Falling Idols (21 page)

You’ve always remembered the yellow eyes looking at you, how they recognized you even if you didn’t recognize yourself and even forgot yourself entirely until a month ago, the latest howl of Fenris brought it all back, you’ve known who you are ever since.

You
are Loki,
you
are the fire demon,
you
are the trickster and you’ve been playing tricks ever since, with ground glass and toxins and whatever else is handy. You’ve slipped your bonds as the legends always said you would, you wonder if anyone ever guessed that the bonds were forged not of metal but of a gray life of rent and repetition, and the gods damn them, they made you just one more link in the chain. No wonder escape took so long.

But now you’re here, now you’re free, it’s finally the second Thursday of the month, the end of all that was never really you.

*

By dawn you made it to the building that you selected weeks ago for this morning and you’ve been here ever since.It’s tall, vacant too if you don’t count the vagrants below, they look asleep and in one sense they are. Two evenings ago you tricked them, you left warm deli sandwiches for them, cyanide has a very fulfilling effect, they want nothing from you now.

The building might’ve been a hotel once, its brick shell and musty hallways feel as though they were built in an age of sunnier dispositions. You wonder what happened, if the hotel died first and took the surrounding area with it, or if it was the other way around, if the hotel choked on creeping blight. It does no good to lock the place, whoever tries, vagrants only chisel it open again.

From a high window you view the streets below while awaiting Fenris, the insignificance of two-legged comings and goings is so much more apparent when watched from overhead, perspective is all. They’re marbles in a crate down there, they roll wherever they’re tilted, no pattern to it, and no purpose either. As a trickster you can appreciate the joke, but enough’s enough.

You’re minding your own business when he comes up to you, the way it happens to anyone. You sit on the floor, back against the wall, while you settle your stomach, settle your vision, your head feels hot this morning, never mind this chilly air. When you see him you shift as well as you can, it’s not easy with your crusted belly and thirty-two pounds of weight resting across your lap.

For a moment he only stares, the room is atrocious, plaster crumbled everywhere and wallpaper hanging in tatters, same as the hallways, the whole place looks like a mummy.

“I’d ask if you need help,” he says, “but I think I know how ridiculous that would sound.”

Your soul. He’ll want your soul, it’s as good as predestined. Even from across the room you can tell what he is, he’s wearing a ministerial collar, not Catholic though, Presbyterian maybe. He’s carrying an armful of blankets, it’s what his kind does, they find the homeless in their homes and bring them blankets for the coming winter, blankets with salvation, thanks, much earlier inhabitants of the region were brought blankets too, blankets with smallpox.

“I followed the blood upstairs. I don’t know what your story is … but son, I beg you to let me get you some help, I beg you not to do whatever it is you have on your mind.”

“Today’s Thursday,” you tell him. “You know why it’s called that, don’t you?”

No, no he doesn’t, you know it even before he opens his pale mouth to confirm it.

“Thor’s Day,” you explain, slowly. “The day they dedicated to the thunder god. The one with the hammer. How can you be a holy man if you don’t even know what’s holy? You’re as bad as the rest of them down there. No, worse — at least they don’t pretend to know much of anything.”

He’s asking if he can’t call for an ambulance, get you to the hospital, that’s a nasty-looking belly wound and maybe so but they take a long time to die from if you die at all, depends on how the rest of this morning goes.

“That’s—” He’s shaking, now why would that be, it’s not that cold. “That’s about the biggest rifle I’ve ever seen.”

He speaks the truth, across your lap rests a McMillan M-93 sniper rifle, each .50-caliber cartridge is nearly as long as your hand and each magazine holds twenty of them, it cost you every dollar you had in the bank and some you didn’t.

“You don’t know who I am, do you? You don’t even recognize me,” you say, then he tries to fool you, says sure, sure he does, the light was bad is all, but who’s he kidding, can’t trick the trickster. “That’s all right, nobody else does either. I’m used to it by now. Not that it matters today, right before.”

“Before…?” he wants to know.

“You really are in the dark, aren’t you? Doesn’t your god tell you anything?”

It’s the wrong thing to say, all the lead-in he needs, next thing you know you’re getting a sermon, for God so loved the world, well he doesn’t actually say it but you know that’s what’s going through his head, there’s a remarkable consistency to the sheep of the lord, and if anything knows sheep it’s wolves.

There’s a beauty in devastation that escapes the appreciation of most, they’re so attached to what has been they never think of what might be, never consider how a decomposing body can enrich a bed of roses, and that’s just the small picture. With the entire world become a graveyard there’s no telling what may grow in time, it’s the great potential that is Ragnarok, so rejoice you deaf, dumb, blind, and ravenous, a better world will sprout from your fat and clutching fingers.

“All of them down there?” you say, with a nod at the window, the street. “As a holy man you must be very disappointed in them.”

“No. Oh my, no.” The Presbyterian shakes his head, he’s even smiling a little. “They’ve given me good reason plenty of times. But then they turn around and delight me. And in between, there’s forgiveness to fall back on. I promise you, they
will
delight you too … if you’ll wait a little longer.”

You snort at his desperate naivety. “If they only had longer teeth, they’d eat each other alive and sleep the rest of the time, they just don’t admit it. I’ve watched it for thousands of years and it never changes.”

