Mortality Bridge

by Steven R. Boyett

  A tongue not human speaks his true name in a language dead to all but archeologists poring over earthen ruins. The single word a hook to reel him struggling back into the hopeless world.

  Niko opens his eyes to see a huge and alien face peer down at him with eyes of purest aqua. Pupils shaped like plus signs. The eyes blink and Niko startles even more awake.

  “Here.” An enormous hand offers Niko’s neatly folded clothes. Niko accepts them dumbly and stares at the proffered hand. A mass of writhing digits too slim and articulated to be called fingers. The skin seems made of smooth and glossy marble with a faint intaglio of slightly darker veins.

  Feeling half in dream he sets his clothes upon his naked lap and looks up at the looming face before him. Violently carved yet in its lineaments there lives a kind of beauty. Ruinous terrible and cruel but beauty all the same. What emotion it contains embedded in its frozen features.

  The monster is bald as a cueball. Faint blue veins roadmap its scalp. Ivory horns curve like baroque newels. And in the rough hewn setting of the monster’s face the adamantine of its eyes. Cold stone eyes of some dead blind idol carved and revered and then marooned by aliens who abandoned their world in some forgotten exodus. To look at them is to lose sight of their dreadful housing. The plus sign pupils give no hint of soul behind them.

  Looking at the monster’s aqua eyes he feels a sudden oceanic pull.

  The monster Geryon kneels until he’s only double Niko’s height. “Do I know you?” His voice is startling normal but those unnerving pupils throw back nothing Niko can read.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I understand you know my true name.”

  Niko nods. He tries to stand and finds he hurts too much and lacks the strength. Geryon holds out an everchanging hand. Reluctantly Niko clutches it and is surprised to find he touches cold unliving stone as Geryon easily hoists him to his feet. Niko’s head swims and he drops his bundled clothes and sways forward. Geryon catches him up and sets him like an infant on an embrasure and supports his back with one hand until Niko nods that he’s not going to fall off.

  The monster steps back but watches him carefully. “I understand you want a favor.”

  Niko nods. It hurts. “You’re very understanding.”

  From down below a funhouse whipcrack snaps before a ragged scream.

  “I understand you would like a ride down,” the monster continues, oblivious to the noise and Niko’s sarcasm.

  “Yeah.”

  That aqua scrutiny. I cannot meet that unremitting gaze for long.

  “You are in a great hurry to be in a world of pain.”

  Niko shrugs. “Oh well.” Heated wind rushing up from the abyss ruffles his hair.

  Geryon stares. The gargoyles have returned to their horrific human pigeonshoot and crouch now upon the crenellation with their granite backs to Geryon and Niko. “I cannot willingly do this,” the monster finally says.

  Niko forces himself to stand and holds on to a merlon for support. Oh man. “Then I’ll walk.”

  “You would never make it.”

  “I’ve come this far.”

  “Yes.”

  They regard one another. Finally Niko sighs and breaks the stare. His eyes throb as if he’s looked away from a bright light. He slowly bends to pick up his clothes. Pain lights up his hamstring so he squats instead. The cuts on his arches spread and tears spring to his eyes. Putting on his clothes may truly kill him. He fishes out his underwear and turns them inside out and feeling like an invalid steps into them. Tries not to think that they were recently worn by a dead man he just threw off a cliff. Glances at his ragged shirt and shakes his head. Hisses as the fabric rasps the shoulder that scraped the merlon in the fight.

  The jeans are stiff and ripe with blood and dirt and shit and sweat and piss, but damn if there isn’t a single tear in them. He struggles into the pants and tries not to cry when the denim slides across his bite wound.

  Buckling his belt Niko becomes aware of the monster looking on in what he thinks is amusement. “What?”

  “You tucked your shirt in.”

  Niko stares down. So he has. “Well. You never know who you’ll run into. Maybe my elementary school principal is down here.” He buckles his belt and painfully shrugs into his torn and filthy jacket.

  “Mr. Wilson. He is.”

