Hart & Boot & Other Stories (4 page)

After he got into the driver’s seat, Zealand said, “Guide me.”

***

Zealand crouched on the edge of a creek in a wilderness area in the mountains above the lake. Hannah lay on her side in the snow nearby. Zealand was exhausted. He’d carried her nearly two miles from the trailhead, most of that well off the path, falling twice when the treacherous snow and ice gave way beneath his footsteps. His knees ached, and his feet were numb inside his boots, but he’d made it. Hannah had led him to a pretty place of tall pines, cracked gray rock faces, and a rushing mountain stream.

“It’s filled with rocks,” Zealand said, staring down at the bottom of the wide, swiftly flowing stream.

“It’s white, speckled with red, egg-shaped, almost as big as your fist,” Hannah said.

Zealand saw the stone, half-buried among water-smoothed rocks. He pulled off his glove, pushed up his sleeve, and plunged his hand into the water. It was deeper than it seemed, and he had to submerge his arm past the elbow before he could reach the stone. He grasped it and pulled it out of the water. Zealand’s whole arm was numbed by cold, and he thought briefly how nice it would be to feel that way all over, inside and out, just cold and aching nothingness, the way he felt on a job, but forever. He couldn’t even feel the texture of the stone in his hand, just the weight, which was greater than he would have expected.

He held Archibald Grace’s life in his hand.

Dropping the stone into his coat pocket, he walked to where Hannah lay in the snow. “Thank you,” he said. “Would you like me to kill you now? I can be quick.”

“No!” Hannah shouted, her eyes wide.

“Your wounds are grievous,” Zealand said.

“I’ll heal.”

Zealand looked down at her for a moment, then nodded. He thought she probably would. She was Grace’s daughter. He squatted on his heels in the snow. “Tell me, before I decide what to do with you, how did you find Grace’s life?”

“It was in his tower, at Cincaguas. I used to play there, as a child—there’s a room that opens onto the ocean, onto the caves where I was born, so I could travel freely between them. I went to the tower last year, and Father hadn’t changed the pass phrase, so the guards let me through. I thought I could make my father talk to me if I had his life, that I could use the stone as leverage. But I couldn’t even
find
him. Then I heard you were working for Father, that you’d been seen around his old haunts, searching for his life. I didn’t know he’d hired you to kill him, so I contacted you.”

“I suppose you regret that now.”

“I only regret not being able to talk to my father. I’d gladly give up a leg for that chance.”

“Life is disappointment,” Zealand said, and he’d never meant any three words so completely. He pondered the possibility of mercy. “I can throw you into the stream,” he said, “or I can leave you for the coyotes.”

“Stream,” she said, without hesitation.

“And if I let you live today, will you come for me later, and try to kill me?”

“Never.”

“Liar,” Zealand said, almost appreciatively. He picked her up by her one good leg and the straps that bound her wrists, swung her a few times, and tossed her into the stream. He stood in the snow long enough to watch her wriggle away, eel-like, and disappear over the falls, flowing back down toward the lake.

***

Zealand kissed Grace just behind his left ear, and Grace moaned and moved his body back against him.

“I found your life yesterday,” Zealand said. “Not forty miles from here.”

Grace went stiff in Zealand’s arms. They lay together in a wide, soft bed, mountain morning light filling the window and the room. “And now you want to use it to control me,” Grace said, his voice heavy with disappointment, but not surprise.

Zealand put his hand on Grace’s slim, bare thigh. “No,” he said. “I just wanted to spend one more night with you, before smashing your soul apart.”

Grace relaxed. “Good. That’s good. I’ve lived for eons. Another day doesn’t matter much.”

Zealand shifted uncomfortably at this echo of Hannah’s words. He shouldn’t have treated her with such brutality. He was tired of doing things he regretted, tired of feeling ashamed, tired of bad dreams. How nice it would be to become immortal, and let his regrets drain away, or freeze over.

Apropos of nothing obvious, Grace said, “It’s easier to be a sorcerer when you don’t have a soul. It’s easier to do the awful things you have to do, when you know the true sensation and emotion will be forgotten in the aftermath.”

Not for the first time, Zealand wondered if Grace could overhear his thoughts. “How does it feel?” he asked. “Putting your soul aside?” It was an important question, and one he hadn’t asked before.

