Seraphim

by Jon Michael Kelley

  Duncan jerked away. “What if I don’t have a choice?”

  “Oh, don’t let them bully you, Donut. Simply bare your buttocks and tell them to kiss it and be on your way.”

  “Tell who?”

  “A bunch of mongrels,” he said. “But the more important question is: Who are you?”

  “Truth is, I’m not sure anymore. But I am curious, so—being the deity that you are—why don’t you enlighten me.”

  Gamble regarded him sincerely. “Oh, I think you know, Donut.”

  Duncan noticed that the night had become uncannily calm; a settling lull so tangible, so lucidly crystalline that had the moon been any fuller, he was convinced that its beams would have chimed against the stillness like drizzle on fluted glass.

  “Did you do that?” Duncan asked.

  “It isn’t in the playbill,” Gamble said, inspecting the scenery himself, going one further by sniffing the air like a dog.

  Duncan stared at Gamble with a mixture of fear and contempt, and with enough admiration to be nakedly ashamed. After all, Gamble was just being Gamble. Sure, he was full of pretension, but in his case it was utter verisimilitude. How many people did he know, or had ever known, who portrayed themselves so genuinely?

  With a slaked expression, Gamble said to Duncan, “Tastes vaguely like something upon which I used to dine. A heavenly creature of sorts.”

  “An angel?” Duncan said, glancing upward.

  “More or less.” Like a hunter in a blind, he scanned the sky in anticipation. “A hybrid, if you will.”

  The ground trembled. “Step away from him, Duncan,” boomed a voice; one imperially feminine.

  Both he and Gamble continued searching the night, but neither could find her.

  “Back away from him!” she insisted, the ground shuddering beneath their feet.

  Duncan looked at Gamble, shrugged his shoulders as if it were beyond his control, and began moving away.

  “I know what you’re up to,” Gamble said to the voice, his own just below a yell. “It’s underhanded, unlawful, and, most of all, unauthorized.” Then he twirled, his face beaming with delight. “Oh, baby, we were meant for each other!”

  Duncan was convinced that Gamble knew this being intimately.

  “Imp, you know nothing,” assured the voice.

  Gamble stared at the stars. “I know man,” he said, “because I was born of him. And now that your kind have been lounging around that gene pool too, getting more than just a tan, I’ve been able to anticipate certain things. Like what you’re planning to do with my friend here. Again.”

  A fusillade of heavy guns at sea. “Prattle!”

  “It’s intoxicating, isn’t it?” Gamble said, as if he were a practiced waiter making light of a patron’s rude belching of the house Bordeaux. “You keep going in with the right intentions but keep stumbling out like a slut with puke on her pumps, promising herself that she won’t do that anymore. Now look at yourself—once again, you’re right back on your favorite stool, showing some leg and well on your way to another idolatrous rendezvous with the porcelain god. That’s what happens when you dance with man. Once you’re in his arms, you soon become mesmerized to the glitter ball and begin thinking you can keep up if you just follow the pretty little lights.” Appearing bewildered, he held up his arms. “But the way you keep lurching around, sweetie, how do you expect to convince me and the band that you can waltz, let alone last the marathon?”

  There was a protracted silence, and it was beginning to scare Duncan even more than Gamble’s own presence. He could sense the entity deliberating, and this suggested that perhaps Gamble was indeed speaking some truth. The truth about what, Duncan could only guess, since he didn’t have the faintest idea what the asshole was gushing on about.

  The ground was alive; the loose, shifting skin of some behemoth.

  “Duncan has made his choice,” the entity finally said. “Now leave.”

  “You can’t bullshit an old bullshitter,” Gamble charged. “You’ve been making his decisions for him. Shame on you.”

  Like a fossilized pustule, the asphalt ruptured, extending the width of the street, filling the air with the fetor of raw sewage. The sky quaked. Shadows see-sawed along the crater’s craggy rim, as if the gates of hell had finally been opened and the first wave of tormented souls was congregating above the molten pit, pushing and shoving, their frantic intimations cast by the leaping flames below.

