by Jack Hamlyn
Jim knitted Marlow’s fingers together so that they resembled a praying man’s. He didn’t particularly care for this method of transport, but he refused to drop his only form of protection, the bat, in order to execute a more graceful fireman’s carry. He took off into the wood line, dragging Marlow behind him with the man’s arms wrapped firmly around his neck. Jim had never felt so much like a plow horse.
“We’re leaving a fortune behind on that beach,” Marlow mused, about as close directly into Jim’s ear as anyone but a lover had ever spoken, “Bergeron will have our guts for garters, not a doubt in my mind.”
A bullet pulverized the mud just behind Marlow’s wounded leg, jarring it and causing him to wince.
“Shall I leave you with it, then, Captain Charles?”
Marlow didn’t really have to shake his head, but he did anyway. The trek wasn’t as difficult as Jim had feared. For one thing, the villagers, finally rallied by their town mother, had taken to the riverbank to fight the pirates, which took some of the heat off the escaping interlopers. For another thing, Marlow’s legs weren’t completely useless, and he continually scissored his good leg to keep Jim moving forward.
Even so, they were scarcely a kilometer into the brush before Jim had to stop for a breather.
“You’re stronger than you look, Jim,” Marlow said. “You really ought to leave me.”
Jim said nothing.
“Would we ever make it all the way back to Allang like this?”
“No,” Jim replied.
“We might wait out the battle and then reclaim our boat,” Marlow said, “if it’s still there. If not, we shall have to beg the villagers for help, I should think.”
Jim pretended he was still too busy catching his breath to respond.
They both heard it at the same time. A sudden crack, sharp like gunfire, but distinctly different.
“I shouldn’t be surprised if that will be your boogey man, then, Jim,” Marlow said, trying to chuckle, but he had lost too much blood to do so adequately.
The pugot, if indeed that’s what it was, was rustling in the underbrush, as though it were caught on a wad of tanglevine. Jim’s thoughts unconsciously flashed back to the fat woman with the stick impaled through her eye.
“I’ll go flush it out,” Jim said, gently unlocking Marlow’s bloodless fingers from one another and setting his diminishing body up against a tree trunk.
“I say, Jim,” Marlow called after him as he stalked up to the pugot in the underbrush, “why did you trade away the gun? You could have simply shot it.”
Jim considered asking whether Marlow wanted to give away their position, but from the way he was shouting, Jim already knew the answer. Instead, he put his finger to his lips. Thankfully, silence fell. Jim swung the bat underhand through the scrub where the creature had been rustling. Jim spotted a flash of red fur as the animal darted away into the jungle. So it had been a vixen after all.
“Jim!”
Suddenly, Jim felt a great weight slam home over his head, clocking him in the crown. That wasn’t the worst of it, though, because he was suffocating before he really knew what was going on. He dropped the bat to scrabble at his face, but found his way blocked by hard glass.
“What’s the matter, don’t like your new helmet, you little shit?” someone whispered behind him in Curienese.
Jim scrabbled at the glass jar, and began trying to pull it off his face. He dropped to his knees, all the lost air sucking the fight out of him. He could scarcely think, as panic made his heart flutter, but he had enough of his wits about him to recall that some muggers in Manila had used plastic bags to knock their marks unconscious. He had never heard of using a glass jar before, but the Curiens were a world unto themselves when it came to crime and all else.
A sense of calm took him as he realized that he was breathing his last. The world seemed all in slow motion. He glanced over to where he had left Marlow. The man was gone, though a trail of blood led off into the jungle. He turned in the other direction. His heart was beating loud in his head, slowing.
A man stumbled through his field of vision, as black cigarette burns speckled his whole field of view. The man had a beard tucked into his belt. Jim had once mistaken him for the town elder. All of his entrails crept out through his beard and trailed behind him on the ground. Yet he walked on. The town elder, or whatever he really was, was shuffling like the victim of a terrible stroke. One pirate stood before the man, goading him forward like a matador. As the matador distracted the disemboweled old man, another pirate snuck up from behind, jammed a glass jar down over his head, and tightened the mouth of the jar around its neck with a metal sealing bolt. This was the first time Jim realized what, precisely, was suffocating him.
