Anarchy

by James Treadwell

  “What are you, my guilty conscience? Cute. I should know myself better than that. I can’t guilt myself out of bed in the middle of the night. Hey, I took that kid home, that oughtta be good enough for you. Me.”

  If only she could find him she could kick him. “How about you at least get up long enough to open the station? I don’t have keys.”

  “What’s this about, Goose?”

  She was trying to follow his voice, but every time she took a hesitant step she seemed to have gone in the wrong direction. She thought she heard another sound, faintly, a suppressed rattle or rustle; perhaps he was getting dressed after all.

  “Ah, never mind,” Jonas went on, peaceably. “Whatever, it’s good you came. Been missing you, you know? We had a good thing going.”

  “Is that you moving?”

  “Probably wake up after this, won’t I? I hope I remember. This is kinda trippy.”

  Someone or something was definitely moving. The reek of fish was disorientingly strong. Could someone else have blundered in through the open door? She heard a kind of wheezing grumble from a direction that might have been outside.

  “Jonas.” She tried one last time. As far as she knew he didn’t touch weed or even drink, but she hadn’t known him long and it wouldn’t really have been a surprise if he had a secret habit. “If you’re drunk or stoned, whatever. Listen to me. You’re not dreaming. We’ve got a problem in town. Up you get. We’re partners. Right?”

  Perhaps the scratchy sound was coming from the bushes outside. It had that quality, the massed bristling of stiff small twigs. A grunt went with it.

  She went still, suddenly listening intently. The grunt hadn’t sounded human.

  Bear?

  Distracted from her efforts to rouse Jonas, she was surprised when he spoke, very softly, very ruefully.

  “I can’t go with you, man. I’m not ready yet.”

  The moving thing was big. Though she couldn’t see a thing, she could sense its weight, its presence: like the chug-chug-chug of the ferry in the fog, massive even in the absence of any shape or ratio. The reek seemed to bear down on her like an unseen vessel.

  “Did you take my boat?” Jonas sounded farther away. “I had a feeling that was you. When I heard you’d gone the same night. I’m right, aren’t I? I guess that makes me partly responsible, something like that. You want me to tell someone the news, Goose? Kinda hard to imagine how, but sure, I’ll do what I can. You want me to try and get word to your folks?”

  His delirium passed her by, a mere mournful background hum compared to the gathering animal menace. “Jeez, Jonas,” she muttered, though she was talking to herself, “only you would take a kid home and then leave your freaking door wide open.” She took little sideways steps toward what she hoped was a corner of the room, looking to get solid walls at her back.

  “You’re not at peace,” he said, “are you. Still fighting it. Still that kind of lady.”

  Something rustled and crunched, very nearby. “Hey,” croaked a new voice, also close yet muffled, as if behind a thick curtain. “White girl.”

  “Wakin’ up,” Jonas said, receding. “Go easy, Goose. Don’t fight it. I’ll say some words for you, help you along.”

  The other voice, husky and full of malice, chuckled. “No help for you, white girl. Hear me? Get out here.”

  Was Jonas finally rousing himself ? She was so confused now about what was happening where, she couldn’t place the creak of a body shifting, turning over in sleep. The other person had the strong husky accent of the oldest First Nations people. Some old native bum stumbling by in the dark. Must have heard her voice and decided to pick a fight. “Jonas?” she called again.

  “No one in there listening to you no more. Lost your voice, white girl. Got no language. Just one message left to say and you’re gonna forget it anyhow. Three words too many for you. Get out here. Gonna take you back to the water where you belong.”

  They were all drunk, maybe. She could imagine how it had gone when order broke down; straight to the market, all of them, fighting for free booze. That was always the first thing to get stolen, before money even. Money would just be used to buy booze anyway; better to cut out the middleman. Curiously, she felt neither anger nor her usual thrill-coated anticipation. Normally she looked forward to these confrontations. Perhaps it was just that on a night like this dealing with an incoherently insulting native guy seemed tedious more than anything else, a waste of time. On the plus side, it did sound as if Jonas had finally shrugged himself out of his weird stupor; she heard him—presumably him—making the furniture squeak and crack as he got himself upright.

