Arctic Smoke

by Randy Nikkel Schroeder

  She did. “Not hate, Ted.” She thought of prophets. “Anger. There’s a difference.”

  He took one step and shoved her. Her head snapped, and she tumbled and hit the carpet.

  The elevator closed. Seri sat stranded in a hallway of snickering shadows, face pimpled with Rooke’s blood. Three seconds, then she leaped up to rush down the stairs, two at a time.

  “Ted! Ted!”

  She stopped at the lobby door, panting. “Sir, have you seen a tall man?”

  But she could not get a yes from anyone, nor find Rooke anywhere. Only his coat, abandoned like a shed skin on the lobby floor.

  † † †

  For days she searched in widening circles, using all her skills. But in vain: there were no clues to be found in the hotel, only bellboys slithering hallways, faint voices misting from vents.

  “Did you find a coat on the floor?” she asked valets, chambermaids, night managers. The answer was always no, often chased with a lingering stare, a shoulder shrug, a shaking head. Seri should have picked that coat up immediately, before sprinting out to the parkade. Had anyone seen a tall man with black hair and a white Van Dyke? Sounds like something from a cheap horror movie. Your father? A lover? Beg pardon, ma’am, none of my business.

  Rooke’s car hadn’t moved.

  “Haven’t seen him,” said the receptionist. “How will you be paying?”

  Seri offered her credit card, retired to clean the room. She tried to read the Bible, but her eyes flitted back and forth between columns, her finger flicked pages compulsively, and her mind wandered again and again to the dearth of clues. She closed the good book, looked out to where acres of snow unmapped beyond the moon-crazed glass.

  God, your prophet needs a sign here.

  She dug out her notebook and phoned the old Vancouver office, but no one was there. Next day she headed out and prowled the strange avenues.

  “Haven’t seen him,” said the constable. “What kind of law enforcement did you say he was, again?”

  His partner laughed. “No, ma’am, no branch in this town. Try north, in Calgary. What’s CSIS, again?”

  If only she’d had a picture. Was there a picture of Rooke, anywhere? She described, best she could.

  “No,” said the librarian.

  “No,” said the lawyer.

  “No,” said the minister. Worth a try, Seri thought. She thought of her old job, the dependable certainty. But right now home seemed far away as heaven. Have you seen a particular man, very intense, looks like. . . .

  No.

  No.

  Sorry.

  The day wore on. No clues, only strange omens: broken trees, whispering children, tramps with rumoured names—Iceking, Rain Man, Skeleton Tim. Seri forgot to eat lunch.

  † † †

  At twilight, when the snow swirled like topsoil, she stopped at The Onion Pub & Grill to eat and watch a group of dryland farmers perform three sets of Celtic folk. After hot shepherd’s pie and a long-nursed Pilsner, she stepped into the alley and pondered her next move. Something jigged at her visual periphery, something hunched and moonlit. She looked after it, but there was only dark.

  She was about to return to the hotel and get out her notebook. But she stopped, looked again. There, flickering between fence posts—a kid riding a German shepherd. A boy, wearing a long black coat with sleeves dangling.

  Seri shook her head, turned to go. Only in Lethbridge. But hold on: that was Rooke’s coat. There was no mistaking the thin lapel, the silver buttons.

  Seri sneaked after, stopped at an alley fork to peep around the fence. The boy dismounted at a back gate, long dark hair seaweed in the wind. He put a hand on the dog’s head, then whistled, low and soft. The gate creaked and a girl emerged in a hooded coat, holding a giant pine cone. They smiled at each other, turned to climb the steep alley, dog padding between them.

  Seri scrambled up to the sidewalk, just in time to see the kids dip into a thick wood across the street. She followed, then paused at the wood’s edge, where a stone arch said Galt Gardens: downtown.

  She plunged. As soon as the path turned, all street noise disappeared. Wind rushed the leaves. Light shimmered down in slants, snow holding the hushed greens and blues. Seri floated through a coral reef of frozen berries, over the sunken hull of a dead birch. The kids were gone, drowned.

  No, there they were, up ahead, kneeling at the bole of a giant poplar, boy elbow deep in underbrush. Boughs loomed like tentacles, mist drifted from barky tangle to the treetops. Seri stooped to watch. She felt an unexpected loneliness, but it was all right, more an awareness of each cell thrumming her body.

