The Shibboleth (40 page)

“Have we not acquired your services for the duration?”

“Sure, it's just that I usually pick up and drop off.”

“Not today, I'm afraid. Mister?”

“Killette.”

“Mr. Killette. Please become familiar with the material in that packet.”

As he looks through the maps, face screwed into an interesting pretzel of concentration, I withdraw my laptop and attach the device Delacroix provided as cover. It would not do to have someone question my demeanor while probing the ether, and this gadget will camouflage my preoccupation with things undetectable to the human eye or senses.

When he puts down the packet and looks into the backseat, I have the gadget attached to my computer and I'm ready to proceed.

“What, are you like in the government or something?”

“Or something.” I slip into the void and, as starlight, filter into his consciousness. He is a simple man, with simple tastes. He is uncompromised—our Chinese counterparts, the
mó fâ
,
have not inhabited him, luckily—so as quietly as I entered, I leave him. No need to cause undue stress.

“Ah. Gotcha.” He touches his index finger to his nose and winks at me, a curious gesture of bonhomie and overfamiliarity. But I'll allow him his presumption.

From Baltimore, we drive north. “Before we start on our appointed path, I would like to go to a certain address, if I may.”

“Sure. You're the boss.” Killette seems more comfortable with these sorts of instructions. A simple man, indeed.

“Sparrow's Point. Near the wharf and the rail yards. I'll give you more precise directions when we get nearer.”

He nods, and the car begins to move. I spend my time rocking silently and looking out at the old whore of a city. The skyline lurches sluggishly across my view, and nothing stirs in me at its passing. The opposite of love is not hate. It is indifference.

Eventually, we pass by the huge squat warehouses and rumble over railroad tracks. While recognizable, the decayed landscape reminds me of some war-torn battlefield after the first great war, the one where Bryce and Haveford died in the Verdun mud. And I ceased for a time to care about my own life. For the final darkness will come for us all, and it matters not who is its agent. The Hun? Myself?

It matters not.

“Here. Wharf Lane. Turn here.”

Driving quite aggressively for a hired man, Killette whips the car into the one area in this urban wasteland with trees, a secluded, trash-strewn bower with rubble and used prophylactics as flora and fauna. I step out and survey the lot.

It has been nearly forty-five years since I last saw Priest and he wooed—no,
compelled
—me to join the Society. This old body I wear now was young then.

I look at the shattered, weed-wracked space. A building stood here once. Stately and old and tall. Its deeply burnished wooden floors echoing the footfalls of countless extranaturals, its rooms full of comfort and understanding. So many people. All of them like me.

My body was young then, but me, my spirit, was aged, in my third incarnation. Yet I was different. Gentler, maybe. Lucius was more ancient still—I once heard him refer to Sulla, the Roman dictator, as a friend, and I realized how ancient he might truly be, and the possibilities of endless life yawed before me like an abyss. But despite Lucius's age, he was full of life, exuberant and spritely; he was possessed of that rare ability to spark inside me a wonder at our universe and hope for the
human race. We believed we could escort humankind through its next step in evolution. We were gods among mortals, modern Prometheuses not bringing fire to humankind but lighting the fire within their minds. To this end I endeavored wholeheartedly.

Then there was the ruinous night. I had been away on assignment. A storm delayed my train. I arrived in the small hours of the morning, and when I returned, wanting nothing more than the comfort of bed, I found the old Society building an inferno. The few Society members left alive in the conflagration were gibbering and witless. Including poor Lucius. And it was then that the leadership of the Society of Extranaturals fell to me.

“The dragon …” Lucius whispered when I found him disheveled and soot-stained and bleeding in the hidden arbor behind the Society building. “The elder …”

My spirit detached from the sum of my parts and tried to settle upon him, to calm him and give his soul succor, but his spirit bucked and thrashed. I could no more calm him than a boat could moor in a storm-tossed sea. I felt massive forces warring within him, prodigious psychic energies shifting and settling like the tidal energies of stars. Looking at me, he blinked, and the thing that looked out of his eyes was no longer him, not anything I had ever sensed in my three lifetimes. I found myself shivering and cold at the darkness contained therein, and Lucius collapsed to a coma, never to regain any sort of measurable consciousness.

His body was very young too, at that time, though the personality that propelled it was not. When the ambulances came, and had I made sure that Lucius and the few other survivors were well taken care of, it was then time to deal with our shadow, the US government. I was closeted with them for weeks, it seems, and it was then we hashed out our current arrangement. Afterward, when I attempted to find the
last members of the Society, though mad or comatose, I could not. The agents of this country, the noble United States of America, had obscured their whereabouts such that even I could not suss it out. And why? Secrecy becomes a habit and requires no more reason than “we have always done so.” Yet I think worries over the ascendancy of the
mó fâ
spurred their actions.

But now, looking out at the deteriorating remains of such a beautiful old campus, I can almost taste the ashes in my mouth once more, smell the acrid and ruin-perfumed smoke. It is all just rubble; long ago scavengers picked over every bit of salvage there was to be had from the Society. Now there's a pile of tires lolling there, and the burnt-out husk of a car, surely torched in some spat of gangland warfare or exuberant youth.

I walk forward, into the tall, oily grasses that grow in clumps, snaring and snagging at my slacks. That once I called this spot home is unimaginable.

Behind me the car still rumbles.

I can remember his laugh. Despite changing bodies, always the same laugh. He was the best of us, and ever since then, we have fallen so low…

I turn away from the sight of all that once was, turn back to the car waiting for me.

Out of Sparrow's Point we drive, into the clutter and bustle of the withered city, and eventually, when I am composed enough to probe the ether, I send out that part of me that will never die, the incorruptible spirit, to sense what it can. To find the source of the impenetrables.

