by John Shirley
At last they stretched her out on a soft patch of sand in the lee of a charred driftwood log.
“Someone’s had a fire here,” Gatewood said, kicking at the cold ashes and hugging himself. “You think we should risk one? Mercury’s shivering. Me, too.”
“Like to—can’t. We’re in this country illegally. Got to get to Marseilles. If the Old Balkan’s still there, he’ll hook us up.” Constantine was rather proud of using this Americanism, “hook us up.” “The Balkan owes me. I yanked an evil spirit—or so he thought—out of his daughter some years back. He’s the man for forged papers. Might be in jail by now though . . .” He looked around and noticed a moving light, about five hundred yards up the beach, spearing along the shoreline road. “You see that? Looks like cars up there on a highway. I ought to be able to get someone to stop . . .”
“But how do we get her there without attracting too much attention? We’re a strange group anyway. I mean, with your friend with the beard and the . . . oh crap, where’d he go?”
They looked around and couldn’t find Spoink. “Uh-oh . . .” Constantine looked around. The eastern horizon was redefining itself in gray, but the sun hadn’t truly risen yet. He cast his psychic net out and picked up a confused signal from down the beach: a fearful, muted word or two from Spoink, soon locked down under another presence, darker and cryptic.
John. He . . . it’s . . . crush . . . pressure . . .
“Just stay here and watch over Mercury, Paul, will you?”
Constantine started off after Spoink, not at all sure how he was going to deal with him. But Constantine didn’t want to abandon him to a living hell in another man’s out-of-control body.
He had gotten only about fifty paces when his foot struck something soft and warm. He crouched and in the dim light made out the shape of a large dead seagull. He could smell blood. A little more light leaked into the sky and as he kept looking at the dark shape he perceived that its throat had been cut. Some Muslims still performed animal sacrifices at Mecca—and this freshly killed seagull’s body was turned so its head pointed southeast, toward the Holy City.
Constantine stood, and saw the dim outline of the man Spoink had inhabited, standing near a boulder at the foot of a hillside overlooking the beach.
“Oi—Spoink!” he called. There was no response.
Constantine sighed and trudged toward him, thinking he might be able to take control of the man’s mind long enough to let Spoink reestablish himself. “Oi, Spoink, you in there? You got to take control again, mate”!
John . . . help me . . . he’s too . . . And then the contact faded.
But the man was turning his way. He stared, for the space of several panting breaths, and then started toward him.
Too late, Constantine remembered the Blue Sheikh’s prophecy, his warning about a man slashing the throat of a bird . . .
The man Spoink inhabited was picking up speed, running full tilt, teeth bared, a dark shape with only his teeth showing in the midst of the silhouette of his head.
He shouted something about Allah, as he came—it was the same word in Farsi as Arabic—and something more about daevas, and Iblis. Probably calling on God to help him in his fight with the Devil. In that split second, Constantine picked up a loose mental image flickering from the Iranian: he’d seen Spoink’s memory of him and Constantine chucking a couple of the Imam’s friends overboard in the Caspian. He was sure Constantine was an agent for the Little Satan.
Face contorted, the Iranian knocked him flat on his back, roaring obscurely in Farsi—face close, breath hot, his beard in Constantine’s mouth, left hand on his throat, his knees pinioning Constantine’s arms. Metal gleamed in the thin light: the knife in his right hand, poised to stab. The very knife Constantine had used to cut the heel of his palm.
Constantine reached out with his mind, managed to focus his mental field on the Iranian’s brain stem enough to interfere with its signals. The man became momentarily paralyzed, body going rigid . . .
And the knife blade stopped a quarter inch from Constantine’s throat. It hovered there.
But Constantine knew he couldn’t hold it long. The Iranian began to shake, to struggle against Constantine’s control, making a gurgling sound deep in his throat.
There came the sound of feet chuffing rapidly through sand, then a crunching thump—and the Iranian groaned and let go of Constantine, slumping to the sand beside him.
