X. Credo

“There is,” the old man is saying, “in Baghdad,” but wait, this is over a hundred years ago! Almost two hundred! What is this doing here?

“There is in Baghdad,” he’s saying, and there can be little doubt, it’s him, he’s the old man, no, no, he’s not, timelost and unstuck again, somewhere in, in Eastbumfuck, in, was it Sinnemahonig? Sinnemahonig, up in the foothills of the Alleghenies, in Pennsylvania, and the old man’s telling the room at large in a deep voice, a preacher’s voice, about the stele in Baghdad, “brought there from Persepolis, or rather, from that place where one day Persepolis would come to be, more years ago than I care to remember, but it was before Methusæl was even a gleam in Mehujæl’s eye, and on that stele—it’s a column, you buffoon, a slab, a post, of stone, set upright, from the Greek, stele!” His hands are wide and powerful and white hair grotesquely tufts the first and second knuckles of his fingers, even the knuckles of his thumbs, and his white eyebrows stand out alarmingly from the side of his face and seem almost to vibrate, to thrum, as he thrusts his sharp and beaky nose at—well, him, the other him: he’s tall; his arms are long and powerful, like an ape’s, but not so powerful as his brother’s; his nose is as big as the other’s, but spread wide across his face, and already smeared with the wreckage of capillaries broken from too much bad whiskey; he—he is wearing an eyepatch, which explains why the other is so curiously flat; he is Reuben Buckman Claflin, of course. Gambler, horse-thief, saloonkeeper and raftman: if it’s Sinnemahonig, he must be Buck. And it must be Sinnemahonig—smell it: old sour beer and unwashed men and flatulence, horseshit and dogshit and sawdust wet with melting snow, and his wife is telling fortunes in the tent next door. (Elsewhere, elsewhen someone came up to him in a narrow hall and asked him a question, and he answered, as best he could; here and now, though, here and now as he—Buck—chuckles and kicks back the last of his mash whiskey, he—the old man, the preacher, John Garrett—has raised one furry white hand to about the top of his head and frowns at it—) “About yea high.” He frowns more, his absurd eyebrows twisting together. Lifts his hand a hand-span or two. “Or maybe yea high.” His hand trembles as he holds it there in the air. He’s peering beneath it as if by frowning hard enough that dam’ rock or column or stele will magically appear and damnation if he—he, Buck—can’t almost trick himself into seeing something there, ghostly and shimmering. The whole dam’ bar has grown quiet as he—John—has been yapping, preaching, maybe he’s warming up, and Buck’s feeling a creeping tingle along his spine, like—ah, hell. Must be the sour mash. “And carven on that stele,” he’s saying, Garrett is, “are the forms of two winged bulls, with the faces of men whose beards are long and full. And these are the forms of two angels: their names,” he takes a deep breath, “their names.” Buck blinks. Garrett blinks. “Their names are Haurvatat and Malach Ra.”

Buck grins. Buck is a fool who thinks himself a man of the world because he knows how to steal horses, paint them black and ride them to the next town over to be sold before the rightful owner knows what’s what. He thinks he has the world by the balls because his wife’s young and quiet and a timid thing in touch from time to time with what she says are voices from Beyond, and so she listens to what the other women and some of the men tell her when she reads their fortunes in their hands or in the dregs of a cup of coffee or in smoke curling up into a cloudless sky, and women and sometimes men tell her things then, when they want to know what will come of it all, confidences, you know, was it worth it that I, and will he ever learn what, and every now and then it gets to be too much for her, and she runs up a hillside and screams out their sins to the Lord, and if a man followed her up that hill and listened and kept all the details straight, well, hell. A hint here, a knowing smile there, and he could arrange for any number of things, now couldn’t he? Buck thinks the eye that was gouged out to pay off a horserace gone bad makes him even more intimidating, and every now and then he’ll lift up a finger and pry that eyepatch away to scratch at it, making sure whomever he’s talking to gets an eyeful of the red mess underneath. Buck says, “That don’t sound like something from the Book, Preacher.”

