Halfway Down the Stairs

by Gary A Braunbeck

  The church shook off the dirt and began to glow from within as candles were set aflame.

  The doors were unlocked with a loud, creaking groan, and thrown open.

  The Dust Witch stepped from behind the doors and gestured up toward the balloon, the bones in her arthritic index finger cracking as she curled it forward, then back, forward, then back: Get yourself down here, now.

  The balloon lowered. The Dust Witch took hold of the tie-off line and wrapped it around one of the gargoyles.

  The basket touched ground, and the young man climbed out, slowly, with much hesitation and even more sadness.

  Around him, the keening trees turned their faces downward, screaming.

  He touched his lips, then pulled away his fingers to look at the blood covering them; then he reached toward the back of his head, surprised at the size of the exit wound.

  He smiled, shrugged, and looked at the hag standing before him.

  “A belated word of advice,” said the Dust Witch, taking his hand and leading him through the doors into Hell. “Whenever you sell your soul, don’t sell it so cheap.”

  Shikata Ga Nai: A Bag Lady’s Tale

  We find her, as expected, in her favorite place: the iron bench on the courthouse lawn, the one with the sculpted-bronze figures of two old women doing cross-stitch sitting on it. It’s fortunate that it’s a big bench, because the old lady needs a good deal of room, she does, for her bags and blankets and such. Judging by her face, she’s not a day over fifty, yet she claims to be in her early eighties. No one knows her name, or where she lives, or if she has a home at all. But we know her, in a way. As a neutrino has no mass or electrical charge and can pass through the planet in a blink, so this bag lady’s existence can pass through this world; she, like the neutrino, is a ghost, yet both are real, both exist and have presence, even if that presence is unseen or ignored.

  We take a place near the little garden a few yards behind the bench and watch as she begins to unfold the quilt; we listen as she tells the story to her still bronze companions, who never seem to tire of hearing it:

  “Gene got himself shot overseas during the war and it did something to the bones in his leg and the doctors, they had to insert all these pins and build him a new kneecap and calfbone—it was awful. Thing is, when this happened, he only had ten months of service left. He was disabled bad enough that he couldn’t return to combat but not so bad that they’d give him an early discharge, so they sent him back home and assigned him guard duty at one of them camps they set up here in the states to hold all those Jap-Americans.

  “Gene guarded the gate at the south end of the camp, and I guess it was a pretty big camp, kind of triangle-shaped, with watchtowers and searchlights and barbed wire, the whole shebang. There was this old Jap tailor being held there with his family and this guy, he started talking to Gene during his watch every night. This guy was working on a quilt, you see, and since a needle was considered a weapon he could only work on the thing while a guard watched him, and when he was done for the night he’d have to give the needle back. Well, Gene, he was the guy who pulled ‘Needle Patrol.’

  “The old guy told Gene that this thing he was working on was a ‘memory quilt’ that he was making from all the pieces of his family’s history. I guess he’d been working on the thing section by section for most of his life—’cording to what he told Gene, it’d been started by his great-great-great-great-grandfather. The tailor—this fellah in the camp with Gene, that is—he had part of the blanket his own mother had used to wrap him in when he was born, plus he had his son’s first sleeping gown, the tea-dress his daughter had worn when she was four, a piece of a velvet slipper worn by his wife the night she gave birth to their son....

  “What he’d do, see, is he’d cut the material into a certain shape and then use stuff like paint or other pieces of cloth stuffed with cotton in order to make pictures or symbols on each of the patches. Gene said this old Jap’d start at one corner of the quilt with the first patch and tell him who it had belonged to, what they’d done for a living, where they’d lived, what they’d looked like, how many kids they’d had, the names of their kids and their kids’ kids, describe the house they had lived in, the countryside where the house’d been ... I guess it was really something, all right. Gene said it made him feel good, listening to this old guy’s stories, ‘cause the guy trusted him enough to tell him these things, you see? Even though he was a prisoner of war and Gene was his guard, he told him these things. Gene said it also made him feel kind of sad, ‘cause he’d get to thinking about how most people don’t even know their great-grandma’s maiden name, let alone the story of her whole life. But this old Jap—’scuse me, I guess I really oughtn’t use that word, should I? Don’t show the proper respect for the man or his culture—but you gotta understand, back then, the Japs was the enemy, what with bombing Pearl Harbor and all....

