The Best of Lucius Shepard (40 page)

*
* * *

The next morning—sunny,
cloudless—I staked myself out on the red dirt of Cam Le to wait for Stoner.
Nervous, I paced back and forth until the air began to ripple and he
materialized less than thirty feet away. He walked slowly toward me, his rifle
dangling; a drop of sweat carved a cold groove across my rib cage. “Puleo,” he
said, and this time I heard him. His voice was faint, but it shook me.

Looking
into his blown-out pupils, I was reminded of a day not long before he had died.
We had been hunkered down together after a firefight, and our eyes had met, had
locked as if sealed by a vacuum: like two senile old men, incapable of any communication
aside from a recognition of the other’s vacancy. As I remembered this, it hit
home to me that though he hadn’t been a friend, he was my brother-in-arms, and
that as such, I owed him more than journalistic interest.

“Stoner!”
I hadn’t intended to shout, but in that outcry was a wealth of repressed
emotion, of regret and guilt and anguish at not being able to help him elude
the fate by which he had been overtaken.

He
stopped short; for an instant the hopelessness drained from his face. His image
was undergoing that uncanny sharpening of focus: sweat beads popping from his
brow, a scab appearing on his chin. The lines of strain around his mouth and
eyes were etched deep, filled in with grime, like cracks in his tan.

Tides
of emotion were washing over me, and irrational though it seemed, I knew that
some of these emotions—the fierce hunger for life in particular—were Stoner’s.
I believe we had made some sort of connection, and all our thoughts were in
flux between us. He moved toward me again. My hands trembled, my knees buckled,
and I had to sit down, overwhelmed not by fear but by the combination of his
familiarity and utter strangeness. “Jesus, Stoner,” I said. “Jesus.”

He
stood gazing dully down at me. “My sending,” he said, his voice louder and with
a pronounced resonance. “Did you get it?”

A
chill articulated my spine, but I forced myself to ignore it. “Sending?” I
said.

“Yesterday,”
he said, “I sent you what I was feeling. What it’s like for me here.”

“How?”
I asked, recalling the feeling of emptiness. “How’d you do that?”

“It’s
easy, Puleo,” he said. “All you have to do is die, and thoughts... dreams,
they’ll flake off you like old paint. But believe me, it’s hardly adequate
compensation.” He sat beside me, resting the rifle across his knees. This was
no ordinary sequence of movements. His outline wavered, and his limbs appeared
to drift apart: I might have been watching the collapse of a lifelike statue
through a volume of disturbed water. It took all my self-control to keep from
flinging myself away. His image steadied, and he stared at me. “Last person I
was this close to ran like hell,” he said. “You always were a tough
motherfucker, Puleo. I used to envy you that.”

If
I hadn’t believed before that he was Stoner, the way he spoke the word
motherfucker
would have cinched it for me: it had the stiffness of a practiced
vernacular, a mode of expression that he hadn’t mastered. This and his pathetic
manner made him seem less menacing. “You were tough, too,” I said glibly.

“I
tried to be,” he said. “I tried to copy you guys. But it was an act, a veneer.
And when we hit Cam Le, the veneer cracked.”

“You
remember....” I broke off because it didn’t feel right, my asking him
questions; the idea of translating his blood and bones into a bestseller was no
longer acceptable.

“Dying?”
His lips thinned. “Oh, yeah. Every detail. You guys were hassling the
villagers, and I thought, Christ, they’re going to kill them. I didn’t want to
be involved, and…I was so tired, you know, so tired in my head, and I figured
if I walked off a little ways, I wouldn’t be part of it. I’d be innocent. So I
did. I moved a ways off, and the wails, the shouts, they weren’t real anymore.
Then I came to this hut. I’d lost track of what was happening by that time. In
my mind I was sure you’d already started shooting, and I said to myself, I’ll
show them I’m doing my bit, put a few rounds into this hut. Maybe”—his Adam’s
apple worked—”maybe they’ll think I killed somebody. Maybe that’ll satisfy
them.”

I
looked down at the dirt, troubled by what I now understood to be my complicity
in his death, and troubled also by a new understanding of the events
surrounding the death. I realized that if anyone else had gotten himself blown
up, the rest of us would have flipped out and likely have wasted the villagers.
But since it had been Stoner, the explosion had had almost a calming effect:
Cam Le had rid us of a nuisance.

Stoner
reached out his hand to me. I was too mesmerized by the gesture, which left
afterimages in the air, to recoil from it, and I watched horrified as his
fingers gripped my upper arm, pressing wrinkles in my shirtsleeve. His touch
was light and transmitted a dry coolness, and with it came a sensation of
weakness. By all appearances, it was a normal hand, yet I kept expecting it to
become translucent and merge with my flesh.

“It’s
going to be okay,” said Stoner.

His
tone, though bemused, was confident, and I thought I detected a change in his
face, but I couldn’t put my finger on what the change was. “Why’s it gonna be
okay?” I asked, my voice more frail and ghostly-sounding than his. “It doesn’t
seem okay to me.”

“Because
you’re part of my process, my circuitry. Understand?”

“No,”
I said. I had identified what had changed about him. Whereas a few moments
before he had looked real, now he looked more than real, ultrareal; his
features had acquired the kind of gloss found in air-brushed photographs, and
for a split second his eyes were cored with points of glitter as if reflecting
a camera flash...except these points were bluish white, not red. There was a
coarseness to his face that hadn’t been previously evident, and in contrast to
my earlier perception of him, he now struck me as dangerous, malevolent.

