Authors: John Shirley
Some cop had been passing at the corner and a neighbor flagged him down; she’d heard the shouts, seen the window shattering.
Curtis went to jail and did time for assault and possession of a controlled substance, and I went to a foster home, lucked into some pretty nice foster parents, and for two years I focused on doing art that had nothing to do with me or my life and never thinking about anything except what kept me out in front of the pursuer, the dogged pursuit of what it hurts to think about.
Later, 1999, I was out on my own, pretty young, and believing that pure art was the only way out of human suffering. Then I heard about my mom’s suicide. Nothing. I felt nothing. I was out in front of feeling anything about it, way out in front and going at a good clip ahead of it.
And then one day I was given an assignment I didn’t want—to do some art inspired by a newspaper article, any article. I tried to be inspired by a science article, but nothing came. The only article that seemed to transfer onto the canvas was a long piece about the slave children of Haiti. Was it December 1999? I think so. There were, I read, an estimated two hundred thousand children in Haiti sold into virtual slavery, into indentured servitude and worse, by their parents, sometimes for as little as ten dollars. More often than not the child was given a box in the yard to sleep in, was not allowed to meet the owners’ eyes, not permitted to play with other children, not acknowledged at birthdays or Christmas. They were unpaid, underfed, barely clothed, oft-beaten servants. It was technically illegal, but the authorities in Haiti shrugged and said there was nothing they could do because it was “traditional.” I began to draw photo-realistic images of the children—I began to see
particular
children who, I felt, were not imagined, who really existed, who were actually living in these conditions, often competing with dogs for scraps to eat; working despite having fractured bones, fractures received in beatings . . . dying . . . and replaced by others. And I couldn’t sleep. I began to feel them out there, to feel their suffering like radiation in the air, like heat or a burning UV light. Then I heard about several thousand Albanians kept in prison by the Serbians even after we’d bombed them into submission in Kosovo: twelve-year-old boys crammed in with men, fifty to a room made for eight, forgotten by the diplomats. I could
feel them
there. I read about children in Africa forced to join roaming gangs who called themselves revolutionaries—forced, as initiation, to shoot their own sisters and brothers in the head. I felt their feelings as if they were my own, shared them in waves, transmitted through some unknowable medium. Children in the United States whose parents were crack addicts, speed freaks, brutal drunks; children who were taken away from abusive parents and, because there were not enough foster parents, were put in juvenile detention lockups and forgotten—though they’d committed no crime. I could hear the whimpers, the groans of the suffering in the world, and I heard something else—sardonic laughter behind it all. I saw the indifference of those who committed these crimes, and I saw the motivation behind that indifference: simple abject selfishness, pure appetite. And I saw, beneath that selfishness, that unfettered appetite, the faces of demons . . . of demons . . . of demons.
The nervous breakdown was swift in coming. But I was in the hospital for only three months. I quit the medication the day I quit the hospital. I simply learned to plug my ears, to not hear the groan of the world. To deaden myself. To go back to sleep.
I managed it most of the time, anyway. Most of us do. It’s a skill you learn.
Then the sky thickened, and the clouds hung heavy, and gave birth to the Seven Clans . . .
7
Has it been three days or four? With all that’s happened, and happened so fast, and the journey across the various time zones—I don’t know.
A few days ago I woke to hear Melissa talking to someone. It wasn’t the way she talked to the cats.
I sprang from bed, afraid there’d been a break-in, found her in the living room—on a cell phone I hadn’t seen before. She was looking at a drawing I’d done . . . done and done and done over again.
“No, I think this is it. Come and see it. Now, seriously. Okay.” She broke the connection, turned to see me staring at her.
“Where’d you get that phone?”
“Nyerza gave it to me. I just haven’t needed it till now. They gave it to me for something specific. We’re here about you, as much as anything else, you know. They felt you needed a haven, a familiar place to go to ground for—” she pointed at the drawing “—for this, I think. They’re on their way here. I have to meditate. Wait out here, okay?”
“But . . .”
She wouldn’t say anything else and didn’t come out of her room till they arrived four hours later, in the same helicopter they’d left in.
Nyerza and Paymenz came into the living room, looking around with, I thought, relief. Cluttered and eccentric, but it was a home, even so. I wondered what conditions they’d been living in. Both men looked haggard; Paymenz wore the same clothes I’d last seen him in. He embraced Melissa, shook my hand, greeted the cats, as Nyerza stood at a small wooden table I used for my art, looked at one of my drawings.
“Have you had enough to eat?” Paymenz asked.
“Sure,” I said. With the intermittent famines going on out there, it would’ve been childish to complain about the quality of the food. We were lucky to eat anything.
“There appears to be a corpse on the roof,” Paymenz said. “The birds have been at him, so it’s hard to tell, but he seems to have been . . . filleted.”
“Yes. There was a Bugsy up there, but the Bugsy wouldn’t come near Melissa. The guy on the roof was supposed to get at her, some way. He failed and—”—
“And have there been other human attacks?” Nyerza asked, looking up from the table.
“One. Prompted by some guy’s Internet contact with the demons, oddly enough.”
“Not so odd,” Paymenz said, sitting wearily on the arm of the easy chair. “They’ve been very playful that way.” He smiled crookedly. “The Gnashers have developed a real affection for mass media. I expect them to sign with William Morris soon.”
I was pretty sure he was kidding. About the William Morris part.
Nyerza looked at me, and I knew he wanted me to come to stand beside the table. “Yes?”
“This drawing, Ira. Do you, then, know what city this is?”
“I don’t. I assume it’s an imaginary one.”
“No. We have been surveying American cities. This is certainly Detroit. This symbol, here—what does it mean? I have seen it somewhere, but that sort of arcanum is not my specialty.”