Constantine sat up to see Gatewood standing over them, one side of his face limned in the increasing dawn light, the pistol in his hand. “Didn’t mean to hit him quite so hard.”
“Glad you thumped him good,” Constantine said, turning to examine the bearded Iranian. “Another second and he’d have cut my throat.”
Gatewood crouched beside them. “How is he?”
“Um . . .” Constantine could feel no pulse in the man’s neck. “He was in touchy health right along. He was in a coma when Spoink took him over. My guess is . . .” He bent close and pressed his ear to the man’s chest. “Yeah. He’s dead.”
“Dead!” Gatewood tried pumping the man’s chest, attempting to restart his heart. The body shook limply in the sand with his efforts, but the heart refused to start beating. Gatewood stood up, shaking his head. “Shit. I was just trying to get him off you!”
“He was barely alive, in a way. Probably some blood clot in the brain, keeping him in the coma. You knocked it loose and it closed his accounts, it’s for the best, you know.”
“What? Your friend was in there.”
“He was trapped in there. This has set him free. He’s probably glad of it. He was disillusioned with being embodied again anyway. Getting that nasty meat-puppet feeling.” Constantine stuck out his hand. “Bloody weeping Christ, I’m tired. Here, help me up.”
Gatewood pulled Constantine to his feet. “We’d better get back to Mercury, John.”
Grunting, Constantine picked up the body Spoink had been using in a fireman’s carry, and trudged back to Mercury. Blood dripped from the back of the dead man’s head, leaving a spotty trail behind them.
They found Mercury still apparently dozing in the shelter of the log; the wind reached around the log sometimes and made her hair ripple past her closed eyes; her lips moved silently.
Constantine put the body down and sat on the log beside the two supine figures—a bearded stranger and Mercury, one growing cold in death and the other twitching in an uneasy trance.
“I’m shagged out with lugging limp bodies around . . .”
Constantine sat a good while, just to make sure the man was dead.
The sun edged into view, the clouds around it salmon colored; the wind died out, but the Mediterranean’s surf rolled in, drew back, and rolled in again, rumbling and whispering, repeating the same cryptic message it had repeated since before the time of Ulysses: A movement . . . and a rest. A movement . . . and a rest. A movement . . .
Was Spoink really gone? Constantine wondered. Was he truly set free?
He closed his eyes, widened his mental receptivity, and called out.
Spoink? Oi, Spoink!
Was there a response? A faint echo of an echo? Maybe. And something brushed at his ankle.
He opened his eyes and looked down at the sand. The wind had died down, but the sand near his feet was lifting up as if blown by a breeze, only it was moving in precise directions, handfuls of sand slipping this way and that, as if guided by a sculptor. Beach sand and bits of shell drifted and feathered and traced, until a picture formed in the sand, drawn by an unseen hand.
It was a man’s face—a young man with long, unruly hair, a wide, grinning mouth . . .
Constantine intuitively felt this was an image of Spoink as he’d been in life out in California. As if in response to his recognition, the face in the sand rearranged itself so that one of its eyes winked.
Then the wind skirled up from nowhere and erased the image—but Constantine had gotten the message. “Okay, mate. See you at the local . . .”
“Forget it.”
“Were you talking to that Spoink, dude? I could tell he was still around somewhere.”
“I expect he’ll head across the River of Forgetfulness soon enough.” Constantine looked closely at Gatewood. “You could ‘tell he was still around’? Some ghosts are pretty easy to see, but if they’re spirits, really independent, more than a lost and lonesome ghost, like, they’re harder to see. Can you see him?”
“No, I can feel him.”
“Can you, then?” Constantine lit a cigarette, drew deeply on it, squinting at Gatewood knowingly. “You can feel him . . .”
“Um, what about it?”
“The ghosts in Baghdad didn’t choose you because you’re a kindly personality, though that probably helped. You’ve got a deeper connection to the dead than I do. You’re a medium, Paul. That a specialty in the U.S. Army, is it? ‘Spiritualism Specialist Gatewood’? ”
“A medium? You mean like . . .” He snorted, and shook his head firmly. “No way! They’re all frauds!”
