by John Shirley
He was just stepping out of the men's room when a dry rustling sound and a creaky call drew his attention to the half-open door to the air shaft. It was where people went to smoke, with a bucket filled with sand and cigarette butts. And poised on the bucket was Yorena, cocking her head, shaking her feathers out.
“What?” Bleak asked.
The bird made a come-with-me motion with its head. A very human motion.
Bleak shook his head. “I just got here. You want to wait, then maybe.”
He went back in the main room, found his beer waiting for him, and quickly drank half of it.
So Shoella wanted to see him. Sending Yorena was safer than e-mail. He was trying not to think about the CCA threat; didn't want it to consume his life. Figured he could dodge them till they got interested in someone else. But that was probably what this call by Shoella was about: CCA.
Bleak paid, left a tip, and headed out the front door. Long shadows slanted across from the west side of the street. A group of young tourists, in shorts, walked along talking excitedly in German. They seemed to be taking pictures of some of the elaborate neopsychedelic graffiti on the walls of the old buildings.
Bleak started to step into a doorway—and was driven back by the strong reek of urine. He went a little farther down, found a cleaner doorway, and went to stand just inside, waiting.
He only had to wait about a minute. A flapping, a shadow over the dirty sidewalk, and he knew that Yorena was there.
“Okay,” Bleak muttered, “take me to her.” The shadow wheeled and darted to the downtown direction. He followed, glancing up to see the familiar flickering in and out of view about two stories up. Pigeons and crows scattered to get out of its way; one pigeon was two slow; the familiar veered, struck, and the bird fell, spiraling and trailing feathers, to smack bloodily onto the sidewalk. Pigeon Lady would not be pleased.
He stepped over the dead bird and followed the shadow downtown.
***
IT WAS DARK WHEN Bleak got to the Battery area, at the lower tip of the island of Manhattan, and he was getting footsore. He was aware of Yorena flying overhead, but couldn't see the familiar. He wasn't surprised at meeting Shoella here; he knew she liked to stay close to running water; close to rivers and the sea. She felt powerful there. He drew power from running water too, but he suspected Shoella needed it more.
That's where he found her, on the walk overlooking the water, just beyond a small park at Battery Place. She was standing in a cone of darkness where there should have been light—a line of lampposts paced down the walkway, following the railing, the lamps all lit up, except the one she stood under, the only one that wasn't working. He looked up at the light fixture and saw that the lamp glass was blocked off; it was covered with black butterflies and moths, a living swarm of the creatures summoned by Shoella that kept most of its light muffled.
She was a thin dark figure in the oasis of shadow. Yorena flew to Shoella's shoulder, the creature nestling her head in the wildness of Shoella's black hair as Bleak walked up and leaned against the other side of the post. Behind them, lights twinkled from high metal-and-glass buildings; before them, the river surged and hissed.
“Well?” he asked, enjoying the cooling breeze off the water.
“Lots of things, cher darlin',” Shoella said, her voice grave. “There's a spiritual blackout, you feel?”
“Something of the sort. Last night. As I was going to sleep, I usually get a hit of the Hidden—like the big picture, out a certain distance, a few hundred miles.” She nodded. Knowing what he meant. “And?” “And there were a lot of blank spots.” “Hey, where you staying anyway—not that boat?”
“No, in the city.” He became aware that Yorena, sitting wings-folded on Shoella's shoulder, was watching him narrowly; seemed to be listening closely. He found it annoying. “There's a hotel I know, where they don't ask me for a credit card, and there they don't have tweakers making noise in the hall, and there's no bedbugs and I even have my own bathroom. Clean linen. Lot of old-time junkies there, but they're pretty quiet, they're on the methadone.”
She turned to her feathered familiar. “'Blank spots,' he says, Yorena!” Shoella looked back at him, her head cocked like the bird's. “There's great holes in the Hidden, in the Northeast, holes you could drive a truck through, Gabriel. The Hidden is there—always, everywhere!—but there are places you can't see into it, now. Big places. This is new. And it is tres persistent over to Atlantic City way.”
