by John Shirley
“Reach for him,” H. D.’s voice came again.
Stephen reached out to the miserable ghost at the bottom—the top—of the mountain until he had leaned too far out and was falling. Falling up or down—he couldn’t tell which. He was rushing toward the open arms of that wailing, ghostly figure, and into it, through it, just like he’d gone through the rune creature at the heart of Saturn.
He passed into dark interstellar space, black space occupied only with constructions of black-light traceries, photo-negative outlines, forming themselves into vast structures that were like castles, castles built on castles built on castles, each multifaceted fortress whirling like an asteroid through the void. In each was a tangled maze where demons—what else could they be?—ran and crawled and jumped endlessly after one another, endlessly preying on one another.
The seven clans, he thought. Some marched in endlessly ugly parades with banners that looked like waving arms holding stretched flaps of human skin, each banner embossed with a living human face, its eyes darting around in terror . . . a sort of nightmarish Valhalla, squirming with Tailpipes and Bugsys and Gnashers and Spiders. And the castles they bounded about in were creatures themselves: some other kind of demon . . . something more powerful, masterful.
Stephen felt himself rocketing toward one of these whirling, photo-negative castles, and felt the swarming creatures turn to face him, howling in anticipation.
He felt real fear catching up with him then. But he heard H. D.’s voice . . .
“The way has been prepared. You have only to say to yourself, ‘West Wind’s needs, West Wind’s goals . . .’ ”
Stephen said it, in his mind, and as aloud as a soul can speak: “West Wind’s needs, West Wind’s goals . . .”
Then he was flashing past the tumbling castle and toward a star, a living star, that whispered, “Here, come hither, hence from there, hie you here . . .”
And he fell through the gateway of the star.
He found himself rushing down at the sea of multicolored energy again, crashing into the energy sea’s surface, going down into it, and coming out of its surface—down becoming up again.
He was launched straight into an ordinary elevator shaft.
It was an ordinary human construction. He could seecables and, stenciled on the wall of the shaft: SAFETYPROMISE ELEVATORS, INC.
Stephen slowed to a gentle upward drift till he came to elevator doors. He passed through them as if they were gossamer and came to a halt in the hallway of an ordinary earthly office building.
Stephen shook his head. He couldn’t write that stuff down. He started typing again.
THE JOURNAL OF STEPHEN ISQUERAT
I passed through a series of strange worlds I can’t really describe, including a sort of space filled with floating, spinning castles swarming with demons. It was as if H. D. was guiding me. I found my way to a star that was a kind of entrance back to our world. Then I was in our world, on Earth, but I was there astrally. OBE-like. Disembodied. Whatever you want to call it.
But I was really there. I could feel the carpet under my feet. It felt good: Anything to be away from the other place. Though I hadn’t realized it, I’d been on the verge of dissolving into terror in that place, and now I was somewhere more or less familiar. It was the hallway of an ordinary office building.
There were people walking past me, going about their business. Ordinary people, but I had the sense that they were just riding their bodies around—and the bodies, not the souls, decided where they would go. Not one of them looked at me. I was invisible.
There was a guy from Pakistan or India, pushing a cart full of racked computer disks; there was a woman whose bald head was painted different colors—I recognized it as a style some people sported in cities like New York. I’d seen a commentator making fun of it on TV. I heard people talking, in a fuzzy kind of way; some of them had New York accents.
I felt a sort of inner tugging that told me where to go. I walked through a door without opening it. I walked right through the wood, then down a hall, through another door, then I found myself coming up behind a man who was standing at a floor-to-ceiling window, his hands in his pockets, gazing out at the Manhattan skyline. There was a scaffolding on the top of the Chrysler building—it was still being restored, I remembered, because people suffering from the demon hallucinations had destroyed it somehow. The man looking at it wore a white shirt, a tie, tailored trousers. He was blond, but partly bald, I think. I never did see much of his face. He was frowning as if at some thought. It was as if he was trying to remember something.
I came to a stop. Whatever had directed me here was waiting. There was something I had to do. What was it?
I couldn’t remember.
Out of the corner of my eye I seemed almost to see those hideous faces in the iridescent mist—faces created by my own fear, I knew, but hideous anyway. I focused my attention on this office, this view of the city in the early morning.
What was I supposed to do?
Then I remembered. I tried to speak but found I couldn’t make a sound. I could sort of feel my mouth, but I couldn’t make a noise with it. Then I remembered just to think it, clearly: Yes to West Wind buyout offer.
I thought those words over and over, staring hard at the man, and he seemed to lift his head and nod as if in answer to an idea.
Yes to West Wind buyout offer.
And then I heard H. D.’s voice. He said something like: “Just relax. Feel the table under you . . . those warm pulses going into you. Go with the feeling they bring to you . . . ride them back to the sound of my voice.”