“Ain’t everything God ever did in Scripture, son,” says Garrett. “Now. You telling this story, or am I?”

“Oh,” says Buck, “you are, no doubt, sir.” He leans back and spreads his hands expansively, because Buck thinks he can afford to be generous, here.

He really thought he had all the time in the world, didn’t he?

Buck, that is.

Garrett snorts. “Where was I? —Stele, yea high, angels. Between the two of them can be made out the form of a cup, and the sight of carvings like this in places like that, you might be interested to know, is the source of some of our legends of griffins.”

“Griffins?” says Buck, who’s wondering why his little glass is empty.

“Griffins,” says Garrett. “Unholy, heathenish beasts. Half lion and half eagle, as distinct from the hippogriff: half eagle and half horse. They—”

“I thought,” Buck starts to say. Garrett rather theatrically freezes his lecture mid-gesture, one hand held tremblingly in the air as his rather thick lips purse unpleasantly, as if he had just bitten a lemon. “I thought,” Buck says, “they looked like bulls.”

Garrett has nothing to say to this. Perhaps one eyebrow twitches. Muscles along his jawline working, perhaps.

“Bulls,” says Buck. “With wings.”

“A griffin,” says Garrett, “is half lion. And half eagle. With the tail of a camel, or of a serpent, or wyrm, and the beard of a unicorn.” He really had gone on forever about nothing at all back then, hadn’t he? —Garrett, that is. “Fierce and noble; cruel and divine. It was said that a man could not break an oath sworn upon a griffin’s egg, and if it was merely an ostrich egg covered in lapis, so? And a goblet whose bowl was cupped by griffin’s claws was said to be proof against poison. Which, you see, brings us back to that cup.”

A bottle is set on the bar between them, and Garrett plucks it up before Buck, prizing out the cork with his teeth and spitting it into the sawdust. Without asking, he splashes more whiskey into their glasses: mostly clear, though oily, and with a cloudy amber tinge to it in the dying sunlight.

“The cup,” says Buck, and he hadn’t even thought to pause before picking up his little glass of whiskey and slugging most of it down.

“The cup,” says Garrett, “on the stele, between the carven forms of two angels: who are bulls, then, with wings, and the heads of men with great beards—not the beards of unicorns; the beards of kings: soft and black and oiled in curls and never touched by razor.” Garrett absently stroked his own white-stubbled chin. “Pay attention. Fierce and cruel; noble and divine: for these are the angels of Penitence, and of Evil.”

“Angel of Evil?” says Buck, and he coughs. The whiskey is harsh. But good; real good. Well, strong. “You mean Satan. The Devil.”

“Don’t you tell me what I mean, boy. I said Malach Ra, and I meant Malach Ra. The Angel of Evil. Good Lord works in mysterious ways, and there’s—you read your Augustine?”

Buck ducks the question by finishing off his glass and, without asking, pouring himself some more.

“Hell. Better question might be, you read at all?” Garrett snorts. “Augustine tell us in his De diversis questionibus octoginta tribus,” and he takes a deep breath after that rolling mouthful, “that, and I’m translating for your benefit, here, ‘Every visible thing in this world is put under the charge of an angel.’ Then, Paul wrote, to the Colossians: ‘Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels,’ but you might want to take notice that the two statements do not each exclude the other. It is, after all, written in the Book of Job: ‘Behold, he put no trust in his servants; and his angels he charged with folly.’” (And to himself, he—Garrett—had muttered, “‘How much less in them that dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust, which are crushed before the moth?’”)

But Buck hasn’t heard that; he’s staring off at the three raftmen dicing by the pot-bellied stove, and he’s mildly annoyed that what started off as a story about far-off places and long-ago times has turned into another dam’ sermon. With versifying, to boot.

“Anyway,” Garrett’s saying; “anyways. Pay attention. God don’t trust his angels, and he charges them with folly, but he also charges them with every visible thing in this world. So Haurvatat’s the Angel of Penitence—”

“I thought,” says Buck, “you said it was every visible thing.”