  “Where was I? Oh yeah—this old tailor, he knew the history of every last member of his family. He’d finish talking about the first patch, then he’d keep going, talking on about what all the paintings and symbols and shapes meant, and by the time he came round to the last completed patch in the quilt, I guess he’d covered something like six hundred years of his family’s history. ‘Every patch has one hundred-hundred stories.’ That’s what the old guy said.

  “The idea was that the quilt represented all the memories of your life—not just your own, but them ones that was passed down to you from your ancestors, too. The deal was, at the end of your life, you were supposed to give the quilt to a younger member of your family and it’d be up to them to keeping adding to it; that way, the spirit never really died because there’d always be someone and something to remember that you’d existed, that your life’d meant something. This old tailor was really concerned about that. He said that a person dies twice when others forget that you had lived.

  “Well, Gene, he starts noticing that this tailor, he seemed really … I don’t know … scared of something all the time. These camps, they weren’t nearly as bad as them ones the Nazis built for the Jews, but that ain’t saying much. Some of ‘em was filthy and cramped stank to high heaven, but this camp Gene was at—I can’t remember its name, dammit—it had this sign tacked up over the entrance gate, and this sign was on the inside of the gate so everyone in the camp could read it, and it said, ‘Shikata ga nai.’ It was this old tailor that had made the sign and hung it up, you see. He told Gee that it meant, ‘It cannot be helped.’ I guess a lot of them poor folks jammed into them camps felt that way, y’know? Like there wasn’t nothing they could do about it and never would be.

  “Gene finally got around to asking the tailor what his name was. The guards weren’t supposed to get too familiar with the prisoners, I guess, and asking one for their name was against the rules something terrible, but Gene was a decorated war hero and figured, what the hell are they gonna try and do to me, anyway? So when he notices that the tailor has been acting real scared, he tries to talk with him, calm him down, right? The tailor tells Gene he needs to tell him a story first, before he tells his name, and then he says—get this—he says that he’s older than any piece of land anywhere on Earth. He’s crazy, right?

  “And then he tells Gene this story. He says that when a child dies its soul has to cross the Sanzu River, that when a person dies, they can cross the river at three different spots—depending on how they lived their lives. Since children ain’t lived long enough to have done something with their lives, they can’t cross the thing. At the edge of the river, these children’s souls are met by this hag named Datsueba, and she takes their clothes and tells them to build a pile of pebbles so they can climb up it to reach paradise. But before the pile can get high enough for the children to reach paradise, the hag and her gang of demons knock it down. If the soul is an adult’s, Datsueba makes them take off their clothes, and the old-man Keneo hangs these clothes on a riverside branch, and that branch, it bends against the weight of that soul’s sins. If the sinner didn
’t have no clothes, Datsuba stripped them of their skin.

  “That’s the part of the story when the old tailor, he told Gene that his name was Keneo, that he’d escaped the underworld and Datsuba because he couldn’t take part in her behavior no more. He couldn’t watch them poor kids trying to climb their piles of pebbles or them adults stripped of their skin. He said that when he escaped the underworld, he stole every piece of clothing that had ever been left by the Sanzu River, because if he could find a way to make a quilt with one section of cloth from each piece of clothing, them souls would be released and there wouldn’t be nothing Datsuba could do about it. But in order to give the quilt this power, the clothes from them souls in the underworld had to be stitched alongside pieces of clothes from the living, and that’s why it was taking the tailor so long to finish it. The guy, it turns out, didn’t have any grandfather, or great-grandfather, or great-great-great grandfather. They was all him! Gene, he thought the old guy had himself quite the imagination, so he just smiled and handed him a needle and watched him do his work.

