Arctic Smoke

by Randy Nikkel Schroeder

  He turned, lenses clear, eyes green as a poisoned river. “God in heaven,” he snatched her notebook, began to scribble, “you really do need every little thing spelled out for you.”

  His pen tore the page.

  “Ted, no need. . . .” She tried to imagine Gran’s face, but the white tongue of fire turned inside her and burned it away. She tried to hear Gran’s voice, but heard only rising wind and her rattling heart.

  Somewhere a phone rang.

  Rooke ripped the page from its coils and held it at arm’s length.

  “Clear enough?” he said. “Real enough?”

  She stared. Sanskrit, Latin, runes, what were these curls and cursives?

  “Shall I draw a chart?” He sneered.

  What was this spider-script, this hieroglyph, this Gestalt?

  “Shall I make a tidy list, Serendipity?”

  Her eyes focused. She processed.

  “Do you need glasses?” he said. “Read.”

  She did:

  I’m going to kill him.

  Rooke crumpled the page, dropped it at her feet.

  Seri reached a hand to steady herself, found nothing, almost fell.

  “Ted.” She swallowed hard against the nausea. Her whole paradigm turned upside down, emptying its plans and proofs and explanations, darkening as suddenly as the clearing in Galt Gardens. She had missed the signs with fastidious precision. She did need glasses. She was a Sunday-school spy, a toy-box prophet, a winter clown.

  She opened her eyes, almost laughed, how clear at last. This was some chase, some threesome: Seri, Rooke, and Rooke’s shadowy acolyte. The Biblical parallel was indeed King Saul and prophet Samuel, but also David, the third, Saul’s apprentice, replacement and nemesis. This was an unravelling tale of displacement, charisma, jealousy, rage, and madness.

  She bit the inside of her cheek.

  Also a tale of laxity, blindness, and torpor, Gran help her, God forgive her. But even King David got a second chance, right? Still time. Seri choked down her nausea, smoothed her shirt, summoned her fire. She strode to the door and flung it open.

  “Ted. Wait. This has gone far enough.”

  The air chilled. The phone rang in some distant hemisphere.

  She followed Rooke out, fingers flailing, trying in vain to catch the steam clouds that poured from her lungs.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The Hotel Agartha

  Whatever the Weird was, it now had a voice and a body. Lor wondered how far it could press into the physical world before he was certifiably insane. He wouldn’t let that happen. He’d run. He’d find the answer.

  Someone kept sabotaging the equipment—impossible, since they saw no one after Yellowknife. Lor just ignored it. He closed one astigmatic eye, and, with the other, watched dots of moonlight in the truck’s interior, caught like summer flies between the windows.

  Summer itself was a vague and distant memory.

  † † †

  “Now what?” Lor rapped the frozen truck door with his knuckles.

  A giant fissure cracked the Mackenzie. The truck stood idling at the edge, bumped up against an overturned stool, next to a car totally whitened by frost.

  “Weirditudinous.” Alistair had his map unrolled on the hood. “But I can see the south side of the island from here. Hearties,” he looked up and winked, “We can hoof it.”

  “What is that?”“ Lor squinted at an icy hill in the distance. Fatty stood beside him, thumb knuckle glazed with frozen snot.

  “Looks like a pingo, mates, though I can’t explain the utter strangeitude of colours. Blue, green—Lor, kind of looks like the glitter in your pouch.”

  Lor squinted harder through his lenses’ icy cracks. “With a circus tent on top?”

  “Looks more like a haunted mansion.” Alistair rolled up the map with a snap. “Come on. We travel light and lean as wolves, an instrument in each hand, a festival to play, lives to be pared down to essentials—”

  “What about the mixing board?” Lor said.

  “Fuck it. Come on, we’ll negotiate that fissure, claw our way up that pingo and storm that mansion like renegade angels.”

  “What about my truck?” said Fatty.

  “Leave it with the other car.”

  “Dingle my nuts I will.”

  “Who’d steal it? A fuckin’ frost demon?”

  “A fuckin’ hoodlum!”

  “You’re the only hoodlum here.”

  “Where is here?”

