DeVille's Contract

by Scott Zarcinas

  Frank O’Lynn scratched a fleabite on his neck. “Nearly three hours.”

  Louis stared back at the guinea pig as unblinking as The Master herself. A shiver coursed down his back to the tip of his tail, a kind of electric tingle that made his hairs stand on end. It was not too unlike that feeling he always got when he realized his wallet had just been pick-pocketed, that oh-you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me kind of feeling.

  “You were exhibiting the classic symptoms,” The Master said. “Staring into space. Impassiveness. Nonsensical muttering. The only thing you didn’t do was drool.”

  “So I am suffering from Post Traumatic Death Syndrome,” he said, almost relieved. There was something comforting in knowing that this was all a figment of his delusional mind.

  “Heavens no, something a lot more common than that.” The Master appeared to be laughing at a private joke. “Faithlessness.”

  Louis glanced at the poem on the inside cover of the book. It was all returning to him, every insane detail. I’d love to help you, lady, he wanted to say. But I can’t. Suicide missions aren’t my thing. You need the Dirty Dozen, or The Magnificent Seven, guys who’ve got nothing to lose and figure going out in a blaze of glory is better than fading away. “I just can’t have faith like that,” he said, and clicked his claws. “I just can’t believe in something I’ve never believed in before.”

  “Nobody is totally faithless. Everyone has faith in something. Money, career, a partner, anything that gives them a sense of meaning.”

  Louis fiddled with his tie and scoffed. “If you need that sort of thing.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with need. Meaning exists whether you need it or not. It’s the ink with which we write. The reason behind existence.”

  Louis now laughed out loud. “Hippie horseshit! We’re here and that’s it. There’s no reason to exist other than that.”

  The Master just smiled. “But even no-reason is a reason, don’t you see? You can’t escape it.” Louis made to say that her argument wouldn’t hold up in a court of law, but then let it go. “Listen, Mr. DeVille,” she said. “If you’re going to be with us and help the Freedom Fighters take Miles N. Boon’s prophecy to its completion, you will have to tear down the wall of doubt and prejudice you’ve spent a lifetime building. Remove it brick by brick if you have to. Allow yourself to believe that there’s more to life than you can otherwise see. It’s not going to be easy.”

  Damned right it wasn’t going to be easy. He had been living in the Kingdom of Old Habits for a long time. His walls were pretty damned tall. “You never got around to telling me what a prophet is supposed to do,” he said. “I’m not good at letting things pan out for themselves. I need a plan. Something to follow.”

  The Master stood, and said, “Then follow me to the hotel. We can discuss what’s already been done while I Zip you over to the AGM.” She faced Frank O’Lynn. “You know what to do. Tell the others it’s begun. We’ll rendezvous at the prearranged location. Till then, farewell for now, and good luck.”

  Without further ado, The Partridge left the apartment. He had a skip in his step Louis hadn’t previously seen. The Master then grabbed Louis’ paw and told him to close his eyes. “Ready?” she asked.

  Louis hadn’t even finished nodding when he heard a Zzzzzzzip, like Velcro ripping. Then strangely his head was filled with images of the cinema. Not just any cinema, either. The Odeon, the old converted theatre down near the Hudson he used to frequent almost as often as Sunday school. “I can smell popcorn,” he said. “Buttered popcorn.”

  “Open your eyes,” she said.

  Some part of him expected to see himself as a thirteen year-old at the box office with his father, waiting to purchase tickets to Ben Hur, the very first color film he ever saw. Another part of him would also not have been surprised to see Salma Gundi behind the reception desk in the lobby of the LeMont Hotel. It was neither. Unlike the time he had Popped from the blues bar to the archway at the end of Conduit Number 1, he and The Master hadn’t moved one inch from the basement apartment; but although the contents were still the same – the books on the shelves, the figurines on the piano, the coffee table and sofa – they somehow looked different, as if everything had been removed while his eyes were closed and replaced with stage props.