“It’s been so long since I had my soul, I don’t recall the difference.” Grace rolled away and sat on the edge of the bed. Zealand looked at the muscles in his unblemished back. “Fear is the first to go, which is liberating. Then other feelings fade. Your memories go, but it’s the bad memories first, so it seems a boon. Finally the conscious will to live erodes, and you become like a moss or a lichen, living for the sake of mere existence. But you retain your mind, and so there is some dissatisfaction, some sense of...” He grasped at the air. “Eventually, you long for death.”

“Do you wish to die, even when you’re with me?” Zealand said.

Grace shrugged. “Perhaps moss enjoys the sensation of falling rain, or the warmth of sunlight. But that’s not meaning. It’s just pleasure.” Without turning around, he said, “Do you still want your payment for killing me? Do you still want me to show you how to be immortal?”

Zealand didn’t answer. It had seemed obvious, before. An immortal life, free from self-doubt, self-loathing, and fear—of course he wanted that. He touched Grace’s back. Despite their time embracing, Grace’s skin was cool, almost cold.

Zealand didn’t answer Grace’s question, and after a while, Grace forgot he’d asked, and went into the kitchen to get a piece of fruit.

***

After they made love a final time, after Grace taught Zealand the trick of putting his soul aside, they went out onto the deck that jutted over the cold blue vastness of Lake Tahoe. Here on the northern shore houses were fewer and farther apart than on the more tourist-friendly south shore, and they had a clear view of snowy mountains and evergreens. The brisk air made standing on the deck a bracing experience, and Zealand narrowed his eyes against the lake wind. He placed the spotted stone that held Grace’s life on the redwood deck railing. Grace didn’t seem interested in it; he just gazed, wide-eyed, at the mountains, as if seeing them for the first time. “Go ahead,” he said. “I’m ready.”

Zealand raised the old stone axe with its unbreakable handle. He thought about touching Grace, or kissing him, but the time for that had passed, and hesitation would only make this harder. He brought down the axe, and shattered Grace’s life.

The spotted rock burst apart, and light the color of Grace’s eyes shone forth, blazing so brightly that even when Zealand squeezed his eyes shut, he saw blue. After a moment the light faded, and Zealand opened his eyes.

Grace sagged against the railing, his whole body trembling, and when he spoke, his words were choked by sobs. “I have a daughter,” he said, and then began pounding his head against the deck railing, slamming his forehead down so hard that the wood audibly cracked. Grace looked up at Zealand, his forehead gashed, blood running into his eyes, and screamed, “Finish it! Kill the body!”

Zealand lifted the axe again and brought it down between Grace’s eyes. The man’s forehead caved in, and the axe stuck there, embedded in Grace’s skull, trapped fast in bone as old as the mountains. Grace fell back on the deck, dead.

Zealand went inside for the tarps and the chains he’d need to sink Grace to the lake bottom. His hands trembled as he wrapped Grace in the heavy plastic. The dead man had shaped nations, seduced monsters, and lived to the outer extremes of experience, but he’d died like anyone, like so many others at Zealand’s hands—messily, and speaking only of regrets.

Zealand sat by Grace’s corpse, holding the dead man’s hand for a while, and contemplated the nature of immortality.

***

Zealand sat in the upper room of the tower at Cincaguas, holding an oblong piece of shaped marble in his hand. The stone was prepared according to Grace’s instructions, as a receptacle for Zealand’s life, and he could never make another—this was one-time magic, once and forever magic. Zealand heard the distant scrape and clang of weapons on the lower floors. He’d claimed possession of the tower with the pass phrase he’d learned from Hannah, and then he’d changed the phrase to one only he knew. But the guards were old, and Hannah knew her way around, so he was not surprised to see her limp in through the arched doorway. She apparently did have some starfish in her ancestry, because her leg had grown back, though it was knotty as coral, and a bit shorter than the other leg. She wore the slashed remains of a dark blue wetsuit, and she bled water from the wounds the guards had inflicted. Her teeth had grown back, too, though they curved off at strange angles, and some of them cut her face when she closed her mouth.

“You killed my father,” she said, her voice emerging from the air before her, a calm statement of fact.

“He wanted me to,” Zealand said. He didn’t stand up.

“I don’t care. Because of you, I never had a chance to talk to him, and make things right between us.”

Zealand rolled the marble egg between his palms. “He mentioned you in his last words. He said he had a daughter, and I’ve never heard such anguish.”

“He remembered me?”