It happens so fast that his cheek is stinging and Garrett’s settling back against the bar, his weight back on his elbows, before Buck realizes he’s been slapped. “You gonna stand there and tell me, son,” says Garrett, companionably, “you ain’t never seen penitence? You actually gonna tell me you ain’t never seen evil?”

He doesn’t deck the old man. Why doesn’t he deck the old man? He tells himself it’s bad luck to hit a man of the cloth, especially one as old as this. Buck blinks, and looks away.

“You ever been bit by a copperhead?”

Buck turns back, startled. “What?” he says.

“You’re in the hills, and it’s late afternoon and you’re walking from one holler to another. You been run out the first because the wrong girl’s belly started getting too damn big and everybody knows it’s you put it to her. You got a reputation, let’s face it.

“And it’s hot and you’re tired and you sit down on a rock next to a stream to listen to it for a minute or so and maybe you were thinking of getting up to splash a handful of water down your throat but you weren’t too careful, were you? Because a mean old copperhead was sunning hisself in a coil right next to where you put your foot down, and before you know it, he’s letting you know how pissed he is. Unfortunately, like most snakes, copperheads don’t think things through too much. You, after all, has got yourself a knife, and you ain’t that much slower than him. So it all falls out: he ain’t got a head, but you got a bootful of poison. Things look to even themselves up, soon enough.

“But you know what to do, and you ain’t panicking. You rip up your pants leg and you can see the threads of black coursing up your veins and you make a big deep cross-shaped cut in the meaty part of your calf there where you can bite deep and hard. Maybe you’re chewing on some saddle leather you sometimes use when you want to smack some sense into the girl you happen to be putting it to at the time. But when the cut’s made, you spit it out and hunker down and start sucking away and it’s bright and salty on your tongue but when you start to taste that bitterness you spit it out, and you suck up another mouthful and you spit that out, and it shines black in the sunlight on the old leaves there by the stream.

“And when you’re done, you’re light-headed from the sucking and the blood leaking out of you and what little of the poison got through to your heart and your head, and it almost seems like you can see her: tall she is, and her arms are bare, her skin is white as snow and her hair is black, her lips are pale and her eyes are cold and grey. She’d look like your mother, you could remember what your mother looked like. She carries a cup, a simple cup, clay bowl, almost, with a foot, and she kneels in the dust before you and sets that cup down to catch the black blood pouring out you, and she does not waste a drop.

“So,” says Garrett. “You ever been bit by a copperhead?”

Buck, who has never been bitten by any snake, poisonous or not, says nothing.

“Because that, son, is evil. That is penitence. You have seen both, for they are visible things, and they are given into the care of angels: Haurvatat, and Malach Ra.” Garrett yanks up his little glass and throws back his whiskey in a single swallow, slamming the glass, upside down, back on the worn grey plank that serves as a bar. He’s shrugging into his old black frock coat, now, fumbling about for his scarf. “Ask yourself, son: what happened before the Lord Christ came to this vale of tears to wash us clean of our sins in his blood? Who made the cut then? Who knelt in the dust and held that cup? For sure as you’re born, someone did.” Dressed now for the bitter cold outside, Garrett grins. It is an alarming sight. “That’s what the stele in Baghdad tells us. Those of us with eyes to see, that is.” He claps Buck on the shoulder, and then says, in the same deep and cheerful tone of voice: “‘How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?’”

“What?” says Buck, dully. His cheek still stings.

“You don’t know your Scripture, son. ‘And white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said to them, that they should rest yet for a little season, until their fellow servants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be fulfilled.’ Warms my heart, that does. Maybe I ought to see you tonight.”

And Buck, who has no intention at all of attending Preacher John Garrett’s Tent Revival, watches the tall old man lumber out of the saloon, and brush past his wife, Roxy, who’s coming in, coins clinking in her fist. She heads straight for her husband, as a good wife ought to do, though Buck knows (and she knows, and every man in the room knows) that a good wife wouldn’t be caught dead in here in the first place. “Was that,” she says, her face shining, “Preacher John? Preacher John Garrett? Oh, Buck, was it?”

