The Best of Lucius Shepard (83 page)

“Like
what?” I asked.

“I
ran across some papers in the archives. Letters, documents. They suggested the
tunnel led to the heart of the law.” He appeared to expect me to speak, but I
was chewing. “I figured you might want to have a look,” he went on. “Seeing
that’s what you’re painting about.”

I
worried that Causey might want to get me alone and finish what he had started
years before; but my interest was piqued and after listening for several
minutes more, I grew convinced that his interest in the tunnel was purely
academic. To be on the safe side, I brought along a couple of the chisels I
used to scrape the walls—they would prove useful in unwedging the door as well.
Though it was nearly three in the morning, we headed down into the
sub-basements, joined briefly by Colangelo, who had been sleeping in the
corridor outside the anteroom. I brandished a chisel and he retreated out of
sight.

The
door was ancient, its darkened boards strapped with iron bands, a barred grille
set at eye level. It was not merely stuck, but sealed with concrete. I shined
Causey’s flashlight through the grille and was able to make out moisture
gleaming on brick walls. With both of us wielding chisels, it required the
better part of an hour to chip away the concrete and another fifteen minutes to
force the door open wide enough to allow us to pass. The tunnel angled sharply
downward in a series of switchbacks, and by the time we reached the fifth
switchback, with no end in view, I realized that the walk back up was going to
be no fun whatsoever. The bricks were slimy to the touch, rats skittered and
squeaked, and the air … dank, foul, noisome. None of these words or any
combination thereof serve to convey the vileness of the stench it carried.
Molecules of corruption seemed to cling to my tongue, to the insides of my
nostrils, coating my skin, and I thought that if the tunnel did, indeed, lead
to the heart of the law, then that heart must be rotten to the core. I tied my
shirt across the lower half of my face and succeeded in filtering the reek, yet
was not able to block it completely.

I
lost track of the passage of time and lost track, too, of how many switchbacks
we encountered, but we traveled far beneath the hill, of that much I am
certain, descending to a level lower than that of the river flowing past the
gate of the prison annex before we spotted a glimmer of light. Seeing it, we
slowed our pace, wary of attracting the notice of whatever might occupy the
depths of Diamond Bar, but the space into which we at length emerged contained
nothing that would harm us—a vast egglike chamber that gave out into diffuse
golden light a hundred feet above and opened below into a black pit whose
bottom was not visible. Though the ovoid shape of the chamber implied
artificiality, the walls were of natural greenish-white limestone, configured
by rippled convexities and volutes, and filigreed with fungal growths, these
arranged in roughly horizontal rows that resembled lines of text in an unknown
script; the hundreds of small holes perforating the walls looked to have been placed
there to simulate punctuation. A considerable ledge rimmed the pit, populated
by colonies of rats, all gone still and silent at the sight of us, and as we
moved out onto it, we discovered that the acoustics of the place rivaled that
of a concert hall. Our footsteps resounded like the scraping of an enormous
rasp, and our breath was amplified into the sighing of beasts. The terror I
felt did not derive from anything I have described so much as from the figure
at the center of the chamber. Dwarfed by its dimensions, suspended from hooks
that pierced his flesh at nine separate points and were themselves affixed to
chains that stretched to the walls, was the relic of a man. His begrimed skin
had the dark granite color of the prison’s outer walls, and his long white hair
was matted down along his back like a moldering cape; his limbs and torso were
emaciated, his ribs and hipbones protruding and his ligature ridged like
cables. Dead, I presumed. Mummified by some peculiar process.

“Quires!”
Causey’s whisper reverberated through the chamber. “Jesus Christ! It’s Quires.”

The
man’s head drooped, his features further hidden by clots of hair. I had no
evidence with which to argue Causey’s claim and, indeed, not much inclination
to do so. Who else, according to the history of the prison, merited the torment
the man must have experienced? It did not seem possible. Quires had been in his
eighties when he stepped down as warden more than eighty years before. But the
existence of the chamber undermined my conception of the possible. Its silence
was so liquid thick and chilling, it might have been the reservoir from which
the quiet of the prison flowed. A brighter fear flickered up in me.

“Let’s
go back,” I said. “We shouldn’t be here.”