  “Fatty. My friend.” Alistair grinned and pointed to the sky. “We are at the top of the world. And we are about to finish your brother’s mission.”

  † † †

  Lor felt an instant attraction to Night Manager Peart—her boylike face, the sizzle of her cigarette, the tap of her finger as she moved pawns across a chessboard.

  “I like to play with myself,” was the first thing she said. “Need a room?” the second. She fingered her nametag. “I do not recommend more than a week’s stay.”

  The lobby of the Hotel Agartha had a sweet mammal smell, like someone had slopped a bunch of caramel on a hot hog’s back. Various bits and pieces of the hotel were cracking in the hearth fire—shutters, couch legs, baseboards, anything made of wood. Erratic clouds of steam and smoke drifted low across the floor, settling in corners, between bookshelves, beneath chairs. Just outside the front door, a guardian snowman glistened in the dim light.

  “This place is even creepier than the Marquis,” Lor said.

  “There is only one hotel.” Night Manager Peart did not look up at her three frosted guests. “With many shadows.”

  “Can you tell us how to find the alternative music festival?” Alistair said through chattering teeth. “It started earlier today.”

  “Today.” Smoke collected between her nostrils and drifted downward. “Today is a rather tricky concept.”

  “Oh, indeed princess.” Alistair dinged the bell on the countertop. “Like, the trickiest, abso-fucking-lootely. But surely you can help us.”

  She moved a knight with a hand as veiny as leaves. “There is no festival.”

  “What?”

  “That I know of.”

  Alistair smacked the bell again. “What the fuck you telling us, ’damoiselle?”

  She smiled, brow furrowing like bark.

  Fatty, who had been poking at the fire with one toe, yelped and jumped backward, boot smoking. Lor felt himself inexplicably getting a hard-on.

  “Will you need rooms?” Night Manager Peart said. “I do not recommend more than a month’s stay.”

  Alistair grabbed the brim of his hat and yanked down. “Good fucking night nurse, madam, the festival is here somewhere, you just don’t know it. Do you have any idea how far we’ve travelled, any inkling darling, any hypotheses or suppo-fucking-sitions? Good God!” He smacked the bell. “Get us those rooms now.”

  “There is only one room, with many shadows. Who needs one?”

  “You!” Fatty screamed, smoky boot tapping.

  “Book us, baby,” Alistair said. “We’ll find the festival ourselves.”

  † † †

  In Lor’s room was a frozen hearth fire, which shattered to ashes at his touch. When he looked again, the hearth itself was gone, and the walls had changed from blue to green.

  “There is only one room,” Night Manager Peart said later. “With—”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Lor clutched the lip of the burnished counter. “With many shadows. What kind of place is this?”

  It was hard to stay awake in the Agartha. Conversations were slow, stretching themselves so thin you could see through them. Sometimes he would realize that he’d been standing in the same place for hours.

  “An hour.” Night Manager Peart flashed him an ivory smile. “An hour is a tricky concept.”

  “How did you know I was thinking—”

  “You just said so.”

  “When?”

  “An hour ago.”

  “I did?”

 
“You.”

  “Me?”

  “I. You. Me.” She fingered a chess piece. “Tricky concepts.” She dragged the piece across the board. “It’s easy to split yourself. Checkmate. Damn!”

  Again Lor felt a sexual attraction to Night Manager Peart’s boyish features, to the set of her hands, which moved as if she were always holding fruit. He leaned over the counter and grabbed her by the shirt.

  “Who is the phantom that chases me?” he demanded.

  “Which one?” She removed his hand from her shirt with cold fingers. “All the secrets of life will be revealed to you, in time, by God himself.”

  “Really?”

  She twirled a pawn. “No, not really.”

  He clenched his hand, unclenched. “Can we ever leave?”

  “Yes.”

  “We can go back?”

  “Of course.” She knocked down a queen. “Less than a century ago, a holy traveller wandered this way, and, after a terrifying adventure, returned to southern lands unscathed.”

  “So he was okay?”

  She considered. “No, not really. He is still simmering with regrets and the desire to set things right.”

  “You know him?”

  “He was always so polite. Sir this and sir that.”