“Yeah. But then Jersey's always a spiritual blackout.”
“Hey! Not funny! Everyone got to bash Jersey. They take good care of me, many good people in New Jersey. Now—this blackout...there is something else there. While some places are black, other places are shining with a volcano light. Yorena, you are hurting my shoulder again.” She shrugged Yorena away; the bird flew to the railing overlooking the river and hunched sullenly to watch them.
When Bleak looked at the creature, she snapped her beak at him.
“Your bird, if that's what it is, is getting on my nerves, Shoella.” He added, in a mild, speculative tone, “I wonder if she would taste good roasted.”
Yorena fluttered her wings and made an outraged squawking. “Ignore him, Yorena,” Shoella said. “He'sjust tryin' to get a rise out y'alls.”
Bleak contemplated Shoella a moment. “What did you say—some places shining with...volcano light? What do you mean?”
“So I call it. A nasty hot-red light. Like the light from hell! It only comes through sometimes. Comes and goes. Mostly those places, all under a blackout.”
“You're under a blackout yourself.” He looked up at the blotted-out streetlamp—glanced at the shadow around them.
“It was that helicopter, that come looking for us.” She looked pensively at the city, her eyes searching the sky over the buildings. “That why I put up the umbrella here. Helicopters looking for me make me nervous, cher darlin’. Don't like to be seen easy from up above now.” She looked at him, a; leaned a little closer. “You know that there is a 'wall,' in the north, as some calls it—that thing that keeps the Hidden...hidden? What keeps it quiet?”
“I've had that feeling.” Bleak thought of the “wall” impression he'd had that day soon after his thirteenth birthday, on the ranch. There was ShadowComm lore about “the wall in the north.” Without the unknown force from the north, which kept the Hidden muted—a force all Shadow Community felt —they would be swamped by the energies of the Hidden, would constantly see its inhabitants all around them as easily as seeing trees and cars; could see the demon known as the Lord of the Flies as easily as houseflies. And that way lay madness.
“Now the wall in the north begins to break open,” Shoella muttered, frowning at the water beyond the rail. “Much more is coming to us. Maybe we can adapt. But other things come through. Things from the Big Outside. From the Wilderness! And there are some bad people who might be powered up.... And you and me, we have to sort through all this. We are stronger together, Gabriel Bleak.”
She broke off, but looked at him, her lips parted...as if she was considering opening up. He suspected he knew what was on her mind. The tenderness in her eyes cued him. He'd felt it through the Hidden, more than once—her feelings for him. And she felt his for her. Only, hers were rooted in emotion. With him, it was just desire. And he was instinctively sure it wouldn't work out, in the end, because of that disparity. Besides—the one other time he'd had some kind of intimacy with a ShadowComm girl, Corinne Mendez, long vanished from sight, she'd fled to the West Coast over the affair. It'd been dangerous, what he'd had with Corinne. A bad kind of explosiveness. Shoella felt even more volatile.
So when Shoella seemed about to make that suggestion—he changed the subject. “You ever wonder what makes this 'wall in the north,' in the first place?” Bleak asked quickly, looking up at the dark fluttering on the streetlight. The black butterflies and dark moths muted the light the way the wall in the north muted the Hidden. » Shoella looked at him. Licked
her lips. Shrugged away the unspoken.
“Yes, I've wondered. But I don't know who made it, cher darlin'. Who knows? Pigeon Lady is wise and she don't know. 'It comes from the north,' she says, 'like the northern lights, it comes from the north.' Scribbler—perhaps he knows. But he scribbles riddles.”
“If the wall is weakening more, then there shouldn't be a spiritual blackout...we should see more than we do.”
“That blackout comes from a thing that came through the wall in the north. It creates a darkness in the Hidden to conceal itself—like octopus ink, ya feel?”
“Maybe. Why you telling me this? You think I know something about it?”
“Maybe it is connected to this CCA raid. The wall begins to weaken. The power grows. Things come through—and CCA comes after you. Maybe a connection, cher darlin'. Maybe you learned something about that. You keep your distance from us—don't always talk to us.”
