The Shattered Gates

by Ginn Hale

  He sank fast and farther than the pool should have reached. His lungs burned as suffocating pressure closed around him. He felt no up or down, no sense of forward or back. Lost in the crushing light, Kahlil concentrated on that single thread that guided him, even across worlds. He felt muscle and bone and a heartbeat stronger than his own—and it drew him like filament landing a fish.

  Blurred images of walls and stairs, pipes and electrical wires whipped past him. Then, suddenly, he broke the surface. He opened his eyes, and for a moment, he floated there, his face and chest rising up until he found himself lying on a wooden floor, gazing up at the familiar ceiling overhead. His sword jutted out at an angle from the bare light fixture in the ceiling. Cracks radiated out from where the blade had driven in.

  Later today, he should pry his sword free and buy some spackle.

  The dog stepped over him and jumped onto his narrow army cot.

  Kahlil pulled himself up and flopped onto his side. His shoulder hurt, but in a numb way, as if his body was too tired to process the pain any longer.

  He just lay there.

  From the floor below, the sounds and smells of mid-morning began to penetrate his senses. The strong aroma of coffee drifted up to mix with the scent of wet dog that filled his room. A radio fuzzed through snippets of gospel, serious news voices, and flares of rock music. At last, the dial settled on an overly-excited sports announcer. Some team somewhere had won something. A minute later, the radio went off abruptly. Bad news, he supposed.

  Kahlil caught the sound of footsteps pacing the kitchen. He easily pictured John, striding through the room, his strong frame almost too tall for the ceiling fan, the breeze from its overhead blades tousling his disorderly blonde hair. Then Kyle remembered him wearing only a white towel, glancing back over his tan, muscular shoulder and catching Kyle’s guilty gaze.

  What a dangerous and foolish chance that had been, and yet it had seemed impossible to resist.

  He wondered how much time had passed since then. Even with the key, he couldn’t perfectly control the Great Gate. Between the two worlds, hours, days, weeks, even years slipped by.

  The distinct sound of papers flopping into the yellow trashcan below the sink reassured him that he’d returned to the same home he’d left. That would be John sorting through the mail. Kahlil wondered if anything had come for himself and then smirked at the ridiculousness of that thought. Nothing would ever come for him, not until it was time to end the world.

  Chapter Three

  “Don’t.”

  John stared at the letter for several moments. He held it up to the light, hoping that there might be something more written on the creamy paper. Maybe a secret code in lemon juice, like the one he and his brother had used back when they were Boy Scouts. He turned the paper over, inspected the edges, and held it up to the light again.

  Nothing.

  He slumped down onto his cheap plastic chair and tossed the letter into the pile of bills on the kitchen table. He shoved the curly mass of his blonde hair out of his face. So, he’d spent the last ten minutes convincing himself that he had a right to open his crazy roommate’s mail, and this was all the payoff he got.

  “Don’t.”

  How disappointing.

  Well, at least it hadn’t been a picture of some porn star with his own face pasted over hers. He poured himself a cup of coffee. It was the cheap stuff, acrid in the mouth and hard on the stomach, but it was better than nothing. He took a slug and scowled.

  If Kyle did not show up soon, how was he going to scrape together enough money for rent? Sell something? He didn’t have much.

  He scanned the kitchen. The faded, old Victorian cupboards revealed a box of peanut-butter granola, a little pile of coffee filters and a single foam cup of instant noodles. The total value, he supposed, was maybe a dollar. The stale granola and ramen noodles had been in the house when John moved in a year ago.

  Probably more like twenty cents.

  He could always volunteer for one of the scientific studies at the university. One of his fellow graduate students had mentioned a sleep deprivation trial that paid daily. But John rebelled at the thought of being so closely observed and monitored. He supposed that he was almost as bad as Kyle when it came to maintaining his privacy. Maybe that’s why they made such good roommates.