“They are. You’re right. Except for a very few. If some oik says he’s a medium, that’s a sterling indication that he’s not a medium. None of the famous ones are the real thing. But the talent does exist, it’s just quite rare. It’s been sort of hidden away in you, I expect. That’s the real reason you’ve come along on this daft expedition. To guide them to me, and to stay in touch with them.”
“Hey, I don’t want to be a medium.”
Constantine shrugged. “I don’t want to be a fuckup, but I am.”
“Great to know I’m in good hands with you.” He bent over the dead man and touched his throat. “He’s not coming back, unless it’s as a ghost. But I don’t sense the Iranian guy around. Hey, this being a medium, is it going to get . . . worse? I mean, won’t they start, like, coming around and waking me up at night and scaring my girlfriends off, that sort of thing?”
“No doubt they’ll make you spit up white ecto-goo, and you’ll be trying to chat up a pretty girl and some old lady’ll take over your mouth so she can tell her husband what a bastard he was. Get used to it.”
“Oh . . . crap.”
Constantine went to hunker down by Mercury, taking her pulse. Still steady, but he’d need to get some food into her, first chance.
“So what now, John?” Gatewood asked.
“Now we bury this bearded git as best we can and say a few words to wish him onto Allah. Wish I had my Iranian friends with me—got a couple of good mates, Persian Muslims in London. Top of the line blokes, they are. They’d give him a pass to the Prophet, all right. Best we can do is consign him to whatever crustacean burrows in this sand, and then we’ll head for that road up there. I’ll have a go at getting someone to stop.”
Constantine took the little figure of Zoroaster out of his pocket and held it up to glimmer in the morning sun. “With any luck I can . . . persuade them to give us a lift.”
12
PROBLEM CHILDREN: REALITY AND UNREALITY
A village near Jalalabad, Afghanistan, close to the border with Pakistan
Abdur and his brother Halil were playing army in the dusty, empty lot next to their house, mostly staying in the shade cast by the houses on either side. It was a hot day. They were on the edge of town, and in the distance angular blue hills rose from the haze. They liked to imagine they were patrolling those hills with the Afghani army and the American army. They had visited their Aunt Noesh in Gandahar, near a U.S. military base, and she had said the Americans had arrested the Taliban men who had been threatening her for not wearing her burqa. Abdur and Halil’s father hated the Taliban: they had killed his brother for selling some American DVDs. He had merely been trying to survive, selling these movies which he got on a trip to Egypt—mostly early Adam Sandler films and one starring Annette Bening—and they had killed him for “spreading the dirt of the Great Satan.” The American soldiers had befriended the two boys, had taken them on rides on their motorcycle, and let them climb up into a parked Chinook helicopter; they had given them candy and showed them how to use a baseball mitt. They liked Americans and they often played American soldier. Lately Abdur, the oldest at eleven, had been playing President Karzai, pretending that the president was leading the army against the Taliban in the hills. Halil got to be the general in the game. “You are only nine. So you cannot be president yet,” Abdur said.
They were throwing rocks, standing in for grenades, at a stack of old tires on the other side of the vacant lot just now, and smelling the delicious scent of meat and flatbread cooking inside the house. Their mother was cooking; their father was home for lunch from his job as a taxi driver. Halil was suggesting they go look to see if there was anything ready to eat yet when they heard the rumble in the sky, and looked up to see the American plane.
It was an F-16, equipped with missiles; higher up, they could see one of the big strange airplanes, with the mushroomlike hump on its back, that sometimes, Abdur had heard, directed the other planes.
But they were not frightened of the American planes. They were their friends, after all. They might know where some Taliban were hiding. They were going to “give them hell”—that was an expression Abdur was proud of knowing; he had heard it used at the base.
“Ooh, where do you think they are going to shoot?” Halil asked.
