The Way of Sorrows

by Jon Steele

  The inspector corrected him. “In point of fact, it will be more like the ninth circle in Monsieur Alighieri’s Inferno for any human soul left alive.”

  Harper flashed up an episode of the History Channel he watched once: Visions of Heaven and Hell. The program featured some mad-as-a-hatter drawings by a Renaissance painter, Sandro Botticelli. Sandro visualized the descending levels of eternal torment in Dante Alighieri’s tale. Last stop: the ninth circle, where Satan is trapped waist-deep in ice. The six-eyed demon spends his eternity trying to break free of the ice by flapping his six massive wings to melt it, but the resulting windstorm refreezes the ice and keeps him well stuck.

  Hang on . . .

  Harper looked at the inspector. “Are you telling me someone is still alive in there?”

  The inspector adjusted the silk scarf under his cashmere coat. “The mother and child both wore life status bracelets. They were constantly monitored by my team at Bern HQ. As transmissions from the site began to fail, we could not get an exact location on their whereabouts within the perimeter. There is an underground bunker at the house, a safe room, if you will. We don’t know if they got to it in time. To complicate matters, the enemy duplicated the signals, putting mother and child at several locations at once so that we would lose track of them, then all communications were lost. All we know is, up to that point, mother and child were alive.”

  “How alive is that?” Harper said.

  “Good question, and I’m sending you in on a recon mission to answer the question yourself, after you attend to a small errand in Lausanne.”

  “What sort of errand?”

  “One to help you understand what is happening in paradise so that you may better execute your mission. And frankly, it gives the chief mechanic one more day to plot an infil solution through the shifting sands of time, so to speak.”

  Harper let the inspector’s last sentence sink in.

  “You want me to infiltrate a place that doesn’t exist on a map? And you want me to do it by tunneling through the bloody shifting sands of time?”

  “Indeed.”

  “And how am I supposed to do that?”

  The inspector pointed to the north doors where he had entered the cathedral. “You just witnessed a field test of the technology. We’ve been developing it over many generations while you were in stasis. Works surprisingly well, I think, though engaging it in unstable temporal conditions may prove otherwise.”

  “Terrific. Why me?”

  “You have specific qualifications for the job, of course.”

  Harper felt a touch of vertigo—or maybe it was a measure of gravitational singularity.

  “No great loss if I end up trapped inside, you mean, seeing as I’m half dead already.”

  The inspector nodded. “That would be one reason.”

  Swell, Harper thought. Out of the cosmic frying pan, into an infinitesimal point of space-time with no escape. And Satan thinks he’s got it tough.

  “Right then.”

  Harper stood and walked across the crossing square to make it a threesome around the sanctuary lamp. He leaned back, looked up into the lantern tower, and read what the cop and the roadie had been signaling to the outside world: Mortem tuam annuntiamus et tuam resurrectionem confitemur. mortem tuam annuntiamus et tuam resurrectionem confitemur.

  “‘We proclaim your death and confess your resurrection,’” Harper said.

  “Yup,” the roadie confirmed.

  “What’s it mean?”

  “Depends on whether you’re a local or one of our kind.”

  Harper lowered his eyes to Krinkle. “What kind of an answer is that?”

  “The only one on offer at the moment, brother.”

  Harper thought about it.

  “You know, mate, since we met in Toulouse, you’ve always been two steps ahead of me. Why is that?”

  “It’s my job,” Krinkle said.

  “How long has it been your job?”

  “From the beginning.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Harper reached in the pockets of his mackintosh, found his own gold-filtered fags, and lit up. He took a deep hit of radiance and held it. He felt the weight of his physical form lift from his eternal being.

  That’s better, boyo.

  He released the smoke straight into Inspector Gobet’s face.

  “I give up. What’s the other reason you want me to take the mission? Unless you want to arrest me for smoking in a gothic cathedral and call the whole bloody thing off.”

  Inspector Gobet waved away the smoke.

  “The woman in the States, the child’s mother, her name is Katherine Taylor.”