  “Crawl back into your hole!” she ordered.

  “I’ll leave the same way I came, if it’s all the same to you,” said Gamble. “You know, the road less hackneyed?” He then grabbed the air with his fingers and tore back its skin. “Don’t make the same mistake twice,” he appealed to Duncan, then vanished through the rent.

  More befitting an angel, her voice was soft now; a gentle wind. She said, “I will explain. The night you were shot must be relived. It is necessary for many reasons, as will be explained to you later. Do not let Gamble’s visit here scare you into trying to amend the original course of events. It is not so easily done, as you will soon experience. We prefer your older self to remain a bystander. You see, your kind of time endeavors to remain on a track of linear rails.”

  “You mean destiny?”

  “Yes, I think I do.”

  “Well, hey, I don’t want that responsibility again. I greased the tracks twelve years ago and have no intention on throwing any switches the second time around, or third, or however many times you’ve brought me back here. So why don’t you just put me back with the others, and we’ll call it a day.”

  “I’m afraid you must see it through yet again.”

  “So you have brought me back before. How many times?”

  “As many lessons as deemed necessary.”

  He was shouting now. “So what’s your destiny? To make sure I keep the train aligned with fate or change tracks and head to Baltimore instead?”

  “I only design the portages of providence,” informed the entity. “I cannot make those decisions for you. But mark my warning and remain a bystander.”

  “Swell,” Duncan said, throwing up his hands. “Then let’s get on with it.”

  “Yes, let’s do.”

  Without delay, the street returned to normal, and the previous lull recommenced, although the neighborhood was much louder to him now after having spent minutes in a vacuum (assuming the meter had been running at all). He could not feel the slightest breeze, yet the leaves and flowers trembled on the trees and shrubs around him, as if their roots had reached the distant interstate and, through some magical act of osmosis, tapped into the nocturnal vibrations of those heavy trucks and RVs hoping to shave some time.

  There was no way for him to tell if the entity was gone, but he suspected she hadn’t moseyed too far.

  Moths bumped the glass domes of porch lights, electrical wires hummed, a car engine pinged and ticked as it cooled in a nearby driveway.

  Turning, he saw that the wolf was still there, muzzle down, still staring at him. Staring into him...

  Curious.

  He continued to stare back, finding it almost impossible now to peel his eyes away. Strange, the feeling...

  A glow leaked from the rims of those canine eyes.

  So ...Goddamn strange...

  Then another mutation of the night air. Something happening...

  The neighborhood had changed; was now as it had been, twelve years distant.

  Soft, advancing footfalls jarred him away from the wolf. Just as he turned, his partner, Tyler Everton, jogged not past him, but through him. There was no sensation whatsoever, but he flinched just the same, as animatedly as if he’d been caught in the crosswalk by a speeding car.

  That would also mean that his younger self was already over the fence and coming around the side of the house.

  So...it had begun.

  His heart was racing again, and a fierce compulsion to merge with his other self began to build.

  “Oh, shit,” he muttered.
Gritting his teeth, he steeled himself against the urging force, one he instantly compared to polyuria, the frequent and profound need to urinate. He’d experienced this in the hospital after demanding that someone remove his catheter, his argument being that if he was able to press the call button that continued to summon nothing but the ward’s fattest, homeliest nurses to irrigate his cath, then he was able to hold and shake his own dick, thank you very much.

  But nature wasn’t calling from his loins. What begged release now was something way deep inside his chest; deeper. His torso was only inches thick, of course, but the force within it seemed to be emanating from the cold sable depths of a mine.

  Then his surroundings began to dehydrate, the edges crinkling and curling inward like the sloughed, drying skin of a snake. Within moments, the neighborhood had become something reminiscent of a Beatles’ song, a series of rice paper lawns, cellophane streets, and crackleware houses. Translucent pieces of a meal now digesting in the belly of time.

