The Gone World

by Tom Sweterlitsch

  “What was her name?” Njoku asked once they’d reached their cars.

  “Whose name?” asked Moss.

  “You said there was someone in Boston, you think I’m supposed to meet her.”

  “Jayla,” she said. “Jayla, but I don’t know her last name. She plays the saxophone.”

  Moss waited in her truck while O’Connor maneuvered his Subaru from the clearing, fluttering brake lights as he inched down the precipitous drop. She was worried about him; he’d looked pale as they’d said their good-byes. O’Connor would be heading back to D.C. by the afternoon, a several-hour drive. The Navy would occupy this place soon, the first contingent by nightfall, if not earlier. Njoku was flying out from Pittsburgh but would return in a few days with physicists from the Naval Research Lab to study the Vardogger. She was disoriented, still—thinking of the way the forest had seemed to fragment and multiply was like remembering a cramp in her eye. The coffee in her thermos was warm—it was peaceful here, though she felt like a leaf caught in an eddy. She had been drawn to this place in her far future, when she’d suffered crucifixion, and she had also been drawn here in her recent past, when she began the investigation into the Mursult deaths that had led her here now. A leaf caught in a whirlpool, a wheel within a wheel.

  —

  Wendy’s on West Pike in Clarksburg, scribbling on napkins, Everything has changed, but nothing has changed, spicy chicken, no mayo, paper place mat, dipping fries in paper cups of ketchup, writing, The anatomy of men and women laid out across the sky. Sipping Pepsi, sounds of ice cubes in a waxy cup, writing, A rain of pollen in reverse, writing, a strange symmetry: cadavers in the sky and the hanged men, a pollination of flowers and the running men. Clouds had accumulated through the afternoon, a cold front sweeping in. A fine rain misted outside. Moss stepped out for fresh air, huddled beneath the Wendy’s overhang. Wishing she still smoked—the old addiction never entirely dies. Perfect time for a cigarette, the late hour, solitude, something for her nerves, a forest with doors that led to new forests. She could almost taste the tobacco, wondered where she could buy a pack around here, or even just one, bum a cigarette if a man walked by. Her cell buzzed: BROCK.

  “IDs came back on one of the Buckhannon bodies we pulled from the truck with Marian,” he said. “I told the doctors to sit on this information. I thought I should tell you first before we proceed.”

  He cleared his throat. She heard him struggling with this.

  “Positive ID,” he said. “No mistakes. Ryan Wrigley Torgersen.”

  “Our person of suspicion for the CJIS bombing,” she said.

  “He’s like . . . Torgersen is like Marian,” said Brock. “There are two of them, two of each of them. They’re clones, or they’re doubled somehow.”

  “Focus on Torgersen. You’ve had him under surveillance?”

  “I just talked with Rashonda, checked to see when Torgersen had last been at work, and she told me he was sitting at his desk all day. Shannon, this guy can’t be at his desk all day and in the autopsy room, he just can’t be . . . I don’t understand what’s happening. I don’t understand Marian—”

  “Where is he now?” asked Moss.

  “My wife just called over to Torgersen’s place under some pretense, spoke to his wife. He’s there now, at home.”

  “Let’s talk with him,” said Moss. “I’m already in Clarksburg, nearby CJIS. I can meet you at Torgersen’s. What’s his address?”

  —

  Ryan Torgersen’s house was one of a newer construction north of Clarksburg, a development built in the small boom following the CJIS facility’s arrival, one of sprawling identical houses with prefab design her mother would have called “McMansions.” Moss found her way through the planned neighborhood streets, streets that were copies of one another, repetitive, plotted all at once yet strangely incomprehensible in their design, cul-de-sacs and loops. Night had fallen, windows of most of the houses bright at the edges of drawn curtains. Brock waited in front of the neighboring house, sitting in his silver sedan, a new model. The repetition prickled Moss, a shiver of gooseflesh. She parked behind, joined him in the front seat of his car. She wanted to tell him that the last time she’d sat with him like this, he had just murdered two special agents. She wanted to tell him what he had lost in that future and what he had already saved by finding Torgersen here.

  The scent of licorice, classical radio on low volume, Brock’s face dewy with sweat. “How do you want to play this?” he said. “Ask him about the body we found?”

