“Julian,” she calls out, as quietly as she can. “You need to come with me. You’re not safe here.”
Julian puts a hand on his forehead. “Who are you?”
“I’m here to help you.” She pauses, like she doesn’t want to say more, but is forced to by circumstances. “I’m here to help you take down Fun–Co. But you can’t do it without me.”
He nods. He is floating inside, as he takes this role of provocateur upon himself. He starts to go down the front stairs but she says, “And bring Chester. We need him with us. I’ll help you.”
Julian doesn’t hesitate. He doesn’t hesitate anymore. They haul him into the trunk of her Corolla and slam the lid shut.
“What about my car?” Julian says.
The woman puts a hand on her shoulder. “Leave it. Taking him and taking my car will buy us a little bit of time.”
Julian pauses. “Where are we going, exactly?”
She smiles. “South Dakota. To your dear friend Harry.”
Her name is Emory. They drive all day, only stopping a few times for bathroom breaks and food and gas. They don’t give Chester anything; they don’t really talk about it. Through hills and flatlands, prairies and strip malls unconnected to any towns, past collapsing barns and burnt farmhouses. He expects her to speak more, to explain herself, but she says little. When he asks her what Fun–Co actually is, she doesn’t say much. “Clearly we are in the realm of the supernatural. And you have seen more of it than I have. What’s important is that they were using you, and others like you, as conduits between their world and… this one.”
“Why though?” Julian asks.
She shrugs. “If we knew that, there might be an easier way than what we have to do.”
Julian also notes what he had read in the “Training Manual” about the “Unspeakable Leviathan.”
She laughs. “That could be code for their leader. Their CEO, if you will. I’m sure you have Its direct attention now.”
With twilight arriving, they come upon the call center — a white warehouse with wheat fields on three sides and a gas station on the fourth. There is little else around. Julian thinks the call center looks like a mausoleum.
They stop the car in the gas station parking lot, and Emory pulls a pill box out of her purse. She stares hard at Julian. “Now the power is in your hands,” she says, opening the pill box. Inside are a dozen of what look like black aspirin. “They are going to be ready for you. They don’t want you in. But with my help they won’t be able to stop you.”
“Okay, but what do you need Harry for?”
“The call center. It’s the only place where the ritual can take place. They are using your phone number to try to break you and the work you are doing; only by using a phone hub like this will you be able to break through the defenses.”
He pauses. “How do you know this?” he asks. “I mean, about the work I do?”
She sighs, but not unhappily. “I’m one of your biggest fans. I admire your site so so much.”
For a few moments, doubts absorb into him like the winged woman’s blood into the dancers’ cell phones. But he chases them away. He doesn’t want to doubt himself, or the fact that his life and work — forever ignored — is truly worth admiration. And since everyone on the Internet is more or less a stranger, it makes sense for a stranger like Emory to admire him.
“Open your palm,” she says. He does, slowly, and she places all the black pills in his hand. Taking a deep breath, he swallows all of them and she gives him a sip of water.
There is no taste at all to them.
“Hold on,” she says. “Hold on.”
Things begin happening quickly after that. His awareness of what happens comes and goes. He feels like he is nine feet tall, somehow scrunched into his Corolla, as Emory backs the car across the state highway, through the parking lot of the call center, crashing the trunk of the car into the front doors.
They exit amongst the smashed glass. Emory pops open her trunk. Julian sees that Chester is unconscious. She sighs and gives him a shot from a needle she had in her pocket. He wakes up from that, and Julian cut his legs free. They hoist him out. The receptionists flee deeper into the building.
Julian and Emory pick their way through the broken door, trailing Chester behind with rope. Green, glittering hoops appear in the air and disappear again. Julian grabs Emory’s hand and she squeezes it. They are in concert. Julian feels himself beginning to know what Emory is thinking, and he imagines that the same is happening to Emory. Two security guards come rushing toward them from a side hallway. Their faces are molten, like steel in a blast furnace. Their bodies glow orange. They don’t look quite human to Julian. Emory shoots them with a revolver. Blue bullets fly out. They fall. Julian doesn’t stop. Everything is easy. They walk over the bodies, but as he’s walking to the main open room of the call center, his senses are darkening. He is not going to the griefgraveyard, though — he is only darkening in the here and now.