At
the sound of my voice, the rats offered up an uneasy chittering chorus that
swirled around us like the rushing of water in a toilet. Causey was about to
respond to my urging when Quires—if it was he—lifted his head and gave forth
with a cry, feeble at first, but swelling in volume, a release of breath that
went on and on as if issuing not from his lungs but from an opening inside him
that admitted to another chamber, another voice more capable of such a
prolonged expression, or perhaps to a succession of openings and voices and
chambers, the infinitely modulated utterance of a scream proceeding from an
unguessable source. The chittering of the rats, too, swelled in volume.
Half-deafened, hands pressed to my ears, I sank to my knees, recognizing that
the cry and its accompanying chorus was pouring up through the holes that
perforated the walls and into every corner of the prison, a shout torn from the
heart of the law to announce the advent of a bloody dawn. Quires’ body spasmed
in his chains, acquiring the shape of a dark thorn against the pale limestone,
and his face … Even at a distance I could see how years of torment had
compressed his features into a knot of gristle picked out by two staring white
eyes. I felt those eyes on me, felt the majestic insistence of his pain and his
blissful acknowledgment that this state was his by right. He was the criminal
at the heart of the law, the one in whom the arcs of evil and the redemptive
met, the lightning rod through which coursed the twin electricities of
punishment and sacrifice, the synchronicity of choice and fate, and I
understood that as such he was the embodiment of the purpose of Diamond Bar,
that only from evil can true redemption spring, only from true redemption can
hope be made flesh. Joyful and reluctant, willing servant and fearful slave, he
was thaumaturge and penitent, the violent psychotic saint who had been
condemned to this harsh durance and simultaneously sought by that service to
transfigure us. Thus illuminated, in that instant I could have translated and
read to you the fungal inscriptions on the walls. I knew the meaning of every
projection and declivity of stone, and knew as well that the heart of the law
was empty except for the exaltation of the damned and the luminous peace of the
corrupted. Then Quires’ cry guttered, his head drooped. The rats fell silent
again, returned to their petty scuttling, and all but a residue of my
understanding fled.

I
staggered up, but Causey, who had also been borne to his knees by the ferocity
of the cry, remained in that posture, his lips moving as though in prayer, and
it occurred to me that his experience of what had happened must have been far
different from mine to produce such a reverent reaction. I turned again to
Quires, realizing I could not help him, that he did not want my help, yet moved
to give it nonetheless, and thus I did not see Colangelo break from the tunnel
behind us … nor did I see him push Causey into the pit. It was Causey’s outcry,
shrill and feeble in contrast to Quires’, but unalloyed in its terror, that
alerted me to danger. When I glanced back I saw that he had vanished into the
depths, his scream trailing after him like a snapped rope, and on the spot
where he had knelt, Colangelo stood glaring at me, Causey’s chisel in his right
hand. Had he forced a confrontation in the anteroom, anywhere in the upper
levels of the prison, I would not have been so afraid, for though he was taller
and heavier, I was accustomed to fighting men bigger than myself; but that
dread place eroded my confidence, and I stumbled away from him, groping for my
own chisel. He said nothing, made no sound apart from the stentorian gush of
his breath, pinning me with his little eyes. The wan light diminished the
pinkness of his skin. His lips glistened.

“The
hell is your problem?” I said; then, alarmed by the reverberations of my voice,
I added in a hushed tone, “I didn’t do shit to you.”

Colangelo
let out an enervated sigh, perhaps signaling an unraveling of restraint, and
rushed at me, slashing with the chisel. I caught his wrist and he caught mine.
We swayed together on the edge of the pit, neither of us able to gain an
advantage, equal in strength despite the difference in our sizes. The excited
squeaking of the rats created a wall around us, a multiplicity of tiny cheers
hardened into a shrill mosaic. At such close quarters, his anger and my fear
seemed to mix and ferment a madness fueled by our breath, our spittle. I wanted
to kill him. That was all I wanted. Everything else—Quires, Causey, the panic I
had previously felt—dwindled to nothing.