  Horseshit. “What kind of adventure?”

  Peart lit a long cigarette. “North of here, where the night gathers, he wrestled with a dark visitor.”

  “What do you mean?” Lor crossed his toes inside his shoes.

  “A creature of ice and shadow.” She drew fire. “They wrestled the entire night. Then, at dawn—”

  “There is no dawn here.”

  Peart squinted. “This is a story.” Exhaled smoke. “At dawn, the holy man stole the visitor’s very heart, and fled south with it. But his story did not end there. Back in his own home, the man was increasingly distracted by his talisman—infected, let us say—until his love soured, and his own family abandoned him and. . . . Well, do these tales ever end well? He kept the stolen heart secret. Kept it in a tiny box carved from the bark of the old tree.”

  “Which tree?”

  “This one.” Peart smiled, rolled up her sleeve to show a patch of dis-coloured skin, much whiter than the rest.

  What horseshit. “Sounds like a folk tale,” Lor said.

  She twirled the cigarette. “To us, your lives are all like folk tales.”

  “Who are you?”

  “All is connected. There are many stories. There are many rooms.”

  Behind the hotel, Lor found a single tree, its bark skinned in strips to reveal the silver beneath. He peeled off his bent glasses and smashed them against the trunk. The lenses popped out. He hung the twisted frame from a branch.

  Back in the lobby, Night Manager Peart had beaten herself at chess once again. Her skin glowed silver. She flicked the fallen queen, squinting through Lor’s mangled glasses.

  † † †

  Lor sat on his bed and poked his finger with the magpie guitar’s strings. But this time his awareness seemed to drain with the blood. He poked another finger, then another, but could not clot his bleeding sense of self. He poked all four fingers and his thumb, and played the guitar, squeezed the neck until there was blood everywhere. By this time he hardly knew who he was. He reached for the bag of glitter and tried to stanch the cuts with it.

  Suddenly his fingers clenched around the pouch.

  That fucking dust was the problem! Of course. He’d been holding the dust the whole time at Inuvik, during the vision, the whole time at Yellowknife. It was in his pocket the whole Happy Hanukkah cabaret, it was all over the magpie guitar. The Weird had smuggled itself out of Lethbridge in a pouch.

  He glared at the dust, seething with attraction and repulsion. Standing, he threw the pouch into the nightstand drawer and slammed it shut, then kicked the nightstand for good measure. He grabbed his guitar and made for the door.

  He never wanted to see that dust again.

  He wanted to open the drawer, pick up that dust, and never let it go.

  † † †

  Lor entered a room scented with ganja, saw Fatty slumped in a chair, Alistair bent over him. They had a fire going in the middle of the floor, burning rolls of toilet paper, a cube of weed, the closet door.

  “So cold.” Alistair tossed the last of the toilet paper into the flames. It turned to ash in seconds.

  When the fire dwindled, Alistair began to take apart Fatty’s drum kit and roll it into the fire. With each tom popping, each cymbal sparking, he added his own bass guitar, then produced a harp and added it to the flames.

  The fire ate a hissing groove across the bass’ twelfth fret; the neck buckled, scissored and stroked the harp’s strings; the harp snapped, each string striking a drumskin. The fire played a concerto, transmuting rhythm to smoke, an offering to the ceiling gods.

  “It ain’t punk,” said Alistair.

  “No,” Lor agreed.

  Alistair pointed at Lor’s guitar. “Now. Your own sacrifice.”

  Lor felt a rush of love and rage. He hugged the guitar tight to his breast. “Don’t touch it.”

  “Amigo. We’re dying here.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “We’ll take it.”

  “I’ll kill you both.”

  Alistair sighed. “This is an imbroglio of sorrows.” He put his hands on Fatty’s shoulders. “We have news.”

  Fatty’s jaw clenched. His teeth squeaked.

  “Tell ’im,” Alistair said.

  Fatty did not look up. “Fondle my nuts.”

  The fire began to play a jig.

  Alistair turned to Lor, said, “Fatty’s been sabotaging our gigs. He’s our boy.”

  “What?” Lor pulled the guitar tighter. The fire vamped, cracked out a rhapsody.