Time passes and when he remembers again, and can see things again, he is in the middle of the call center, computers circled around him, Chester at his feet, and another man bound. He isn’t wearing clothes, and Emory is on top of him. He has just come inside of her, and she is still rocking on top of him, her breath seething. Her veins are blue and raised, and her skin is flushed and her head is tipped forward. Julian still feels the pills working inside of him. Green hoops rise above the two of them all the way to the ceiling. Emory disengages and Julian looks around. All of the computers have the griefgraveyard site on their screens. No one else is in the room besides Chester and the other man, although he can hear sirens, distantly, and a bullhorn.
“What’s happening?” he asks, rubbing his head.
“You are almost ready for your passage,” she says.
The other man starts rolling around. It’s Harry, Julian realizes. It has to be Harry. Harry is younger than Julian thought he would be. For some reason he had considered Harry to be kind of his twin in loneliness, but Harry appears to be the kind of fun–loving, assertive guy who always had little to do with Julian as he was growing up and navigating life.
“Remove his gag,” Julian says. Emory hesitates for a second, but then does so.
“Julian?” Harry says. “Julian, please.”
Emory kneels down next to Harry, putting the revolver next to his forehead. “This is a Fun–Co nexus,” she says. “This is why I brought you here. I didn’t want to alarm you about your friend, but he’s one of the intermediaries tasked to keep tabs on you.”
“Like the DJ,” Julian says.
“Not exactly like the DJ,” she says. “He exists in both places. But close enough.”
“This is crazy,” Harry says. “I don’t know what she’s talking about. At all.” Julian kneels down as well and looks into Harry’s eyes, trying to discern something there.
Harry’s irises glitter. Julian shakes his head sadly and reaches out for Emory’s hand. “I’m ready,” he says.
She smiles. She leans in to give him a hungry kiss. He can feel her tongue sliding all the way down his throat. “Don’t worry about them,” she says, motioning toward the walls, the outer world where the police await. “I’ll take care of them. Go.”
He nods and starts to take in deep breaths, and then spin around, looking at each monitor. From the vestibule of the building there are shouts and smoke grenades. A momentary fear passes over him but it dissipates as soon as the darkness from the monitors truly settles over him, and after a few moments, his head feels like it’s in his stomach, and it snaps back again, he is back in the realm of Syberian Candor.
He is the same glittering cloud, but everything else is different. The halogens in the ceiling are harsher and brighter, like a bar after last call trying to get the drunks to go home. The turntables are gone, all the dancers are gone. The altar is still there, but in the light he can’t see the green stains. In the center of the room — which is more cavernous than he had realized, now that all of it
s walls were in full light — is Emory. She is cross–legged on the ground and trembling. At first he thinks that she is upset. Perhaps she arrived here by accident. He drifts toward her to comfort her, but then sees her stand. Her legs grow taller. Her skin becomes gray and oily. She turns towards Julian. Her chin splits open twice, revealing two small mouths there, each with a row of tiny fangs. Her hair lengthens into thick red knots, down to her waist, and her pupils widen until her irises are extinguished.
Julian stops in front of her. She manages to smile. He recognizes that smile of hers, even in her current form. She looks like she is ready to devour his form, but then he hears a phone ringing — an old fashioned ring — and Emory pulls a phone out of her elongated thigh.
“Yeah,” she says. She holds out a finger to Julian as if to say, “I’ll be with you in a minute.”
“Yes, it’s all done. Worked like a charm. No, he’s not going anywhere. It was a little too easy. I know. Yeah. Listen, we’re going to keep this locus unascended. Cut our losses. Yep, exactly. We’ve already repurposed the dancers into…”
Emory says a name that Julian finds to be unpronounceable.