•

As he stood there, one—let’s call it a foot—on the first riser of the companionway up to the deck so far above, someone came up to him—had already come up to him, yes—and asked him a question. And he had answered it. And looking it over, he saw that his answer had been good. He was—just for a moment—there, in that restaurant in the European Quarter, and again the lau-yay had come up to their table, wrapped in that grimy robe, his teeth brown and ramshackle in his beaming smile as he laid his bundle on the floor at their feet, kowtowing before them, audibly knocking his forehead against the polished wood floor. He is, is he—

But he smelled the cold air wafting down the steep steps; smelled snow, diesel fumes, old ice, the chill in the air, and even as the lau-yay unwrapped his bundle, revealing an empty china bowl and two long chopsticks, he was carried back to where another him had been: snow, and old ice; woodsmoke; the hot smell of oil and glass from the lanterns, and warm canvas; and sweat, fresh and gleaming, old and sticky; food half-chewed, food spilled down the fronts of shirts, the warm round smell of egg, the yeasty tang of undercooked bread; flatulence like the scent of cows; a foundation of shit, as more than one person has stepped in it, here or there, despite how it stands out against the snow; and even, yes, there, and there, the earthy musk of women, the sharp chemical froth of men—His chief delight and favor, him for whom all these his works so wondrous he ordained—

He put one—foot, yes, that’s the best word—in front of another, and climbed up the companionway, up into the freezing arctic night, timelost and unstuck he shoulders aside the canvas and pushes Roxy ahead of him into the mass of people, Pennsylvanians, Christians, raftmen and horse-thieves and gamblers and logging-men and hardscrabble farmers and all their chorehorses and little children, in clothing too thin for the cold, eagerly awaiting the appearance of Preacher John Garrett, and the lau-yay with a flourish covered the bowl with his grimy cloth and with his chopsticks tapped the rim once, twice, thrice—

•

Why is he here, in the press of it, his monstrous hand on Roxy’s thin arm, steering her towards a bench nearer the back than the front? Why isn’t he standing up there before them all—he is, dammit, look, there he is, dressed all in black, his frock coat threadbare, his pink chin freshly shaven, his arm outstretched, his hand held above them all in a gesture of benediction, his mouth a grim flat line. Oh, he’d liked doing that, hadn’t he. Surveying the crowd. Not deigning to look at any one of them, but nonetheless he’d still their disrespectful restlessness with his flat, dark eyes. They thought he prayed, from time to time, or that the Spirit came in and essayed a first draft or two, whispering through his barely moving lips before he built up a head of steam and got to sermonizing. No: he was quoting. “‘There went a fame in Heaven,’” he’s saying now, to himself, he can read his own lips, just barely (it does help to know what he’d said), “‘that he ere long intended to create, and therein plant a generation, whom his choice regard should favor equal to the sons of Heaven...’”

But he’s most decidedly not up there, Preacher John Garrett; he’s here, Buck Claflin, sitting his ass down on a splintered wood bench next to his wife who’s quivering like to bust already, and what the hell, he figures as long as he’s here he might as well enjoy hisself, and anyway even though she’d bitched about the cold all the way over here (despite the fact that this was at her insistence; he’d even stopped there in the snow, cold leaking in over his right heel, God-damnable boot, and he’d spread his arms, grinning wide enough to split his head from side to side: “Well, hell, honey, you’re so cold, we can just go back home, I mean, this was your idea; I don’t give a good God damn...” And what might have happened had she not been so annoyed as to push on, to spite him—?), well, she’s warmed up now, shucked her coat and she’s blazing, her skin is hot under his hand, and so he pulls her to him and for once she doesn’t push away, and an armful of Roxy feels good, damn. Her tit is heavy against his side and soft and he presses her more closely to him so he can enjoy it and he grins, leering with his one good eye at the goodwife across the aisle.

Without preamble, he bellows—he, Garrett—“You are all damned.”

Shrieks. Moans.