  Alistair giggled. “It was the only way he could kill his pain, his terrible cry of the heart. The kid has been desperately chasing a song all these years, never catching it. It’s been driving him mad, says it even has a smell, f ’you can believe it.”

  Fatty sniffed.

  “This amigo is truly his brother’s . . . er, brother.”

  The fire broke to a smoky lullaby.

  Alistair clomped a boot. “Like, the little dude heard the tail end of a song on the radio, years ago, or somebody singing, dig? And—how do you explain the vagaries of mystical experience?—he’s been searching for it ever since, always just out of reach, just out of earshot, somewhere in the distance, beneath the static—”

  “Fuck off,” said Fatty.

  Alistair grinned. “And now he keeps hearing someone hum snatches of that mel-o-dee, in the next room, in the hallways. . . . Deep down, the li’l shit is really . . . uh, deep.”

  Lor freed a hand and put it on Fatty’s shoulder. “What’s going on?”

  “You.” Said without feeling. The fire dwindled for an intermezzo, then crackled between blues and bebop.

  Alistair tapped his boots. “Can you hum a few bars for us, amigo-san?”

  “Dingle my nuts.”

  “Fatty,” Lor said. “How does the song go, man? We may have heard it.”

  Fatty looked up, lip between teeth. He exhaled, took a breath, started to speak, stopped. The fire began to die around a florid arabesque, singing whiffs of bitter smoke.

  “Hum it, Fatster.”

  Fatty hummed one note, coughed. He tugged one ear, then the other. Stuttered two beats, clicked his tongue, fell silent. He looked like he would get up, but slumped instead. He stared at his own crotch.

  Alistair nodded vigourously. “Yeah, man. The relentless elusiveness of the ineffable.”

  Fatty sat, motionless.

  “Hey. Dude.”

  Fatty an ice sculpture.

  Lor leaned down. “Fatty?”

  Fatty spoke, voice a cracked whisper. “Kiss my piss.”

  The next morning he was gone.

  † † †

  “Well,” said Alistair through blue lips. “Truck gone, no way back now.�
��

  “Franklin could have found this damned festival,” said Lor.

  “If only he were here now.”

  “If only.”

  The ashes from the fire briefly revived, glowing with the sounds of a distant hootenanny.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  All Tables Are Covered In Vomit

  “Stop, Ted. It ends here.” Seri almost tumbled into a wall mirror funhousing the Agartha’s remaining light. Her fingers twitched; she was dying for a phone. Rooke plunged into the hallway shadows, long stride navigating curves and corners.

  “I created him,” he called back. “I’ll destroy him. This is not your journey.”

  “You wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for me.” Seri’s breath sandpapered. She passed a room in which two people were obviously making rough love—bedsprings creaking, door rattling, a whip or cracking belt.

  “You can’t renew yourself through destruction,” she called to Rooke. “Give it up.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “Destruction is a tricky concept,” Peart croaked from a darkened alcove, where she perched upon an overturned armoire chiselled with gargoyle motifs, fingers flourescent with sticky stars. She laughed, a clink of frozen moons. “We are in a Fimbulwinter. We are waiting for the end.”

  Seri sped to catch Rooke, who had vanished behind a corner. “Ted, enough! I’m putting an end to this.”

  “Really?” He stood waiting. “How?”

  “Your quest is over.”

  “Lovely! Will this be a citizen’s arrest?”

  “We’re going back south.”

  He grinned. “Will you call down a choir of angels?” He snapped two fingers. “Oh! Perhaps your darling grandmother will help you, send up a magical Bible verse.”

  “How did you. . . ?” She felt a roar of rage. “I’m alerting hotel staff, right now.”

  “Have you seen any?”

  “I’m calling the spymasters at Internal Security Division.”

  “Will they know me? Send them my love.”

  “I’ll call the RCMP.”

  “How?” He dangled his cellphone.

  She squeezed the coins in her pocket. Her toes bunched in her shoes. Dear God, open a path here. This was like punching fog.

  “Yes, pray.” Rooke shoved her, loped into the shadows. “We’ll see how powerful your watchmaker is.”