  “I’ll go deal with this loser,” she said. “See you round by the station, okay? Got that?” But no one answered.

  “No more whispering and walking,” cackled the throaty voice. “Time’s up.”

  She felt for the doorway, found something else under her hands—a damp and living something, life unburdened by thought: the bushes between the back of the house and the road—and, disoriented again, looked up. A tinge of firelight marked the presence of the open sky. There was someone standing in the road, a very large shadow distinguished from the rest of the deep-shadowed world by the faintest glitter, as if its darkness were scaled where everything else was shrouded.

  The bigger they came, she thought, the harder they fall. Especially the drunk ones.

  “Sir,” she said, advancing, “I’ll be straight with you. You freaking stink.” If the stench had been bad inside Jonas’s house, it was twice as bad up close. The old guy must have stuck his head in a barrel of rancid fish oil.

  “Don’t you ‘sir’ me,” rasped the big shadow, and Goose realized with brief surprise that it actually belonged to a woman, not a man; a gap-toothed-crone voice, a sixty-a-day throat-cancer voice. “You got no house. Don’t owe no one no respect.”

  “Okay, here’s who you’re messing with. I’m Constable Maculloch of the RCMP, Hardy detachment, on secondment to Alice. This here’s my police station you’re standing outside. Now. Do you have any alcohol on your person, ma’am?”

  “Cuntsible Maculloch Arseyempee Hardy Alice. I’m eatin’ your asshole white names and I’m spittin’ them out and you know what’s left?” With a many-voiced dry rattle the shadow suddenly loomed, the elusive glitter of its clothes coming alive with movement, as though a chain-mail sleeve had thrust itself at her. “No name.”

  A hand closed on her hand. Goose gasped airlessly: no breath escaped her but she felt a clutch of inward shock. The hand was immensely strong and bitterly cold. The foul smell enveloped her, and at the same moment she remembered it, it fell into a place in time, a beginning, before which everything had been unchanged and normal. It was the reek she’d smelled in the station (right next to her) when she’d come back from Traders with her coffee and found the cell open and the girl, impossibly, gone. In the wake of that inexplicable instant followed other things, the pursuit of Jennifer, the middle that came after the beginning, one thing after another until they came to an island in a cold sea, which was the—

  “Down you go,” the coarse voice said, and Goose found herself being pulled along the road like a toddler. With every step the shadow beside her spoke in its other voice, the wordless chattering incantation of its clothes. As it dragged her away from the back of the station, the myriad objects whose rustling and clicking made that murmur snagged more firelight from the sky. She saw that the huge old woman was draped in things, bone and horn and beaten metal and hollow wood, head to toe, and she had the sudden dreadful knowledge that she too was just another thing, a notch on a stick, a dry wordless voice among hundreds of thousands that had gone before, being carried along against her entirely useless will.

  “Let me—” But trying to pull her hand away was like trying to uncuff herself, except the cuff was a shackle of stone. “What are you—?”

  “Been walkin’ ou
t too late,” the woman growled. “Don’t know who let you go but they had their turn. I got you now for good. Gonna drag you under.”

  “No,” she said. She thought she heard a door open behind them. “Jonas!” she shouted. “I’m here!” The woman pulled her around a corner and started down the dimly outlined street. Looking down its length, she saw the inlet below, a slash of darkness varnished in reflected fire. “What’s wrong with me?” She couldn’t feel the road under her feet or the air on her face. All the sensation she’d ever had was compacted in the unspeakably icy grip around her hand. If Jonas had heard her he wasn’t answering, if it was even Jonas at all. “You can’t do this to me. I’m—” She lost her breath as the woman made her stumble, or so she thought. “I’m . . .” No stumble this time, and no breath: the incomplete sentence was simply that, a connection with only one end, a beginning that petered out. She couldn’t have breathed anyway, not against the rank stench of rot filling the air. She groped for the next word, the one that went with I. It wasn’t there. “Je suis . . . Je m’ . . . J’ . . .” Less than a word, less than a syllable: the only sound left to her matched the dumb rustle of the woman’s coat. They were skirting the circle of things given visible substance by the fire, heading straight down the blocks below the station to the enveloping nothingness of the sea. One other person moved in the street, another mere shadow. The town she’d come to live in, a nice, backward, ordinary British Columbian town, a place of determined neighborliness and pension-funded comfort, had turned into a solar system of chaotic darkness orbiting a raging bloodred sun. The oblivion of drowning loomed below. Goose gathered herself in desperate protest and tried one last time to remember herself, remember that she was still herself. “I . . . am . . .”

