The Best of Lucius Shepard (13 page)

“Yeah,”
I said. “I know.”

“Fucker’s
paranoid,” said Skipper. “Be paranoid myself if I was holding a key of smack.”

“Heroin?”

“King
H,” said Skipper with immense satisfaction, as if pronouncing the name of his
favorite restaurant, remembering past culinary treats. “He’s gonna run it up to
Copenhagen soon as—”

“Shut
the hell up!” It was Shockley, standing in the front door. “Get out,” he said
to me.

“Be
a pleasure.” I strolled over to him. “The twins are leaving tomorrow night.
Stay off their case.”

He
squared his shoulders, trying to be taller. “Or what?”

“Gee,
Rich,” I said. “I’d hate to see anything get in the way of your mission to
Denmark.”

Though
in most areas of experience I was a neophyte compared to Shockley, he was just
a beginner compared to me as regarded fighting. I could tell a punch was coming
from the slight widening of his eyes, the tensing of his shoulders. It was a
silly school-girlish punch. I stepped inside it, forced him against the wall,
and jammed my forearm under his chin. “Listen, Rich,” I said mildly. “Nobody
wants trouble with the Guardia, right?” My hold prevented him from speaking,
but he nodded. Spit bubbled between his teeth. “Then there’s no problem. You
leave the twins alone, and I’ll forget about the dope. Okay?” Again he nodded.
I let him go, and he slumped to the floor, holding his throat. “See how easy
things go when you just sit down and talk about them?” I said, and grinned. He
glared at me. I gave him a cheerful wink and walked off along the beach.

*
* * *

I see now that I credited
Shockley with too much wisdom; I assumed that he was an expert smuggler and
would maintain a professional calm. I underestimated his paranoia and gave no
thought to his reasons for dealing with a substance as volatile as heroin: they
must have involved a measure of desperation, because he was not a man prone to
taking whimsical risks. But I wasn’t thinking about the consequences of my
actions. After what I had seen earlier beyond the point, I believed that I had
figured out what Tom and Alise were up to. It seemed implausible, yet equally
inescapable. And if I was right, this was my chance to witness something
extraordinary. I wanted nothing to interfere.

Gray
clouds blew in the next morning from the east, and a steady downpour hung a
silver beaded curtain from the eaves of my porch. I spent the day pretending to
write and watching Alise out of the corner of my eye. She went about her
routines, washing the dishes, straightening up, sketching—the sketching was
done with a bit more intensity than usual. Finally, late that afternoon, having
concluded that she was not going to tell me she was leaving, I sat down beside
her at the table and initiated a conversation. “You ever read science fiction?”
I asked.

“No,”
she said, and continued sketching.

“Interesting
staff. Lots of weird ideas. Time travel, aliens...” I jiggled the table,
causing her to look up, and fixed her with a stare. “Alternate worlds.”

She
tensed but said nothing.

“I’ve
read your notebooks,” I told her.

“Tom
thought you might have.” She closed the sketchpad.

“And
I saw you trying to open the tunnel yesterday. I know that you’re leaving.”

She
fingered the edge of the pad. I couldn’t tell if she was nervous or merely
thinking.

I
kept after her. “What I can’t figure out is why you’re leaving. No matter who’s
chasing you, this world can’t be as bad as the one described in the notebooks.
At least we don’t have anything like The Disciples.”

“You’ve
got it wrong,” she said after a silence. “The Disciples are of my world.”

I
had more or less deduced what she was admitting to, but I hadn’t really been
prepared to accept that it was true, and for a moment I retrenched, believing
again that she was crazy, that she had tricked me into swallowing her craziness
as fact. She must have seen this in my face or read my thoughts, because she
said then, “It’s the truth.”

“I
don’t understand,” I said. “Why are you going back?”

“We’re
not; we’re going to collapse the tunnel, and to do that we have to activate it.
It took all of us to manage it before; Tom and I wouldn’t have been able to see
the configurations clearly enough if it hadn’t been for your drugs. We owe you
a great deal.” A worry line creased her brow. “You mustn’t spy on us tonight.
It could be dangerous.”

“Because
someone might be waiting,” I said. “The Disciples?”

She
nodded. “We think one followed us into the tunnel and was trapped. It
apparently can’t control the fields involved in the tunnel, but if it’s nearby
when we activate the opening....” She shrugged.

“What’ll
you do if it is?”

“Lead
it away from the beach,” she said.

She
seemed assured in this, and I let the topic drop. “What are they, anyway?” I
asked.

“Hitler
once gave a speech in which he told us they were magical reproductions of his
soul. Who knows? They’re horrid enough for that to be true.”

“If
you collapse the tunnel, then you’ll be safe from pursuit. Right?”

“Yes.”

“Then
why leave Pedregalejo?”

“We
don’t fit in,” she said, and let the words hang in the air a few seconds. “Look
at me. Can you believe that in my world I’m considered beautiful?”

An
awkward silence ensued. Then she smiled. I’d never seen her smile before. I
can’t say it made her beautiful—her skin looked dead-pale in the dreary light,
her features asexual—but in the smile I could detect the passive confidence
with which beauty encounters the world. It was the first time I had perceived
her as a person and not as a hobby, a project.

“But
that’s not the point,” she went on. “There’s somewhere we want to go.”

“Where?”

She
reached into her airline bag, which was beside the chair, and pulled out a
dog-eared copy of
The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
“To find the people who
understand this.”

I
scoffed. “You believe that crap?”

“What
would you know?” she snapped. “It’s chaos inside the tunnel. It’s....” She
waved her hand in disgust, as if it weren’t worth explaining anything to such
an idiot.