Killette makes sounds with his mouth, and in the ether, it is hard to assign meaning to any of his talk. I don't even try, and eventually, the man falls silent.

There is something here. It shivers in the invisible starlight of the void, and I can feel a tugging on the tendons and connective tissues of the ether. It's strange, but it feels as if I'm on a gentle slope and gravity pulls on me to go one way or, as the car turns, another. It leads me, inexorably, like the events in a dream. A nightmare in which I know all that is to happen, yet cannot change the outcome.

My gods, I need a cigarette. Bother this and all vibrations of the ether. I need a cigarette.

I withdraw from the void like a hasty lover withdrawing midstroke, and say, “Driver, do you smoke?”

“No, sir. Quit almost ten ye—”

“That is no matter to me. Take me to the nearest store.”

It's only a few moments before he finds one. In the parking lot, I shuck my jacket and unbutton my shirt so that I might have access to the patch burning itself into my skin. I rip it away and rebutton my shirt. I buy two packs of Pall Malls. I will need to find a tobacco shop soon, to locate my old friend Peter Stuyvesant.

The hot, perfumed smoke fills my lungs even before reaching the idling hired car. Killette smiles at me with his window down.

“Sorry, the boss don't allow no smoking in the ride.”

“Understandable,” I say, taking the smoke into my lungs, so deep it feels like drowning. “Give me a moment,” I say. “A few moments.”

He nods and the sedan window rises, cutting him off from view.

I smoke and lean against the back wheel well of the car, looking at the lowering daylight filtering through the wires and packed-tight brownstones and cheap apartment complexes of Baltimore. There are thousands of souls here, living on top of one another. In some chamber of my mind, the reality of this future I never imagined or considered crashes in, cacophonous and frenetic. I was born so many years ago in the morning of the world; I see that now only in retrospect. When I was
a boy, the forest in which I was born stretched from leafy New Haven to the far edges of Pennsylvania and beyond, though we didn't know it then. The world was flat, and I could test the unknown edges of it with this strange ability I had, ethereal and full of ghostlight. Now the sun-hammered world feels as old as I do, the surface of the earth spackled with concrete and tenements and desperate, near-illiterate serfs who don't even understand the depth of their own servitude.

I hesitate to touch the void. Something is amiss. It is a feeling I've had over and over again since I've touched down, but only now as I smoke and let the deleterious and woozy effect of the nicotine and tar swim in my bloodstream, only now when I'm sated and calm enough, can I recognize the feeling.

Something is wrong here.

Only after I've smoked three cigarettes, jump-starting each from the butt of the previous, am I ready to reenter the sedan and begin once more to probe the ruinous ether.

Killette drives slowly, allowing me to find my own bit of comfort in the rear seat as the tenements and strip malls pass us slowly by.

I am terrified. The dark gravity teases at my superattuned etheric sense. It's like the miniscule pitch and yaw of an airplane midflight—you're not consciously aware of it, but your body knows and reacts. It's the gravity well of a black hole, tugging with tidal forces.

We drive on interminably, hours pacing and stalking up and down streets full of cheap housing mashed together like blocks of clay, cars lining the streets. Whores and crackheads and dealers toddle about, desperately gesturing toward the sedan, and then we're out of that neighborhood and prowling through more industrial areas full of short, extruded-metal buildings and cinder-block reliquaries of the failing American business. The only balm is progress, for the wasted streets of America and for me. We are nearing our goal, unknown though it is.
Yet I know, feel in my bones, that it approaches.

I tell Killette to stop.

Outside I sniff, I probe at the ether, even while my hands work steadily to ferret the cigarette from the packet, bring it to my mouth, and light. The Kwik-E-Marts and mercados and Pep Boys seem beaten down in the vapored, humid air. The smoke is a noxious blossom, a cancerous flower blooming in the dark capillary dusk of my lungs, and its scent is heady and sweet and foul.

It is there. Just beyond that line of buildings. I know it.

After I smoke the cigarette, and then another, and then another, I get back in the car.

“Go over there,” I say, leaning forward into the driver's area, pointing toward the source of my unease. “That's where we're going.”

He muscles the sedan into traffic—which is, all things considered, quite light—and we find our way over two blocks to a row of antique-looking buildings.

A sign reads TOWSON VETERANS HOSPITAL. It's a massive, five-storied structure that looks as if it could fall at any moment, rain- and snow-streaked, paint scaling, beaten by the elements. It looks like it was built at the same time as our Society's Montana campus, a WPA project. But where the buildings in Montana are prime—preserved through a natural environmental blessing or the diligence of man—this hospital bears the brunt of the ruinous energies of entropy and decay. Annihilation always comes more slowly than we'd like, but faster than imaginable.

“Stop!” I'm nearly screaming. My composure is like a loose tooth, dangling on its last fiber.

He slides the car to a stop, and I lurch from its dark confines to stagger up the main steps of the Towson Veterans Hospital. At the dullard receptionist's alarmed look, I fumble at my pants and withdraw
the NSA badge I'd been given for just these sorts of emergencies. And it does enough to preclude her from calling whatever negligent security this shabby hospital might have. None, I'm guessing.

In the elevator, I press all the buttons. As we rise, the doors open and shut. Fourth floor feels right.

I don't know what my body's doing. My avaricious desire for tobacco and nicotine is gone, and all I can do is keep my heart from going into tachycardia before reaching the end of this particular rabbit hole. I feel like a ship on the edge of the maelstrom, a satellite on the cusp of falling into the beginnings of a new star.

There are doors passing on my left and right. I pull one open to reveal a hollow-eyed man, a soldier most likely, with an obvious missing leg. He's emaciated and bruised.