  “Why is the room shimmering? It looks like everything’s made of water. Even you.”

  The Master suddenly raised her paw to slap him across the face. He braced himself for the impact, but it never came. Her paw passed straight through is head; he didn’t feel a thing. “You try it now,” she said. “Go on. You can’t hurt me.”

  Louis just looked at her. There might have been a few things in his past that he wasn’t entirely proud of, things said and done in the heat of the moment, but there was one thing nobody could ever accuse him of being, and that was a wife beater. He had always been a goddamn gentleman. “That won’t be necessary,” he said, and reached across to caress her cheek. Unbelievably, his paw passed through her whiskers and fur to the other side, like dipping his paw into a trickling stream. Staring at his paw, he said, “I guess nobody can see us. Like Popping.”

  “Only those who are Zipping through this exact period in time, but I wouldn’t worry about it. The chances are incredibly small. It’s only happened to me once before.” She went to the door, which shimmered like a fluorescent light flickering on when she grabbed the handle. “I want you to prepare yourself for what you are about to see.”

  Louis came over. “Why? What’s out there?”

  She opened the door and Louis took an involuntary step backward. There was nothing save an abyss of total blackness, as though he were about to step off the edge of the goddamn world. “Shut the door,” he said, grimacing. “I’m not going out there. Not for a million goddamn dollars.”

  “There’s no need to worry. Nothing’s going to happen. The emptiness you see is not a void, or a vacuum, as you may be thinking. It’s the totality of everything that exists in this present moment of now. What you see is time and space frozen, like one giant block of ice.”

  Still more uncomfortable than he liked to admit, Louis peered through the door, trying to see a familiar landmark – the street at the front of the apartment, maybe a Burger Boss or Happythecary – anything in fact to make him feel more at ease. He would even have settled for a glimpse of The Tower and its logo. “I still can’t see a goddamn thing,” he said.

  “Then you’ll just have to have faith, won’t you?”

  Louis smirked. Bravery was something he was happier witnessing than doing. Unlike all the other kids at school, he had never wanted to be a fireman or policeman; he had just never seen the point in risking his life for someone he didn’t know. “I’ll feel better following after you,” he said.

  Her expression was mocking, but kind. “Ladies before gentlemen? And here I was thinking chivalry had died along time ago.”

  Despite her words to the contrary, he still expected The Master to plummet into the void as if she were stepping over the edge of a cliff. It didn’t happen. The moment her sneaker passed over the threshold, a miraculous thing took place – the hallway outside the apartment suddenly blinked into existence. He could even see the stairs leading up to the street; but what really blew his mind, more than the dark nothingness itself, were the numerous frozen images that had appeared out of nowhere, images of The Master walking up the stairs with a weasel in a blue-gray suit following close behind. It was like someone had set up cardboard cutouts of him and The Master, all at various postures of ascending the stairs. In some, his left leg was raised, ready to step forward, his right leg taking his weight; and in another it was reversed, his right leg raised and his left leg firmly planted. Except there weren’t just one or two of these cardboard cutouts, there were hundreds, all of them blurring together. Some were barely indistinguishable from the one preceding or following it, maybe with the left leg slightly more raised, or the right leg slightly lower, as with The Master. All of her images were also in so
me kind of frozen pose of walking up the stairs. It was goddamn stop-motion. Like staring at a series of cartoon stills before they were run through the camera and given animation. The kind Disney and Loony Toons had framed and numbered and then auctioned for ridiculous amounts of money to middle aged men like himself.

  “What the hell is going on?” he said.

  The Master was now completely outside the door. The hallway and stairs had taken on the same apparition-like shimmer as the apartment, as if she had triggered some kind of light sensor, a kind of supernatural spotlight that followed her everywhere she went. “I understand your concern,” she said, “but you just have to put your doubts to one side and trust me.”