There was a rushing as I passed back through the shining sea, past a mountain, through a storm, through a living white noise, and suddenly I was back on the gurney, staring up at a small, bright light. It moved—it was some kind of doctor’s examination light.
H. D. was leaning over me, shining the light into my eyes. He was frowning. I was back in the observatory. I blinked and turned my head (the light was beginning to hurt) and he straightened up, nodding with satisfaction. Looking up at him was like looking up a cliff to the top of a mountain. Peering down from somewhere above his head was a frightened ghost.
I found myself sobbing and clawing to get off the table. They undid the straps and gave me something hot to drink in an Inimicalene cup. I think it had a tranquilizer in it, because the peculiar old lady and Harrison Deane had to help me to my bed.
I slept for a while, and when I woke up, I felt I had to write this down, to remember, to be sure it wasn’t a dream. Or to be sure it was.
But it wasn’t a dream. Even more than the mushroom faces in that tray of dirt in the pyramid: not a dream.
I want out of this. I’m going to tell them today. I want out!
Maybe I’ll just leave. I’ll send them an e-mail later or something. Jonquil obviously doesn’t intend to get back in touch with me. So there’s no reason to stay.
I should just leave.
6
Ira didn’t want to open his eyes.
Eyes shut, he stayed in the dream. If he opened his eyes, he’d be back on that soiled, icy stone floor.
But here, in the nothing place, he was floating on a multicolored sea, a sea that was the border between two worlds; and here he was safe, floating on liquid energy. He could feel Yanan and Melissa and . . .
No, Marcus was strangely absent. Marcus was there, but then he wasn’t.
There was a wedge of cold stone forcing its way into this world. He could see it in the roiling, misty sky: a giant stone ax, primitive as the men who first wielded it, men who lived within his torturers. Angling down at him, a giant ax to smash him.
It was a feeling, really, the feeling of the stone floor under him as he began to wake. Leave me dead! Don’t kill me, just leave me dead.
But the stone ax of the waking world slammed down into him, though he tried to hold on to the other place by squeezing his eyes shut.
He could hear their footsteps; he could hear their vo
ices. He knew what they were going to do.
“Ira?”
Now he was hallucinating Melissa’s voice, her touch on his face. Then a great multiple crackle of pain flashed through him as someone picked him up.
He opened his eyes—more in a convulsive reaction to the pain than for any other reason—and looked up between swollen eyelids at a great blur of a face. The face came in and out of focus. There: an old man with drooping white mustaches.
“Who the fuck are you?” Ira said, before lapsing again into semiconsciousness. Gone was the sense of the ecstatic otherworldly place; only a foggy limbo remained, echoing with voices, familiar and unfamiliar. They were the voices of people around him, yet they were infinitely far from him, too.
“We must hurry,” the man carrying him said, this time speaking in English.
Ira felt another, agonizing, many-forked lightning-strike pass through him as he was laid onto some sort of stretcher. He arched his back with the crackling pain.
A hand patted his shoulder, stroked his cheek; a blanket was draped over him. The pain subsided to merge into a swinging nausea as the stretcher was carried somewhere, someplace slightly warmer. The echoing footsteps around him suggested a corridor. He heard a muted scream from some other cell. Or maybe it was his own cell; maybe it was himself screaming back there still. Maybe these demons had come to carry his soul away, to wrap it in cerements and carry it into their world. It made a change, anyway.
“Quickly,” someone said. “My friend in this place cannot help in person, so if the papers he gave us are questioned, we are lost. Your veil, adjust your veil.”
Then he heard a voice that made him want to shout with rage: Nyerza’s voice. “We’re almost there.”
So they weren’t demons, except in the way that any human could be a demon: They were humans who’d betrayed him. And Ira shouted: “Damn you, fuck you, you hypocritical bastard. You stole my wife and child!” Forcing the words out as loudly as he could, though every syllable hurt coming through his swollen face. But he seethed and burned with rage. Nyerza was in league with his interrogators!
“Quiet!” Nyerza’s voice said urgently above Ira’s head. “You’ll give us away!”
“Fuck you, fuck you! You’re working with them, you son of a—”—
“It’s all right,” came the other man’s voice from near Ira’s feet. He sounded as if he had his back to Ira—carrying the stretcher from the front. “Let him rave. He would, as a prisoner being transferred to a madhouse.”
All this in the gray mist, the limbo place—he still didn’t want to open his eyes. He couldn’t bear to see.
He heard them talking to a sentry. An explanation was whispered in English to someone. There would be a delay of perhaps half an hour before they could be allowed to leave, because the sergeant with the authority to let them go was off somewhere eating.
But in time they would transfer him to a mental hospital. Who knew what cruelties they would inflict there? Brain-wrecking drugs perhaps.
