Zephyr VI

by Warren Hately

  The goon looks at me like I’m stupid, which maybe I am.

  “No reason other than what? Having a boss who can astral travel and go back in time and wear people like you an’ I wear suits?”

  I pause a moment at the guard’s time travel reference, but that’s another note I’m going to have to file away in the increasingly cluttered office of my mind.

  “OK, but you haven’t seen him come out?”

  “Nope.”

  I look to the others now milling behind me and back to the slick guard.

  “Mind if we have a try?”

  Zephyr 22.2 “Off Its Proper Angles”

  THE DOOR TO Twilight’s inner sanctum is six-inch oak ensorcelled to a degree of toughness to withstand even my irritated banging as I stand at the lead of an equally frustrated and increasingly meddlesome group of has-beens stalled on the Persian hall runner outside our unwitting host’s retreat. Long seconds pass in which I try to discern even the slightest suggestions of noises coming, muffled as they might be, from beyond the immovable object, though Maxtor’s troubled mouth-breathing and Mistress Snow’s frequent, petulant little sighs are like static to any fine-tuning I might hope to achieve. I finish up with a bug-eyed look I share equally among the members of my newfound posse.

  “I have no idea if he’s in there,” I say.

  “Try again,” Seeker says.

  “Maybe I should do it,” Mistress Snow says. “Twilight and I go way back.”

  “Goons seemed to know this one though,” Sentinel says, eyeing me like cattle and irking me yet further with his grammatical objectification.

  “Try again,” Seeker says.

  “Jesus, OK.”

  I bang on the door with the palm of a fist that even as Cusp could probably cave in someone’s head pretty easily. A dull thud is my only reward.

  “Twilight. Open up. It’s me . . . Cusp,” I say, admitting the requisite conviction is missing in action as I stare hopelessly at the whorls in the surface grain suppressed by a thick coating of black lacquer.

  Again no movement.

  “I don’t think he’s even in there,” the skinny goon from before says.

  I slam down my hand again, though only half-heartedly.

  “Twilight!” I yell. “I need to speak to you. I have a message from Zephyr.”

  There’s a collective muttering of surprise as a few of my companions repeat my untethered alter ego’s name, but whatever their reactions, they’re whitewashed by the doorframe erupting in bright red lines that sizzle into nothingness almost as soon as they appear.

  Then the door eases open.

  Twilight’s hulking and disheveled figure stands silhouetted in the doorway, a weird spectral light from behind projecting only the illusion of the man I once knew. Because we are close, I can see his eyes set in deep squinting bags on his normally handsome visage and the exhaustion and inexplicable sorrow framing them.

  “It’s you,” he says to me in a monotone.

  His cloudy blue eyes slowly pick over the others before returning to me.

  “You’d best come in.”

  He backs away leaving me and the others to follow.

  *

  THE SANCTUM IS a mess. There is nothing metaphoric about me describing the scene like Twilight has been sleeping, eating and shitting in here for the past three days solid. As is his wont, the big guy wears only a pair of itty bitty boxers and an outlandishly gay-looking gold robe which hangs customarily open. I’m transfixed by the antihero’s unusual bearing, something off about him and not just his ignorance about my true identity.

  Bookcases line the octagonal chamber which also has a huge long work bench covered in books and the various items de rigueur to any alchemist’s lab. If you picture a bachelor pad designed by Aleister Crowley with a hint of three-day-old dick cheese, then you have half the picture – or at least a very good idea about the smell. Behind the long table, an archway sits in the wall of books that gives onto another candle-lit chamber containing what I can only describe as a curiously small-scale model of Stonehenge.

  Twilight catches me peering and presses a button concealed under the table and the book shelves seal together seamlessly.

  “You don’t need to go in there.”

  “I don’t remember you having that. Must be new.”

  “It is.”

  “What have you been doing? Redecorating?”

