by John Shirley
I was pretty sure he was kidding. About the William Morris part.
Nyerza looked at me, and I knew he wanted me to come to stand beside the table. “Yes?”
“This drawing, Ira. Do you, then, know what city this is?”
“I don’t. I assume it’s an imaginary one.”
“No. We have been surveying American cities. This is certainly Detroit. This symbol, here—what does it mean? I have seen it somewhere, but that sort of arcanum is not my specialty.”
“Astrological symbol of the planet Saturn. I don’t know why it’s there. It just felt right.”
“We will go there, to that part of Detroit—and find out. You have been chosen as an interpreter. The Solar Soul—the Gold in the Urn—has been guiding you. It resides in Melissa, but sometimes speaks to you. Come—the roof—”—
“Wait,” Melissa said, with her head cocked, as if she were listening to something only she could hear. “I . . . think I should bring some broth.”
Nyerza looked at her in surprise. “Broth? I can obtain government food supplies. We don’t need—”—
“Broth. I have some chicken soup in cans. I’ll put it in a thermos.”
Paymenz looked at Nyerza and shrugged.
A short, stomach-churningly turbulent trip by helicopter to a private airstrip in a Marin County eucalyptus grove, then a tense, smooth trip in a private jet to Detroit. I felt disoriented, shaken, as the trip wore itself away. Melissa simply slept. Paymenz would answer none of my questions. “Let’s just see,” was all he would say.
A drizzly evening in an armored limousine. The limo drove around abandoned cars on the freeway, around rubble on the street, to a deserted refinery on the edge of Detroit. A Grindum leapt from the trees beside the road, bounded toward us, each leap closer making my heart thud louder. The limo screeched to a halt as the Grindum blocked our way, a hundred feet off. As it stalked snufflingly toward us, Nyerza said, “Hit the accelerator—drive right at it!”
The driver—Mimbala, who’d piloted the chopper—shook his head doubtfully but obeyed. He floored the limo, and we roared at the Grindum—and it leapt straight into the air, just before we’d have struck it. I didn’t see it come down from the first jump, but a few seconds later I saw the demon in the distance, bounding away from us.
I glimpsed the shadow of a Sharkadian ripple over the road’s shoulder, as if it were pacing us some distance overhead; less than a quarter mile behind, a Spider drifted like Hell’s own dandelion puff through the sky after us. But never coming too close.
Melissa and the Gold in the Urn again.
Paymenz had a flashlight on my drawing, was comparing it to a detailed map of the area. He pointed to a gravel road that led off to the side; there was a chained steel gate in a hurricane fence blocking the way. “There!”
We’d passed the turn; we had to stop and back up. Mimbala got out and broke the lock with a big iron mallet and chisel from the trunk of the car, and then drove us through.
“Touch nothing,” Paymenz said, as we got out of the limo. We stood between empty-looking cinder-block buildings in the shadow of a rusting oil refinery. “This area is blighted—there was an industrial accident here. You remember—almost the same time as the one in Hercules. About twelve hundred people died in the toxic cloud. How much they’ve cleaned the surroundings since, I don’t know.”
We looked around the dark, nondescript buildings—and then we saw the faintly phosphorescent shape of a man step out from a doorway. It was Mendel. Wearing medieval armor, now, and the tabard, red cross on white—gesturing for us to come.
He turned and vanished into the closed door. We hurried to the door and found it double locked. Mimbala and his chisel again, a prolonged, painfully loud pounding with the mallet that echoed off the deserted buildings around us. I was sure the dissonant ringing would bring someone, or something. But no one came.
Then he had the door open, and we went in. There was a grudging, dim yellow light over a stairway that led underground.
Deep underground. Ten flights down, another door opened into a sort of antechamber within which was a stone structure: a mastaba of some reddish stone—but it had been built recently: a reproduction of a low, slope-sided, oblong structure used as an entrance to certain Egyptian tombs. There were Egyptian gods painted on the front in the hieroglyph style—on one side of the door, an image of Set. On the other—
“I don’t recognize that one,” I said.
