by Andrew Pyper
Down the stone slope and into the main concourse along with all the others seeking the gate to their train or a snapshot of themselves with the giant Stars and Stripes hanging from the ceiling in the background. None aware that, somewhere among them, there is an ancient spirit occupying the skin of the dead. And that a living man has traveled seven thousand miles to meet it.
I come to stand near the center of the floor, turning around and, first, scanning the upper level of bars and restaurants to see if Belial stands at a railing waiting for me. But what am I looking for? What form has it chosen to take? I keep an eye out for a repeat performance. Will Junger. Toby. One of the Reyes girls. Raggedy Anne. Yet no one familiar to me presents themselves, whether among the living or otherwise.
With a sudden wave of nausea the thought arrives that I am wrong.
The “clues” were never clues, the “trail” only a wandering of my own making. The demon, if it was ever real at all, merely delighted in watching me run around in this continental circle. A man lost in every meaning of the word.
Which would mean Tess is lost, too.
Soon the police will come. And they will find me here. Weeping in the crowd on the terminal floor, cursing the painted stars on the ceiling and whatever cruel architect screwed them into the sky, inviting those on Earth to look for patterns that were never there to begin with.
So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear.
He stands beneath the gold clock in the same spot O’Brien would stand when I’d come here to meet her. Watching me with an expression of contentment he seemed incapable of while alive.
My father. Belial’s final joke.
I approach and feel the malicious triumph radiating from him, a fouling of the air that passes into my lungs without taste, but repugnant nonetheless. Yet the setting of his face remains the same. A mask of fatherly pleasure at seeing his son after a long separation. The prodigal returned.
“You cannot know how long I have waited for someone like you,” my father says in his own voice, though the inflections, however lifelessly flattened, belong to the demon. “Others have come close but lacked the strength to endure. But you, David, are a man of uncommon commitment. A true disciple.”
“I’m not your disciple,” I say, the words barely audible.
“When you were called did you not answer? Are you not a witness to miracles?” He looks directly down at the briefcase at my side. “Are you not in possession of a new gospel?”
I don’t move. It’s the fight against blacking out. Dots of shadow swarming around my father’s head. A Black Crown.
“Give it to me,” he says.
I take an unconscious step back from his hand, now outstretched.
“I thought you wanted me to make it public,” I say. “To speak for you.”
“You will speak for me! But the document will precede you. And then, when the time is right, you will tell your story. You will personalize the document, give people a way to accept it.”
“The police are after me. Others, too.”
“Submit to me, David, and I will protect you.”
“Submit? How?”
“Let me in.”
My father takes a half step closer but somehow more than makes up the distance of my retreat, so that he is now all I can see, all I can hear.
“How our story is presented is as important as what that story is,” he says. “The narrator must have a compelling tale of his own, and there is nothing more compelling than self-sacrifice. Milton was jailed, too. Socrates, Luther, Wilde. And of course, no one more than Christ himself understood how delivering your message from chains makes the message easier to hear.”
“You want me to be a martyr.”
“That is the way we will win our war, David. Not from the position of dominance, but resistance! We will win the hearts of women and men by showing them how God has suppressed their quest for knowledge since the beginning. The forbidden fruit.”
“Hence I will excite their minds / With more desire to know, and to reject / Envious commands.”
“Yes! You will feed man’s desire to know the truth of my kind, our unjust fall, the cruelty of God, and the emancipation that Satan offers. Equality. Is this not the most noble cause? Democracy! This is what I bring. Not a plague, not arbitrary suffering. Truth!”
My father smiles at me with a warmth so alien to the muscles of his face it causes a trembling in his cheeks.
“Courage never to submit or yield.”
“Quite so!” it says, mouth wide. “Our Lord Satan’s pledge.”
“But you forget the preceding lines. All is not lost; th’ unconquerable will, / And study of revenge, immortal hate.”
“As I’ve told you,” my father’s voice says, though now without the empty humor of moments ago. “John was obliged to disguise his true sympathies.”
“That is no disguise. Revenge. Hate. Those are your sole motivations. All good to me is lost. Evil be thou my good.”
“A play on words.”
“That’s all you do! Turn words inside out. You can’t let them stand for what you feel because you feel nothing. Good for evil, evil for good. It’s a distinction that lies beyond your grasp.”
“David—”
“Belial. Without worth. The greatest lie you tell is that you are a creature sympathetic to humanity. It’s why who delivers the document is as important as the document itself.”
My father steps closer still. The power and size of his frame as evident now as when I was a child. Yet I cannot stop the words I speak to him. Convictions I’m arriving at as they pass my lips.
“All along I thought I was chosen for my expertise. But that’s just window dressing. You chose me because mine is the story of a man who loves his child. And yours is the story of nothing. No child. No love. No friend. In all of the ways that matter, you don’t exist.”
“Be careful.”
“Why? You can’t return Tess to me. That was a lie from the start. I figured out your name, brought the document here before the new moon. None of it matters.”