  Twilight stares at me for long seconds. Whether this is part of his new look or I’m only noticing it for the first time, but the outline of Twilight’s skull seems more evident beneath the flesh of his face. Despite his otherwise disinterested mien, his blue eyes rake over me with a feverish quality.

  “That room isn’t located in what you might call conventional space,” he says, as if reluctantly. “I’d recommend staying out.”

  “Someone might recommend the same to you.”

  “Where’s Zephyr?” Twilight snaps. “You said you had a message?”

  “We need to talk to you,” I say.

  Twilight’s gaze flicks to the others.

  “All of you? Where’s Zephyr? Or did you just say that to lure me out?”

  “We lost contact,” I tell him. “When did you see him last?”

  “I haven’t seen anyone for days.”

  “I thought you might have the others with you.”

  “What others?”

  “Well, Portal, for one,” I say. “We could really do with his help.”

  “Then I can’t help you with that,” Twilight says. “I’m out. Done. You have no idea what I’ve been through. Last I saw Portal and Legion and anyone else with only one name, I set them up in a safe house down near the waterfront. Zephyr would know it. We tussled with my cousin there not long ago.”

  Twilight looks askance to Seeker and nods, remembering she too would know the waterfront digs where we ran afoul of Danica Azzurro. The big lug’s eyes scan up and down Seeker’s slender metallic form, in her armor resembling a battle-ready Barbie doll as much as a mechanoid praying mantis.

  “Nice duds,” Twilight says.

  “Just something I picked up lately,” Loren calmly replies.

  Twilight grunts – the closest thing we’re going to get from him as far as appreciating jests goes – then resumes his attention on me.

  “Holland, right?”

  “You call me Cusp.”

  “Uh-huh. Still got hard feelings?”

  I only stare him down. I am far from the most fitting person to lecture Twilight for his abuses of power, though I am also the only one now left to speak for Holland.

  “What are you doing here, Twilight?” I ask instead.

  “I live here.”

  “You know what I’m saying.”

  Twilight’s glare returns like that of the truculent child I imagine he once was.

  “I live here.”

  “City’s in trouble.”

  “Fuck the city.”

  “People need you.”

  “Fuck people.”

  “Uh-huh, so you’re just . . . hiding out?”

  “Not hiding. I’ve quit.”

  “If you’re talking about being a hero, I’m not sure you can quit something you never properly started,” I say to him. “You’re the antihero, right?”

  The phrase freezes Twilight in his tracks. He fixes me with his increasingly lucid gaze, then waves distractedly at the others like a statue coming to life.

  “My people will look after whatever you need,” he tells them.

  Then to me, turning away already, he adds, “Cusp and I have to talk.”

  Twilight presses the concealed button and the book cases fold open once more. Like a true alpha, he goes ahead without waiting to see if I follow.

  I glance back at the others caught between confusion and relief.

  “I thought your name was Jo?” Maxtor says.

  I shrug, nod to Seeker, and move after Twilight.

  *

  “WHAT GIVES, JOE?” the big lug asks
the moment the sliding door slips back into place behind me.

  Suddenly I feel uncomfortable in the bigger, more powerful man’s presence, aware as I am of the violent possessive sexual history between him and Holland and the fact he can enspell doors shut so there’s nothing I could ever do to break free.

  He sweeps up a fairly epic brass goblet and swirls the contents in the bleak light. Twilight’s visible relaxation is only apparent as he loses it, growing tense and serious as he takes in my discomfort.

  “What’s the matter?” he asks. “Cat got your tongue?”

  “I could ask you the same thing.”

  “You’re safe, Zephyr. I’m not a rapist.”

  “You’re not?”

  “Is that a question?”

  “Yes?”

  Twilight stares at me long moments and I am surprised when his hard stare breaks in on itself and he sniffles and looks away.

  “That hurts, man,” he says. “You don’t know anything about the history between her and me.”

  “I know you used some magic trick to possess her so you could have sex with me, you depraved piece of shit,” I say.

  “You never did get over that.”

  “No, I never did.”