“He remembered everything, and I think he wanted to die even more, once he did.”

“I came here to kill you,” Hannah said, but she didn’t come any closer.

“I thought you might.” He held up the stone, so she could see it. “I’ve been up here for weeks, trying to decide if I should put my life in this rock. I’ve never been an indecisive person, but I’ve been balanced on the edge over this.” He glanced up at her, then away, and said, “I’m sorry for the way I hurt you.” He set the egg on the stone floor.

Hannah sat down beside him. She smelled strongly of salt water. “My father never told me he was sorry for anything.”

“He wasn’t capable of being sorry, not while his soul was put aside.”

“I’m sure that made his life easier.”

“Mmm,” Zealand said. “Are you still going to kill me?”

“Perhaps. Did you love my father?”

“As well as I was able. But I may as well have loved a cloud, or the stars, for all the feeling that was returned.”

“I know how that feels.” She picked up the marble egg. “I don’t think I’ll kill you. Not just now.”

“I almost want you to. It would take the decision out of my hands. I wish I knew where to go from here.”

She laughed, that harsh hyena sound, and Zealand realized that her laughter, unlike her voice, came from her own throat. “No one knows that.” She put the marble egg back in Zealand’s hand. “Not even my father knew where to go next. He just knew he was going to keep going on forever. Until you helped him find forever’s end.”

Zealand nodded. He stood and walked to the tower window, and looked down at the earth, far below. Hannah came and stood beside him.

“It’s a long way down,” Zealand said.

“Looked at another way,” Hannah said, “we’ve come a long way
up
.”

Zealand squeezed the stone in his hand. It was cold, and hard, and didn’t yield at all under the pressure of his hand. He thought about irrevocable decisions.

Zealand dropped the marble egg out the window, and Hannah stood beside him as they watched it fall.

Cup and Table

Sigmund stepped over the New Doctor, dropping a subway token onto her devastated body. He stepped around the spreading shadow of his best friend, Carlsbad, who had died as he’d lived: inconclusively, and without fanfare. He stepped over the brutalized remains of Ray, up the steps, and kept his eyes focused on the shrine inside. This room in the temple at the top of the mountain at the top of the world was large and cold, and peer as he might back through the layers of time—visible to Sigmund as layers of gauze, translucent as sautéed onions, decade after decade peeling away under his gaze—he could not see a time when this room had not existed on this spot, bare but potent, as if only recently vacated by the God who’d created and abandoned the world.

Sigmund approached the shrine, and there it was. The cup. The prize and goal and purpose of a hundred generations of the Table. The other members of the Table were dead, the whole
world
was dead, except for Sigmund.

He did not reach for the cup. Instead, he walked to the arched window and looked out. Peering back in time he saw mountains and clouds and the passing of goats. But in the present he saw only fire, twisting and writhing, consuming rock as easily as trees, with a few mountain peaks rising as yet untouched from the flames. Sigmund had not loved the world much—he’d enjoyed the music of Bach, violent movies, and vast quantities of cocaine—and by and large he could have taken or left civilization. Still, knowing the world was consumed in fire made him profoundly sad.

Sigmund returned to the shrine and seized the cup—heavy, stone, more blunt object than drinking vessel—and prepared to sip.

But then, at the last moment, Sigmund didn’t drink. He did something else instead.

But first:

Or, arguably, later:

***

Sigmund slumped in the back seat, Carlsbad lurking on the floorboards in his semi-liquid noctiluscent form, Carlotta tapping her razored silver fingernails on the steering wheel, and Ray—the newest member of the Table—fiddling with the radio. He popped live scorpions from a plastic bag into his mouth. Tiny spines were rising out of Ray’s skin, mostly on the nape of his neck and the back of his hands, their tips pearled with droplets of venom.

“It was a beautiful service,” Sigmund said. “They sent the Old Doctor off with dignity.”

Carlsbad’s tarry body rippled. Ray turned around, frowning, face hard and plain as a sledgehammer, and said, “What the fuck are you talking about, junkie? We haven’t even gotten to the funeral home yet.”

Sigmund sank down in his seat. This was, in a way, even more embarrassing than blacking out.

“Blood and honey,” Carlotta said, voice all wither and bile. “How much of that shit did you snort this morning, that you can’t even remember what day it is?”

Sigmund didn’t speak. They all knew he could see into the past, but none of them knew the full extent of his recent gyrations through time. Lately he’d been jerking from future to past and back again without compass or guide. Only the Old Doctor had known about that, and now that he was dead, it was better kept a secret.