Colangelo
tried to butt me. I avoided the blow and, putting my head beneath his chin,
pushed him back from the pit. He went off-balance, slipped to one knee. I
wrenched my left arm free and brought my elbow hard into his temple. He
slumped, still clutching my wrist, preventing me from using my chisel. I threw
another elbow that landed on the hinge of his jaw, an uppercut that smacked
into the side of his neck and elicited a grunt. He sagged onto his side as I
continued to hit him, and when he lost consciousness I straddled his chest and
lifted the chisel high, intending to drive it into his throat; but in
straightening, I caught sight of Quires hanging at the center of his chains. He
did not look at me, but I was certain that in some way he was watching, aware
of the moment. How could he not be? He was the substance of the prison, its
spirit and its fleshly essence, the male host in whom the spider of female
principle had laid its eggs, and as such was witness to our every thought and
action. I sensed from him a caution. Not reproval, nothing so pious. In the
thin tide of thought that washed between us there was no hint of moral
preachment, merely a reminder of the limit I was on the verge of transgressing.
What was it Ristelli had said? “Innocents and murderers. The system tolerates
neither.” Madness receded, and I came to my feet. Prison logic ordained that I
should push Colangelo into the pit and spare myself the inevitability of a
second attack; but the logic of Diamond Bar, not Vacaville, commanded me.
Numbed by the aftershocks of adrenaline and rage, I left him for the rats or
whatever else fate might have in store, and with a last glance at Quires,
suspended between the light of heaven and the pit, like the filament in a immense
bulb, I began my ascent.

I
had in mind to seek out Berbick or someone else whom Causey had befriended, to
tell them what had come of him and to determine from their advice whether or
not to make the events of the night and morning known to the board. Perhaps, I
thought, by opening the sealed door I had violated an inviolate taboo and would
suffer as a result. I might be blamed for Causey’s death. But as I trudged
wearily up along the switchbacks, the emotion generated by my fight with
Colangelo ebbed away, and the awful chamber in which we had struggled began to
dominate my thoughts. Its stench, its solitary revenant, its nightmarish
centrality to the life of the prison. With each step, I grew increasingly
horrified by my acceptance of the place and the changes it had worked in me. It
had neutered my will, obscured my instincts, blinded me to perversity. The
things I had done … Bianca, Joy, my devotion to that ridiculous mural. What had
I been thinking? Where the fuck had Tommy Penhaligon gone? I wanted to be who I
was at that precise moment: someone alert to every shadow and suspicious
presence; open to the influence of emotion and not governed by a pathological
serenity that transformed violent men into studious, self-examining drones and,
were you to believe the plumes, less violent men into women. If I returned to
my cell and confided in Berbick, thereby obeying the rule of the prison, sooner
or later I would be sucked back in and lose this hard-won vantage from which I
could perceive its depravity and pathetic self-involvements. I had no good
prospects in the world, but all I could aspire to in Diamond Bar was that one
day I would go shuffling through the yard, an old man dimly persuaded that he
had been gifted with the grasp of a holy principle too great for the brains of
common men to hold, a principle that was no more than a distorted reflection of
the instrumentality responsible for his dementia. Instead of heading to my
cell, when I reached the eighth stair I kept walking down through the hill toward
the annex gate, past the cells of sedate men who had grown habituated to the
prison, past those of agitated new arrivals; and when I reached the gate—it
was, of course, unlocked—I threw it open and stood on the threshold, gazing out
upon a beautiful spring morning. Cool and bright and fresh. A lacework of sun
and shadow under the dark firs. The river running green with snowmelt. I had no
fear of the quick-flowing current; I had crossed it once in handcuffs, and
unfettered I would cross it all the more easily. Yet I hesitated. I could not,
despite my revulsion for what lay behind me, put a foot forward on the path of
freedom. I felt something gathering in the woods, a presence defined by the
sound of rushing water, the shifting boughs and pouring wind. A wicked
imminence, not quite material, needing me to come out from the gate a step or
two in order to be real. I berated myself for a coward, tried to inject my
spine with iron, but second by second my apprehension grew more detailed. I had
a presentiment of jaws, teeth, a ravenous will, and I backed away from the
gate, not far, but far enough to slow my pulse, to think. No one walked out of
prison. There must be watchers … a single watcher, perhaps. A mindless
four-footed punishment for the crime of flight. I told myself this was the same
illusion of threat that had driven me inside the walls many months before, but
I could not disregard it. The beckoning green and gold of the day, the light
rippling everywhere—it had the insubstantiality of a banner fluttered across a
window, hiding a dreadful country from my sight.