  Twilight gives me his best Macaulay Culkin a few moments more. I know it’s not super-interesting to keep describing Twilight’s drawn-out huffing and puffing, but he really does stand there self-consciously striking a pose, except I’m as sensitive as a Richter scale to the tremors beneath his otherwise hand-carved exterior.

  *

  TWILIGHT RETURNS TO life, taking a big sullen swig from the ceremonial cup and moving past the first of the replica plinths which encircle the room at armpit height. Like Stonehenge, the center of the various cromlechs is a clear space of ground with another of Twilight’s customarily arcane and detailed magickal cyphers, identical to the one covering the floor of the main library in this manor and wherever else he normally conducts his sorcery.

  “What’s going on, big guy?”

  “I should ask you. What the fuck happened?”

  “Matrioshka.”

  “The chick with the big head from Afghanistan?”

  I’ve confided in a lot of my off-world adventures to Twilight, so he takes liberties with the shorthand version of the tale honed by long hours of our past discussions, and I nod even though Matrioshka’s even more evil twin in the parallel universe of The Twelve is the one with the skull swollen by her psionic powers, at least Twilight’s able to keep up – one of the reasons I guess I like his company, and all the more reason for me to feel conflicted as I stand there, him in the wrong headspace and me in the wrong body, so many kinds of fucked up it beggars description, belief and credibility.

  “I don’t know if I could explain even if I could,” I say, knowing that makes no sense. “I need to know about you. What the fuck is going on?”

  “I told you before. It’s not complicated. I quit.”

  “What?”

  “I have quit.”

  “Yes yes,” I snap. “Explain to me why.”

  “Jeez, you on your period already?”

  “Quitting. You’re telling me why.”

  “Bah,” Twilight says. “I can’t do it anymore, and I don’t want to.”

  He goes to drain the cup only to see he already has. He reluctantly sets it down on a nearby menhir.

  “You remember me in Afghanistan?” he says without meeting my eyes.

  “Yeah.”

  “I picked a fight with you,” he says. “It’s not the first time.”

  “True.”

  “Did you listen to any of that shit Sting was preaching there?”

  “It wasn’t Sting, it was the Doomsday Man, but yeah.”

  “Your father.”

  “Actually possibly or probably not my father,” I say.

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t get distracted. Why quit? Man, I need you,” I say. “I don’t know what the deal was between you and Holland. I know that. I –”

  “She was one of your biggest fans,” Twilight says.

  “What?”

  “She was a fan. She was crazy hot for you. The first time, it was her idea. I was just along for the ride.”

  “Holy shit, you’re making me feel sick.”

  “Homophobia?”

  “I am thinking about this fucking woman’s life I helped erase.”

  “You didn’t do that and you know it.”

  “Oh,” I say and try to laugh and the noise just comes out like a rodent emitting gas. “Now you’re the one trying to keep me bright and fluffy?”

  “Hardly,” Twilight says. “I’m clean out of bright and fluffy. That shit in Afghanistan made me think. I have no ethos. I have no creed.”

  “That shit in Afghanistan was utter horse bollocks, Twilight.”

  “I know that, but the people gathering there to spoon it up like Ben & Jerry’s, they had something I didn’t have – and they didn’t have to bushwhack their best friends just to fucking feel something for once.”

  The admission weighs heavily in the room in which one of the most powerful men in Atlantic City is also its loneliest. Yes, I know this could be me we’re talking about, but I am too fucking gender confused right now to really qualify for such a particular award. And that such a walking disaster area as Twilight thinks of me as his best friend – the guy he rimmed while possessing an apparently willing mask-groupie’s body – just goes to show how far the universe is off its proper angles.

  Zephyr 22.3 “The Truth At Its Heart”

  “I HAVE BEEN reading,” Twilight says and gestures back in the direction of the room we can no longer see, and if the earlier information means anything, is no longer technically on the same planar reality.