  FIVE

  i

  The screaming tone stopped but reverberations ricocheted off the walls like stabbing things, and she remained paralyzed. The reverberations decayed, and she gasped for air.

  “What . . . what was that?”

  Her voice sounded strange. She lowered her hands from her ears.

  “Hello?”

  The words resonated in her chest, but were barely audible passing her lips. She sat up, braced her back against the wall. She clapped her hands twice; the sound was muffled and dull. She looked at the dead man on the floor. His unmoving eyes were locked on hers.

  “What is this place?”

  The dead man did not answer, still.

  “Why is everyone dead but me?”

  Nothing.

  Smoke blew into the room on another wave of heat. She caught a whiff of something foul. Her stomach convulsed, and vomit rushed up her gullet into her mouth. She gagged, leaned over, coughed and spit for half a minute. She wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her cloak.

  “Jesus, I’m deaf and eating my own puke. When does this fucking dream end?”

  She looked at the dead man again, hating him for being near her.

  “Stop looking at me!”

  She kicked the body over on its side, got to her feet, looked out to the yard.

  “What the fuck?”

  The black mist lowered as if draining away, and the dead bodies in the yard emerged like islands. She thought goo was dripping from the bodies in streams, then she saw it was moving like knowing threads, wrapping themselves around each of the dead. A thought hit her: It’s alive. It’s feeding. Then the sensation she felt before touching the return key doubled down: You have so seen this shit before. She shook her head.

  “I need to wake up. I really need to wake up.”

  She saw the monitor on the wall, the word ANGELUS still flashing at her.

  “Fuck you!”

  She rushed at the monitor, tried to yank it down. It was bolted in place.

  “Fuck you, I said!”

  She grabbed a laptop from a nearby desk, threw it at the monitor.

  “Enough of this fucking shit!”

  The monitor sparked and sizzled and spit glass. It was dead and the flashing word was gone. She heard a dull buzz in her ears and it made her dizzy. She leaned back against a desk to balance herself, but the room began to spin. She closed her eyes.

  “God in heaven, what now?”

  She sensed consciousness leave her body for a moment, then the dizziness passed. She opened her eyes, looked at the world beyond the porch. Mushroom cloud above the forest still pulsing, fire in the house still churning, but the black mist was gone. And where the twenty-six dead men had lain, there were now twenty-six tightly woven cocoons. Black, oily, hardening in the flaring heat.

  “Bad shadows,” she whispered.

  She did not know what the words meant or why she pronounced them, but she knew the words to be truth. And for the first time since finding herself in this fucked-up dream, she was afraid.

  “Fuck!”

  She ran from the room and down the stairs to the tunnels. She ran faster, following the black-bloodied walls through the concrete maze. The flickering fluorescent lights in the ceiling made the tunnels appear longer than they were before, as if stretching ahead as fast as she ran. Pani
c seized her. You’ll never make it back, you’ll never make it back, they’ll find you!

  “Enough! Please, enough!”

  With her heart racing and pounding in her chest, she reached the two men slumped at the top of the stairwell leading down to the vault. She jumped over the bodies, got halfway down the stairs, and lost her footing. She grabbed at the handrail, missed it, and fell.

  “No!”

  She crashed down on her knees, landing next to the slaughtered woman who lay outside the steel door.

  “Get away from me, damn it!”

  She tried to get to her feet, but slipped in the woman’s blood. She kicked against the woman’s legs and shifted the body.

  “Get the fuck away! I don’t want to end up like you!”

  She backed up against the steel door, getting as far away from the slaughtered woman as she could. She drew her throbbing knees to her chest, saw bloody scratches and cuts through the rips in her jeans. She wrapped her arms around her legs, felt herself shudder.

  “Why won’t I . . .”

  She saw something in the woman’s right hand. Something green, barely poking through the woman’s fingers. Something the woman was desperately trying to hold on to even in death.

  “. . . wake up?”

  She reached over and pulled the thing from the woman’s death grip. It was a small green band made of rubber, or it was before it had been cut open. She held it to the light, saw a thin metallic layer in the rubber. She looked at the bracelet on her own wrist. Except for the size, it was identical. She tried to pull hers off to get a better look at it, but the hoop was too small to slide over her wrist. The only way it would come off was by cutting it. She held the smaller bracelet before her eyes, connected the severed ends to form a ring. It wasn’t just small, it was very small; designed for . . .