For a moment he looks puzzled, still holding the blankets in his arms, he’s a befuddled emissary, and then you hear it, Fenris at last, the mighty howl whose pattern you figured out is trying again and this time you’re ready, it permeates the sky, it rolls through the streets.

“Hear that?” you ask. “I’ve waited for this forever.”

“It’s just the disaster siren, for heavy storms and such,” he says, he still looks befuddled and why not, he’s so desperate now he’ll say anything. “They’re all over town.”

You’ve never heard such nonsense in your life, you may be a trickster but that’s no reason for him to take you for a fool. Today isn’t the first day you’ve heard it, after all, sometimes you’d be off work and Fenris would howl, the sound seeming to come from everywhere and every dog in your neighborhood would join in because they all remembered, their instincts hadn’t dulled, their ancestral roots still ran true.

“It’s nothing to be afraid of,” the Presbyterian says, “the city tests it once a month or so—”

Fenris hangs at the peak of his first howl, he’s waiting for you, Loki unchained, the father of the wolf. You tilt the rifle up from your lap, you squeeze the trigger without aiming and it makes such thunder. One second the Presbyterian has two good arms and the next has only one, the other’s no longer there, you think it might’ve flown back out the doorway and into the hall. He sits down among the scattered blankets as though he’s been hit with a hammer and stares at his shoulder and empty space, it’s a good thing he had blankets since there’s blood enough for them all.

Fenris lets his voice fall, then it crests again, when you swing the rifle around to the window your stomach rips with pain and starts to bleed again. You rest the massive barrel across the windowsill, no trained sniper would ever reveal himself this way but at thirty-two pounds the rifle needs support and you have no need of escape anyway, the world will fall around you now.

You bolt a new cartridge into the chamber and peer through the scope, everything and everyone in your face again, they swarm like maggots on a corpse and are equally soft and hungry. You settle on the first, and five pounds of trigger pull later you’ve made thunder again, the recoil pushes back a couple of inches into your shoulder and you’ve taken the guts out of sacrifice one. The second loses her heart and lungs, now you’ve got the hang of it, you’ve got the rhythm and the roll, no different than practicing on milk jugs, and it’s time to get tricky, time to start taking heads.

Twenty shots go by fast, Fenris seems to think so, he’s still with you as you snap on twenty more and bolt the next into the chamber, you bring the street up close again and they’re all in your lens now, some of them still standing there covered in bits and pieces and splashes of the fallen and they haven’t noticed a thing, for them not one thing has changed, sometimes you feel as though you’re the only one alive and you wonder what does it take, what does it take just to get their attention? Some guy down there is still reading a newspaper, you punch the next bullet through the headline, black and white and red all over.

All in all, they’ve at least made your job easier.

You’ll remember to thank them later, in that better world to come.

After more than half a year since their debut tumble into bed, this was their first genuine trip together. But a whole month across an ocean was overdoing it. A month either cemented the bond or drove the wedge, and barely a week after debarking at Heathrow, Kate found herself warming to the idea of scrapping their return tickets in lieu of seats on the Concorde. Financial cretinism, but it would halve the hours next to Alain and his perfect face.

A few days in London, then southwest, until they’d nearly run out of England altogether in rocky, windswept Cornwall: “My gran came from here,” Kate had told him. “Left when she was a girl, but the place never left
her
.”

“Yeah?” Alain had said. “I guess everybody’s from somewhere, aren’t they?”

He’d not even meant it as a slight. It simply hadn’t occurred to him that he should be interested, even if it did mean a bit of diplomatic faking.

When feeling lazy or scapegoatish she was tempted to blame the bad days on the gap between their ages, her eight-year jump. Sometimes a crack, sometimes a chasm. Look at them thirteen years ago, where they’d been in the world. She’d awakened one morning after sleeping in her car, and shot the photo that won her a Pulitzer. Twenty-three years old at the time. Alain, on the other hand, would’ve been flunking driver’s ed and drowning in hormones.

Thirteen years later Alain Carreras still exuded the petulant charm of a scruffy teenager. This, she decided, was the problem: It was more appealing on paper. At least there you could furnish your own depth. Alain walked through real life as though having stepped fresh from one of his Gap ads, longish hair mussed so artfully it must’ve taken hours, and really
didn’t
have anything else going on beneath the surface. In some people — rarer than you might think — surface went all the way through.

Cornwall was the better part of a day behind them, the county of Shropshire ahead on the A49, when he could no longer take the weather.

“And they call this a climate? I thought climates
changed
.” Too bored by it to sound good and annoyed. “How long does monsoon season last in England, anyway?”

Mist. It was a heavy mist. Barely needed the wipers.

“Look on the bright side,” Kate told him. “It does wonders for your complexion. No sun? Might as well not even have packed your moisturizers. You’ll go home looking like a milkmaid.”

There. That made him happy. She was looking pretty peaches and cream herself, while the damp had fluffed her hair, not quite shoulder length, just enough to make her want to grow it again, renew the wild black mass it used to be before she got practical.

But shoot Alain in the same frame as some of the millennium-old carvings strewn about the region, and the contrasts between skin and stone would never be any more pronounced. Along with the other big difference: Some of those graven faces actually smiled, without fear of giving themselves wrinkles.