Abdur said nothing. He had seen the F-16 tilt and come around their way, and he was seeing the air-to-surface missiles launching, and he couldn’t speak, he was too awestruck by the sight. He knew they couldn’t be aiming at his house—it must be someone nearby, it must be—
When their house exploded, Abdur and Halil, though not indoors, were close enough that they were killed immediately because the exterior walls of the house were propelled outward with terrific force, smashing them flat.
Abdur and Halil hardly felt it, they were both dead so quickly. Their father, however, had been protected by having stepped out for a moment to get something from his taxi, and the car had sheltered him from much of the explosion’s force. Blinded in one eye by glass from his overturned cab, he staggered back to the smoking crater where his house had been and stood on the edge of the wreckage, looking past the crust of walls, seeing parts of his wife sticking out of the rubble here; more parts twenty feet away.
Abdur and Halil watched him from above the house. They seemed tethered to it, like balloons. They did not understand, and they could barely remember who they were, or who this man was. He was important to them, close to them, and they must stay here and determine who he was and what had happened, they must stay and stay in this broken place, they must not go anywhere, they were closely connected to this weeping man with the face of blood, they must not go . . .
Paris, France
“General Coggins, sir?” Captain Simpson’s voice, gently prompting, calling him from a troubled sleep.
. . . this weeping man with the face of blood . . . like a painting of Jesus he’d once seen. Like . . .
“Oh Lord Jesus!” Coggins sat up abruptly on the sofa in the suite’s main room where he’d fallen asleep; a midmorning nap, really, after a long sleepless night.
The image of the man staggering through the wrecked house, the ghosts of two children hovering over him . . .
It stayed in his mind . . .
Just a dream, though. That was all.
“General? I’m sorry, sir—you told me to get you this report, no matter what, when it came in, but if you want to finish your nap—”
“No, Simpson, give it to me . . . I just . . . Lord, what a dream . . .” He smoothed his rumpled hair, flipped the folder open. “Remind me what this is?”
“That raid you directed in Iraq, right before we went on the ‘special assignment.’ You got some guys you thought were Al Qaeda. They gave us that safe-house location in Afghanistan? Jalalabad?”
“Oh right. That was my raid; I wanted to know if it’d borne any fruit, yes . . . I need some coffee . . .”
&
nbsp; “Shall I—”
“No, dammit, you’re a captain, not a corporal. I’ll buzz for it. This report . . .” He flipped through the pages. “Seems like . . . shit . . . they hit the wrong place?”
“Yes and no sir. It’s been confirmed as the location that the prisoners gave us. But they—either they were wrong or they were lying. Seems to’ve been a family sympathetic to the Karzai regime, anti-Taliban. Looks like in fact the guy was a cab driver doing a little spying for the CIA on the side. One of our own people. Chances are the Taliban found out. They make up lists, disinformation lists, try to get us to target innocent people, even our allies . . .”
Coggins felt sick. “And the pricks score a two for one—a propaganda victory and—” He broke off, realizing. “Was this place on the edge of town? Vacant lot next door?”
“Yes sir, you can see on the surveillance photos . . .”
“Holy shit.” The house from his dream.
“Sir?”
“General!” It was Strucken, carrying something into the suite. Whatever he was carrying was hidden under a gray cloth. Strucken looked coldly at Simpson. “This one will have to leave. I have something important . . . Vital. It must not wait . . . We must discuss. No one must be here with us, General.”
“Whatever, fine, Simpson, thank you. Go ahead on downstairs. Oh, before you go, they, uh—they’re still regarding me as on ‘special assignment,’ are they?”
“Yes sir. That’s the designation on the communiqué.”
“Good. How long the chief of staff will go for that smokescreen I don’t know . . . Okay, I’ll see you downstairs in about an hour.”
When Simpson had gone, Strucken set the object in his arms—something glassy, about as big as a gallon jar—on the ornate coffee table beside the sofa.
“What’s this?” Coggins reached to pull the cloth away.
“No sir—no!” Strucken stopped Coggins with a firm grip around his wrist. Seeing the cold anger this impertinence elicited, Strucken drew his hand back and bowed slightly. “I’m sorry, General. Best not to . . . expose this. I have certain instructions.”