“Aumaunet,” said Melissa, “mistress of infinity.”
“And there—” I pointed at other symbols “—hermetic symbols, pentagrams, symbols from the kabbalah—they don’t belong with Egyptian images. They’ve mixed all the symbology up. . . .”
“It’s not mixed up, exactly,” Paymenz said. “They’re symbols from various cultures but meaning the same thing. And what is symbolized in iconography is repeated, here, in text.” He pointed to an inscription over the door. “I think that one is Sumerian . . . and here, I can read this one—in ancient Greek. It refers to a simple exchange: ‘To the dark god, we give life; from the dark god, we receive life.’ ”
Nyerza seemed impatient with the mastaba. He gestured, and Mimbala, increasingly nervous, set about opening this last door, which was made of gnarled black wood.
A few strokes of the chisel, and the dark wooden door swung inward onto a short flight of stone steps, leading down to a brief concrete corridor and another door, of blue-painted metal, lit by an overhead bulb. This door was unlocked and opened onto a vast subterranean chamber—a room as big as a football field.
We stepped inside, trying to take it all in. The room was awash in the harsh glare of fluorescent strip lights on a ceiling so low Nyerza had to stoop. Under the lights were hundreds of portable hospital beds; on each one, a recumbent figure, a man or woman, to all appearances dead. They wore ordinary street clothes, their skin seemed grayish, and there were cobwebs on some of them. But they did not seem to be in a state of decay. From somewhere came the hum of powerful ventilation fans, the whisper of an artificial breeze.
“These people,” Melissa said. “They’re so . . . they seem so still. Are they dead?”
“I do not believe so,” Nyerza said. “They are asleep and beyond asleep—in a state of suspended animation of some sort. Almost the catatonia that mimics death . . .”
“A vast premature burial,” Paymenz murmured. “Poe would be most distressed to be here.”
Melissa gasped softly, grabbed my arm, and pointed. I saw Mendel, in the center of the room, head bowed in prayer. An apparition, he was there but not there. His form ever so slightly transparent.
“Oh thank God you’ve come,” came a croak from someone else in the shadows to my right.
Shephard limped into view, shuffling painfully to within a dozen steps of us. I barely recognized him. His suit was in tatters; he wore a ragged beard streaked with what might have been old vomit and dried blood; his eyes flickered in deep sockets. He seemed bent; his clothes hung on him so loosely, a shrug might have dropped them to the floor.
“Stop there,” Paymenz said, drawing a small automatic pistol from a side pocket.
Melissa looked at the gun and her father in surprise.
“I think it is all right,” Nyerza said. “Or—all right for now. I do not believe he can hurt us.”
“Nor would I,” wheezed Shephard. “This place is supposed to be demonically protected. There are dozens of them, all seven of the clans, roundabout the building’s exterior. Yet—yet you have entered unmolested. The Gold in the Urn must indeed be here with you . . . yes?” He looked at Melissa. I saw her squirm a little under his febrile gaze. “But yes, yes . . . inevitably yes.”
“Why are you here now—and not entranced?” Paymenz asked, looking around for Mendel. The apparition was no longer visible.
Shephard licked his cracked lips. All his former insularity, his machinelike poise, was gone. He seemed a shell, sustained by will alone. “I . . .” He shook his head, unable
to speak for a moment, coughing, covering his mouth with bony fingers.
“Sit down, Professor Shephard,” Melissa said. “Rest yourself.” Adding to herself: “Now I know who the broth is for. . . .”
She’d been carrying the thermos in a big leather purse, looped over her shoulder. She knelt beside Shephard and helped him to sit up, giving him a red-plastic thermos cup of broth. He drank it eagerly. She had to restrain him at times, so he didn’t overdo it.
At last he pushed her hand away. “God bless you, my dear.”