“Anyway — no. No, you listen to me. I am your Eternal Overlord. The blood of all things should fill my stomach and fill my veins, etcetera, etcetera. Remember that? Okay. Good.” Emory sighs. She’s already walking away. “Well, we’ve had worse.”
Julian races after her. Emory turns around. She stares at the cloud without pity.
“I’m not exactly sure how you found me to be so trustworthy,” she says. “But it was a pretty bad decision.”
She shimmers through the wall closest to her. He tries to do the same but is repulsed. Then he tries to retreat back to his own body, to return to the world, but he can’t. He doesn’t know how.
He tries to shout but can’t.
He is left with his thoughts and little else. Over and over — he has no conception of time — he tries to make something happen but nothing does.
Not wanting to perceive anything, he enters the stone altar and remains asleep. It is not at peace but he is, at least, dormant.
Ages pass. Or perhaps they do not pass at all. He is awakened by vibrations like slow earthquakes. He jettisons out of the altar and sees the DJ again, the old DJ, playing several records at once. The lights are dim again. None of the dancers are the same; they all wear white robes. And the music is a drone, sounding like a distant bombing raid through the perception available to him.
They are all dancing in a circle, arm in arm. In the center of the circle is his mother: tall, braided hair, with the robe swirling around her.
More than anything, she looks innocent. Julian moves towards the circle, trying to see whether any of these dancers have phones.
There are so many things wide open to him, and so few.
Such & Such Said to So & So
Maria Dahvana Headley
IT WAS LATE JULY, A DARK green mood–ring of a night, and the drinks from Bee’s Jesus had finally killed a man.
The cocktails there had always been dangerous, but now they were poison. We got the call in at the precinct, and none of us were surprised. We all knew the place was no good, never mind that we’d also all spent some time there. These days we stayed away, or not, depending on how our marriages were going, and how much cash we had in the glovebox. There were no trains nearby, and if you ended up out too long, you were staying out. The suburbs were a dream, and you weren’t sleeping.
There was nothing harder to get out of your clothes than Bee’s Jesus. We all knew that too. Dry cleaner around the corner. You’d go there, shame–faced and stubbled at dawn, late for your beat.
“Ah, it’s the Emperor of Regret,” the guy behind the counter would say to you. No matter which Emperor you were. All us boys from the precinct had the same title.
“Yeah,” you’d say, “Emperor of Regret.”
The guy could launder anything. Hand him your dirty shirt, and he’d hand you back a better life, no traces, no strings, no self–righteous speech.
I was trying to get clean, though, real clean, and the martinizer couldn’t do it. I knew better than to go anywhere near the Jesus, but I could hear the music from a mile away. Nobody wanted to let me in anymore. People doubted my integrity after what’d happened the last time. The last several times.
The cat at the door was notorious, and had strict guidelines, though lately he’d begun to slip. Things weren’t right at Bee’s. Hadn’t been for a while. They had to let me in tonight. This was legit police business.
“C’mon, Jimmy, you can afford to look sideways tonight,” yelled one of the girls on the block, the real girls, not the other kind.
“I’m here on the up and up,” I said, because if I came in on the down and down, the place wouldn’t show. But I’d seen it as I rolled past, lights spinning. Gutter full of glitter, and that was how you knew. Door was just beyond the edge of the streetlight, back of the shut–down bodega, and most people would’ve walked right on by.
But I knew what was going down. Somebody in that bar had called the police, and reported a body, male, mid–thirties, goner. I was here to find out the whohowwhy.
“You the police?” the caller had said. “It was an emergency three hours ago, sugarlump, but now it’s just a dead guy. They dumped him in the alley outside where Bee’s was, but Bee’s took a walk, every piece of fancy in there up working their getaway sticks like the sidewalk was a treadmill. So you gotta come get him, sweets. He’s a health hazard. Dead of drink if you know what I mean.”
We did know what she meant, most of us, and we crossed our hearts and needle–eyed, cause we weren’t the dead guy, but we could have been, easy. We were fleas and Bee’s Jesus was a dog’s ear.