“That’s right. That’s right. Every man jack of you is a sinner, sure as you’re a murderer, a fornicator, a heathen worshiper of idols. Every woman in this tent, sure as she was a painted whore on the steps of the temple of Babylon, tempting men with her flesh, with her dark eyes flashing coyly over her veil, sinners!”

“Oh, God!” cries someone. Someone else is weeping, loudly. They are all of them close, already; the air was charged with something that night—the very tent seems to thrum like a plucked string, humming beneath his words—shaking the tent—

“Sinners, the lot of you! Sinners. Sin is the meat you eat, and the bread; the water you drink, the air you breathe, the dust that flies up when you kick your dogs. Sin! And do you deserve any better?”

“No,” moans this person, whispers that. Women, mostly.

“Do you?” he bellows again. He throws out his hand then, a conductor signaling his chorus, the first gesture he’s made since he began, and his chorus responds: “No!” they cry, men and women both. “No, oh no. Mercy no. Good Lord, no.”

He—Buck—had not cried out anything at all. Roxy trembles in his grip, and he pulls her close, but he doesn’t say anything. He keeps an eye on this man. Angels of Evil and Penitence, indeed.

“And why should you? Why? You were the glory of creation! Crowned with surpassing glory by the good Lord hisself, you looked out from your dominion like the gods of this entire world! You were! At the sight of you the stars themselves hid their diminished heads, such was your brightness! But!” He stepped out from behind the old podium they’d dragged across the snow for him from the schoolhouse up on the hill above. “But,” he said, cantilevering himself out over them, spreading his arms, his face looming over them. “Don’t think I’m telling you this to raise. You. Up. Oh, no. Oh no. I’m telling you this so’s you get an idea of what. You. Lost. You were his favorite! The crowning glory of creation! His choice regard favored you—you!—as equals to the angels themselves! His chief delight, for whom all these works so wondrous had been ordained! You! And what did you do?”

Silence. Heavy breathing. A gasp.

“What did you do?”

“Oh, God.” “Christ merciful, merciful Christ.” “Please, oh God.” “Oh, oh...”

He stalked the front of the congregation, punctuating each step with a spat-out word: “What. Did. You. Do—” and stopped, and raised his face to the bright canvas just above his eyes—“You threw it all away!”

That sets the first of them off like a match to a powderkeg. She raises up off her bench like the powderkeg itself was just beneath her, blam! and screams at the top of her lungs, “Oh, God! Oh, God—” and keels over, sobbing. Her husband or her father or her brother or someone kneels over her and he doesn’t give a damn, Roxy’s shivering next to him and muttering something he can’t make out, and hell, you think this is hot, wait till we get to the hellfire and everlasting damnation, the terrors of the abyss, and then the soothing balm of Gilead, just wait—

People will bark like dogs—

People will speak in tongues—

People will yank their hair out—

The tent will shake—

Men will rip open their shirts and jackets, and women their blouses and chemises; children will scream, and kick, and punch; that man there will calmly unbutton his pants so his stiff thick pego bobs purple and swollen in the air and he will make a fist about it and begin to stroke, lost in his own epiphany, as if no one is watching, and no one is; that woman, and that woman there, and Roxy too, will each in their turn fly suddenly into the aisle and spin and spin, yammering madly, “Christhisglory Iamcoming Hallelujah claspmetoyou—” And Buck will leap to his feet to catch her, her bonnet having flown back off her head, bouncing against her back from the force of her whirling, and he will fold his heated dervish in his monstrous long arms and she will beat her fists against his shoulders, foam spilling from the corner of her mouth as she throws back her head, her eyes glazed, and cries, “I am born again in the Lamb’s blood!”

And Buck will carry her back, six steps, seven, to a back bench already cleared, and he will lay her on the cold bare ground, flipping up her skirts (looking up momentarily, he will catch the eyes of another man engaged in the same exact task, kneeling over his wife, his daughter, his sister, someone)—and he will unbutton his pants—

“Oh, Lord!” he will cry, will cry Preacher John Garrett, his ugly, mocking voice lost in the swelling cacophony all about him. “Oh, Lord, forgive them—they know not what they do—”

•

Tap; tap; tap; then the lau-yay whisked away the grimy cloth. The china bowl, once empty, was filled with water, and a single plump goldfish, whisking its tail, serenely bumped along the smooth, clean wall of its shallow prison.