He tried one last time to take a deep breath, even attempting to break the air seal around his neck with his fingers. It was no use. The metal was just too tight, although he took a couple of good chunks out of his neck with his fingernails. All he got was a lungful of spent air from the inside of the jar. He’d be dead in just an instant, he knew.
The bat wavered before him on the ground. His hand seemed to emerge from nowhere to pick it up. It swung well wide of the jar over his head the first time. Before the bat, seemingly of its own volition, swung again, another apparition stepped into his field of view. It was the child this time, the one who had taken Marlow’s gun, a gun which it still clutched in its otherwise dead, rigorous fingers.
The child had a jar over its head as well. Its body was riddled with bullets. Its mouth was wide open, and it was more or less giving the inside of its jar a lengthy, saliva-free Roman kiss. The boy was obviously dead, but still walking.
“Pugot,” Jim mouthed breathlessly.
He didn’t really feel the bat as it was plucked out of his fingers, but that was more a function of the loss of sensation in his digits than anything else.
“Hey,” someone said behind him in Curien pidgin, “this one’s not dead.”
Something slammed into the side of Jim’s head and he thought he felt the glass shatter before he passed out.
2. SONNTAG
Doubt crept into Reverend Sonntag’s heart for the first time in his life, as he peered into those cold, vacant eyes. Over the forty-odd years of his earthly ministry, he had witnessed in person and heard in testimonial, sins that had turned his blood to ice and struck his tongue mute, but always, always he had taken solace in the fact that God had a plan. As a prison chaplain, he had stared cold-blooded parricides in the face, pederasts, arsonists, and all manner of petty criminals and recidivists, and had never once doubted that Providence could save these souls.
For the first time, he wondered if a soul could disappear or be bought. A seed of doubt, planted in his mind by those hollow black orbs, asked what kind of God could allow this blasphemy. Some dark tendril of fire gnawed at the back of his mind, answering that only a mad God or no God at all, could have placed this shell before him.
The empty eyes had once belonged to a member of his flock. The creature’s name had once been Peter Walters. Now the body, which had formerly housed Peter’s soul, housed only a void as bottomless as the pupils of those cold, dead eyes. An empty vessel, its memories and desires vacated for colder climes. It stared blankly, no longer capable of Peter’s warmth, or even the bitter laughs of regret Sonntag had once been able to elicit from him.
Sonntag clasped his hands together, covering his nose and his mouth. His eyes were clenched tightly, locked in prayer or meditation. Or perhaps simply deliberation. Slowly, he opened them again and turned around.
Peter (back when he had been fully Peter and not just a shell), had been widowed in the fire. He rarely spoke of his wife. Perhaps it was too painful to do so out loud. But her memory preyed constantly on his mind and haunted his face. Perhaps Peter thought he could have fooled himself. But deep down he knew. He must have known. After that, he had thrown himself into his missionary work with redoubled zeal. There was nothing else for him.
; “Are you in there?” Sonntag asked.
The creature lunged forward, snapped its jaws as it often did. Only a few feet of heavy chain and a collar around the former Peter Walters’s neck provided Sonntag with any buffer whatsoever. He had no doubt in his mind the creature would sink its teeth into his flesh given half an opportunity, as a million of its comrades had tried to do a million times before. He owed Peter more, though. He had to try.
Sonntag stood up and walked down the rough-hewn floorboards of the rustic church. Peter had lived lightly, a simple man without many possessions. He had lived out of a knapsack. Sonntag struggled to clench the strap of Peter’s backpack with his arthritic fingers, and finally tossed it over his back. After a moment of deliberation, he reached for Melanie’s bag as well, and carried them both down the aisle back to the creature.