Me and the boys duked it out for who was taking statements and who was caution–taping, and now it was me and my partner Gene, but Gene didn’t care about Bee’s like I did. The place was a problem I couldn’t stay away from. I kept trying to get out of town, but I ran out of gas every time.
“What’re you doing, Jimmy?” Gene said. “You’re trying to sail a cardboard catamaran to Cuba. Not in a million years, you’re not gonna get that broad back. Cease and desist. Boys are getting embarrassed for you.”
I was embarrassed for me, too. I wasn’t kidding myself, she was what I was looking to see. I was trying to put a nail in it.
Gloria was in that place somewhere, Gloria and the drink she’d taken to like a fish gill–wetting. Bee’s Jesus was Gloria’s bar now.
§
Ten years had passed since the night she sat on the sink, laughing as she straight–razored my stubble, and lipsticked my mouth.
“Poor boy,” she said, watching the way I twitched. “Good thing you’re pretty.”
Gloria was a skinny girl with bobbed black hair, acid green eyes, and a tiny apartment full of ripped–up party dresses. In her cold–water bathroom, she melted a cake of kohl with a match and drew me eyes better than my own. She’d told me she wouldn’t take me to her favorite bar until she’d dressed me in her clothes, top to tail, and I wanted to go to that bar, wanted to go there bad.
I woulda done anything back then to get her, even though my Londoner buddy Philip (he called himself K. Dick, straight–faced) kept looking at her glories and shaking his head.
“I don’t know what you see in her, bruv. She’s just a discount Venus with a nose ring.”
She was the kind of girl you can’t not attempt, already my ex–wife before I kissed her, but I knew I had to go forward or die in a ditch of longing. It was our first date.
I saw her rumpled bed and hoped I’d end up in it, but Gloria dragged me out the door without even a kiss, me stumbling because I was wearing her stockings with my own shoes.
Downtown, backroom of a bodega, through the boxes and rattraps, past the cat that glanced at me, laughed at the guy in the too tight, and asked if I could look more wrong.
Actual cat. I tried not to notice that it was. It seemed impolit
e. Black with a tuxedo. Cat was smoking a cigarette and stubbed it out on my shoe. It groomed itself as it checked me out and found me wanting.
“Come on, man, go easy,” Gloria said. “Jimmy’s with me.”
She was wearing a skin–tight yellow rubber dress and I was wearing a t–shirt made of eyelashes, rolling plastic eyeballs and fishnet. It didn’t work on me. It wanted her body beneath. She was a mermaid. I was trawled.
“You expect me to blind eye that kind of sadsack?” the cat said, and lifted its lip to show me some tooth. Its tail twisted and informed me of a couple of letters. NO, written in fur.
“Better than the last boy,” Gloria said, and laughed. The cat laughed too, an agreeing laugh that said he’d seen some things. I felt jealous. “I’ll give you a big tip,” she said to him.
I was a nineteen year old virgin. I’d never gotten this close to getting this close before.
Gloria picked the cat up, holding him to her latex and he sighed a long–suffering sigh as she tipped him backward into the air and stretched his spine.
“Don’t tell anyone I let the furball in. They’ll think I’m getting soft.”
“I owe you for this,” she said to the cat.
To me, she said “Time to get you three–sheeted.”
I was pretty deep at this point in clueless. Underworld, nightlife, and Gloria knew things I had no hope of knowing. She was the kind of girl who’d go into the subway tunnels for a party, and come out a week later, covered in mud and still wearing her lipstick. I’d been in love with her for a year or so. As far as I was concerned, the fact that she knew my name was a victory. She kept calling me Mister Nice Guy. Years later, after we’d been married and divorced, after Gloria had too much gin, and I had too many questions, I learned this was because she’d forgotten my name.
She tugged me around the corner, through a metal chute in the wall. For a second I smelled rotting vegetables and restaurant trash, cockroach spray, toilet brush, hairshirt, and then we were through, and that was over, and we were at the door that led to Bee’s.
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