  Then John remembered running into Kyle at the Steamworks bathhouse. Had it really been so bad that they had seen each other? If Kyle hadn’t disappeared, maybe they could have laughed it off together. Or maybe their mutual knowledge could have become something more. There had certainly been desire in Kyle’s eyes before recognition burned it away.

  John wasn’t sure if he liked that idea or not.

  Also it was beside the point. Right now John needed rent.

  He strode past the carved staircase into the living room. He gazed at his possessions. Not much: an old DVD player and a 12-inch television, which couldn’t be configured to work with any remote control unit in existence. Not surprisingly, a number of supposedly universal remotes were piled up beside the television like sacrifices to an indifferent god of technology.

  Both the television and the DVD player shared a rickety plywood-and-brick structure that served as John’s entertainment center. Stacks of ecology textbooks slumped on the remaining shelves in no particular order. John glanced through the open door to his bedroom. His futon was the only thing of any value in the dim room. Maybe seventy dollars. John frowned at the hopelessly compacted futon and the disheveled bedding. It gave him a slightly sordid feeling to stare into his bedroom and contemplate money. He sensed that this wasn’t a resource that decent people ever resorted to considering.

  The gently aged architecture of the house itself didn’t add any sense of respectability to John’s endeavor. While the house wasn’t in the best repair, the natural luster of the wood floors and detailed moldings reflected an enduring craftsmanship. Deep care showed in the perfection of the tall, smooth walls, and the carefully turned rungs of the staircase. The obvious devotion that had produced the house carried an almost moral quality. It radiated a simple goodness.

  John’s possessions suffered from the comparison. From his CD player to his running shoes, every item seemed conceived with an eye for quick satisfaction and disposability. Nothing accrued value. It all just fell apart.

  John returned to the kitchen for a refill of coffee. Unwillingly, his gaze drifted from the cracked white cup in his hands to the substantial stack of bills on the table.

  Money was such an ugly thing. It made people consider actions that they knew they would despise themselves for later—actions like begging their friends for loans. John scowled. He hated having to ask for anything. Money was the worst, though. Just the idea of it made him feel pathetic, like a kid who couldn’t make it in the grown-up world. He’d had enough of that when he had been a kid.

  The real problem with asking his friends for a loan, though, was the fact that most of them were broke. Usually, only John earned a steady income. He couldn’t imagine many of his acquaintances amassing four hundred dollars, much less lending it out. Their universal poverty pretty much stranded John on the moral high ground, whether he liked it or not.

  Upstairs, the toilet flushed.

  John almost dropped his coffee cup. He heard the water pipes rattle, wheeze, and then subside as the pressure built. Then the sound of the shower hissing into life drifted down.

  It had to be Kyle. He must have come home in the middle of the night, and John hadn’t heard him. A rush of relief flooded through John. As strange as it was, he almost felt giddy with expectation, his trepidation about their meeting at the Steamworks vanishing with the prospect of financial relief.

  As John reached out to straighten the stack of bills, he noticed the page of creamy parchment paper lying there. He’d forgotten about the letter and the key. He reached down into the pocket of his robe and looked at the key again.

  The honest thing to do would be to give Kyle the letter and
the key and apologize. He would probably be mad. He would have a right to be mad—possibly even furious.

  John didn’t think he had ever seen his roommate angry. He wondered just how mad a guy like Kyle could get. Immediately, he considered Kyle’s collection of scars and also his ever-present knives. Would Kyle actually stab him for opening his mail? John glanced at the padlocked cupboards and frowned.

  The key went back into the pocket of his bathrobe. He picked up the letter and its envelope and stuffed them into the recycling bin, beneath the underwear catalog. After he shoved the trash back under the sink, he rinsed his hands. When he turned around, Kyle was descending the stairs.

  Usually Kyle moved well, employing a fluidity of motion that sometimes seemed almost too easy. John wasn’t sure what exactly gave him that impression. It was a tiny thing, and after watching Kyle for just a few moments, the impression always faded from John’s consciousness. It was like the slightest lingering accent that could only be caught for brief instants.