It stared attentively at him, like a cowed but untamed puppy. It would listen out of necessity, but not out of any sense of respect. Respect was what Sonntag wanted, respect or understanding. Glancing up to make sure the chain was still holding, Sonntag unbuttoned the flap to Peter’s simple burlap bag. With a little more difficulty, he unzipped Melanie’s plastic yellow Spongebob Squarepants backpack. Their bags reflected a fundamental difference between the lovers. Peter had always been a pragmatist, Melanie a dreamer. They had been different, but a perfect match.
Sonntag drew a dog-eared Bible out of Peter’s sack. He held it up, his hand quivering just a bit.
“Does this mean anything to you?”
The creature cocked its head inquisitively. Sonntag opened the book with a sigh, flipping through to see if Peter had ever highlighted any favorite passages or made a margin note on something meaningful. True enough, he had underlined a passage in John 11 with a black pen.
“’This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it.’”
Sonntag looked up to see if the words were having any effect on the thing. It continued to snap its jaws, more as though testing them than actually to bite through something. With a sigh, Sonntag placed the book down on the pew next to him.
“Well, you never were much of a reader,” the reverend said. “Don’t get me wrong, a dedicated servant to Christ, but always a doer rather than a thinker or a talker. Sometimes, I wish I had the strength left to do more than talk. The strength or the youth. Oh, what I wouldn’t trade to have your youth.”
Sonntag instantly regretted saying it. He rummaged (if “rummaged” was the right word for what his aching fingers could do) through Peter’s sack and caught hold of what felt like a small paper parcel. He drew it out. Photographs. Actual photographs, developed and printed, not kept on a computer as most folks did these days. Thank God for a little tradition, Sonntag thought.
He stood up with some difficulty and approached as close to the creature as he felt comfortable in coming. He flipped through the photos. A few didn’t come out. One was of a riverbank. Another was some of the local birds, out of focus.
“Guess you weren’t much of a shutterbug, Peter,” Sonntag said. “Ah, here’s a decent one.”
Sonntag held up a picture of the two lovebirds embracing outside the still unfinished church back on Patusan. Sonntag must have taken that photograph himself, although he didn’t remember doing so. The spouses were both sweaty, and Peter was wearing his Panama hat and had a bit of zinc on his nose, which made him look ridiculous. Sonntag pointed at Melanie.
“Do you recognize her?”
The creature seemed to try to say something. All that actually came out was a prolonged moan.
“Mel-a-nie,” Sonntag said, syllable by syllable.
Squinting its eyes, the creature groaned again, but even with wishful thinking at his back, Sonntag couldn’t interpret the noise as anything but inexpressive twaddle. Sonntag tried a few different pictures, but the creature refused to speak anymore, if “speak” was the right way to describe it. Exhausted and frustrated, Sonntag sat back down.
“Perhaps there’s nothing for it,” Sonntag said. “Perhaps the humane thing to do, as they say on the news, is to put you down. If a man has lost his soul, is he even a man anymore? It wouldn’t be murder so much as euthanasia. But even then, the Good Book tells us not to live in a culture of death.”
Sonntag sighed and buried his face in his hands. He glanced up at the creature, as though expecting it suddenly to be wearing a smoking jacket and joking about something it read in The Journal the other day. Aside from lowering its arms, it had not in fact changed at all.
“I could do it, I suppose,” Sonntag said, “I wouldn’t even have to. I could get one of those people outside to do it. Promise one of them they’ll be saved or some such. Wouldn’t even have to do it myself. No, I think maybe I have too much respect for you, Peter. Perhaps I should stop calling you Peter. Fido, then. I had too much respect for Peter to let someone else do this to you, Fido.”
Sonntag stood up and made the long trip down to the rectory, or rather more accurately, the little shack attached to the church that he somewhat mockingly referred to as a rectory. There was a fireplace there, a nod to the rather cold nights that sometimes came upon the Hippoan countryside, contrary to what Sonntag ever would have thought about the tropics. He grabbed the fireplace poker and made his way, shuffling and limping, back down the aisle towards the newly christened Fido.