His rage made him forget his earlier, dazed passivity. Ira struggled to get free of the blanket, to roll off the stretcher—shouting without words—and then he felt a hand take his and gently squeeze. He knew that hand, that small soft hand.
It couldn’t be her, really, could it? He might have looked to see if it was her. But if he did . . . he knew what he’d see: only the translator. And Nyerza, his betrayer.
Enemies.
Strangers.
Traitors.
Better to keep his eyes shut, hold this stranger’s hand, and pretend it was Melissa.
San Francisco Airport
Exiting the 797, Stephen was dazedly surprised to find a limousine driver waiting for him, holding a sign with his name on it. “You waiting for me?” Stephen asked him. “I’m Stephen Isquerat.”
“Yes, sir,” said the young Asian-American driver. “West Wind sent the limo for your convenience, with their compliments.”
Stephen shrugged. “Lead on, then.”
He’d told West Wind he was quitting, and yet they were sending limos for him. Maybe they were hoping to get him to change his mind.
Let them try. He wasn’t going back there. The dead animals floating in that pond, the nightmares they’d sent him into, in another world—and in his own. He wasn’t going back. But there was no reason he shouldn’t take advantage of a free ride. Maybe it was Winderson’s way of saying no hard feelings.
Stephen didn’t really care. He was just trying to get from point A to point B without breaking down; and that meant he had to believe in the world as it was supposed to be.
It wasn’t easy, because of the way people kept turning into ghosts all around him. Or spirits. They were spirits, all these people: spirits in designer sneakers and loafers, spirits in sports coats and raincoats, spirits with luggage swinging in their hands, spirits speaking on cell phones, spirits watching television shows in the gate area as he came out. That feelinghe’d had, drifting unseen through that New York office building, had never completely left him. These people were in ordinary human bodies, to be sure, but it was as if they were riding the bodies instead of being the bodies—carried within them, trapped in forms that were making all the decisions about where to go and forced to ride along willy-nilly.
This point of view was sickening. It made everything seem ephemeral, dreamlike, insubstantial. Only once did he see a man who looked solid, unghostly: a middle-aged Oriental, perhaps a Tibetan. The tote bag he carried looked like Tibetan craftsmanship. The man seemed to sense him, then turned and stared at him. Did he nod just slightly? Then he moved away, moved more purposefully in some indefinable way than the people in the crowd around him, though each no doubt had a destination. It was as if this Tibetan were more here than the others.
And then he was lost in the crowd.
Walking beside the limo driver, Stephen felt as if everything might melt away at any moment, and the only thing that kept the whole world in place was a thought. A Big Thought that was thought by something unknown. But if whatever was thinking that Big Thought stopped thinking it, then all this would go away, melt into a sea of chaos, a sea of energy.
They went down a moving-stairs device used for transporting spirits from one deck of temporary material to another: a crowd streaming down an escalator.
It was with relief that he made it out into the morning, overcast but shiny from a recent rain. Here he could breathe cool air and feel a breeze on his cheeks and hands as he waited for the driver to fetch the car. The chill felt real.
“The white zone is for loading and unloading only.”
A silvery stretch limo pulled up, its electric engine eerily silent. The young Asian driver got out, came around, and opened the door for him. “Here you go, sir,” the driver said, smiling; the smile was locked away in his mouth, and he didn’t communicate with his eyes at all.
Stephen got in the back, a little reluctantly. He hadn’t asked for this. It felt close in here, smelling of leather and cigar smoke and—gardenias? He hit the switch to roll the window down, let the cool air shock his cheeks. “You’re not cold, sir?” the driver asked, as they pulled away from the curb, jockeying with the taxis and shuttles.
“No. I need the fresh air this morning.” Stephen found himself staring out the left side window at ruins. There’d been a restaurant there once, hadn’t there, when he was a teenager? One of those circular restaurants on the edge of the airport. The shattered walls, marked off with yellow tape, looked muddy; the ground around them was covered with weeds grown through an ice field of broken window glass. And on one of the remaining walls were what looked like big, deep claw marks. “They tearing something down over there?” Stephen asked, to keep his mind busy.
“Yes, sir, they’re finally clearing that away. Supposed to begin rebuilding it next month,” the driver said. “That’s what I heard. It’s been there for nine years. The demons, the crazed people, they did so much damage at the airport, it’s taken a long time to get it all fixed up.
It only just got back up to full capacity like a year ago.”
A tram full of passengers went by—a box of ghosts on wheels, it seemed to him. He shuddered, thinking of the sea of energy, the mountain that stood on its own peak, the face.
Oh God, where did I go?
He wanted to sob. He seemed to see that terrible, frightened, hollow-eyed face staring at him again. Those disconnected pinwheels, like propellers and not like propellers, hanging in the sky. That face—a raggy, threadbare version of his own soul.