  Niko stops with the jacket halfway on and stares at Geryon who stares back without returning a thing. Niko shrugs and works his arms the rest of the way through the jacket and shoots his hands through the cuffs and pats the pockets. Son of a bitch. He fishes out the Swisher Sweets and sees the cabbie also tucked a box of whitehead lucifer matches into the pack. He tamps the battered half full pack against his unbitten thigh while gazing around the Battlements. Ramhorn rears back holding a bald old man by the torso. Pignose shouts Pull and the poor soul flies away.

  Niko looks away from the dwindling strangled scream and offers the pack of cigarillos to Geryon. “Smoke?”

  Sudden orange light stains spooncarved stone and turns the aqua eyes a filmy yellow. Geryon reaches toward the pack but stops. “We are not supposed to.”

  Niko shakes the pack. “Live a little.”

  “Well.” The monster plucks a cigarillo from the pack.

  Niko taps out one for himself. He pops a match alight against his thumbnail and as it lights the matchhead grinds onto the nail. As it spits and smokes there Niko calmly wipes it off against his jeans. He holds his hand up and stares at the burnmark on his thumbnail. Coals to Newcastle. “You ever have one of those days?” he asks the creature before him. He’s not sure whether to laugh or cry. The unlit cigarillo trembles in his hand. Silently the monster takes it from his fingers as if Niko is a child and puts both cigarillos in his hard gash of a mouth, and when he pulls them put again they’re lit. He hands one to Niko and returns the other to his lipless slit. It’s like a toothpick in that enormous head.

  Niko leans back against the wall and takes a long deep drag. His eyes water and his head throbs and he feels bitterness at the back of his palate and rasping in his throat and harshness in his lungs. It’s wonderful. The nicotine goes straight to work, do not pass GO. Niko once read that every cigarette subtracts ten minutes from a smoker’s life. Yeah well this is the most pleasant little suicide Niko’s ever committed, and certainly the best feeling he’s had since he stepped through the gate. On his deathbed he doubts he’ll want these ten minutes back.

  Geryon smokes his cigarillo down to the nub in one enormous pull. No smoke emerges from his mouth or beakish nose when he exhales. If he exhales.

  A few minutes later Niko flicks the burning butt onto the walk and goes to grind it out but stops when he remembers he is barefoot as a hick. The soles of his feet are shredded wheat. That’s gonna be awfully inconvenient.

  Geryon eyes the smoldering butt and says nothing.

  Niko forces himself to take his weight from the wall. Sparkling fish swim in his vision. “Okay. Gotta go. Gotta gig.”

  “A moment. I forget that you have barely arrived here.”

  “Feels like I’ve been here all my life.”

  Something in the monster’s face intensifies the violence intrinsic to its form. His great stone wings rustle. “I mean only to say I forget that you are not accustomed to how we go about our business here.” He sets a pale blue writhing hand against his massive chest. “We are servants. Our roles are narrowly defined.” He counts off on his varying wormy fingerbunch. “We carry out the punishment of the damned. We prevent escape. We maintain order.” The fingerbunches lower. “Your presence here upsets a balance. We have few rules for dealing with mortals who come here. But we do have protocols. We are not to unwarrantedly molest mortals on their journey in. But when those mortals try to leave—” A monstrous shrug. “Well, you know their stories as well as I do. The Park is easy to get into and very difficult to leave. Like marriage, the pundits tell me.”

  Niko registers the monster’s eloquence only dimly. The mellifluo
us voice has gone hollow and distant and without content. Niko nods but he is fading out. Like a junky. “This is all very interesting,” he hears himself say, “but I really need to be going.” He steps away and wonders absently how many steps he’ll get before he passes out.

  But Geryon holds up a muscled arm. “What I am telling you is that I cannot willingly carry you down. I can only follow orders.”

  Niko frowns. Brings a hand to his face to rub the aching flesh. Knows the monster’s trying to tell him something but feels thick and slow and stupid and can’t mine meaning from the words. Can barely link the words together as coherent information.