  A minute crack started at his feet, then fanned outward into millions of cleaving tendrils. The corollary struck him that he was on a clear, frozen lake—and instantly he was, standing on a thin and amazingly limpid ice field, with no shoreline in sight. Beneath the fracturing sheet, the frigid waters constricted into a black vortex, giving Duncan the illusion that he was staring directly down into a whirlpool. Then the swirling blackness rose to meet his position. Like a lamprey, it attached itself to the underside of the lake’s shattered veneer and began to suckle.

  “Oh, shit,” he whimpered. “Oh, shit, shit—NO!”

  He closed his eyes and braced himself for...

  Himself.

  9.

  Amy had been right. That fateful night was not through with him.

  Everything was as it had been.

  Except now there were two minds—one oil, the other water—separated by a thin layer of years. And they were in the hands of heavenly hosts whose intentions, Duncan feared, were to shake them into solubility. For what gain, what purpose, Duncan didn’t have a clue. But he was certain that this wasn’t some divine civility being paid him by his daughter, as he had originally and so immodestly suspected.

  No, someone or something was indulging him and the clock for entirely different reasons.

  Maybe Gamble had been right; maybe these so-called angels had been dancing with man and were heady from the glitter ball’s exhausting tempo. Then again, who was he to question divinity’s aim, even if its bloodline was tainted? And how could he possibly trust Gamble?

  But he was only grasping at straws. And that scared him more than anything else. Not knowing. Not understanding.

  Suddenly, there was the feeling that he was being stretched. No— rounded! Like a bubble. Then there was blackness.

  Nothingness.

  Only the pounding of his heart.

  Calm down, he reassured himself, you’re still just a bystander here.

  Then…

  *****

  Duncan was at the front door; his partner Tyler Everton beside him.

  “I hope to fuck you know what you’re doing, McNeil,” Tyler whispered angrily. “Like I told you at Smitty’s, I’m doing this for you, not the money. I won’t take a fucking dime. We’re in and out like Ex-Lax, got it?”

  “Like candy from a baby,” Duncan assured.

  Smitty’s was the cop bar they frequented, and the place where Duncan had first told Tyler about his plan. Tyler agreed to help, but not without dumping a truckload of ambivalence on the table.

  Duncan rang the bell.

  “Who is it?” The inquiry was casual, laid-back. These were not the kind of people you could look at and conclude with any amount of certainty whether they were musicians, accountants, car salespeople, or drug dealers. They were middle-to-upper class lowlifes; not big-time but big enough, smarter than your average scum, but lacking the one vital ingredient that kept most other drug dealers out of prison long enough to put at least thirty-thousand miles on their new Mercedes’. Paranoia. Hell, according to his informant, these people didn’t even have an alarm system in their house, not to mention a peephole in the door. No vicious Rottweiler.

  “It’s Lighthouse,” Duncan said. “Tony V.’s with me.” These names had been given to Duncan by his informant, who’d promised, “They’ll get you in the door.”

  Despite the hour, a Caucasian male in Hawaiian shorts and a blue tank top blithely opened the door. He smiled, and from behind his glasses his brown eyes hesitated, as if he’d been expecting someone else. Lighthouse and Tony V. was Duncan’s guess.

  Duncan raised his 9mm Smith and Wesson to the man’s face. “Not a peep,” he said.

  Tyler pushed open the door. Directly ahead, two people sat at a round glass kitchen table, a portly Hispanic man with a handlebar mustache and an attractive female, brunette, early twenties. In the center of the table lay open two Elante aluminum briefcases, one full of heroin, the other money. No paraphernalia on the table, it didn’t appear to Duncan that anyone was using, at least not openly. Besides there being nearly a quarter-mil in cash crowding the napkin dispenser, and enough heroin to see Sid Vicious through his next lifetime, there were also three Heineken bottles, a cup of what might have been coffee, and a full ashtray.

  Duncan frisked the doorman, then instructed him to join the others at the kitchen table.

  With puckered expressions, all three stared at the two masked gunman, the reality of their situation now having fully struck them like a bad case of the runs.

  “Everybody remain perfectly fucking still,” Duncan ordered. “I want all hands flat on the table.”

  “Who else is here?” Tyler demanded.