  “‘Bout ten months after Gene started Needle Patrol the old tailor came down with a bad case of hepatitis and had to be isolated from everyone else. While this guy was in the infirmary the camp got orders to transfer a hundred or so prisoners, and the old guy’s family was in the transfer group. Gene tried to stop it but nobody’d lift a finger to help—one sergeant even threatened to have Gene brought up on charges if he didn’t let it drop. In the meantime, the tailor developed a whole damn slew of secondary infections and kept getting worse, feverish and hallucinating, trying to get out of bed and babbling in his sleep. He lingered for about a week, then he died. My Gene, he almost cried when he heard the news.

  “The day after the tailor died Gene was typing up all the guards’ weekly reports—you know, them hour-by-hour, night-by-night deals. Turned out that the three watchtower guards—and mind you, these towers was quite a distance from each other—but all three of them reported seeing this old tailor at the same time, at exactly 3:47 in the morning. And all three of them said he was carrying his quilt. Gene said he read that and got cold all over, so he called the infirmary to check on what time the tailor had died. He died at 3:47 in the morning, all right, but he died the night after the guards reported seeing him—up till then, he’d been in a coma for most of the week.

  “Gene tried to track down the tailor’s family but didn’t have any luck. It wouldn’t have mattered much, anyway, ‘cause the quilt come up missing.

  “He didn’t tell me about any of this till our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. He took me to New York City so’s I could see a real Broadway show. On our last day there we started wandering around Manhattan, stopping at all these little shops. We came across this one antique store that had all this ‘Early Pioneer’ stuff displayed in its window. I stopped to take a look at this big ol’ ottoman and I asked Gene if he thought there were people fool enough to pay six-hundred dollars for a footstool. He didn’t answer me right away so I asked him again and when he didn’t answer this time I turned around to see him all white in the face. He let go of my hand and goes running into this store, climbs over some tables and such to get in the window, and he rips this dusty old blanket off a rocking chair.

  “It was the quilt that Japanese tailor’d been working on in the camp. They only wanted a hundred dollars for it so you bet your butt my Gene slapped down the cash. We took it back to our hotel room and spread it out on the bed—oh, it was such a beautiful thing. All the colors and pictures, the craftsmanship ... I got teary-eyed when Gene told me the story. But the thing that really got to both of us was that down in the right-hand corner of the quilt was this one patch that had these figures stitched into them. Four figures. Three of them was positioned way up high above the fourth one, and they formed a triangle. The fourth figure was down below, walking kind of all stooped over and carrying what you’d think was a bunch of clothes. But Gene, he took one look and knew what it was—it was a picture of that tailor’s soul carrying his quilt, walking around the camp for the last time, looking around for someone to pass his memories on to because he couldn’t find his family and he couldn’t go back to the underworld on account of what Datsuba would do to him. He was lost forever, and there wasn’t nothing he could do about it. It couldn’t be helped. Shikata ga nai. Isn’t that sad?

  “See here, this’s the quilt. And this here needle? Gene gave it to me. It was the one that old tailor used. I been adding things to it, ‘cause it seemed to me that’s what my Gene would want me to do if he was here. See this? This is part of the suit Gene wore when we got married. And this here come off the baby gown that my mom made for Cindy when I had her. Them things there?—those’re the dog tags that the Army sent to us after Jimmy was killed over in Vietnam. The way I figure it, Gene was like family to the tailor, so it’s only right that I do this. It’s only right.

  “Thing is, I’m not as sprightly as I used to be, and except for Cindy all my family’s gone—she don’t much want to have anything to do with me. I’m not even sure where it is she and her husband are livin’ these days. And if—oh, Lord, look at me, will you? Getting all teary-eyed again.