“David—”
“You have the power to destroy, but not to create, not to unite. No matter where she is now, you can’t bring her back.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because I’m here for a different reason than helping you.”
“Really?” he says, suddenly sure of itself again, knowing with this turn it has won. “Then tell me.”
I can’t answer that. It leaves me to look around the seething space of the great hall. Hear, as if for the first time, not its cacophony, but a chorus of human voices. Who among them would miss me if the serpent were to succeed? What would the end mean without Tess? Without her, I, too, am without worth.
Yet, though I am alone, those passing around me aren’t. The young mother pushing a stroller with one hand and gripping the wrist of a toddler singing the alphabet with the other. An elderly couple kissing farewell, the man’s crooked fingers drawn across the lines of his wife’s cheek. Two women in burkas walking past a pair of Hasidim, the current of the crowd joining them for a moment as though in a secret meeting of the city’s all-in-black devout. A man clipping by in heels and a red cocktail dress, his Marilyn wig in need of straightening.
Strangers set upon their own courses, crossing the terminal floor. But to see them as only this would be to take the demon’s view. An erasure of their names, their own reasons for sacrifice.
“This isn’t yours,” I say, gripping the briefcase’s handle with both hands.
“Your daughter—”
“I won’t—”
“Your daughter is in PAIN!”
A head-splitting shriek. The echo of it shattering off the stone walls of the great hall. But nobody around us seems to hear. Just as nobody hears what he screams next.
“She is BURNING, David!”
I take a step closer to my dead father’s face. Stare at the presence inside him through his eyes.
“If Tess is in
hell, tell her I’ll be there soon.”
He is about to reply with force of some unpredictable kind. The coiled readiness of violence. Shoulders raised, fingers splayed out like claws. But something other than my defiance holds him back. His head turning as though at a shouted warning.
I take another step back and my father watches me go. His hate as pure as necessity, as a starving animal swallowing its young.
I turn and Belial’s shriek follows me as I go. Grinding, metallic. Unheard by all but me.
If I keep looking at him I will be lost. Not because he will hunt me down, but because I will go to him. I can feel that as a weight greater than the briefcase sliding down against the back of my legs, its contents suddenly heavy as a slab of granite.
So I walk. Turn my back on my father and feel enveloped by the suffocating grief that is partly his, partly the thing inside him.
I’m halfway to the escalators when I spot the police. Two pairs of uniforms entering from the tunnel that leads up from the Oyster Bar. And then, a second later, coming down the stairs at the hall’s opposite end, three men in suits who speak to each other under their breath, giving orders of deployment.
None of them seem to have seen me yet. Which means I have to move.
But I only remain standing where I am. Frozen by Belial’s tormented cry. Its surface the sound of chaos. Yet beneath it, his knowing voice inside my head.
Come, David.
Sounding more fatherly than my father ever did. More falsely kind, falsely loving.
Come to me.
There is no choice anymore, no more refusal. I’m turning to go back to my father, still standing beneath the gold clock, when I see a woman who looks like someone I know. Someone I knew.
It’s only her back. Only a glimpse. But in the next second it’s enough to see that it is O’Brien. Not the woman with the frail, stooped posture of O’Brien at the end, but the tall and athletic Connecticut girl who never stopped, in her brainy, teasing, A-type way, being the tall and athletic Connecticut girl.
She doesn’t look my way. Just goes to the ticket windows, her back to me. Cutting through the streams of travelers in a gray overcoat, her gait straight and unslowed.
I start after her. Which turns Belial’s screech into a thundering howl.
The woman who looks like O’Brien purchases a ticket and then slips back into the crowd, heading toward the gates. It forces me to change course to follow, cutting across the sightline of the uniformed police who now jump up to scan across the heads rolling out before them like a rippled lake. I make no effort to conceal myself, judging a duck-and-run a greater risk of attracting notice than late-for-a-meeting swiftness. Trying to keep the dark-haired woman in view.
As I get closer, Belial’s wailing suddenly lifts up several octaves before splitting in two, throwing part of its noise to a register lower than thunder, a nauseating sub-bass. So loud it feels like it will bring the stars on the ceiling down on us all. It spurs the reflex to look up.
And when I return my eyes to the crowd, O’Brien is gone.
At least, she isn’t where she was a moment ago. Yet almost instantly I spot her again, maybe thirty feet to the left of where she’d been. How could she have covered that ground in a second or two at most? There is no time for the weighing of what is possible. I’m already following her again, now pushing people aside with murmured Pardon mes as she somehow carves through the same bodies without touching them.
When I catch up to her it hits me too late to pull my hand back from the woman’s shoulder.
The animal smell of the barnyard. The mold of wet straw.
She turns. That is, her head swivels evenly upon its neck, though every other part of her seems frozen, a wax statue come to partial life. It’s as though her face naturally looks backward, and she has merely parted her hair to show her bulging eyes to me, the pushed-out bones of cheek and chin, the black-rooted teeth.
“Shall we go, Professor?” the Thin Woman says.
