Strawman Made Steel (28 page)

Eustace took a glass tumbler and a bottle
of vodka from the man. He placed the tumbler on the table, twisted the top from
the bottle, and filled the glass almost to the brim with the clear, fiery
liquid.

“Drink that and we’re done here,” he said.

My eyes made laps between the glass and
Eustace’s face. He didn’t blink. They made a few more laps.

Then I looked through the one-way window at
Ailsa. She hadn’t moved. She looked pale and alone.

Eustace saw me look at her.

“That’s right,” he said. “Drink up or she’ll
get into a tangle with a mugger at closing time.”

“Seems a waste,” I said. “Of vodka.”

“A bullet ain’t a waste of lead,” he said.
The polish had rubbed off his accent. He sounded more like a toffed-up rat than
a business major.

I looked at the drink again, then at Ailsa.

“Why not just put a bullet in me?” I said.
“I don’t really like vodka.”

“Almost closing time, dick,” he said, and
flicked a thumb at the window. “Better hurry up if you want her face to stay in
one piece.”

A light went out on the other side of the
glass. A man in a barman’s uniform stacked chairs on a table and moved to clear
away another.

Behind me, Eustace’s men were still moving
the furniture around. I twisted my head around to see what they were doing. The
motion sent a bolt of pain lancing down my spine. But I did see they’d rigged a
rope from a bracket on the wall up and over an exposed beam. Hanging down from
the rope’s end, was an object moving back and forth in the gloom, like a fish
in muddy water.

I lowered my eyes to the floor and saw what
had made the scratching noise I’d heard earlier. Inch thick bars of chalk had
been used to etch a figure on the floor. I couldn’t decipher the figure, and
maybe it didn’t mean anything, but its significance was clear to me. It lay
directly below the thing swinging back and forth from the end of the rope. I
glanced up again and confirmed what was attached to the rope. It was an iron
hook.

The last time I’d seen a hook like that
there were twenty of them, and a dead man hanging from each. This room had been
mocked up as a satellite of Eutarch’s death cult, and I was to be the first and
only hoisted. The lone sacrifice.

I couldn’t see the sense in that and said
so.

Eustace told me to shut up and drink.

“Do I get a cigarette?” I said, as my mind
tried to wrestle out from beneath a blanket of pain.

I guessed they were tying off a loose end.
Eutarch was dead and his baby had to die too. I was the fire sale.

“Sure,” said Eustace. He slipped me a
cigarette from a pack and snapped a lighter open. I lit up and was watching the
naked flame’s reflection on the window’s surface when through it I saw another
light die. The barman was still clearing away tables. Ailsa’s eyes were
tracking him. Pretty soon he’d be asking her to pack up.

For the last time I looked at the drink
sitting on the table in front of me. And with a sigh, stretched out my hand for
the tumbler.

Someone screamed.

That someone was my arm. The one the grunt
had used as a sculling oar. I overrode its reflex to jerk back, and grasped the
glass.

I raised it to my lips, gave Ailsa a nod
she’d never see, and said, “Bottom’s up.”

It went down my tortured throat like lava.
But I decided my prejudice against vodka was unfair. It wasn’t a bad drop. The
bad drop was what was already flowing in my veins.

“I’d say see you round and nice knowing
you, dick,” said Eustace, stowing his lighter. “But I won’t, and it wasn’t.”

Then just like that they left. I guessed
the grunts would be back when my ticker gave out to string me up and complete
the picture.

My body knew straight away the drink was
wrong. It had landed in my guts with the usual spreading warmth. But no sooner
had it begun to bloom within me than it became cold, like I’d dropped a block
of ice into my stomach.

Movement tugged my gaze to the window. A
boy appeared and went quickly to Ailsa. He handed her a slip of paper. I
watched her read it, and as she read, the tension left her frame. She smiled.
She rose, and left, and on her heels the last lights were put out.

And there I sat in the near-complete dark,
alone.

Not for the first time my mind harked back
to the cold slab of the X-ray machine. I felt again the coarse thread of the
twine I’d used to fire the exposure. Doubted again the wisdom of pulling it.

The cold was steeling through me fast.

―When the fingers of my right hand found
the warm metal encircling the ring-finger of my left.

Its touch quickened my mind.

Maybe Grace lay somewhere out there, in the
dark. Lost and alone. Wondering if she were the last human alive.

I couldn’t bear that thought.

Over the clamor of the pain thrilling in my
body, I retrieved and pocketed the Lady. I poked my cigarette between my lips
and drew in a gust of smoke. Its tip flared.

For a half-second I saw an image rise in
the window-become-mirror before me―a ghost that wore my features. That ghost
looked pissed, and I pitied the man who incurred its wrath.

And I dove for the mirror.

On the far side, in the In-Between,
was chaos.

I had already known it would be a rough
ride home to good ol’ New York. The distance from Gramercy Park to the Upper
East Side was longer than I was used to, and made it a recipe for a trip
hangover.

But the path home through the mirror, the
solidus, was a log bobbing on a river in tumult. I’d no sooner stepped onto
this end than it rolled under me and I plunged into a moiling fluid. Fire was
replaced with frost. It pressed close on me, probing in a sensory assault of a
new kind. I was a man with only a childhood memory of how to swim.

Exits yawned up at me from out of nowhere
like the mouths of sea grottos. Voices seeped in through the pores of Reality,
garbled and indistinct. I was tempted to dive for any old exit and take my
chances.

Currents tugged at me, and I scented on
them the exit I wanted. But I was blind, and just as the scent grew strong, and
I sensed my exit was near, a cross-current struck and dragged me away.