He—no, he is not, perhaps, the best of words, but it is the one he chose, long, long ago—he stood under the harsh actinic light of the spots that lined the sides of the great ship, and he did not deign to notice the woman jerking past, her eyes staring at nothing, the sleekly heavy machinegun carried lightly in her hands. He was, after all, remembering—but remembering isn’t the right word, either; not for something so vivid, so real, so—so very much there. So ongoing. Timelost; unstuck; he is there, always there, in that White Russian restaurant as all over again the lau-yay dropped his grimy cloth back over the bowl and tapped it, and taps it again, the tock of wood on ceramic echoing dully through his wine-fogged head—how many times had he done this?—and the crowd gasped, again, as his hand swooped down, swept off the cloth, and there! the bowl was empty, dry. Polite applause, pattering, as the armed woman jerked past him in the harshly lit night, as the King’s whore, noseless, her breath buzzing behind the pink and green and gold veil that hung straight and flat from the puckered bridge between her dark eyes, leaned forward to prick his arm with the heavy Moorish dagger, as the old man, his pistol laid to one side now, pinned his shoulders with two claw-like hands and surged forward, his pelvis slapping into his buttocks with a force that, quite beyond the tearing pain (which, after all, he was used to, by now), surprised him, driving the air from his lungs in a single cry, as he stood beneath the stars on that cold, cold night and felt the pains begin, stitching along his upper arms with great, swooping dives of the needle, threading the sharp bright ache along his veins and straight into his heart. He fell to his knees in the snow and opened his arms, looking up to the cold stars above, as torches burned, as two girls ran past, barefoot, shrieking, as Dr. Liddy Canon loudly told anyone who would listen that He was the Savior, come again, as voices raised themselves raggedly in song, as he leaned his great weight against the railing over the black waters so very far below, as the metal groaned and creaked beneath his—hand, and he grinned his terrible, frightening grin, and remembered thinking, very clearly, that he would be seeing Buck, one-eyed Buck Claflin, who couldn’t carry a barrel of salt half as far as his brother, he would be seeing Buck much sooner than he’d thought. And then his heart, the heart of Preacher John Garrett, had stopped, and he’d keeled over face-down in the snow.

Tap.

Look! He’s going to do it again. He spreads newspaper on the floor, a Chinese newspaper, though the language is unimportant—it’s just to demonstrate there’s been no hanky-panky with trapdoors. He lays his dry and empty bowl on the newspaper, and grinning, holds up one brown and dirty finger. Begging your kind indulgences, most honored ladies and gentlemen. Kind indulgences are given, as the English and French and Germans and the occasional American and even a Russian or two, here and there, shush themselves and wait. He shakes out the grimy cloth with great ceremony, drapes it suddenly over the bowl. Chopsticks in hand, poised—tap; tap; tap—

First there is a goldfish. Then there is no goldfish. Then there is.

Tap.

•

They fell upon him in the woods.

Had fallen. Have. Will fall, and will keep falling, until—until—

They fall upon him in the woods, just above the frozen stretch of Sinnemahonig Creek north and east of the town. He’s walking along, trying not to think about why this man’s pego is cold, colder than the rest of him, and feels like it’s glued to his drawers, trying not to think about much of anything at all, aiming a kick at a frozen rock and discovering the hard way that the heel on the right boot is loose and leaks snow, whistling a jaunty tune, wondering at how—flat—the world is, with only one eye. He’s walking along, and they fall on him: and it’s not a sudden precipitous descent they make, clattering down the slope to his path; no—they congeal out of the shadows so suddenly it’s like they aren’t there, then—they are. The first one, anyway, unfolding himself out of the dark web of branch shadows, black on the deep blue snow. First he is here, kicking at another frozen rock, and then he is also and indisputably there, in the dim starlight glowing up from the snowdrifts, smiling, his one eye flat and black. He turns, swiveling on a loose bootheel. And he is there, leaning against a black walnut tree, picking at his teeth with a knife; he is there, collar unsprung, boots gleaming, eyepatch jauntily framed by artful tangles of oiled black hair. —No, they fall as an idea falls; hell, a whole interlocking mare’s nest of ideas, a cliff face shearing off in his head and lying in rubble at its base, leaving behind something clean and sharp and dazzling bright. He is here, and there and there and there, and he is not who he is.