“God’s name is defiled on your lips, Shephard,” Nyerza rumbled.
“Yes,” Shephard said, looking sleepy now. “Yes, perhaps. I do not intend defilement. I ask forgiveness—and I have suffered, Dr. Nyerza, for the sake of my penance, yes, suffered before God these many weeks in this very room. I brought a little food and water with me, but it was not enough. And I was sick, for so long . . . so sick. . . . And the visions . . . the terrible visions . . . But you see, I was sure the Gold in the Urn would come, if only I could survive a day longer, an hour longer . . . a minute longer. . . . And so it proved. I thought I heard Mendel whispering to me. Dear Mendel, whom I hated—yes, hated!—at one time.” He laughed sadly. “Oh how deep is my fatigue, deep and cold as the . . . long since I could sleep . . . How I have envied their sleep . . . and feared it, too . . .”
He seemed to droop but straightened a little as Paymenz moved to stand over him. “You will not sleep,” Paymenz said, his voice hypnotically commanding, “but you will tell us what takes place here and your part in it.”
“I was—was to be one of these,” Shephard said, pointing at the hundreds in the vast room suspended in the sleep that mocked death. “I was to be in the final group. The ushers, we were called, preparing the way, enacting the final rituals. But then—then I saw what became of the world . . . and in the eyes of the demons I beheld a mirror. And in that mirror I saw my soul. And I crumbled, and it all fell apart for me. . . . I came here—to try to wake them and could not. I sensed that if I left—the Tartarans would destroy me, and suck my pitiful little spark away. May I have some water?”
Paymenz shook his head and opened his mouth to denythe water; but Melissa said, “Quiet, Daddy. And put that gun away.”
She took a little plastic container of bottled water from her purse and helped Shephard drink a little of it. He wiped his lips and patted her hand. “Thank you. And those who accompany you . . . I thank them . . . I thank all who—”—
“Speak!” Nyerza said. “Finish your story!”
Shephard hugged his knees, and in a cracked voice went on. “There are not so many demons as people think, but many reappearing, helter-skelter. There are a few thousand, sometimes bi-locating. Even one can be terribly destructive, of course. They are . . . also these.” He pointed at the sleepers. “They are possessing the demons.”
“You mean—the demons are possessing them in some way?” I asked.
“No, Ira. They possess the demons. The demons in their own world are just . . . complex appetites, minimally self-aware creations—almost like artificial intelligences, but of a spiritual variety. Self-aware and yet—” he paused to swallow, to gather his strength “—and yet not self-aware. Living, to some extent sentient but not imbued with soul. They are the—the side effects of humanity at its worst—the psychic consequence of our cruelties, our selfishness, our brutality, echoing in the planes of metaphysical creation, finding its own level. Not Hell, not Sheol—that is just the sunless absence of God—but a world that parodies our world at its worst. There are many more than seven clans, of course. Only seven have come so far—but more will come, oh yes, when they’re through: This I have seen. . . .”
Paymenz and Melissa looked questioningly at Nyerza.
“Yes,” Nyerza said. “More will come unless these are stopped. Speak on, Shephard.”
“If I must . . . The Tartarans are long-lived but in a way more temporary than humanity—the root souls of human beings are eternal, you see. Early in the last century certain practitioners of ritual magic came into sufficient consciousness to create real magick. With this . . . with only this stupid little magickal tool . . . they sought to secure immortality for themselves—to remake the rules, to achieve not only immortality but a state of what they believed would be godhood. Each would, they hoped, become the ruler of some personal cosmic realm. As of old, this called for human sacrifice—but vast numbers of sacrifices were needed. Thousands, thousands, thousands of deaths—and there were two methods: Many could be killed, all together . . . or many could die over time as the result of a deliberate act and by a kind of slow poisoning. You see?”
“Not—well, not entirely,” I said.