  Today, Kyle’s ethereal grace had been somewhat subdued. John’s strongest impression was that Kyle seemed to have made an attempt at normalcy. His heavy coat and knives were nowhere to be seen. He wore dark gray work pants and a white sleeveless T-shirt. His long black hair hung in damp strings down his back. Even the scars covering his arms and at the edges of his mouth seemed paler and less obvious. His one disturbing feature was the thick bandage that engulfed his right shoulder.

  “I didn’t know you’d gotten back.” John decided not to ask about the bandage, where he had been for two weeks, or their near encounter at Steamworks bathhouse. Confronted with the reality of Kyle, his curiosity folded.

  “You might have been asleep.” Kyle stopped at the kitchen table. He looked down at the bills and for a minute, John had the irrational thought that Kyle could somehow tell that the letter had been sitting right there.

  John said, “I was just adding up the expenses.”

  “Nothing’s overdue yet, is it?” Kyle picked up the electricity bill and looked at it. He turned it over slowly. He didn’t appear to be reading the balance so much as studying the bill itself, as if it were an interesting artifact. After a moment, he placed it back on the pile.

  “The water bill was due last week, but I paid it...” John shoved his hands into the pockets of his robe out of habit. His fingers brushed across the metal surface of the key. He pulled his arms back up and crossed them over his chest. “And, you know, rent is due tomorrow...”

  “Oh, I’ve got the money for you.” Kyle dug into his pocket with his left hand. He held his injured right arm close to his body. “How much was the water bill?”

  John watched him pull out a thick wad of bills. They looked like hundreds. Hundreds of hundreds. John stared at the money. It was like something from a cartoon. Real people just didn’t wander around with thousands of dollars in loose bills crammed into their pants pockets.

  Kyle counted out the rent then glanced up at John questioningly. “How much for the water?” he asked again.

  “Ah, it was fifty-four bucks total, so your half...” Exactly how much money did he have there, John wondered. He couldn’t even guess. Two inches of bills, maybe three? Maybe the bulk of it was fives and ones, and Kyle was just attempting to impress him by wrapping a hundred dollar bill around them.

  Kyle frowned. “I don’t have any smaller bills on me right now.”

  John could feel his mouth opening slightly, preparing to form the words, “Where did you get all this cash?” Instead he said, “I think I have some twenties. Maybe I can break one of the hundreds.”

  Kyle shook his head.

  “Why don’t I just give you a thousand? I think that should cover my half of the rest of the bills.” Kyle dropped the money down on the table.

  “A thousand.” John repeated the number just to say something. It was too much money, obviously. Even adding in Kyle’s half of the water bill, there would be a lot of money left over. Something like five hundred dollars.

  That was enough to pick up a new pack and better supplies for winter camping, possibly even a GPS. Or, it could go into his Jeep repair fund. He could use a new pair of pants. If he just bought new socks, he could throw out his old ones and forget about washing them. Hell, maybe he’d actually buy something from that stupid underwear catalog.

  He forced himself to stop his fantasy shopping spree. He couldn’t just take the extra money. Kyle hadn’t even seen how little he owed. Not one of the calls on the phone bill was his. The electric bill was tiny, and so was the gas. And John definitely didn’t deserve to take anything from Kyle. He’d just stuffed his mail in the garbage.

  “I don’t think your half adds up to that much,” John said.

  “I’d rather pay too much than too little.” Kyle shrugged, and then winced as he moved his right shoulder.

  “But that’s way too much.” John glanced at the money. All the bills looked crisp and new.

  “Don’t worry about it.” Kyle’s tone was disinterested. He looked at the coffee pot. Again that expression of abstract interest flickered over his features.

  “I can’t just take your money,” John insisted.

  “No?” Kyle looked up at him.

  “No.”

  “All right, then you can pay me back.” Kyle started to shrug again but then stopped himself. “Why don’t you take me out to breakfast, and we’ll call it even?”

  “Breakfast? We’re talking about something close to half a grand.”