  At the tree, the girl laughed. The boy pulled a silver tin whistle from the bushes and blew a note. He was answered with another note, a high clear singing voice. Seri squinted and leaned closer. Nobody’s lips had moved.

  Then, out of the bole climbed a Lethbridge creature the likes of which Seri had scarcely imagined. Was it an old man or a bearded child? Seri peered. The apparition had long greasy hair, a Blue Jays baseball cap decked with curly pink ribbons, fluorescent blue scarves around his ankles, stilleto heels. And, in one hand, a gnarled poplar branch chewed to a point.

  “Ye come in high fine time,” he growled, yanking the girl’s hair. “Now haste is among us, and the fox himself i’ we tarry.”

  All three crunched off through the snow, down a sharply dipping path.

  Seri waited a few minutes, then rose to follow their footprints. She heard music, wisps at first, then louder—some kind of ambient dub, threads of tin whistle, rattle of tambourine. She crept down the slope and paused beneath a stunted birch.

  The woods opened to a small clearing, an island bristling with kids, most dancing madly, some hanging from the trees. A bonfire cracked at the heart, roasted nuts popping and exploding. Beyond the fire, a row of bikes rested against the trees, and a tribe of shaggy-haired feral kids glared from between spokes.

  I hope they’re not drinking, Seri thought.

  Under a giant black cottonwood, a gang of brightly mittened girls were building a faceless snowman, under directions from the freak, who clapped his hands, pointed long nails, whirled like a dervish.

  “Ha!” he cried. “And th’ poplar wands! For without arms t’is no warding.”

  He jabbed his stick through the snow, unearthed a spinning clod of ice and dirt. “Fire in the belly!” He danced, kicked up his shoe. He caught it, began to pock the snowman’s face with the stilleto, snow chips sparkling his beard. “By the slotted spoon! He will not pass here!”

  “The Knife Thrower shall not pass!” the girls screamed. “Never, never until the snow melts!”

  Snowballs whizzed the island. A shriek, and the dance shifted: they were throwing a hot tinfoiled potato, steam sizzling its vapor trail. Then toys—flying yo-yos, checkerboards, glass-eyed dolls blinking as they somersaulted the air. Seri noticed an open toy chest by the fire, still brimming with puppets and paints. A few kids held sticks to the fire and raised torches to the frosty sky.

  I hope they don’t burn the place down, Seri thought.

  Then a sudden hush. Twigs and leaves drifted down. At the clearing’s end, a leafy curtain rustled and swept open. A pizza delivery boy stepped through, boxes held high.

  Seri peered, straining her eyes. Just beyond the pizza boy, where the wood thickened, where grew an unlikely thatch of Nanking cherries, a jacket lay tangled on a bush. In the moony dark it was impossible to tell its colour. But further, where the bright berries dropped, where the weeping birch gathered, a shadow crouched, waiting and watching.

  Rooke.

  Seri looked at her shoes, focused her eyes, rehearsed her various options. This scenario was so dense with visual information that she couldn’t calculate the contingencies. Best idea was probably to sneak around the border, ignore the kids, and surprise Rooke.

  “By grace!” cried the freak. He seized the snowman by the head. “This is our pillar of fire. We have well measured our time, and he will no
t follow us to the House of Fog. He will not pass!”

  The feral kids leaped, hooting and spinning bike wheels. The music swelled. The dance fragmented. The dog began to bark.

  Then, behind the snowman, behind the cottonwood, something red flashed. Seri blinked. A red jacket. A boy in a top hat and red military jacket, crouching, holding a long knife by the blade. The boy crept forward, raised his elbow, drew back the knife to his ear. He aimed at the clearing’s heart with his free arm.

  The fire roared high, singeing leaves. Seri’s heart clenched. She rose and stepped into the clearing. “Hey, be careful—”

  The fire doused. Torches sizzled in snow. The woods dimmed—the island tipped and sank to the bottom.

  Seri stumbled, blind, eyeballs dry with smoke. “Ted!” She looked down, closed her eyes, forced her pupils to adjust. Heard a clatter of bicycles, a crunch of footfalls. A tidal wind swished through the woods, leaves bobbing in currents, bits of laughter washing up and trailing under the oldest lunar spell.