  “A little boy.”

  She looked at the dead woman. Remembered first seeing her through the gap in the steel door, wondering if the woman was named Molly and if the missing child was hers. She got to her knees, checked the woman’s right wrist; no bracelet, and she didn’t remember seeing one on any of the dead. Me and the little boy, she thought, we were wearing bracelets; only us. She touched the inner side where it would have rested against the little boy’s skin. It was like touching . . . my son?

  “Oh, my God.”

  She grabbed the handrail, pulled herself from the floor. She squeezed through the gap in the steel door and marched straight to the bathroom, where the woman in the mirror was waiting for her. She held the small bracelet to the glass for the woman to see. The woman in the mirror did the same thing.

  “I don’t care how fucked-up this dream is supposed to be, you need to give me some answers, bitch, right fucking now. The little boy, he’s not an illusion, is he? He was here and he was wearing this, wasn’t he?”

  Silence.

  She held up her right wrist; so did the woman in the mirror.

  “Look, I’ve got one, too. No one else in this dream does. Not the woman outside, not any of the men. Just me and the little boy that was in here with me. I know he was in here, so do you, because you’re wearing one, too. I was sitting on the bed out there, pointing a gun at the door because the bad shadows were coming in and I was holding the boy, like this. Yeah, that’s it, just like you’re doing. I was trying to protect him, wasn’t I? The bad shadows killed everyone outside and were coming in this vault because they wanted the little boy, because he isn’t an illusion in my head, because you wouldn’t put a bracelet on an illusion, would you? Because I’ve got one and I’m real.”

  The woman in the mirror did not answer.

  “Look, I know you want to stay down here, but you have to know what’s out there. The bad shadows are feeding on the dead and wrapping them in cocoons. That’s what they do to the dead. I know, I’ve seen it before. I don’t know where, but I fucking promise you I am not making this up. We have to find the little boy before they do the same thing to him. He’s hiding somewhere out there, I heard his voice. I did, in the forest . . . Yeah, that’s where. I know it was him, but the bad shadows chased me back. I need to wake up so I can find him because I’m trapped in this fucked-up dream and he’s out there. He needs me.”

  Silence.

  “I know they did something to you, I can see it in your eyes. It was in the needle, I know. They pumped you with something that stole your soul. That means they did the same thing to me. But you have to help me wake up so we can find the little boy before it’s too late.”

  Silence.

  “Please, don’t you get it? If he’s my child, then he’s yours, too. But you’re just a reflection, so I’m the only one who can find him. I need you to help me. I need you to show me how to wake the fuck up.”

  Silence.

  Rage.

  She pulled the Glock from her belt, pointed it at the woman in the mirror.

  “You need to tell me how to wake up! Talk to me!”

  The woman in the mirror had pulled her own gun and was pointing it from the other side of the looking glass.

  “Please, help me.”

  Desperation.

  Hopelessness.

  “Fuck it!”

  She put the gun barrel to the side of her head; so did the woman in the mirror.

  “This is what you want, isn’t it? You want me to pull the trigger, don’t you? Because those fucking bad shadows turned you into a soulless fucking bitch who can’t even remember her own son, so what’s the point of living, yeah? This is what you want and you want it right now, don’t you?”

  A smile formed at the corners of the reflection’s mouth.

  Yes, do it. You’re not a mother; you’re nothing but a whore.

  She stared at the soulless woman’s eyes for long seconds, her finger squeezing the trigger.

  Do it! Do it, you fucking useless whore!

  “Go to hell.”

  She pulled the Glock from her head, stuffed it in her belt, and went back to the kitchenette shelves. She grabbed the handle of the iron skillet, yanked it free. Everything on the shelves tumbled to the concrete floor. Jars of teas, jars of kids’ food, glasses, pots and pans hit the floor in muffled clangs and crashes. She turned, charged at the woman in the mirror. She saw the woman charging toward her, raising the skillet, swinging it down.