  A recent memory surfaces and the voice of a titan sounds in his mind. FIND THE MONSTER GERYON AND CALL HIM BY HIS NAME. ORDER HIM TO TAKE YOU DOWN WHERE WHAT IS WILLED MUST BE.

  Oh. He gets it now. He cocks his head at the cubist face of the monster standing patient and immense and inscrutable before him. Pearlescent depths of aqua eyes. Those frightening alien pupils. He could pulp me like a rotten prune. How much to trust a monster such as this? What choice do I have? He senses that the monster wants to help him. What he cannot figure out is why. But ascribing human motivation to such a being is useless.

  Niko draws a breath to clear his muddied mind and unearths one of the old keys. “Then Geryon,” Niko says, translating as he goes and paraphrasing to fit his circumstance, “in the name of the power by which I go this sunken way across the floor of Hell, carry on your back my mortal flesh down to the lower depths, for I am not a spirit to move through air.”

  The monster nods thoughtfully. “Nicely put. You need the injunction, though.”

  “This has been willed where what is willed must be.”

  The great hands clap once and a sharp report cracks on the damaged air. A flash of spark illuminates the bluegreen stones of Geryon’s eyes. The monster steps back and bows low. “I am,” he says without a trace of irony, “your servant.”

  As he straightens, he surreptitiously scoops up Niko’s spent cigarillo butt and pops it into his mouth like an afterdinner mint.

  GERYON MOUNTS THE brink with each foot on a merlon and Niko on his back. The monster is an odd amalgamation, one foot clawed, the other hooved. The monster’s back is much too wide to wrap his legs around. Instead he hangs on with his arms locked around Geryon’s neck and tries to wedge himself between the muscled anchors of the monster’s tightly folded wings. Along his clinging length the massive body’s hard and cold as one expects unliving stone to be and that is the surprising thing. The monster smells oddly pleasant, musk and moss.

  Despite the steady warm updraft Niko’s hands are clammy where they monkeygrip the monster’s neck. He no longer feels as if he’s going to faint but rather too alert. The bulk of his inhuman ferry hides the greater portion of the view but this may be a mercy. Below is only swarming dead and falling blood and vast unmeasured deep.

  Geryon’s head turns backward like an owl’s. “Ready?”

  Niko jerks back as the swiveling horns nearly knock him off. “Don’t do that.”

  Pale lids shutter aqua globes: Geryon blinks. “No reason to get excited.” The great head rotates forward again and huge filigreed wings unfurl on either side of Niko. Their muscles flex beneath his ribs as they beat once to shudder the surrounding air. The dead world swims. Niko has an awful moment to realize that Geryon has duped him, that the creature is indeed the Monster of Fraud, that the beast is made of stone and therefore cannot fly. There must be some kind of way out of here apart from this.

  The monster gathers itself and leaps into the dusky air.

  AND FLIES.

  A hole opens in the pit of Niko’s stomach as the monster plummets. Outside in the cold distance the wind begins to howl past great and cupping wings. Now Niko lies prone upon the broad back and holds onto Geryon’s shoulders and feels massive muscles flex beneath his chest in time to the beat of the wings.

  They bank left and spiral down the darkening air. Beneath them the vast undifferentiated wall of cliff rises out of blackness to circle them and circle them. Slanting along its length like a scar runs the carved ramp down which listless souls trudge until they’re swallowed by encroaching darkness well before the bottom can be seen. From the arch hewn into the Battlements above the ramp and to the right, red rain and bodies gout. Geryon’s auger will not intersect the attenuating spray, which is just fine with his astonished passenger.

  He sees a gleam from far below. A sea perhaps comprised of all the blood that rains onto the Lower Plain.

  Niko is quite awake now, exhaustion and hunger and thirst forgotten in the moment. The beast to which he clings is unimaginable. The height from which he gapes is inconceivable. The number of the damned upon the ramp is incalculable. Wide as the ramp is, it is a mere thread against the vast face of the Ledge. There is such a nation of lost on their long march that bodies continually spill over the blunt edge along the ramp’s length culled from the lethargic herd that pushes and stumbles ever downward falling like the myth of suicidal lemmings, falling for entire minutes, naked spinning starfish shapes that sometimes strike the obsidian cliff wall and spin out and strike again, a drawnout tumble down to who knows where.