He
squinted and cocked his head. “What’s wrong, man? You scared of me?” He gave an
amused sniff. “Hang in there, Puleo. Tough guy like you, you’ll make an
adjustment.” My feeling of weakness had intensified: it was as if blood or some
even more vital essence were trickling out of me. “Come on, Puleo,” he said
mockingly. “Ask me some questions? That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? I
mean this must be the goddamn scoop of the century. Good News From Beyond the
Grave! Of course”— he pitched his voice low and sepulchral—”the news isn’t all
that good.”

Those
glittering cores resurfaced in his pupils, and I wanted to wrench free; but I
felt helpless, wholly in his thrall.

“You
see,” he went on, “when I appeared in the village, when I walked around and”—he
chuckled—”haunted the place, those times were like sleepwalking. I barely knew
what was happening. But the rest of the time, I was somewhere else. Somewhere
really fucking weird.”

My
weakness was bordering on vertigo, but I mustered my strength and croaked,
“Where?”

“The
Land of Shades,” he said. “That’s what I call it, anyway. You wouldn’t like it,
Puleo. It wouldn’t fit your idea of order.”

The
lights burned in his eyes, winking bright, and—as if in correspondence to their
brightness—my dizziness increased. “Tell me about it,” I said, trying to take
my mind off the discomfort.

“I’d
be delighted!” He grinned nastily. “But not now. It’s too complicated. Tonight,
man. I’ll send you a dream tonight. A bad dream. That’ll satisfy your
curiosity.”

My
head was spinning, my stomach abubble with nausea. “Lemme go, Stoner,” I said.

“Isn’t
this good for you, man? It’s very good for me.” With a flick of his hand, he
released my wrist.

I
braced myself to keep from falling over, drew a deep breath, and gradually my
strength returned. Stoner’s eyes continued to burn, and his features maintained
their coarsened appearance. The difference between the way he looked now and
the lost soul I had first seen was like that between night and day, and I began
to wonder whether or not his touching me and my resultant weakness had anything
to do with the transformation. “Part of your process,” I said. “Does that....”

He
looked me straight in the eyes, and I had the impression he was cautioning me
to silence. It was more than a caution: a wordless command, a sending. “Let me
explain something,” he said. “A ghost is merely a stage of growth. He walks
because he grows strong by walking. The more he walks, the less he’s bound to
the world. When he’s strong enough”—he made a planing gesture with his hand—”he
goes away.”

He
seemed to be expecting a response. “Where’s he go?” I asked.

“Where
he belongs,” he said. “And if he’s prevented from walking, from growing strong,
he’s doomed.”

“You
mean he’ll die?”

“Or
worse.”

“And
there’s no other way out for him?”

“No.”

He
was lying—I was sure of it. Somehow I posed for him a way out of Cam Le.
“Well...so,” I said, flustered, uncertain of what to do and at the same time
pleased with the prospect of conspiring against Tuu.

“Just
sit with me awhile,” he said, easing his left foot forward to touch my right
ankle.

Once
again I experienced weakness, and over the next seven or eight hours, he would
alternately move his foot away, allowing me to recover, and then bring it back
into contact with me. I’m not certain what was happening. One logic dictates
that since I had been peripherally involved in his death—”part of his
process”—he was therefore able to draw strength from me. Likely as not, this
was the case. Yet I’ve never been convinced that ordinary logic applied to our
circumstance: it may be that we were governed by an arcane rationality to which
we both were blind. Though his outward aspect did not appear to undergo further
changes, his strength became tangible, a cold radiation that pulsed with the
steadiness of an icy heart. I came to feel that the image I was seeing was the
tip of an iceberg, the perceptible extremity of a huge power cell that existed
mainly in dimensions beyond the range of mortal vision. I tried to give the
impression of an interview to our observers by continuing to ask questions; but
Stoner sat with his head down, his face hidden, and gave terse, disinterested
replies.

The
sun declined to the tops of the palms, the yellow paint of the houses took on a
tawny hue, and—drained by the day-long alternation of weakness and recovery—I
told Stoner I needed to rest. “Tomorrow,” he said without looking up. “Come
back tomorrow.”

“All
right.” I had no doubt that Tuu would be eager to go on with the experiment. I
stood and turned to leave; but then another question, a pertinent one, occurred
to me. “If a ghost is a stage of growth,” I said, “what’s he grow into?”

He
lifted his head, and I staggered back, terrified. His eyes were ablaze, even
the whites winking with cold fire, as if nuggets of phosphorus were embedded in
his skull.

“Tomorrow,”
he said again.

*
* * *

During the debriefing that
followed, I developed a bad case of the shakes and experienced a number of
other, equally unpleasant, reactions; the places where Stoner had touched me
seemed to have retained a chill, and the thought of that dead hand leeching me
of energy was in retrospect thoroughly repellent. A good many of Tuu’s
subordinates, alarmed by Stoner’s transformation, lobbied to break off the experiment.
I did my best to soothe them, but I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to return to
the village. I couldn’t tell whether Tuu noticed either my trepidation or the
fact that I was being less than candid; he was too busy bringing his
subordinates in line to question me in depth.

That
night, when Fierman broke out his whiskey, I swilled it down as if it were an
antidote to poison. To put it bluntly, I got shit-faced. Both Fierman and
Witcover seemed warm human beings, old buddies, and our filthy yellow room with
its flickering lamp took on the coziness of a cottage and hearth. The first
stage of my drunk was maudlin, filled with self-recriminations over my past
treatment of Stoner: I vowed not to shrink from helping him. The second
stage.... Well, once I caught Fierman gazing at me askance and registered that
my behavior was verging on the manic. Laughing hysterically, talking like a
speed freak. We talked about everything except Stoner, and I suppose it was
inevitable that the conversation work itself around to the war and its
aftermath. Dimly, I heard myself pontificating on a variety of related
subjects. At one point Fierman asked what I thought of the Vietnam Memorial,
and I told him I had mixed emotions.