  “No,” said Moss. “Ask about his life, his career here. He might not even know about that other body—in fact, I bet he doesn’t. We need to poke around a bit. I don’t want to just lay that on him.”

  “Ashleigh Bietak claims she didn’t know about what was happening in her barn, claims she didn’t know what her son was up to.”

  “You got her to talk?” asked Moss. “How about the guy she was with, Harrier?”

  “He hasn’t told us much of anything that we didn’t already know,” said Brock. “And Ashleigh Bietak just lost her son. When we broke the news that Jared had been shot in the firefight, she broke down, only talked off and on before her counsel arrived, outbursts of grief, sometimes not even comprehensible. We asked her about Mursult, and she said something about a lawyer he knew. Marian mentioned a lawyer, too, didn’t she?”

  “She did,” said Moss, indistinct thoughts flickering in the back of her mind, something she was trying to recall, pieces she needed to fit together. “I don’t know if his lawyer is important, but we should track this lawyer down,” she said.

  “I asked for the lawyer’s name. Ashleigh Bietak can’t tell us, or won’t tell us,” said Brock. “She’s demanding a quick burial for her son, but the Navy confiscated his remains. She’s not cooperating.”

  Ashleigh Bietak had lost her son, but Brock had won the lives of his children.

  “How old are your girls?” asked Moss.

  “Two and four,” said Brock.

  How old would his girls be in the year 2024, when the Terminus was marked? Twenty-nine and thirty-one—his girls will be young adults when the White Hole opens in the sky. All of life was in a gyre, channeled to the same waste.

  They approached the house together, Brock knocking on the front door before ringing the bell. A light in the living room snapped on, the door opened inward, no security chain. The woman was slight, a loose sweater and slacks, house slippers. She seemed puzzled by their presence but smiled, a suburban graciousness.

  “Ma’am, my name is Special Agent William Brock, I’m with the FBI. This is Special Agent Shannon Moss, NCIS. Is Mr. Torgersen home? May we have a few minutes of your time?”

  “Yes, let me just—just one moment, please,” said Mrs. Torgersen. “Please, come inside. I’ll get him for you.”

  Twin skylights were night-violet squares in the foyer’s cathedral-style ceiling. The floor was marble, a swirl of salmon and beige. Mrs. Torgersen showed them into the formal living room before excusing herself to find her husband. Moss heard her recede through the house, calling out, “Ryan?”

  Torgersen and his wife returned together, Torgersen dwarfing his petite wife, the contrast almost humorous. Khaki slacks and a striped polo shirt that hung untucked, his hair thinning silver. A meek man, Brock had said—soft, thought Moss, but with a nervous edge. He’d been drinking, the air wet with the stench of liquor.

  “What is this about?” he asked.

  “Mr. Torgersen, do you have a few moments to answer some questions for us?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Honey, would you mind putting on some coffee?” His wife vanished farther into the house, and Moss heard the kitchen tap spray water. “Or would you like tea, anything else?” Torgersen asked. “Not sure if you’re drinking—if you’re on duty or if we’re after hours. Please, have a seat. Come on in. What’s going on?”

  “Coffee’s fine,” said Brock, taking a seat on one of the leather couches in the formal sitting room. To
rgersen sat adjacent, hands folded in his lap. He bounced his knee, the sound of his heel against the carpet a repetitive swishing.

  “Mr. Torgersen, can you tell me when you began work with the FBI?” asked Brock.

  “Sure,” said Torgersen, his forehead growing pasty with sweat. He wiped it with the back of his hand. “Ten years ago, I guess—no, maybe eleven years ago now. Are you here because of some problem with work? I can’t guess what that might be. I’ve worked in fingerprints. I was one of the few who came over from D.C. when they opened the new facility a few years ago. I can’t think of anything that’s wrong.”

  “The Criminal Justice Information Services building,” said Brock.

  “That’s right. Did you say your name was Brock? I work with a Rashonda Brock, I don’t suppose you’re related?”

  “She’s my wife,” said Brock. “She’s mentioned you to me.”

  “Mind telling me what this is all about?” he asked. “I’m happy to help you. I just don’t know what’s going on.”