Tap.

“Who,” he starts to say.

“Oh, no.”

“Not that question. Please.”

“Anything but that.”

“It’s dull.”

“It bores me.”

“Nothing bores you.”

“Hush.” It—he—lowers the knife from its mouth. His mouth. The one he should have. The one he just took, flopping over in the snow— “I don’t think that’s what it meant to ask, at all.”

“It doesn’t know?”

“Rather fundamental, really.”

“It could be confused.”

“It is confused.”

“Who,” he starts to say again, whirling as the one behind him steps closer, with a squealing crunch of snow, “who—”

“It did make the tent shake.”

“True.”

“Indeed.”

“Djessakid, you call yourselves.”

“Tent-shaker.”

“The one who makes the tent shake.”

“Who are you?” he manages to say, and then he watches his face fall.

“Oh. Oh, my fault.”

“A bad call.”

“Nothing more.”

“It is, after all, confused...”

“You are too kind.”

“Oh, indeed.”

“Too true.”

“We aren’t you, if that’s what you mean,” says the one who is now dressed all in black, his frock coat immaculately mended, his white hair sweeping majestically back from his proud, old face.

“Who would want to be you?” says the one who is now not quite as tall as he is, and inscrutably dark; the starlight leaches the violent colors from the silk cloth draped about its broad, fleshy hips.

“We are called when the tent shakes,” says the one who is young, so young, and the short sword in its hands does not tremble at all from the cold, despite the brevity of its only garment: a skirt lapped with flashing bronze.

“Brother Turtle, I think.”

“The Four Winds.”

“No—Five.”

“The Lion, or perhaps the Serpent.”

“Whatever pleases us.”

“We take what forms we like.”

“You name us as you choose.”

“We shake the tent.”

“But you make it shake.”

“Singing, you are laid upon boughs,” says the one who is now dressed in baggy trousers and a long coat that brushes the snow, a brimless cap whose red is dark in the night upon its dark curls, and a magnificent mustache beneath its magnificent nose.

“Smoke is blown upon you from the burning gifts of tobacco,” says the one who is now swathed in thick folds of deep blue wool, one arm cradling a very pregnant belly.

“You cry out to us,” says the one who is now quite small, wearing a shift of soft doeskin, its long hair gathered into two thick, glossy braids that gleam like ropes of ink.

“And the tent shakes.”

“That is who we are.”

“Sometimes.”

“When we choose.”

“It is, of course, our choice.”

“We aren’t you.”

“Who would want to be you?”

“But,” he says (the metal railing snapped under his heavy grip; the blank-faced woman turned at the sound, gun up and ready, and she opened her mouth and screamed), “but,” he says, wincing at the noise, the siren’s klaxon none of them seem to hear, “but you are...”

“It—”

“It thinks it’s funny, perhaps.”

“A joke.”

“It doesn’t see what we are.”

“I do,” he says, dropping to his knees in the snow (again). They are circling closer and closer. The one dressed all in darkling red, with a wide-brimmed red hat hiding its narrow, dapper face, kneels before him. “You are me,” he says. “All of you. All—”

“Stop it.”

“Make it stop.”

“Tell it who we are.”

“Enough.” The fingers that touch his face are as cold as anyone’s would be, on a night like this. “It says what we know is true.”

“It does not.”

“It hunts.”

“And we hunt him.”

“It eats its own. Look.”

The night is silent. Nothing moves, until the one behind him says, “Oh...”

“It is so hungry,” says the one who is now wiry, and wrapped in a thin robe, clean, though patched.

“So empty,” says the one, whose mouth has only a few white teeth.