They reached the funeral home, and Sigmund had to go through the ceremony all over again. Grief—unlike sex, music, and cheating at cards—was not a skill that could be honed by practice.

***

The Old Doctor welcomed Sigmund, twenty years old and tormented by visions, into the library at the Table’s headquarters. Shelves rose everywhere like battlements, the floors were old slate, and the lights were ancient crystal-dripping chandeliers, but the Old Doctor sat in a folding chair at a card table heaped with books.

“I expected, well, something
more
,” Sigmund said, thumping the rickety table with his hairy knuckles. “A big slab of mahogany or something, a table with authority.”

“We had a fine table once,” the Old Doctor said, eternally middle-aged and absently professorial. “But it was chopped up for firewood during a siege in the 1600s.” He tapped the side of his nose. “There’s a lesson in that. No asset, human or material, is important compared to the continued existence of the organization itself.”

“But surely
you’re
irreplaceable,” Sigmund said, awkward attempt at job security through flattery. The room shivered and blurred at the edges of his vision, but it had not changed much in recent decades, a few books moving here and there, piles of dust shifting across the floor.

The Old Doctor shook his head. “I am the living history of the Table, but if I died, a new doctor would be sent from the archives to take over operations, and though his approach might differ from mine, his role would be the same—to protect the cup.”

“The cup,” Sigmund said, sensing the cusp of mysteries. “You mean the Holy Grail.”

The Old Doctor ran his fingers along the spine of a dusty leatherbound book. “No. The Table predates the time of Christ. We guard a much older cup.”

“The cup, is it here, in the vaults?”

“Well.” The Old Doctor frowned at the book in his hands. “We don’t actually know where the cup is anymore. The archives have... deteriorated over the centuries, and there are gaps in my knowledge. It would be accurate to say the agents of the Table now
seek
the cup, so that we may protect it properly again. That’s why you’re here, Sigmund. For your ability to see into the past. Though we’ll have to train you to narrow your focus to the here-and-now, to peel back the gauze of time at will.” He looked up from the book and met Sigmund’s eyes. “As it stands, you’re almost useless to me, but I’ve made useful tools out of things far more broken than
you
are.”

Some vestigial part of Sigmund’s ego bristled at being called broken, but not enough to stir him to his own defense. “But I can only look back thirty or forty years. How can that help you?”

“I have... a theory,” the Old Doctor said. “When you were found on the streets, you were raving about gruesome murders, yes?”

Sigmund nodded. “I don’t know about
raving
, but yes.”

“The murders you saw took place over a hundred years ago. On that occasion, you saw back many more years than usual. Do you know why?”

Sigmund shook his head. He thought he
did
know, but shame kept him from saying.

“I suspect your unusual acuity was the result of all that speed you snorted,” the Old Doctor said. “The stimulants enabled you to see deeper into the past. I have, of course, vast quantities of very fine methamphetamines at my disposal, which you can use to aid me in my researches.”

Sigmund said, “Vast quantities?” His hands trembled, and he clasped them to make them stop.

“Enough to let you see
centuries
into the past,” the Old Doctor said. “Though we’ll work up to that, of course.”

“When I agreed to join the Table, I was hoping to do field work.”

The Old Doctor sniffed. “That business isn’t what’s important, Sigmund. Assassination, regime change, paltry corporate wars—that’s just the hackwork our agents do to pay the bills. It’s not worthy of your gifts.”

“Still, it’s what I want. I’ll help with your research if you let me work in the field.” Sigmund had spent a childhood in cramped apartments and hospital wards, beset by visions of the still-thrashing past. In those dark rooms he’d read comic books and dreamed of escaping the prison of circumstance—of being a superhero. But heroes like that weren’t real. Anyone who put on a costume and went out on the streets to fight crime would be murdered long before morning. At some point in his teens Sigmund had graduated to spy thrillers and Cold War history, passing easily from fiction to nonfiction and back again, reading about double- and triple-agents with an interest that bordered on the fanatical. Becoming a spy—that idea had the ring of the plausible, in a way that becoming a superhero never could. Now, this close to that secret agent dream, he wouldn’t let himself be shunted into a pure research position. This was his chance.

The Old Doctor sighed. “Very well.”