  “How are you settling into your new space?” asked Brock. “Quite a difference, D.C. to West Virginia. You volunteered to come out this way? Are you getting along all right?”

  “I’m sure Rashonda’s told you about the stresses. We’re working toward a state-of-the-art computer system, a national fingerprint database, but all we hear are budget problems and software glitches. False positives, incomplete records. We’re still working off of fingerprint cards, for the most part. Some of the bigger cities are already computerized, and it’s embarrassing, because they hit on matches in a fraction of the time it takes us to work through our boxes.”

  Torgersen’s body found burned in the Ryder truck, the burned body in an autopsy room in Charleston, but here he was in his living room, an echo, another echo. Moss watched the man perspire, though his demeanor was jocular. He seemed like he wanted to help however he could, but he was fidgety, moving strangely like an animal grooming itself, running his hands over his silver hair, running them along his arms, pulling at his shirt, little tugs. Glass crashed in the kitchen.

  “I’ll check on her,” said Moss.

  The house felt open-ended, rooms branching off from the main hallway, leading to other unseen hallways and rooms. No kids, Moss thought—the place uncluttered, clean. The kitchen was expansive, a cooking area centered by an island counter, a breakfast table and French doors that opened onto a patio and manicured lawn. Mrs. Torgersen had dropped the coffeepot, had knelt to sweep up the pieces of glass with a dustpan. She was visibly unnerved, crying.

  “We heard the glass,” said Moss. “Here, let me, I’ll clean this up. Are you all right?”

  Mrs. Torgersen’s friendly demeanor had decayed since she’d opened the front door, her complexion withered by weariness and sorrow, or terror. She sat at the kitchen table, apologizing while Moss tore off sheets of paper towel from the roll, picked up the larger pieces of glass.

  “I don’t know what to do,” said Mrs. Torgersen.

  “Whatever it is, we can help you,” said Moss, joining her at the kitchen table once she’d swept up the floor.

  “Arrest him,” said Mrs. Torgersen, a whisper, almost too quiet for Moss to hear. “He’s changed, he’s so different now.”

  “Has he hurt you?” asked Moss.

  “No,” said Mrs. Torgersen, almost exasperated to have to explain. “No, it’s not that, he talks about things. He drinks so heavily.”

  “What does he talk about?”

  “He wanted to move here,” she said. “He had heard about this new building, CJIS, and was obsessed with moving here, I don’t know why. West Virginia. We had no reason to transfer, but he was fixated on the idea. He talked nonstop about West Virginia, about Clarksburg.”

  “That was the change you noticed?” asked Moss.

  “No, he’d changed before then,” said Mrs. Torgersen. “He’d . . . have these mood swings, highs and lows, and when he told me we were moving to West Virginia, I asked him not to. We started fighting, we’d never fought before. And that’s when he started telling me his fantasies.”

  “What sorts of things?”

  “Violent fantasies,” she said. “He’d never spoken like this to me before, but he came home one night with blood on his clothes.”

  She cried heavily now, her face crimson, her jaw clenched. “He was younger, he seemed younger. Thinner. He was drenched, soaking wet and dirty with blood.”

  “Blood on his clothes?” asked Moss. “Was he in an accident?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me what happened,” said Mrs. Torgersen. “I thought he was hurt. The physical change in him, the weight he’d lost. At first he told me he’d hit a deer in his car and tried to save it, but his story kept changing. And later that night we fought. When we were in bed together, he asked me if I wanted to die, if I was trying to kill myself by refusing to move to West Virginia.”

  “What did he mean by that?” asked Moss.

  “I don’t know,” she said, shaking now. “I don’t know. He told me that he had seen me die and he never wanted to see me die again.”

  “Was he threatening you?”

  “He was trying to protect me from something in his mind,” said Mrs. Torgersen. “He asked me if I remembered the night we had my boss and his wife over for dinner—this dinner party we’d hosted, years ago in D.C., years ago. He told me that after my boss went home and we were alone cleaning up the dishes, he said several men broke into the house. Of course I didn’t know what he was talking about, some delusion. I thought he was having an episode. I was terrified—he told me several men had come into the house and had tied him up, had held him down, and forced him to watch while they . . . while they decapitated me, cut my head off in front of him. He said he saw this, he said that they had made him hold my head in his lap and he was screaming, just begging for them to stop, but that I was dead, and they . . .”