  Nobody at the table blinked.

  Duncan walked into the kitchen and began patting down the Hispanic man and his female friend for weapons. “My friend asked you a question,” Duncan reminded them.

  “No one else is here,” the Hispanic man finally said, his eyes hesitating a millisecond too long on the drugs.

  He pushed the gun to the man’s head, then reached over and began lifting out the bags of heroin. Beneath, he found two firearms, a Beretta 92-M9 and a Walther .P380. Each had a full clip and, upon further inspection, a chambered round.

  “There’s hope for you yet,” Duncan congratulated. He confiscated the weapons, each one small enough to fit easily into the front pockets of his camouflaged fatigues. He then tapped the Hispanic man on the shoulder and said, “I need a pen.”

  The man pointed to a drawer by the stove.

  Duncan found the item, then said, “Close the briefcase of money, then rearrange the sequence of numbers on the lock.”

  The man complied.

  “Now,” Duncan said, “reinstate the combination.”

  Removing his left glove, Duncan wrote down the sequence of numbers on his hand as the man turned each dial. “Marvelous,” he said. “Now, show me it opens.”

  It did.

  “Good. Okay, repeat step one,” he instructed. “Excellent. Now, pucker up and kiss it all goodbye.”

  Staring down into his lap, the doorman said, almost a whisper, “Man, you are so fucking dead.”

  Duncan nodded. “Because I don’t know who I’m dealing with, right?”

  Still avoiding eye contact, the doorman said, “That’s right.”

  Duncan put a finger under the doorman’s chin, then raised the man’s face to his own. “I’ve seen bigger shit stains on flypaper. I’m only taking the money, so just accept the fact that you and El Porko here are going to have to recoup your losses the old-fashioned way—put more cut in the product.”

  Tyler remained at the entrance to the kitchen, allowing himself full view of the interior. “Get it and go!”

  “You guys are cops, huh?” said the Hispanic male. He spat at the floor. “Dirty fucking cops.”

  “You haven’t been paying attention,” Duncan said. “We’re the robbers.”

  “Damn it! Hurry the fuck up!” Tyler insisted.

  Dunc
an paused to slip on his glove, noticing as he did the young woman, shaking badly. Her long, acrylic nails might have been tapping out Morse code on the tabletop. But it was her nose that intrigued him, as it wanted to point in a particular direction, the rest of her face resisting the pull.

  Body language. How wonderfully betraying.

  “Just do it!” Tyler yelled, rocking on his tip-toes now, as if the walls and ceiling were spiked a la Indiana Jones and closing in at an extremely uncomfortable pace.

  Duncan inventoried the table again: three green beer bottles, each one at least half full, a cup of coffee, an ashtray...

  He grabbed the cup. It read, TO ALL YOU VIRGINS: THANKS FOR NOTHING! He held it against his cheek. Still warm; the bouquet of red lipstick still fresh.

  He grabbed the girl’s chin and gently pulled her face around. No lipstick there.

  “Alright,” Duncan said, “either you’re all lying, or one of you cross-dressing faggots is chasing his Heineken down with Maxwell House.” He pressed the muzzle against the doorman’s ear. “Are you a Clairol man?” he growled. “Or is there something you forgot to tell me and my friend?”

  Before the man could answer, somewhere in the house a baby coughed.

  Tyler raised his firearm and targeted on something that was out of Duncan’s line of sight. “Get your ass in here now, lady!” he commanded. “Move it!”

  Duncan ordered everyone to make like statues. He grabbed the briefcase of money with his left hand, the 9mm in his other, raised and searching.

  The child was squalling now, having been frightened by Tyler’s outburst.

  Just before he breached the kitchen’s wide threshold, Duncan pointed the gun at the Hispanic male and said, “Two seconds to tell me who else is in this house or I’m gonna put a hole in that empty piñata of yours.”

  “It’s just my wife, Sandra, and our baby,” he implored. “Please, don’t hurt them. Just take what you want and go.”

  “Gun!” Tyler cried. “She’s got a gun!”