  The shadowed person ahead unfurled, standing tall, turning. Suspended in it were two unquenched sparks from the blaze.

  “Séverine,” it said.

  The old woman’s fierce shamble abruptly stopped.

  Goose seized on the word like a lifeline. “I’m Séverine,” she said. “Séverine Maculloch. I’m an officer. Let go of me. You have to let go.”

  “Let her go,” the fire-eyed shadow repeated.

  The cold chain dropped away from her hand.

  “Freak thing,” the hulking woman spat. “Monster.”

  “Shut up,” said the shape ahead, stepping forward. The coals of its eyes lit patches of a death-pale face, hollows between pinched cheekbones and a narrow nose. Next to Goose the old woman in the cloak sewn with talismans shivered and bent, cloak and throat both making a gargle like a prolonged death rattle. “You have no mouth. You lost it. Crawl away.” Goose knew it was all true, now, all the way from the beginning to the end. None of it was any kind of dream; the world really was dark and burning, and the demon that had ferried her to her desertion was walking its streets. The demon raised its hand, so pale that it resisted shadow and appeared as a glimmer of ember-tinged flesh: Goose saw a small ring blotting out a hoop of the finger that stretched out toward the cowering old creature. “Go back to the sea. Séverine is mine.” The cloak chittered in violent alarm and rolled away out of sight. Its miasma went with it.

  Along the road, toward the burning house, someone cried out. Glass smashed. There was a snatch of wild laughter.

  The twin fires burned in Goose’s vision, depthless and unblinking, close enough for her to touch.

  She took a weightless pace backward.

  “I don’t want any part of this,” she said.

  “Séverine.” The voice was like fire too, all hissing and whispering and sharp pops and cracks. “Séverine, Séverine.” It lingered over her name the way one might draw a silk scarf slowly over fingertips. “Beautiful, strong Séverine. Have you not yet understood? Have you forgotten me? We shared a night, you and I. You were so brave. Other women would have been weak with terror, but not you. You and I, we sailed the dark hours together, and both of us found what we sought. None of it was a dream.” The eyes had drawn still closer. With a pulsing bittersweet shock Goose felt the withered hand touch her face, gently, lovingly. “None of it. You can’t go back.”

  “Don’t touch me.” But she didn’t push the hand away. It was as caressing as the huge woman’s grasp had been merciless. It was, she realized, the only thing she could feel at all. It stroked her brow and cheek and the corner of her mouth. She held still, knowing that if the stroking stopped she would be left with no sense of touch, no skin.

  “You see, now, don’t you?” The English vowels dripped sad sympathy. “You understand your predicament. Don’t you, Séverine.” The shadow was intimately close now. Goose sensed the clean, salt-washed fabric of its ragged clothes, the cool drowned flesh beneath. “Say it. Say the truth.”

  “I’m not—” she began, but couldn’t say the word. She couldn’t be. If . . . that had happened to her, then none of this could be happening; nothing would be happening . . . there would be no happening, there would be no her. “I didn’t—” she tried again, and again fell short.

  “You are,” the shadow whispered tenderly. “You did.”

  “No,” Goose said. “No. I’m here. I still have a choice.”

  “That’s right.” Its substance touched her. Shredded and scoured leather pressed her front, draped around the weight of a dreadfully wasted body. She felt arms like brittle tentacles slide around her waist. “I’m your choice, Séverine. Say yes.”

  There was no recoil of horror. Not even the ghastly eyes bending over her close enough to kiss could rouse the symptoms of dread, the nausea, the prickling, the helplessly loosened guts. The only sensations allowed to her were in its touch.