“Astrological symbol of the planet Saturn. I don’t know why it’s there. It just felt right.”
“We will go there, to that part of Detroit—and find out. You have been chosen as an interpreter. The Solar Soul—the Gold in the Urn—has been guiding you. It resides in Melissa, but sometimes speaks to you. Come—the roof—”—
“Wait,” Melissa said, with her head cocked, as if she were listening to something only she could hear. “I . . . think I should bring some broth.”
Nyerza looked at her in surprise. “Broth? I can obtain government food supplies. We don’t need—”—
“Broth. I have some chicken soup in cans. I’ll put it in a thermos.”
Paymenz looked at Nyerza and shrugged.
A short, stomach-churningly turbulent trip by helicopter to a private airstrip in a Marin County eucalyptus grove, then a tense, smooth trip in a private jet to Detroit. I felt disoriented, shaken, as the trip wore itself away. Melissa simply slept. Paymenz would answer none of my questions. “Let’s just see,” was all he would say.
A drizzly evening in an armored limousine. The limo drove around abandoned cars on the freeway, around rubble on the street, to a deserted refinery on the edge of Detroit. A Grindum leapt from the trees beside the road, bounded toward us, each leap closer making my heart thud louder. The limo screeched to a halt as the Grindum blocked our way, a hundred feet off. As it stalked snufflingly toward us, Nyerza said, “Hit the accelerator—drive right at it!”
The driver—Mimbala, who’d piloted the chopper—shook his head doubtfully but obeyed. He floored the limo, and we roared at the Grindum—and it leapt straight into the air, just before we’d have struck it. I didn’t see it come down from the first jump, but a few seconds later I saw the demon in the distance, bounding away from us.
I glimpsed the shadow of a Sharkadian ripple over the road’s shoulder, as if it were pacing us some distance overhead; less than a quarter mile behind, a Spider drifted like Hell’s own dandelion puff through the sky after us. But never coming too close.
Melissa and the Gold in the Urn again.
Paymenz had a flashlight on my drawing, was comparing it to a detailed map of the area. He pointed to a gravel road that led off to the side; there was a chained steel gate in a hurricane fence blocking the way. “There!”
We’d passed the turn; we had to stop and back up. Mimbala got out and broke the lock with a big iron mallet and chisel from the trunk of the car, and then drove us through.
“Touch nothing,” Paymenz said, as we got out of the limo. We stood between empty-looking cinder-block buildings in the shadow of a rusting oil refinery. “This area is blighted—there was an industrial accident here. You remember—almost the same time as the one in Hercules. About twelve hundred people died in the toxic cloud. How much they’ve cleaned the surroundings since, I don’t know.”
We looked around the dark, nondescript buildings—and then we saw the faintly phosphorescent shape of a man step out from a doorway. It was Mendel. Wearing medieval armor, now, and the tabard, red cross on white—gesturing for us to come.
He turned and vanished into the closed door. We hurried to the door and found it double locked. Mimbala and his chisel again, a prolonged, painfully loud pounding with the mallet that echoed off the deserted buildings around us. I was sure the dissonant ringing would bring someone, or something. But no one came.
Then he had the door open, and we went in. There was a grudging, dim yellow light over a stairway that led underground.
Deep underground. Ten flights down, another door opened into a sort of antechamber within which was a stone structure: a mastaba of some reddish stone—but it had been built recently: a reproduction of a low, slope-sided, oblong structure used as an entrance to certain Egyptian tombs. There were Egyptian gods painted on the front in the hieroglyph style—on one side of the door, an image of Set. On the other—
“I don’t recognize that one,” I said.
“Aumaunet,” said Melissa, “mistress of infinity.”
“And there—” I pointed at other symbols “—hermetic symbols, pentagrams, symbols from the kabbalah—they don’t belong with Egyptian images. They’ve mixed all the symbology up. . . .”
“It’s not mixed up, exactly,” Paymenz said. “They’re symbols from various cultures but meaning the same thing. And what is symbolized in iconography is repeated, here, in text.” He pointed to an inscription over the door. “I think that one is Sumerian . . . and here, I can read this one—in ancient Greek. It refers to a simple exchange: ‘To the dark god, we give life; from the dark god, we receive life.’ ”
Nyerza seemed impatient with the mastaba. He gestured, and Mimbala, increasingly nervous, set about opening this last door, which was made of gnarled black wood.
A few strokes of the chisel, and the dark wooden door swung inward onto a short flight of stone steps, leading down to a brief concrete corridor and another door, of blue-painted metal, lit by an overhead bulb. This door was unlocked and opened onto a vast subterranean chamber—a room as big as a football field.
We stepped inside, trying to take it all in. The room was awash in the harsh glare of fluorescent strip lights on a ceiling so low Nyerza had to stoop. Under the lights were hundreds of portable hospital beds; on each one, a recumbent figure, a man or woman, to all appearances dead. They wore ordinary street clothes, their skin seemed grayish, and there were cobwebs on some of them. But they did not seem to be in a state of decay. From somewhere came the hum of powerful ventilation fans, the whisper of an artificial breeze.
“These people,” Melissa said. “They’re so . . . they seem so still. Are they dead?”
“I do not believe so,” Nyerza said. “They are asleep and beyond asleep—in a state of suspended animation of some sort. Almost the catatonia that mimics death . . .”
“A vast premature burial,” Paymenz murmured. “Poe would be most distressed to be here.”
Melissa gasped softly, grabbed my arm, and pointed. I saw Mendel, in the center of the room, head bowed in prayer. An apparition, he was there but not there. His form ever so slightly transparent.
“Oh thank God you’ve come,” came a croak from someone else in the shadows to my right.