other for fear of all the cheating going on, well, then old Pastor Tucker, he did what a man should do. He buried himself in that Bible. Four whole days of fasting and prayer, he looked for the answer, and he come up at the end and called out the Devil himself for a wrestling match.
See Pastor Tucker, he figured he had the faith of Jacob-Israel, and he knew that the Devil wasn't no stronger in body than any other angel. So he made his challenge, and pretty soon folk started talking, and the Devil had to put up or lose his standing.
Satan came on down to the lawn right in front of the church, where Pastor Tucker marked out a spot for them. He jumped right in and wrestled the man of God. Just like in the Bible, it went on all night. Pastor, he'd been praying all that week, but he'd also spent a few good years roping bulls in the rodeo circuit, and that was what got him through. Around four in the morning, Pastor Tucker got a good full nelson on Lucifer, and that was it.
Or so they said. Most folks who heard the story while they were passing through didn't believe it. But once you'd been here a few years, and talked enough with the pastor, it just sank in. Good folks will believe the truth, when it's clear what the truth is.
After church, Pastor called a committee meeting to deal with the problem. I was there, me being the mayor. He had his other stalwarts around him -- youth pastor Jon Jefferson, who was being groomed to take over the church; Bob Mull, head of the general store; and old Kevin Dodgson, who'd been the town drunk fifty years ago and knew more about the Devil than any other man present.
"Well," Pastor Tucker said. Normally by now he would've got his cool back, but today he'd been flustered beyond recovery. "We need a hell of a wrestler. No more rematches."
Bob Mull nodded. We all knew who the Pastor was talking about. Elmer, the colored boy, only colored boy in town, lifted freight at Bob's store on the weekends. During th
e weekdays, he logged pinewoods down by the Georgia border with his cousins from Murphy. That boy could fill the choir loft with his shoulders, his mama used to say. Trouble was, Elmer wasn't too fond of white folks, not since his daddy turned up on the end of a rope ten years ago. Elmer hadn't been to the church since his daddy died, when he was about eight.
"Pastor, I pay the boy fair and all, but he ain't said more than three words to me." Bob looked at me. "Your girl Susie, now she was friends with Elmer way back when."
Susie and Elmer were friends, but that was before Elmer left school, before he took a dislike to white folks. Now, Susie was being courted real heavy by Jon Jefferson and thinking about the life of a pastor's wife. "I'll talk to Susie. And maybe Jon here can meet with Elmer's mama, Grace. She might have some pull with her boy."
"Y'all are thinking the physical. Don't forget the spiritual," Jon said. "We gotta hold prayers and Bible studies. And we gotta start loving our neighbors. You know what that means, Hal Fletcher. You and Rich Evan need to suspend that mayoral race."
"Hold on now," I said. "We can run a clean race."
"You said that before --" Jon began.
"Well, this time I mean it," I said. "Boy, believe me. We know what's at stake here --"
Kevin Dodgson interrupted. "Look at what old Scratch been doing." He stood up. Kevin was a good man -- in church all the time, and anyone who talked to him he'd tell them about the evils of the bottle. Usually quiet. "He had his hooks in us before today. We was like a tin of cream, just waiting for the cat to eat us up."
It was uncomfortable quiet then, and we all looked up at Pastor Tucker. The pastor wasn't saying nothing.
I knew the Devil had his hand in things when I got home. My girls was screaming at each other over clothes and jewelry the other one had borrowed.
"Girls!" I exploded myself. "Vanity! The whole town's in danger, and you're fighting over your vanity!"