“Tell
me about it,” I said. Her anger had eroded some of my skepticism.

“If
you’ve read the notebooks, you’ve seen my best attempt at telling about it.
Ordinary referents don’t often apply inside the tunnel. But it appears to pass
by places described in this book. You catch glimpses of lights, and you’re
drawn to them. You seem to have an innate understanding that the lights are the
entrances to worlds, and you sense that they’re fearsome. But you’re afraid
that if you don’t stop at one of them, you’ll be killed. The others let
themselves be drawn. Tom and I kept going. This light, this world, felt less
fearsome than the rest.” She gave a doleful laugh. “Now I’m not so sure.”

“In
one of the notebooks,” I said, “Tom wrote that the others didn’t survive.”

“He
doesn’t really know,” she said. “Perhaps he wrote that to make himself feel
better about having wound up here. That would be like him.”

We
continued talking until dark. It was the longest time I had spent in her
company without making love, and yet—because of this abstinence—we were more
lovers then than we had ever been before. I listened to her not with an eye
toward collecting data, but with genuine interest, and though everything she
told me about her world smacked of insanity, I believed her. There were, she
said, rivers that sprang from enormous crystals, birds with teeth, bats as
large as eagles, cave cities, wizards, winged men who inhabited the thin Andean
air. It was a place of evil grandeur, and at its heart, its ruler, was the dead
Hitler, his body uncorrupting, his death a matter of conjecture, his terrible
rule maintained by a myriad of servants in hopes of his rebirth.

At
the time Alise’s world seemed wholly alien to me, as distinct from our own as
Jupiter or Venus. But now I wonder if—at least in the manner of its rule—it is
not much the same: are we not also governed by the dead, by the uncorrupting
laws they have made, laws whose outmoded concepts enforce a logical tyranny
upon a populace that no longer meets their standards of morality? And I wonder
further if each alternate world (Alise told me they were infinite in number) is
but a distillation of the one adjoining, and if somewhere at the heart of this
complex lies a compacted essence of a world, a blazing point of pure principle
that plays cosmic Hitler to its shadow selves.

The
storm that blew in just after dark was—like the Mediterranean— an age-worn
elemental. Distant thunder, a few strokes of lightning, spreading glowing
cracks down the sky, a blustery wind. Alise cautioned me again against
following her and told me she’d be back to say goodbye. I told her I’d wait,
but as soon as she and Tom had left, I set out toward the point. I would no
more have missed their performance than I would have turned down, say, a free
ticket to see the Rolling Stones. A few drops of rain were falling, but a foggy
moon was visible through high clouds inland. Shadows were moving in the lighted
windows of the houses; shards of atonal jazz alternated with mournful gusts of
wind. Once Tom and Alise glanced back, and I dropped down on the mucky sand,
lying flat until they had waded around the point. By the time I reached the top
of the rocks, the rain had stopped. Directly below me were two shadows and the
glowing coal of the kef pipe. I was exhilarated. I wished my father were there
so I could say to him, “All your crap about ‘slow and steady wins the race,’
all your rationalist bullshit, it doesn’t mean anything in the face of this.
There’s mystery in the world, and if I’d stayed in school, I’d never have known
it.”

I
was so caught up in thinking about my father’s reactions that I lost track of
Tom and Alise. When I looked down again, I found that they had taken a stand by
the shore and were performing those odd, graceful gestures. Just beyond them,
its lowest edge level with the water, was a patch of darkness blacker than
night, roughly circular, and approximately the size of a circus ring. Lightning
was still striking down out to sea, but the moon had sailed clear of the
clouds, staining silver the surrounding hilltops, bringing them close, and in
that light I could see that the patch of darkness had depth...depth, and
agitated motion. Staring into it was like staring into a fire while
hallucinating, watching the flames adopt the forms of monsters; only in this
case there were no flames but the vague impressions of monstrous faces melting
up from the tunnel walls, showing a shinier black, then fading. I was at an
angle to the tunnel, and while I could see inside it, I could also see that it
had no exterior walls, that it was a hole hanging in midair, leading to an
unearthly distance. Every muscle in my body was tensed, pressure was building
in my ears, and I heard a static hiss overriding the grumble of thunder and the
mash of the waves against the point.

My
opinion of the twins had gone up another notch. Anyone who would enter that
fuming nothingness was worthy of respect. They looked the image of courage: two
pale children daring the darkness to swallow them. They kept on with their
gestures until the depths of the tunnel began to pulse like a black gulping
throat. The static hiss grew louder, oscillating in pitch, and the twins tipped
their heads to the side, admiring their handiwork.

Then
a shout in Spanish, a beam of light probing at the twins from the seaward reach
of the point.

Seconds
later Richard Shockley splashed through the shallows and onto shore; he was
holding a flashlight, and the wind was whipping his hair. Behind him came a
short dark-skinned man carrying an automatic rifle, wearing the hat and uniform
of the Guardia Civil. As he drew near I recognized him to be Francisco, the
guardsman who had tried to cozy up to me. He had a Band-Aid on his chin,
which—despite his weapon and traditions—made him seem an innocent. The two
men’s attention was fixed on the twins, and they didn’t notice the tunnel,
though they passed close to its edge. Francisco began to harangue the twins in
Spanish, menacing them with his gun. I crept nearer and heard the word
heroina.
Heroin. I managed to hear enough to realize what had happened. Shockley,
either for the sake of vengeance or—more likely—panicked by what he considered
a threat to his security, had planted heroin in Tom’s house and informed on
him, hoping perhaps to divert suspicion and ingratiate himself with the
Guardia. Alise was denying the charges, but Francisco was shouting her down.