  Louis stepped toward the door to take a closer look, stopping just where it ended and the hallway started. The Master, as far as he could tell, was standing on solid ground, not floating in space. Oddly, her stop-motion images seemed to extend directly from her, as if she were walking into a tunnel contoured to the exact proportions of her figure. His closest stop-motion image, he was bemused to see, began on the other side of the doorframe, barely an inch away from his snout, a frozen still of himself stepping forward, left leg out. “How do I know which one is me?” he asked.

  “They are all you.”

  “Yes, but which one is the real me? I can’t be all of them at once.”

  “They are all really you. What you see is the direct result of the choices you are making. Normally, you can’t see this because the flow of time veils the future. But now that we have Zipped time, you can see the future you are about to bring into existence, all through the process of selecting what you want from the infinite possibilities of what already exists.”

  “Like choosing clothes from a wardrobe?”

  “Precisely. You can’t wear what hasn’t already been made. An experience is simply a choice of selecting a particular part of the infinite and eternal moment that is already there, an experience that has already been created.”

  Louis followed the stop-motion images to the top of the stairs, where they faded into the void of darkness like two hikers disappearing into a hillside cave. “My choices don’t seem to go very far.”

  “Every choice leads to another, then another, then another, multiplying to infinitum,” The Master said, and motioned toward the darkness at the top. “Which is what you see, the infinite multiplicity of every choice you could make from this moment from now. It looks like a formless mass of nothingness because everything you could possibly choose is there, all at once. Essentially, what you see up there is your destiny.”

  Louis scratched his snout. There was something depressing about having a black hole as his future. “Then why can’t I see it?”

  “You are too accustomed to seeing only one thing at a time. That’s why everything all at once – The Plenitude, as we call it in The Tradition – seems so daunting to the uninitiated. Take a look behind you.”

  Louis turned around and froze with shock. The bookshelves and piano had disappeared into a similar black void, as had half the sofa and coffee table, reminiscent of the abyss into which his office, and himself, had been swallowed the day of his heart attack. That wasn’t the goddamn end of it either. There were more stop-motion images of The Master and himself, this time of the past, a still-by-still replay of what they had done in the moments since she grabbed his paw and Zipped. He could see stop-motion cutouts of The Master coming toward the door and grabbing the handle. He could see himself staring, then grimacing when she revealed what was outside. I’m looking at my own goddamn ghost, he mused. Then, while he continued to stare at them, several stop-motion images sparked and disappeared, like light bulbs, brilliant flashes of white as they blew and went dead forever.

  “The choices of our past get absorbed back into The Plenitude once they’ve been experienced,” The Master said. “They haven’t been destroyed. In fact, you can revisit them anytime you like, as memories. Which is precisely what we’re doing now – memorizing – choosing that part of the Infinite Memory we wish to visit and then imprinting it into the reality we call existence. We are all doing it, most of us subconsciously, and we are all doing it in unison with each other.”

  Louis glanced over his shoulder one last time. Several more images flashed before vanishing into The Plenitude. The rest of the sofa and coffee table went the same way. “We’d better get going before we also get swallowed,” he said.

  The Master cocked her head, as if everything she had said had been a complete and utter waste of time. A slap on the wrist from Sister Brady would have had less effect in making him feel so goddamn small and stupid. “The Plenitude is all there is. There is nothing else. You are already in it. You can’t escape from it, and you can’t be swallowed by it. You can only experience it. And what you experience is shaped by your beliefs.”

  Louis nodded and smiled, trying to give all the non-verbal cues he could to convince her that he understood. The Master, however, could see straight through him, in more ways than one. “A Chinese proverb says, ‘The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.’ Are you willing to shed your burden and come with me?”

  She held out her paw. Louis was about to take it, but was struck with a sudden flash of insight. “This is all about free will, isn’t it?”

  The Master smiled. “The power is always within you. No matter what happens. It can only be given away, never taken. Always remember that.”