  “Ahhhh!”

  The mirror cracked and shards crashed into the sink and onto the floor. She hammered at the mirror till there was no more glass in the frame, no more woman staring at her with a vacant gaze. She stared at the wreckage on the floor.

  “This dream wasn’t big enough for the both of us, you soulless bitch.”

  She dropped the skillet. It rang with a muffled gong; like a bell, she thought. She staggered from the bathroom, crossed the concrete room, sat on the camp bed. The storybook and little boy’s pajamas were next to her. She picked them up, rested them on her lap. She traced her fingers over the handwritten script on the book’s cover.

  piratz

  Une histoire drôle de Marc Rochat

  pour Mademoiselle Katherine Taylor

  She flipped through the pages, following the adventures of a band of silly-looking men in paper hats, waving wooden swords, riding a flying caterpillar through the stars on their way to rescue a beautiful princess from an evil wizard’s ice castle. She waited for words or pictures to connect the dots in her memory. When they didn’t, she picked up the little boy’s pajamas and laid them over the book. The repeating pattern of the grinning sheep seemed a happy thing; something that would make a little boy smile. She lifted the pajamas to her face and smelled them. There was the mingled scent of soap and powdered skin again. The scent sank deep into the hollowness of her womb, and there it rested.

  ii

  The Gulfstream G650, registration N3287, made a steep descent from thirty thousand feet before banking to starboard. It leveled off and lined up for its final approach on a heading of 071 magnetic, 090 true. When the jet’s airspeed slowed to 120 knots, its landing gear lower
ed. As the jet overflew the threshold markers of runway 7R, its two Rolls-Royce engines throttled back to idle speed and its nose flared seven degrees. The Gulfstream touched down at 00:17 hours. Reverse thrust engaged and the jet rolled twenty-seven hundred feet before decelerating to fifty knots. It exited the runway onto taxiway E, away from the main passenger terminal. The landing lights and anti-collision strobes of the jet then switched off. For a moment the plane was invisible except for the red and green navigation lights at its wingtips.

  High-intensity lamps mounted in the nose gear came on and illuminated the yellow centerline painted on the concrete. N3287 followed the line at a speed of fifteen knots for one hundred yards before turning onto taxiway H. It rolled by a series of aprons dotted with private aircraft, but there was no activity on the flight line. The jet continued another eight hundred yards to an isolated apron at the end of the taxiway. Power was increased to the right engine and the jet turned one hundred eighty degrees. The nose gear lamps panned over the façade of a blue aircraft hangar, highlighting a sign above the hangar doors.

  ARCTIC X AIR SERVICES

  ANCHORAGE, ALASKA

  ELEVATION: 44 METERS

  CURRENT TEMPERATURE: –9 F/–22 C

  Engines shut down, all lights switched off.

  N3287 sat shadowlike until the hangar doors opened and the building’s interior lamps washed over the apron. Agent Kerr of Homeland Security exited the hangar and walked toward the jet. It was parked as far as possible from the hangar, and a bitter wind was blowing off Cook Inlet. He pulled the hood of his parka over his head.

  “Don’t worry about me. You go ahead and park on the other side of the damn runway if you like.”

  As he neared the jet, the forward passenger door opened and a set of stairs lowered to the ground. Agent Kerr waited for someone to appear in the open hatch. No one did.

  “Fucking shit.”

  He mounted the stairs and stood on the platform outside the jet. There was a small galley inside; the doors to the flight deck and passenger compartments were closed. A quick look at the fittings, not to mention the automatic door and stairs, said the owner of this aircraft was loaded well beyond its $65 million price tag. The fucking interior was painted in twenty-two-carat gold leaf. Then again, Arctic X Air Services was the hub for Texas oil barons, Russian oligarchs, and Asian taipans who wished to remain unnoticed on the hop across the north Pacific. He knew better than to just walk onto a VIP flight and open a door. Walk in on some oil baron fracking his secretary and it could cost him his job; so he stood outside the hatch and let the cold seep into his boots.