  “No,” she said.

  “Listen to me, Séverine. I’ll be your life and you’ll be mine. We’ll be together. Strong and beautiful and young, not like this ragged wreck I wear. We’ll live forever. You gave me back the secret of it yourself, my love. You took it from the foolish girl’s neck and you threw it to me in the water. I want to share it with you. We’ll go wherever we want and feel whatever we want and do everything we want. Say yes. Save yourself from the black water, as I did once. Say it.” Chill shriveled fingers touched her lips. “Oui. Shape your lips for a kiss. Oui. Say it to me now.”

  She couldn’t feel horror, but she could know it. Knowledge meant thought, thought meant choice. “No.”

  The crepuscular face bent over her. The eyes burned but made no sound and gave out no heat; all they did was light up the finger’s-width space between Goose and the demon, trapping the two of them together in their tiny refuge from the darkness.

  “It’s this,” the lifeless lips whispered, “or nothing.”

  “No.”

  “It’s cold below the sea, Séverine. Join me and you can have everything, everything in the world. Without me you’re alone in the dark. Forever.”

  Tires screeched, something banged. The background rage of the fire seemed to surge. If the sun ever rose, Goose thought, there’d be nothing for it to see but destruction.

  “No,” she said again.

  “Nothing can deny me forever. I want your lips, Séverine. And your mouth. And I want your lungs and your voice and your shoulders, and your heart. Say yes. Only once. Without thinking. Once is enough. Watch my lips.” They puckered, bleached and cracked curves opening like the valves of a dried-up shell. “Oui.” They closed on Goose’s mouth until all she could see was flame, swirling and dancing in silent rage. “Say it. Kiss me.”

  A sudden hollow cacophony swept above them, a beating of voiceless thunder. It was so loud and abrupt that it made Goose cringe, breaking out of the embrace. The demon sprang back with a hiss, looking up. A huge winged silhouette passed between them and the glow of the rising fire. Goose heard the thud of those wings descending, and then a scrape on the road.

  “Here,” croaked a toneless voice, from the same nearby darkness where the scrape had come, a little way down toward
the water. “This way.”

  The arms around Goose’s waist tightened but the face had flinched away. “Be quick,” the demon whispered. “Sans moi, rien.”

  Goose thought of her mother drawing on her cigarette, making the tip glow with a rush of tainted oxygen, the impatient inhalation while she waited for her unglamorous tomboy daughter to confess to whatever she’d been accused of. She put her arms down by her sides and levered the skeletal embrace away.

  “I should have said no to you from the start,” she said.

  Another spot of fire appeared, coming up from the shore.

  “End of the road,” said the croaking voice in the dark. The flame beyond it revealed itself to be a torch, smoking and sputtering. Under its umbrella of obscure light two people were walking close together. Only their faces and hands stood out from the night, but they were definitely human faces and human hands. The inhuman thing in front of Goose turned to watch them approach, folding its hands over its chest, where no heart beat.

  Goose thought she heard it whisper something like a sigh: I have and I hold.

  “Still not yours,” the grating voice said. The thing it belonged to, the thing that had winged overhead and come to rest on the road, was like a black hole: the approaching torchlight didn’t seem to fall on it at all, leaving instead a boulder-sized seam of mere darkness. Both the people under the torch had the clear, steady faces of children. One, Goose saw, was Jennifer Knox. The firelight had turned her skin copper, a ceremonial mask beaten perfectly smooth. The other was a boy of about the same age, almost as pale as the drowned white face with the burning eyes, and almost as thin as well.

  “Not yet free, puka?” The demon had lost interest in Goose. Its mocking whisper was directed the other way. “Is it that slavery suits you so well you choose it willingly? I can unbind you with a word, you know.”

  “Up yours,” the impenetrably black lump replied. The two teenagers came up to stand beside it and halted. A sliding, crackling boom echoed over the town, and the fan of fire over the rooftops spread wider, throwing off a sudden billow of fresh sparks. Another house must have gone up, or down. Goose saw a tree burning by the road, quivering black limbs torn upward in a relentless stream of flame: it looked like a soul in torment.