  Louis then made his decision. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he said to himself, and stepped across the precipice into The Plenitude. Left foot first.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Sphere of Illumination

  WHILE The Master led Louis to the closest boulevard through a series of side streets and alleyways, he began to realize that Zipping was going to be a lot harder work than Popping. Time might have been frozen to a standstill, but it still meant he had to walk every goddamn step of the way to the hotel. Still, he was kind of glad for that. Bad news should be approached cautiously, he reckoned, like an unexploded bomb.

  Intriguingly, he couldn’t actually see further than forty or so feet in any direction. Wherever he was – ascending the stairs out of the apartment, wandering through an alleyway, crossing the boulevard – his vision came to an abrupt halt at the abyss of nothingness that seemed to have cocooned him and The Master in their own, self-contained little world. Cocooned, in fact, inside a bubble of light, as he thought of it (“Sphere of Illumination,” she referred to it), beyond which there was nothing to see, in front or at the back, left or right, even above. Just goddamn blackness, like he was walking home through the streets of Manhattan after a meeting that had dragged on much later than he had wanted.

  The stop-motion images blinking into existence ahead, and flashing out of existence behind, were also another part of the whole goddamn enigma he couldn’t quite get his head around. They weren’t solid statues made of stone, as he quickly discovered, or marble, or clay, or even wood; he could move through them like they were wisps of smoke, without the slightest resistance. But the amazing thing was, when he stepped into each image one after the other, they felt solid. It was goddamn freaky.

  “They represent the highest probability of your immediate future, given the scenario in which you find yourself and the intent with which you wish to move forward,” The Master added. “They simply reflect the most likely choice you are going to make when you move from one image to another.”

  Looking at the hazy images blinking into existence at the horizon of The Plenitude, it kind of made sense. He could still make out the basic form, maybe with a left leg stepping forward, or a slight turn of the head across the street, but the edges of his body and suit were fuzzy and indistinct, blurred by some ghosted outline you see on a TV with a crappy aerial. Then, as he neared the stop-motion image he was focusing on, more and more details would become apparent – the seams running down the trousers, the individual whiskers at the side of his snout, the creases on the back of his jacket �
� as if he was twiddling with some kind of inbuilt aerial and the image lost its ghostly halo with the improved reception. Then, when the stop-motion image was immediately in front of him, just as he moved into it, the picture became clear and perfect. One hundred percent reception. Life, Jim, but not as we know it.

  “From what I can gather,” he said, “my body images aren’t actually moving. They just blink into existence, frame by frame, and then I slide into them. You know what it feels like? Like I’m walking along a conveyor belt. Things are coming toward me, but I’m actually staying in the same spot. It’s goddamn weird.”

  “Because you always considered your body that part of your self which moved,” The Master said.

  “Damned right. If my body isn’t moving, what is?”

  “Your consciousness.”

  They continued toward the piazza without saying much more. As they slid through the stop-motion images along sidewalk (he hadn’t as yet seen a goddamn street sign to tell him which boulevard they were on), the dark cocoon of The Plenitude moved with them, keeping a steady distance all around. Once again he had the feeling that The Master was triggering some kind of light sensor, as though the streetlights were switching on one by one as they approached, then turning off behind as they moved out of range. The earlier fear he had when first setting eyes on the darkness was no longer with him. It wasn’t as if he was walking through Central Park after midnight, was it? He was just Zipping through the infinite and eternal dimensions of space and time. It was a goddamn breeze, a mere bagatelle.

  “My mother always told me to be wary of someone that smiled to them self,” The Master said, the corners of her mouth turned up as well.

  “Now why would she say that?”

  “Don’t know. She was always suspicious. Then again, she was a gypsy,” and Louis suddenly understood the origins of The Master’s accent. Most likely Czechoslovakian, or Romanian, something Eastern European. “I guess she was a bit of a pessimist when it came to looking at life. Not one to ever wear rose colored glasses. I hardly ever saw her smile.”