  Seri reached and steadied herself against something cold. She opened her eyes, still prickly and dry, saw her hand on the snowman. Somehow she had crossed the length of the clearing. The entire pageant was vanished, leaving only toys and cinders and one uneaten pepperoni pizza, still steaming on the snow.

  She sprinted for the clearing’s edge, stopped. Which direction? Damn, where was that hanging jacket?

  “Ted?”

  Her feet were freezing, shoes full of snow. She looked down, saw she stood in a giant wheel of footprints, hundreds of tracks patterned in wild fractals. Most vanished at the web’s edge, but not all. Only two sets were large enough to be adult. One made by stilletos. The other not.

  Seri raised her shoulders, dropped them, sighed one long whoosh. Okay. No problem. There went Rooke’s tracks—in fact, there was his dark coat, still mangled in the bush.

  She reached down for a piece of pizza, bit until the juice trickled down her chin. Then, slice flopping in one hand, she cantered after the tracks, grabbing the coat. Behind her, the scattered toys remained still and silent, except for one glass-eyed dolly overhead, caught by its hair at the tip of a long branch, eyes blinking, still swinging.

  † † †

  How Rooke’s tracks kept their integrity, through downtown streets a-slush with many feet, Seri never understood. Beyond that night she understood little ever again.

  She lost the footprints once, near a flock of kids caroling at the steps of a stone mansion, where an old man popped out like a cuckoo to serve hot chocolate.

  “Shitheads,” someone said.

  Seri’s mind sharpened, as it always did on the hunt. Downtown clarified, humming colours, smells, voices. She stopped short at the window of a store called Kresge’s, could not remember if she had followed the tracks here or not. Inside, Rooke hunched at an arborite counter, smoking a cigarette, finger tapping his briefcase. His hair was blotched with white, as if the black was washing out.

  Her heart thumped as she pressed the revolving door. “Ted.”

  “Can’t shake you, can I?” He stared at a picture in his free hand. He did not look up.

  She stood behind a plump stool.

  “Well?” he said. “Sit down. Thanks for bringing my coat.” He hardly seemed surprised. If anything, he looked like he was expecting her. God, this man, with his whiplash moods.

  “You need to explain precisely why you ran off.” Seri sat. “Ted, I have just seen the most frightfully bizarre thing imaginable.”

  “As have I. You know, don’t pretend.”

  “What was that? In the clearing.”

  He chuckled, then met her eyes. “So. Are you an angel?”

  “You need to start making daylight sense, for one minute—”

  “Have you been sent to help me get back what I have lost?”

  These misty parables! “What have you lost?”

  Rooke drew fire from his smoke. “Sent by whom I cannot imagine.”

  Seri checked her pocket for a pen. Time to get a list going. “Tell me why you ran. I know the feeling. I can help.”

  “A few questions of my own first. Consider it the interview we missed.”

  “Forget it.”

  “You have information collation skills?”

  “Yes.”

  “Research talents?”

  “Many.” This was more like it.

  “Analytical abilities.”

  “You know I do.” She smiled.

  “Tell me the name of the Angel of Knives.” He fanned cigarette smoke with the picture.

  She frowned. “Let’s get back to the real questions. He doesn’t have a name.”

  “Few angels do.” Rooke reserved his piercing stare for the picture in his hand. “Why do you love them?”

  Seri touched her temple. “I don’t particularly.”

  “Seems out of character for a rational thinker to love the angels.”

  “Angelology does not resort to the evidence of the senses. But it is a system, Ted.”

  Rooke drew a deep draught of smoke, bit the filter. “Angels have pagan ancestors, the Valkyrie, gathering souls of the dead. They haunt the cracks of your faith.”

  “Nonsense.” She saw a jot of red flesh on his fingernail, realized it was Jell-O.

  He continued. “Who is the Lord of Darkness?”

  She’d never forget that one. “Angra Mainyu.” At university, she always hooked the name on a simple mnemonic: angra mainyu; angry man. The Lord of Darkness was an angry man. “Are these symbolic questions really necessary?”