  Geryon’s head swivels round again to check up on his passenger. He sees Niko staring at the everfalling bodies and tells him that they land atop a pile of their predecessors, and that those at bottom are crushed to shapeless pulp and never will escape. The mounded dead run the length of the ramp itself, piled higher directly beneath the apex of the ramp and gradually lowering until they meet the foot of the ramp where it empties on the Lower Plain.

  Niko peers beyond the sculpted shoulder. Somewhere down there lies the shattered body of a brave and cruel Australian. Somewhere in that unknown space new torments lie. Afflicted in that empty sea of punishment are doubtless those whom he himself has met, known, liked, helped, wronged, loved, despised. Glowing dimly out in that anonymous expanse, a feather floating in a mason jar. Getting closer with each sinking leftward gyre through the starless air. Above them the Battlements hold sway, retching blood upon the parched and punished world below, falling on the unfathomed Lower Plain, quietly dyeing the mountainous piles of the mutilated dead, thickly flowing to feed the coagulated sea across the barren ground, raining hot and red in a fine red mist, descending general on the dead and their tormentors.

  As the ramp rises ever rightward Niko hears a long lamenting growing from the multitude of unclad dead until his ears are filled with roaring on the naked dark.

  His gaze snags on commotion within the chaos close at hand and he grips harder on the massive tendons underneath him. He shouts to no avail in the despairing din. He pounds the massive shoulder with his fist and once again the frightening beautiful head snaps round to face him with its soul-ensnaring eyes. Niko shouts again and points toward the seething ramp, toward the greater commotion within the squabbling damned, toward a figure naked save for hiking boots who is staving off the covetous crowd with swings and jabs of a black guitar case.

  XIII.

  LITTLE WING

  “ARE WE THERE YET?”

  “A great amount of heated air is rising from the lower plain. I am lifted by this updraft, and to descend I must spiral down in a kind of controlled stall. I can tuck my wings and drop if you prefer. It is a long way.”

  “No no no, thanks. I was mostly kidding anyhow.”

  “I should tell you I have no understanding of humor.”

  “I figured it out. You should have been a critic.”

  “I have met many here. May I ask you to move your instrument case a bit to the—oh that is much better.”

  “Thanks for getting my guitar back.”

  “I am for now your servant. Have you pried the hand loose yet?”

  “I threw it off.”

  “It might poke someone’s eye out when it lands.”

  “And you say you have no sense of humor.”

  “How do you find our Park?”

  “You go into
the Red Line and turn left.”

  “I do not understand.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “You hold all Hell in great disdain I think.”

  “How could I not?”

  “This is my home.”

  “Then you’re blind to what this place is. Or you just don’t know any better.”

  “I am exactly as I should be for what and where I am. And I point out to you that screaming bodies fall around us as you speak yet you no longer even glance at them.”

  “If I let it get to me I’d go insane.”

  “Only the naive can afford such contempt.”

  “Is there some point to this discussion?”

  “I will be silent if you prefer.”

  “ALL RIGHT, I can’t take it anymore. Let’s talk geography.”

  “If you wish.”

  “I wish. I don’t have a very clear sense of this joint’s structure.”

  “It is an infinite plain.”

  “But it’s in an enclosed space.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t get it. How could it be inside something and still be infinite?”

  “I am not certain it can be gotten. Mortals do not comprehend the relationship between perception and expectation.”

  “I see what I expect to see?”

  “In a sense. In five senses.”

  “Are you telling me that none of this is real? That I’m imagining it?”

  “I am telling you that none of this is real but you are certainly not imagining it. And just as truly you are imagining it yet it is real.”

  “Look, I sure as hell couldn’t have made this up. I mean look at the Ledge there. It extends as far as I can see in either direction.”