  Moss held Mrs. Torgersen’s hands, said, “It’s okay. We can help him—”

  “And he said these men waited until midnight before they left our house. They put him in the back of a van and drove him somewhere, drove him off into the woods. And he said he saw things—he couldn’t describe what he’d seen, but it was morbid. He said the men made him cross a river, and on the other side these men asked my husband if he wanted to see me alive again. They could give me back to him, and he said the men drove him home and there I was, still alive—asleep, like nothing had ever happened.”

  “And he thought he had to keep you alive,” said Moss. “Is that right? Moving to West Virginia would keep you alive?”

  “He said we had to move to West Virginia when the time came,” she said. “That he had to be ready to do certain things, but anything he did was for my own good, that no matter what happened, he would protect me, but he’s been drinking so much more, and now you’re here, and I don’t know what he’s—”

  “What is he prepared to do?” asked Moss. “What ‘certain things’?”

  “I don’t . . . I don’t know, but he isn’t the only one. He said there are others. He doesn’t know who they are, but they all play a part. Someone from the Secret Service, he said there were more in the FBI, he said there were people in the military. Ryan has a gun up in the nightstand—he never owned a gun before. I told him I wanted it out of the house, but he needs to sleep with it nearby.”

  There are others. Torgersen pulled from the Ryder, and there were other bodies in that truck, maybe their echoes still alive. Moss thought of Torgersen crossing the black river, his clothes stained with his wife’s blood—but his wife was alive. Hyldekrugger, the Devil. Can he cross through the Vardogger? Was it permeable, a doorway to pass between worlds? Hyldekrugger somehow traveling between timelines like a spider crawling across the strands of a web, murdering husbands, murdering wives, as threats. Bringing echoes here to terra firma. Secret Service, FBI . . . Moss imagined sleeper cells in high-security facilities, placed just like Torgersen, waiting to pull the trigger . . . How many others were th
ere? An army of echoes.

  Shouting, from the other room—indistinct sounds, accusations. Moss heard Brock’s voice, calmer. Mrs. Torgersen stood from the table, said, “Ryan?” She took two steps before the blast. A fleeting image of fire like liquid orange light cascading over the ceiling and walls before Mrs. Torgersen was lifted from her feet and Moss was blown backward.

  Moss swam upward from darkness. Ringing in her ears, a tinny ring, silence otherwise. Where? Where am I? A kitchen. She could see flames. Siren light. She was on her back, she was on a kitchen floor. I can move, she thought, righting herself. She tried to stand but wobbled and sank back to the floor, dizzy. Her leg was missing, her prosthesis. Where? She looked around her, saw a body, a woman. Mrs.—but her name escaped. Tor . . . The woman was on the kitchen floor, screaming. The woman was at an awkward angle. Moss crawled.

  Brock.

  “Brock!” she screamed, but her voice was underwater. “Brock!”

  The house in flames. There had been a blast, she realized. She made her way through the hall, crawling—drywall collapsed, exposed timber, dust, smoke. Shrill sounds of smoke detectors competed with the ringing in her ears. What was left of the living room was on fire, the walls had disappeared. Black smoke crawled along the exposed timber where the ceiling had been, billowed from holes that had opened in the roof. Firefighters were on scene, flickering red siren lights.

  “I’m all right,” she said to one of the men. “Brock,” she said. Someone lifted her, held her. “Brock,” she said.

  “Out, out.” A firefighter carried her, saying, “Out, out.” Flashlight beams, someone screaming.

  “There’s a woman in the kitchen,” said Moss, recovering some of her sense.

  She followed the beams of the flashlights and saw the bodies in the living room, barely visible because of black smoke, but she saw Torgersen’s body shredded, she saw his head in separate locations. She saw Brock—his legs had been removed from his torso, one arm was gone. White bone, red meat. Moss screamed. Coughing, smoke burning in her lungs, she screamed and cried. Brock was dead. Moss was carried outside, a mask placed over her mouth, fresh oxygen to cleanse her lungs. She watched the house on fire, a radiant light.