He gestured as if waving a fly away from his face. “A mass human sacrifice that in some cases came about in minutes—as in Bhopal, as in Hercules, as here, in this half-forgotten little suburb of Detroit. Or, in other cases—other ceremonies—the sacrifices came about over a generation or two. Slow, roasting cancerous death in the cancer corridors of Louisiana, in other places in this country, in other countries . . . In rooms like this one, men and women chanted and carried out their ceremonies as those around them died. Sometimes the entire rite took place in one night; sometimes the ceremonies were repeated at the solstices. . . . When environmental regulations in some countries tightened, they resorted more and more to industrial ‘accidents.’. . .” He chuckled, a miserable sound. “That Certain One, with whom such deals are struck—he told them how to carry this out. Eventually it became obvious that industrial pollution caused cancer, emphysema, and so forth. Yet the industries denied and denied and covered up. For many decades they did so—they did not care. Some were simply blinded by greed and indifference—yet that fed the demonic, too, of course. Others worked actively for their dark brotherhood . . . and set up the sacrifices quite deliberately, oh my yes. It was all for the greater good—that some human beings, at least, would become ‘like gods’. . . so they told themselves. So I told myself. The sacrifices were acceptable losses. Like Roosevelt’s sacrifice of Pearl Harbor, to galvanize the country into a war—like Hiroshima to end the war. Acceptable losses of life for something great . . .”
“And you believed this—about its being acceptable?” Melissa asked gently.
Shephard nodded mechanically. “I did. I was the great rationalizer, always. Until forced into . . . a kind of involuntary vigil here, in this great ugly sensory deprivation tank of a room, and inevitably I could not help but see myself as I was . . . see my colleagues in conspiracy as they are. . . .”
“The actual mechanics of all this?” Nyerza prompted. “Anything more?”
“Yes . . . a little water . . . yes the—the industrial areas, those ‘industrial parks’ and factories involved in the sacrifices, were not—were not laid out at random, oh no, my good friends, no.”
Nyerza seemed to grind his teeth at the term of endearment coming from this man, but he kept his silence, as Shephard, after sipping water, went on.
“Each ISZ as we called it—”—
“An acronym for what exactly?” Paymenz asked sharply.
“ISZ? Oh yes, of course—Industrial Sacrifice Zone. The primary ISZs are where the sleepers are found now, all underground. Here you’ll find those who did the deed at Hercules, other places, as well as Detroit. Each ISZ was laid out in the shape of a particular rune—seven runes in all, you see. Even—even the shapes of the oil refineries, certain other mills . . . those at the ISZs were adapted from their necessary shape, in the science of refining, so that against the horizon they etched runes in the seven names.”
Nyerza and Paymenz exchanged startled glances. I thought I saw a flicker of admiration in Paymenz’s eyes as he looked at Shephard. Paymenz murmured, “The scale of the undertaking—astounding, almost majestic.”
Nyerza threw Paymenz a pantherish look of warning.
“But,” I said, waving a hand at the tranced figures on the multitude of gurneys. “But the trance, t
he sleep. They—”—
“It was supposed to be temporary. It was supposed to be over weeks ago. Occupying the demons, they were to take many souls, many sparks from the pleroma—to consume them for the second half of the undertaking, the transfiguration into gods. But . . . it never came about. That Certain One Who Cannot Be Named spoke just once when we ventured to inquire. It said— We have argued what it said . . . but it was something like, A promise to men is in the words men use; such words have no single meaning. Words mean what I say they mean—” He broke off and began to sway to and fro, cackling to himself. “Yes, we ventured to inquire! Heeeee-uh-heee—we ventured—we ventured to—”—
“Stop it!” Nyerza growled, hunkering near him, so that Shephard slunk back, scrambling clumsily away on the concrete floor.
“Don’t hurt me! I’ve been through enough! Or just . . . oh, simply cut my throat. But don’t hector me . . . I am a house of cards inside! I’m going to need therapy and—and medication!”