  “I eat a lot. If it really bothers you, leave a big tip.” Kyle smiled, and John realized that the other man was enjoying this argument in some perverse manner.

  “Okay, fine. I’ll take you out to breakfast,” John stated flatly.

  Kyle broke into a grin. “Great. I’ll get my coat.” He turned and almost skipped up the stairs.

  John stared after him.

  Did he think he was going to get solid gold eggs? A priceless diamond omelet? He had to know that John was just going to take him to the crappy diner where he and his friends hung out. He could eat until he was sick, and it still wouldn’t add up to five hundred bucks.

  This was something that some insane, Howard Hughes type did. Something befitting a knife-wielding freak who had to pay people just to sit in the room with him.

  Suddenly, John’s thoughts came to a crashing halt. That was it, wasn’t it?

  Kyle wasn’t paying five hundred dollars for breakfast; he was paying five hundred dollars to have John take him out.

  As John gazed up at the empty staircase, his entire body began to fill with tense premonition of the monstrous social horrors sure to come.

  Chapter Four

  It was the air; he always noticed it when he came through the gateway. The air here floated around him, feeling thick, almost liquid. Breathing here felt like drinking. Exotic, rich flavors rolled over his lips. Scents clung to his skin like seawater.

  Kahlil drew in a breath. His lungs tingled with the heady suffusion of oxygen. It felt like enough to last him hours—just this one breath. But he wanted more. He loved tasting everything in the air: cologne, cleansers, human sweat, pollen, insect pheromones. The next breath would taste of hot asphalt, tobacco, wild flowers and the distant ocean. The profusion of scents attested to the vibrancy of life here, so different from his own world of Basawar.

  It delighted him even now as he stepped through the door of the diner, and the smell of a perpetual breakfast engulfed him. The odors of bacon grease, fried eggs, black coffee, and cigarette smoke hung like a yellow fog over the brown booths and Formica tables.

  Kahlil watched John’s expression change as he scanned the customers. John disregarded the cluster of teenage girls sharing one order of french fries. He ignored the two old men in denim overalls, as well as the line of strangers sitting at odd intervals along the counter. He paused as he caught sight of a booth far back, and then frowned at the blonde woman who waved at him.

  The woman was pale, her hair more white than y
ellow. Her eyebrows almost faded into the translucent expanse of her delicate face. Her tight, clingy clothes emphasized the fractional curves of her slim body. The image of a green-eyed kitten warped across the tiny expanse of her baby blue T-shirt.

  An equally slender, dark-haired man slumped in the booth next to the woman. He looked like a remnant from an old film noir, dressed in black pants, a white shirt, and suspenders, his once slicked-back hair now hung in disheveled strings. He sagged against the padded seat like a corpse that had been propped up there. His eyes barely opened as the woman jumped up and waved at John.

  “Hey, Toffee,” the woman called out, “we were just talking about you. Come join us.”

  “Toffee?” Kahlil asked quietly.

  “Nickname. John Toffler. Toffee.” John’s expression looked as if this was an old pain that he had learned to live with. Kahlil found it amusing. It was such a small burden.

  It struck Kahlil as odd that either of the two people in the booth would be John’s friends. There was a striking disparity between their physical appearances and John’s that implied opposing lifestyles. Where these two seemed tiny and nocturnal, John’s build was tall and muscular, almost intimidating. His sun-bleached blonde hair and deeply tanned skin blatantly displayed the weeks he spent outside.

  “I’m here with someone, but I’ll catch up with you guys later.” John started towards an empty table across the room.

  “You can both join us.” As the woman got up, Kahlil stared in awe at her shoes. Like golden altars supporting her tiny feet, they were absurd and exquisite at once, exactly the kind of thing that no woman would wear in Basawar. He felt an inexplicable warmth towards the woman for owning such shoes.

  She rushed to John and, catching him before he could sit, wrapped her arms around his waist. “Come on, I promise we won’t embarrass you in front of your new boyfriend.”

  “He’s not—” John began, but the woman turned to Kahlil. She held out her hand.