  Rooke folded his hands, cigarette still sparking diced knuckles. “Indulge me. I need to be highly satisfied of your rage for order.”

  “My what?” She smoothed her hair, straightened her shirt. Drew her pen from pocket, clicked it closed, replaced it neatly.

  Rooke laughed heartily. “Good. Excellent. Are you sent to restore me?”

  He seemed pleased, but without the smooth contours of simple benevolence. He did not betray himself through any grin or posture, but Seri felt his sardonic layer, in the clipped edges of the word restore. She prayed briefly, felt the purpose again. Rooke was angry, angry like the prophet Jeremiah. Well, not quite: not righteous like Jeremiah, but a player in God’s plan here, woven as always in mysterious ways.

  “God will restore you,” she said.

  Rooke dropped ashes on his picture. “You do realize it’s Christmas Eve?”

  “What? You’re kidding. No way.”

  He sucked fire down to the filter. “One hour till midnight. When would you like to open your presents?”

  She drummed her nails on the arborite. Pepperoni heartburn stung her throat.

  “Forgive yourself.” Rooke chuckled. “Memory is chaos. I need to know, finally, how fully you intuit the interstitial textures of reality.”

  “The what?” Rattled now.

  “All the hidden cracks and crevices, the peach-stone spaces.”

  She sighed. Good God. “Hume again? Kant? Oh—the idealists. Never a big fan.”

  He stubbed the cigarette, ground ashes in a widening mandala. “Tell me more of the urban myths you learned at university.”

  Okay careful. Something hinged on this answer, she could tell.

  “Serendipity?”

  “I’m thinking.” Actually, praying.

  “Okay.” She summoned her best Sunday schoolteacher voice. “There is the story of the mad priest adventurer, who believed that more evil walked the world than good, that wickedness could only be destroyed by stealing its heart.”

  “I love this. Highly symbolic.”

  He would.

  She continued. “So he journeyed north, deep into the Arctic, and stole the heart of a frost demon, then fled with the name of God on his lips. The heart remains somewhere south, in some city after all these years, and the demon still wanders the world in search of it.”

  Rooke said nothing, eyes wide, mouth open.

  “There’s more,” said Seri. “The demon is
far from home, and has thinned, and lost his voice. His story is tragic in some tellings.”

  “Yes,” Rooke whispered. She had him.

  “There’s more. Fallen angels also hunt for the demon’s heart, for they believe it will restore them to wholeness, or love, or heaven. Depends who tells the story.”

  Rooke’s pupils dilated.

  She paused for full effect. “All of them animated by one true thing.”

  Rooke exhaled, like he had been holding his breath. “So they’re the same angels as in your other story?”

  “Beg your pardon?” Her eyes missed a blink. “I . . . hadn’t thought about that.”

  She felt a little dizzy. Knife Thrower and snowman, weeks slipping by without her notice . . . God, had she been hallucinating? Infected with Lethbridge air, or earlier, with Og’s delerium?

  “So you have been called,” Rooke said. “Despite my bad faith—”

  “Hey you two.” The waitress, thirty-ish woman with a beehive hairdo. “Merry Xmas Eve, sorry for the wait. Special tonight is toast, two eggs. . . .” She grabbed her hair. “Oh my goodness. Franklin?”

  Rooke darkened, bowed his head.

  “Eggs, Franklin?” Seri said, still dizzy.

  “Good lordy,” the waitress continued. “It is you. Almost didn’t recognize you with the Santa beard, never expected to see you again.”

  Rooke pressed his lips.

  The waitress grabbed a mittful of beehive. “Wow, been a long time, you got a haircut—”

  “Hush,” Rooke said.

  “Your friend got a haircut too,” the waitress said. “He still looks pretty cute—”

  “Hush. No need to broadcast. . . .” Rooke paused, put down his picture, tapped the ashy circle. “Friend?”

  “Yeah, the guitar guy who likes to smash stuff, remember how he—”

  “When did you see him?” Rooke leaned into arborite, fingers twitching.

  The waitress twirled her beehive. “Whul, like, couple of weeks maybe?”

  “Listen to me very carefully,” Rooke said. “Did he have a companion? A tall man, long silvery hair, excessively profane?”

  “You bet. Silver, like on a tree?”

  “Think,” Rooke said.