I start to back away from her before realizing she holds my wrist. A grip as cold as the ring of a handcuff. With every pull against it there is a flare of pain at my elbow and shoulder that makes it clear the bones there are separating, the ligaments stretched to strands of gum.
“They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow,” the Thin Woman recites, her voice calm as she slides me back toward the gold clock where Belial stands. “Through Eden took their solitary way.”
I’m moving without stepping, as though dancing with my feet clamped atop my partner’s. Over her shoulder, through a widening gap in the crowd, my father waits for me. His anguished screams now shaping into something else. A thousand children laughing at the spectacle of a chosen victim’s pain.
I try to think of a prayer. A holy name. A line of scripture. But no words feel they could be uttered and believed at the same time. None but her name.
Tess.
It’s only a thought at first. Then I say it. A whisper even I can barely hear. Yet it gives the Thin Woman pause, slows her floating progress. Lets me grip my arm with my free hand and jerk it back while kicking against the front of her legs with my feet.
Something pops at the base of my neck. That’s the collarbone someone says, before I realize it’s me. Followed by the pain, doubling and hot.
But I’m free.
Finding my footing on the stone floor again and backing away, the Thin Woman appearing puzzled for a moment before her lifeless half smile returns. She looks up at the clock that stands over Belial’s head. The minute hand nudging to fifty.
Two minutes until the moon. Until she’s his.
Come, my father offers again. It’s time, David.
I turn my back to them both to catch sight of the other O’Brien as she disappears through the archway toward Gate Four. It turns my walk to a jog. And with it, Belial’s screech returns. Louder even than before.
If I make it to the gate I will be out of view. Nothing matters but getting close to her. Because with every new foot I put between my father and myself—and every foot I come closer to the gate—the demon’s howl diminishes. Losing its hold as though yielding it to another.
Quiet.
Instant and total. I make it off the main terminal floor and onto the platform with the others finishing their calls or tossing soda cans in the bins before boarding and finding a good seat. And I can hear the living world again, too. Their shoes upon the stone floor, their I’ll be home soons.
She’s not here. The woman I thought was O’Brien—but who wasn’t, who couldn’t have been—is gone. A look-alike I’d imagined. A summoned memory of how she’d appeared the times we’d been here together on our dates-that-weren’t-dates.
As useful as the illusion was, it’s no help now. There’s no going back. If I have a chance of escape, it’s not out there in the station, but on the train. But I don’t have a ticket—have no way to buy a ticket—which means they will eject me at the first stop, or call security. Yet I’ll be out of here. Away, for a few moments, from the police. From the thing that I can feel still waiting for me beneath the clock.
A hand on my shoulder. Firm and sure.
“Love the outfit, Professor.”
I spin around to find her standing inches from me. Looking rested and well. More than that. Amused.
“Elaine. Jesus Christ.”
“What? He’s here, too?”
I want to put my arms around her but all at once a cold wave washes over me and it nearly pulls me under.
“Please. Tell me you’re not—”
“Don’t worry,” she says, pinching the skin of her face. “There’s nobody in here but me.”
“But you can’t be here.”
“I have a decisive rebuttal to that.” She leans in close enough for me to smell the perfume at her neck. “I quite obviously am here.”
“Are you—?”
“They don’t give you wings or a halo or anything like that. But yes, as far as I can tell. I’d say yes.”
A hundred questions compete for attention in my head, and O’Brien reads all of them and casts them away with a shake of her head.
“Get off at the Manitou station,” she says, handing me the ticket she bought. “There’ll be a white Lincoln in the lot with keys just under the left front tire.”
“The document. I need time to put it somewhere safe. Or destroy it.”
“That choice is yours.”
“They’ll still get me.”
“North by Northwest.”
“I don’t—”
“You’re Cary Grant, remember? A good man caught up in a bad business. Mistaken identity. The Pursuer is known to police, the things he’s done. You? You’re a professor who’s never gotten as much as a speeding ticket. You defended yourself the only way you knew how.”
“That’ll work?”
“Reasonable doubt. Works for the guilty often enough. You’ve got to figure the odds are even better for the innocent.”
She puts her hands on either side of my face.
“You’ve done so well,” she says. “Not just since Venice. Your whole life. I knew that, I think, but now I can see it. You’ve fought since you were a child.”
“Fought for what?”
“To do the hard things most of us pretend are easy. To be good. You never let go. You were tested and you passed, David.”
There isn’t time for an embrace, I can see that in the flinch of her smile. But she holds me anyway. A coiled strength that passes through me, lightening the weight of the briefcase in my hands.
“You have to get on this train,” she says, abruptly releasing me. “This train. Right now.”
“I—”
“Yeah, yeah. I know.”
I do as she says. Step through the nearest doors and hear them slide closed behind me. The train already pulling away.
The rear car I’m on is full, and I make my way up the aisle bending to steal glances out the window at the platform, but O’Brien is no longer there. By the archway a cop watches the train slip away into the tunnel and he sniffs after it, as though trying to detect a telltale trace in the platform’s stale air.