  “I don’t know what’s gonna happen to this after I’m gone, you see? And I don’t know where any of them souls’ clothes was stored. I can keep adding things from people living in this world, but I got no way to get them souls’ clothes. I don’t know how I’ll know when this quilt is finished, and if it ain’t finished and I die and don’t pass it on to someone, then them souls will be trapped in the underworld forever. And that scares me something powerful, it does. Right down to the ground.”

  Patience

  “Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity. Women have a more subtle instinct about things: What they like is to be a man’s last romance.”

  —Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance

  He walked slowly down the hallway, the sound of his footsteps swallowed by the deep golden carpet. He stopped at a door that was an ornate slab of burnished teak set within a bronze frame. He knew who waited on the other side, and what he was going to do once he found them.

  He stood in silence, aware of the rhythm of his breathing and the sweat covering his face. He checked to make certain the surgical gloves he wore hadn’t been torn when he’d taken out the two bodyguards downstairs. The first one had been easy—the man was half asleep at his post, it was just a matter of coming up behind him and making sure he punctured the lung from behind with the knife. Puncture the lung, it creates a vacuum, making it impossible for the victim to scream.

  The first guard hadn’t screamed. Had barely made a sound while his throat was slit. Easy.

  The second guard gave him some trouble, even managed to get his gun out if its holster, but never managed to get off a shot. He’d buried the fillet knife in the guard’s eye. To the hilt. He hated having to leave the knife. It had been an anniversary present.

  He almost smiled now, remembering the shocked expression on the second goon’s face when he’d seen him. The man’s eyes had held a thousand questions: Who the fuck are you? What do you want? How’d you get past the alarms? Does this job pay enough to make it worth dying for?

  At least that last one was answered now.

  He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed gently at the perspiration on his face, then stuffed it into one of the nine pockets of his heavy coat.

  The fake beard was itching like hell. The spirit gum he’d used to apply it was burning his skin underneath. He could smell the theatrical hair spray he’d used to make himself grey. And the blue-tinted contacts were causing him to blink more than he liked.

  Still, they were necessary precautions.

  There was almost no light in the hallway, save for that from the moon which bled in from a large window across from him. Outside it was purple-gray, 4:40 a.m.; dawn just creeping in, night not quite finished with the world. A thin layer of snowy mist enshrouded the yard as a dispirited
breeze sloughed through the trees. Frost glistened on every surface, shimmering at the tips of leaves.

  She had always loved this time of night, this time of morning. Sometimes, she’d wake and get out of bed, then just sit in her favorite chair and watch the night with infinite patience, just to see a moment of perfect peace.

  He felt a rush of renewed love for her. So giving, so kind, so patient.

  He’d learned patience from her. He was being patient now. His soul radiated patience.

  He checked his watch. 4:42 a.m.

  It had taken him three years to find this house and this door.

  Three years and nearly fifty thousand dollars, the time and money doled out slowly.

  Almost finished, my love, he thought.

  He kept his face expressionless, willing the same emptiness into his eyes.

  Emptiness was easy now. He had the person on the other side of the door to thank for that.

  He checked his watch again.

  4:45 a.m.

  Time to finish it.

  He pressed his ear against the door, listening.

  From somewhere deep in the room, he heard a groan. Soft. Then louder.

  “Faster, baby...oooooh, that’s it, faster, harder...harder...harder!”

  So he wasn’t alone.

  That was all right. He’d planned for this possibility.

  The noise made by the woman covered the sound of his opening the door. The room was divided into two separate areas, like an expensive hotel suite. He found the sofa and coffee table.

  Behind the bedroom door, the woman was screaming like a banshee, squealing and howling.

  He took off his coat and began emptying the pockets.

  Two pairs of handcuffs. A hypodermic needle filled with a precisely-measured dose of succinylcholine. Ten milligrams for each fifty pounds of body weight. It would cause instant paralysis but not numb the pain or induce unconsciousness.