He shrugged. “I don't know what it means. The agent didn't tell me much. I'm just keeping my head down.”
She hesitated. “There was something else to tell you. Another reason I called you here tonight.” She sighed. “The bon Dieu knows if it's something I should speak of. But I feel...”
Bleak glanced at her; saw her lick her lips nervously. He had the sense that she was about to cross a line, of some sort; to cross a bridge and burn it behind her.
“Go on,” he said.
“You grew up in Oregon—the east of Oregon, yes?”
“Until I was about thirteen.”
“Your brother. You had a brother, yes?”
He felt an icy shock go through him. After a moment he realized she was waiting for him to say it. “Yeah. Gone. Dead. As a toddler.” “How did he die?”
“An accident. With a tractor. Or something.” “His name was Sean?”
“Yeah.” He looked at her. He had mentioned Oregon to her—but he hadn't told anyone about Sean. No one except Cronin. “You get a familiar to tell you that? Something probe my mind when I was asleep, maybe?”
“No, Gabriel. No.” Her voice was low and earnest—more personal than usual. She put a hand on the lamppost between them as if using it to make a connection with him. “I have been trying to find out? what makes the wall over the Hidden—and what is changing it. I found a man who worked for a military agency. MK Omega, the agency was called. Small, elite, this thing. He is not so elite now: a lush, this man, always drinking. He talks, sure, about some things, if you buy him drinks. I met with him this morning. Something he said—I had to tell you. He say something bothered him, about this Omega group. He was part of a team that took a child, kidnapped it away. They took a boy, Sean his name was.”
The name Sean sent an electric chill through Bleak.
“Out in eastern Oregon,” Shoella went on, her voice softly sympathetic. “They didn't take his brother, Gabriel—they wanted Gabriel to be...what did this man say... 'a control'! That's what he called it. 'Experiment control.' Monitoring him sometimes, he say. See how he develops out in the world. This Gabriel could see the Hidden.”
Bleak swallowed hard. He didn't argue.
She nodded to herself. “They lost track of this Gabriel for a time—but the boy they took, he's still with them somehow. He's alive—and he's with them.”
“That's not...” Bleak's mouth was dry. “That's not necessarily him...not necessarily us, that he's talking about.”
“He remembered the family's last name. A strange name, he said. Bleak.”
And hearing his own name, Bleak felt disoriented, almost sick. He should be happy, shouldn't he, to hear that, if this man was not lying, Sean might be alive?
But he felt like a child who'd found a secret room in the back of his closet, with something ugly hanging back there... something dangling by a noose, turning slowly in the shadows... something still alive.
Why did he feel that way about it? He should be ashamed of himself for feeling that way— shouldn't he?
“So—you want to meet him?” He looked at her, startled. “Who?”
“The man—Coster, his name is. This Coster says he knows what happened to your brother. You want to meet the man?”
Did he? After the run-in with the CCA—did he want to meet someone connected with them? Didn't seem wise.
And—there was that sick feeling. Maybe there was a reason for it. *
No. That was just some leftover childhood feeling of horror—his brother vanished, and he reacted. Buried feelings, that kind of thing.
He looked skeptically at Shoella. “How'd you find out about this Coster, exactly?”
“I went to Scribbler, to ask questions about the wall in the north. He could not see much. Because the wall blocks it. But Scribbler, he saw this Coster—scribbled his name, the name of a city shelter. And I found him...Yorena found him...at a shelter, up by Times Square—he's homeless, this man.”
Bleak nodded. Scribbler. A ShadowComm seer who scribbled on paper for hours, mostly nonsense. And then suddenly there it would be, a secret amidst the nonsense.
“What did Coster know about the wall in the north?”
“He wouldn't tell me much about that—said he wanted to talk to you. Said he wanted to say he was sorry he was any part of that... of taking of your brother.” “So he's talkative when he's drunk...but then he's not?” She looked at him curiously. “What are you saying?”