***

“What’s it like?” Carlotta said, the night after their first mission as a duo. She’d enthralled a senator while Sigmund peered into the past to find out where the microfilm was hidden. Now, after, they were sitting at the counter in an all-night diner where even
they
didn’t stand out from the crowd of weirdoes and freaks.

Sigmund sipped decaf coffee and looked around at the translucent figures of past customers, the crowd of nights gone by, every booth and stool occupied by ghosts. “It’s like layers of gauze,” he said. “Usually I just see the past distantly, shimmering, but if I concentrate I can sort of... shift my focus.” He thumped his coffee cup and made the liquid inside ripple. “The Old Doctor taught me to keep my eyes on the here-and-now, unless I
need
to look back, and then I just sort of...” He gestured vaguely with his hands, trying to create a physical analogue for a psychic act, to mime the metaphysical. “I guess I sort of twitch the gauze aside, and pass through a curtain, and the present gets blurrier while the past comes into focus.”

“That’s a shitty description,” Carlotta said, sawing away at the rare steak and eggs on her plate.

The steak, briefly, shifted in Sigmund’s vision and became a living, moving part of a cow. Sigmund’s eyes watered, and he looked away. He mostly ate vegetables for that very reason. “I’ve never seen the world any other way, so I don’t know how to explain it better. I can’t imagine what it’s like for you, seeing just the present. It must seem very
fragile
.”

“We had a guy once who could see into the future, just a little bit, a couple of minutes at most. Didn’t stop him from getting killed, but he wet himself right before the axe hit him. He was a lot less boring than you are.” Carlotta belched.

***

“Why haven’t I met you before?” Sigmund shrank back against the cushions in the booth.

“I’m heavy ordnance,” Carlsbad said, his voice low, a rumble felt in Sigmund’s belly and bones as much as heard by his ears. “I’ve been with the Table since the beginning. They don’t reveal secrets like me to research assistants.” Carlsbad was tar-black, skin strangely reflective, face eyeless and mouthless, blank as a minimalist snowman’s, human only in general outline. “But the Old Doctor says you’ve exceeded all expectations, so we’ll be working together from time to time.”

Sigmund looked into Carlsbad’s past, as far as he could—which was quite far, given the cocktail of uppers singing in his blood—and Carlsbad never changed; black, placid, eternal. “What—”
What are you
, he’d nearly asked. “What do you do for the Table?”

“Whatever the Old Doctor tells me to,” Carlsbad said.

Sigmund nodded. “Carlotta told me you’re a fallen god of the underworld.”

“That bitch lies,” Carlsbad said, without disapproval. “I’m no god. I’m just, what’s that line—‘the evil that lurks in the hearts of men.’ The Old Doctor says that as long as one evil person remains on Earth, I’ll be alive.”

“Well,” Sigmund said. “I guess you’ll be around for a while, then.”

***

The first time Carlsbad saved his life, Sigmund lay panting in a snowbank, blood running from a ragged gash in his arm. “You could have let me die just then,” Sigmund said. Then, after a moment’s hesitation: “You could have benefited from my death.”

Carlsbad shrugged, shockingly dark against the snow. “Yeah, I guess.”

“I thought you were
evil
,” Sigmund said, lightheaded from blood loss and exertion, more in the
now
than he’d ever felt before, the scent of pines and the bite of cold air immediate reminders of his miraculously ongoing life. “I mean, you’re
made
of evil.”

“You’re made mostly of carbon atoms,” Carlsbad said. “But you don’t spend all your time thinking about forming long-chain molecules, do you? There’s more to both of us than our raw materials.”

“Thank you for saving me, Carlsbad.”

“Anytime, Sigmund.” His tone was laid-back but pleased, the voice of someone who’d seen it all but could still sometimes be pleasantly surprised. “You’re the first Table agent in four hundred years who’s treated me like something other than a weapon or a monster. I know I scare you shitless, but you
talk
to me.”

Exhaustion and exhilaration waxed and waned in Sigmund. “I like you because you don’t change. When I look at most people I can see them as babies, teenagers, every step of their lives superimposed, and if I look back far enough they disappear—but not you. You’re the same as far back as I can see.” Sigmund’s eyelids were heavy. He felt light. He thought he might float away.

“Hold on,” Carlsbad said. “Help is on the way. Your death might not diminish me, but I’d still like to keep you around.”

Sigmund blacked out, but not before hearing the whirr of approaching helicopters coming to take him away.

***