  “First time in my life I read anything other than grimoires and ancient manuscripts or Nate Simon’s column in the Post. Where’s Sal Doro gone these days? Redundancies?”

  “He’s dead. I told you that.”

  “That’s right. They wanted you for that?”

  “Only briefly.”

  “You know Schopenhauer said in life, we are like children in a theatre before the play is about to start, but instead we are ‘innocent prisoners, condemned not to death, but to life’,” Twilight quotes.

  “And Schopenhauer was right up there with his pal Nietzsche in the manic depressive stakes,” I say. “Great writers and great minds, Twilight, but probably miserable fucking assholes to live with – especially if you were one of ‘em. What have you been reading?”

  “A lot of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.”

  “Fucking hell,” I say. “We have to get you off that crap.”

  “Crap?”

  “Pragmatic philosophy. Guys like you and me are exceptions to the rule. We struggle with mortality, most of us . . . I’m not sure about you,” I say.

  “Life is empty without purpose.”

  “Look, this is fascinating and all, but I need to find Portal and the others because my purpose is to kick the shit out of whoever’s hijacked my city. Are you in?”

  Twilight stares into my silence.

  “Oh by the way,” I interject on myself. “If you know anything about how Holland got her powers, if she was just some super-powered groupie, I’d really appreciate it. Especially if it involves anything to do with . . . demons?”

  Twilight gives an unconvincing show of looking mystified and concerned, made all the more obvious by his well-known customary disregard for almost anyone and anything. I make a low noise and my thoughts start to sputter off mindlessly and I too reflect on Sting’s preachings.

  “Somehow I’m going to let that one go through to the catcher,” I tell him. “Are you coming with us or not, Dominic?”

  “I’m retreating, Joe. I might be a superhuman, but I don’t know that I am the superman I might wish to be. Not yet.”

  “. . . and your criminal empire?”

  “I guess there’s going to be a power vacuum,” he says and shrugs. �
��Sorry about that.”

  “So I can expect an out-and-out turf war on Atlantic City’s streets?”

  “Maybe once you get the city back under control. If you can.”

  “Jeez, thanks a bunch.”

  “Sorry to shit the bed on you, old pal, but you’ll get through. You’re Zephyr. I mean, not right now you’re not, but you are Zephyr. You always get through.”

  I stare at my erstwhile friend a moment, refusing to be drawn into the sadness I feel because I don’t want to honor this asshole for it. I want to curse him as a traitor, but if I truly sift my thoughts I know it’s just my yearning for something like the four-color fantasy most of us chase with the gang back together and our wounds patched up ready to go kick bad guy tail. Only it looks like it’s not happening that way this time and it feels all kinds of wrong.

  “If you see me around – Zephyr, I mean – give me a shout, OK?”

  “When this is over and you want to talk me through what the fuck happened to you, I might be able to help – especially if, like you say, there’s a demon involved,” he says.

  “Won’t you be in your Fortress of Solitude or something?”

  “I’ll be here,” Twilight says.

  I nod, feeling humbled not sitting well with my earlier outrage. I look for where the door should be and just wish the fucking thing would open by itself.

  “And if you’re still stuck in that body, well . . .” Twilight says and winks.

  “We could have a lot of fun.”

  *

  TWILIGHT AND I file out of his inner sanctum and there’s a vibe like everyone thinks we’ve been fucking. I don’t help things by nervously checking my hair, which comes about as naturally to me as dancing with an umbrella. Twilight’s nonplussed, probably happy to take the cred as he eyes everyone munching from a platter of food and drink adorning the nearest sideboard. I help myself, sandwiching multiple sandwiches together despite my modest feminine hand span, gorging myself on a random mash of pickles, cucumber, cold venison sausage and curried egg. There’s a pitcher of some kind of weird lemon drink and I pick it up by the gilt handle and take a swig, uncaring of the others watching as I back up just long enough to belch before pouring more in. Fuck it. Crumbs rain down like jumpers from a collapsing office block. It feels like I literally haven’t eaten for about a thousand years.