It grew even colder, as though I had swum
out over an underwater precipice and into trans-continental currents. My
stomach prickled at the feeling of exposure.

It’s possible my mind juddered into
brown-out, for I thought I glimpsed deep down in the In-Between other shapes
swimming.

True or not, the vision gripped me with a
deep dread.

Then just like that I was free.

I tumbled from the mirror and rolled off
the same washstand I’d met just four days before, in the women’s restroom on
the third floor of Lennox Hill Hospital. Happily no one had left a glass on it
this time, so I nose-dived onto the tiles with only their bleach-tasting kiss
to endure.

I had no idea what time it was. The part of
my brain that rattles when I walk was cackling that it was time to die.

My skin didn’t prickle. It was bone-cold
and numb. It was no easier to breathe here either.

When I got my hands under me and pushed I
found they didn’t want to play ball. I rolled onto my back. Felt you could call
me Sir Edmund Hillary for that alone. I stared up at the door handle to the
hall and may as well have been gazing at the moon. It wasn’t even part of my
world.

For all the good they were doing me, my
lungs sounded like bellows. Only when they paused, empty or full, could I hear
the lone misfiring fluorescent tube, and drip of a leaking cistern.

That gave me an idea.

But I had to move fast if my future was to
be more than a collection of neat ideas in congealing meat.

I hitched my leg up and pushed. Seen from
above it made my body lie east-west. Due north was a cubicle. I rolled toward
it, collected my head on the doorpost, adjusted, and got my torso inside.

Two feet above me sat a big red button, and
above it the word “Call”.

I poured my will into my right arm.

I
became
an arm. An arm with a nasty
McIlwraith-looking growth. And I flung myself at that big red button. Heard it
clack against the wall. And browned-out again.

It can’t have been more than a minute when
I woke again and I was not an arm any more and all the sky was a face. The face
belonged to the nurse who had found me on my last visit to the hospital, when
my legs had still worked and all I’d wanted was a simple X-ray.

I said, “I’d use the men’s john if it had a
bigger mirror.” But all I got out was a couple of words and a kind of hissy
sound.

Her face, already crinkled with concern,
grew alarmed.

A memory of the voice of Major Jackson P.
Tunney suddenly blared in my ears: “Got someone to give you CPR for an hour,
you’ll be right as rain.”

Time to focus McIlwraith. Just the
essentials.

I dialed my voice back to whisper and said,
“Dead unless CPR. Don’t stop.”

Then the world went brown-black.

Out again.

And I was dead.

So Ailsa had been right. The case had
killed me after all.

Write it on my headstone: here lies Janus
McIlwraith, cut down in his prime by Other. My friend the actuary to file it
one over from
Xenotropic Fauna / Unregistered
in
Xenotropic Fauna /
Derivative / Artificial Synthesis.
Maybe that was more than one folder
over. Whatever. I’d been close.

But it troubled me I was able to recognize
my own death. Dead men aren’t supposed to recognize anything.

Ouch. The pain of paradox.

Pain? Nope. I had until then no idea what
pain was. Returning to life was not the flutter of fairy wings and the yearning
for an eternity postponed that I hear about. Not for me anyway.

No. That lovely young nurse who I’d called
a good kid taught me the meaning of pain when her lungs breathed for mine, and
her fists beat for my heart, and she dragged me back into life.

Let me tell you ― it hurt like a bastard.

Breath. Must have been a poet made it rhyme
with Death.

I lived a lifetime flat on my back, half in
half out of that cubicle in the women’s toilet, smelling bleach and tasting on
her breath the tannins of herbal tea.

I browned out again and then the air filled
with electronic shrieks. Something was clamped over my mouth. It hissed and
tugged. Made me part of it.

I became aware of voices.

One was talking about John Doe.

I wanted to tell them it was Janus, Janus
Pain.

I wanted to tell them to turn off their
stupid machine, because their stupid machine was marching uphill against a
poison that wouldn’t be invented for centuries, and their machine was leaving
tread marks on my brain.

Then I thought of Grace, and told myself to
shut up.

An age later the machine stopped screaming.
Someone settled the thing on my mouth better (a cat?) and it stopped hissing.

No one thought to remove the granite
boulder from my chest. I got used to it, so much so that when it came time to
remove it I’d probably think I was floating.

The voices in the room lost their
stridency. The atmosphere became calmer.

I must have slept because I dreamed of
watching my shadow on a wall move to its own beat.

Next thing I knew I was awake and it
was morning.

I felt no transition from sleep. I simply
found myself sitting propped up on pillows looking into a hospital room full of
clear, warm sunlight. It was pouring through a gap in the curtains and
reflecting off the white walls.

A machine was wired to round plasters stuck
to my chest, and piped contentedly every few seconds or so from my left. Into
that arm was plumbed an IV line that dripped clear liquid in measured time.

I heard a stirring on my right, and looked
to find the young nurse slumped into a chair. She wore grey track pants,
joggers, and a red sweater two sizes too large. Her hair was gathered into a
ponytail. Her eyes were bloodshot, the skin beneath them looked bruised.

“You look like shit,” I said.

Her lips cracked in a smile and it
transformed her face.

“You should take a look at yourself,” she
said.

I declined. I couldn’t face another mirror
right then.

“Where are my clothes?” I said.

Her smile was replaced by an expression of
confusion.

“My clothes?” I said. “The streets are
mean, but they don’t need my naked carcass on them.”

“You can’t― You’re not―” Her shoulders
hitched as she took a deep breath and seemed to collect herself. “You can’t go.
Don’t you want to know what happened to you?”