As he passed by the first pew, he accidentally caught Peter’s old knapsack with his foot and gave it a good knock before disentangling it. A simple, MIDI-like song began to play. Sonntag stopped and turned to look down at the knapsack. Bending over gingerly, he reached in and drew out a small music box.
Fido stood there, his eyes glazed over, like a man in the throes of a passionate memory. Sonntag dropped the poker, thankful to be rid of the heavy nuisance, and Fido was unmoved by the clattering.
“You know this? For Elise?”
The creature looked down at him, its mouth for the first time making a movement other than dumb animal chomping. It was frowning. It moaned pitiably and reached, not for Sonntag’s throat, but for the music box. Slowly, excited, but afraid of surrendering to false hope, Sonntag stepped up onto the altar and placed the music box in the thing’s hand.
Fido didn’t smash it. Didn’t drop it. Instead, it caressed the box. And then, with shaking, uncertain movements, it undid a clasp and the box opened. A tiny porcelain ballerina did an infinite pirouette within the world of the box, forever twisting clockwise perfectly.
“Wasn’t Melanie a dancer?”
Fido looked up. It stared at the reverend for a moment and then…nodded. Sonntag stepped forward. He put his hands around the music box, and although the creature fought against him at first, he took the music box from its hands after a moment.
“Do that again,” Sonntag said.
The creature stared pitiably.
“Can you nod again?”
The creature gave no response. No longer interested in Sonntag’s succulent living flesh, it wandered off into the corner and sat down, Indian-style. Sonntag sat down right on the altar, his heart fluttering like it hadn’t since he had been a young boy chasing girls and pulling their hair. He clutched his chest and reached into his pocket to draw out a pill bottle. He took a single pill, his hand shaking, and slowly placed it in his mouth. His heart calmed.
Slowly, he came to a conclusion. Of course, the photographs had meant nothing to him. Did his eyes even still work? Sonntag’s eyes hardly worked anymore, and he was still alive. And who knew what a two-dimensional picture meant to a creature with a whole different way of thinking. Nor had words gotten through to it. Like man after the fall of Babel, the creatures had lost their power of language.
But music! Something visceral, something meaningful, even to the dumbest of brutes. They could be reached. Something primordial in them could be touched. They still had…a soul.
“Pete,” Sonntag said.
It looked up. No, not “it.” “Him.”
Sonntag st
ood and walked outside. A great crowd had gathered around the church, hundreds of the residents of the Hippoan “capital” Yuzna, and its outskirts, all waited with baited breath for his every word. Most of the Christians from the city were there, but that wasn’t as impressive as the head clothed Muslims, and even the occasional Buddhist monks. The Hippoans were a massive people on average, more similar ethnically to Samoans than the Malays and Bugis that populated Patusan. Many had become notable as boxers and Sumo wrestlers. Yet the crowd that had gathered here looked woefully undernourished, and the distinctive Hippoan paunch was scarcely to be seen.
“You’re welcome to come back in,” Sonntag announced, and then led the tip of the throng inside.
The crowd stopped at the back of the church as they saw Peter up on the altar. Undeterred, Sonntag walked up onto the altar, just out of reach of Peter’s snapping jaws. (He was a believer, not a madman, after all.) He held up Peter’s Bible.
“It’s safe,” Sonntag announced, “you can come in.”
Reluctantly, some of the flock came in. A few even sat in the rear pews, but none came past the midway point of the church. The cameras were there too, and the rest of the bloggers and media parasites. Essentially, what little media presence Yuzna could be said to have was all gathered. There were few enough, and most of them had come on his account, to hear what the mad missionary had to say to the world.
Sonntag had developed a following around the world, because (he suspected) he was the only one to deal directly with the crisis. While Rome and Salt Lake City issued platitudes at best, and “listen to the authorities” announcements more often, Sonntag had directly addressed the plague as a biblical problem. He had given advice the world over on how to deal with the emotional and spiritual problems of losing a loved one to the crisis, and how to deal with them.