“I don't know. Just—makes me wonder. A talkative drunk...and yet a careful one. Kind of contradictory.”
She shrugged. “He talked for a while. But then...that one question, it scared him.” She scratched in her dreads, looked out over the river. “And so? Do you want to meet this Coster?”
“I don't know.” Bleak went to the railing, felt its cold metal under his hands. Watched the reflected lights dancing on the dark water.
No. He didn't want to meet Coster, not really. He knew instinctively it was dangerous. Yet he'd always wondered about Sean.
Maybe he'd always known that Sean was out there somewhere. Maybe he'd always felt it on some level.
But it was a level he stayed away from. It was someplace painful. And he suspected that behind it lay one more betrayal by his parents.
If Sean is alive, he told himself, you've got to know it. He's your brother.
And never knowing the truth would gnaw at his insides. Always. He'd always know he'd blown off a chance at the truth.
So he made himself say, “Yeah. Yeah, I want to meet Coster.”
CHAPTER SIX
A concrete room in a nearly windowless concrete building, somewhere in Long Island. In the concrete room a man was strapped into an unpadded concrete chair. The chair was of one piece with the floor. The chair's restraints were made of woven plastic.
Loraine watched the man in the chair from another room entirely. A small room lined with surveillance screens.
Loraine was trying not to show how disturbing she found the scene. She was uncomfortable in the small, closed-off security surveillance station with Helman, crowded so close to him she could smell his hair pomade. Who wore hair pomade anymore? She suspected he dyed his jet-black hair too.
She was new to this wing of the CCA Rendition Building, and she had almost no experience with the Shadow Community Containment Program. But Loraine did know the name of the man strapped in the chair: Orrin Howard Krasnoff. She had read his file. Now she watched him sit there tapping his feet and hands, looking around mournfully, at the almost featureless room. Clearly afraid of what might happen to him next. Sometimes it was as if he were trying to look right through the barren gray walls.
Krasnoff was an odd-looking man, Loraine thought. The ShadowComm “containee had a jutting jaw, dark with stubble, and his skull, stubbly itself, seemed slightly bisected into two lobes. He had a long nose, itself oddly bisected: a dimple at its tip. His sad brown eyes drooped at the corners; his eyebrows were almost not there. His wide mouth quivered, like a child about to cry, and he muttered to himself. He was a man with a paunch, but thin arms and legs�
��perhaps both effects from spending so much time locked up in CCA custody. He wore a T-shirt, and jeans without a belt, and plastic sandals. Bristly black hair on his pallid, bony arms.
He was not a physically appealing man, but, looking at him, Loraine's heart melted with pity.
She remembered what Bleak had said. She almost heard his voice again, speaking right out loud.
I won't ask what authority you have...but what excuse do you have?
Still, Loraine had accepted her place in all this. Despite her misgivings, she was drawn to this work—and she really did think it was the most important job she could do for her country. But did it have to be done like this? She kept her face impassive, her voice calm, as she said, “We ought to be able to win these people over so this kind of thing isn't necessary. They'll do better work for us if we give them a chance.”
“You forget what our containees are capable of,” said Helman, chuckling disdainfully and taking off his wire-rim glasses. He began to polish the lenses on his flower-painted tie. His oily black hair gleamed in the harsh light of the surveillance room; his black eyes reflected miniatures of the rows of television monitors. “Why do you think we have everything made of concrete and plastic, around this man? Because if we let him contact wood or leather or certain kinds of metal, he can use any of those
things to summon certain Unconventionally Bodied Entities. We don't yet entirely understand why those substances put him in touch with those particular entities.”
Unconventionally Bodied Entities: what Helman called any subtle-bodied entity that inhabited the realm of the Hidden. UBEs for short—some CCA technicians called them Ubes, pronounced “yubes.” The terms annoyed Loraine. She would have preferred to call them ghosts, sprites, angels, spirits, elementals, loas—names with some life and poetry to them. But life and poetry, she had discovered, were an uncomfortable fit in CCA's Rendition Building. Here it was all about containment and control.