“Wendigo,” says the one who holds a mysterious cloth-wrapped parcel in hands whose knuckles are thick whorled knots. He buries his face in his hands. His missing eye aches. His shoulders tremble, waiting.

“Oh, indeed.”

“True.”

“Wendigo...”

“After you..?”

“I couldn’t possibly.”

“You are too kind.”

“I know; I know...”

It is not until none of them has spoken for some time that he looks up. And then stands.

The forest is empty. Trees; snow; darkness. Icy air that fills his lungs and is blown out in thin clouds of chilled steam.

Sometime later, he turned and walked back to Sinnemahonig, and he burrowed so deeply into Buck Claflin that he didn’t come out for another fifty years or more.

(But he never entirely forgot, either.)

•

Someone had screamed, and he had reached out and twisted. Clearheaded—for now—he looked down to see the guard lying broken at his—feet.

She was nothing; a sac of fluids and elastic fibers hung upon a calcified frame; crowned with surpassing glory, she had looked from her sole dominion and felt like a god, at whose sight all the stars hid their diminished heads—until her rudimentary electrical control system had been easily if brutally retrained into a simple set of stimulus-response patterns. And yet—five years ago, even, he would never have dared to do what he had just done, simply because her summons disturbed his reverie.

Now?

Now, her bowl cracked, she lay on the deck, one hand flopping in the throes a final electrical spasm. Her eyes bulged; she sputtered one last breath through blubbery lips. He began to walk towards the bow of the great ship, ignoring the chattering behind his back, the sudden alarmed clamor, insistent, irrelevant.

Now he had things to do, and the ability to get them done.

•

“The child,” the girl is saying, “my child,” but wait! What’s this?

•

XI. Meditation No. 3 (De Profundis, Part 1)

Brittany—

Brittany pressed her swollen forehead against—

The column was soft, and cool. Minty fresh. Brittany pressed her forehead against it.

“Darling,” she said, and tried not to notice how quiet and hoarse her voice was, “be a dear.”

“Yes?” he said. It said.

“I know I’m a filthy mess, but I can’t seem to manage—”

“Brittany,” it said.

Light glinted off metal. She flinched, but gritted her teeth and persevered. “I can’t,” she said, quite deliberately, “seem to manage to check my stool. Is it perchance tarry and black? It’s smeared all along my legs and the floor, there; do be a sweetheart and let me—” She stopped.

“Yes?” it said.

“I—” she said. “I...”

“You’ve already said that? Yes. I know.”

“To you?” she snapped.

It—he—laughed, softly. A breathy chuckle, cheap and tawdry. “Touché, perhaps,” he said, “but a glancing blow. Your joke doesn’t work under our current arrangement. Your fingertips are wet.”

Yes, yes—that’s right. And her ankle, her leg, her lower back was killing her. Because—because all the blood was rushing to her head— And so it couldn’t be smeared all along her legs—

“Touché yourself,” she said. And tried not to notice how quiet and hoarse her voice was.

“The concern of the moment,” he said, “is how to prevent a breach.”

“In the hull?” she said.

“No,” he said. “No, no.” He waved the point of the knife thoughtfully before what were perhaps his lips, though even she could tell he was careful not to touch himself with the bare metal. Base. “It may not be necessary. You may do just fine on your own. It remains to be seen.”

“There are,” she found herself saying, “these two gentlemen.”

“Mutt and Jeff?” he said. “Hot Dog and Hamburg? Laurel and Hardy? Mouse and Man?”

“George,” she said. “George. I’m George?”

“Hugged and petted and squeezed and named, my dear. Called, rather. And you thought you were wasting time, watching all those cartoons.”

“Called?” she said, when the silence grew too long.

“Called,” he said. “Can’t you feel it? Quickening through you? Gleaming?”

“Black,” she said. “And silver. Shining.”

“Protean,” he said. “Though procrustean, as well. Mercurial. Thieves, and pilgrims; peddlers.” He was almost dancing, and the blade slipped through the air, bobbing in time with the rhythm of his words. His?

“Gypsies,” she said, “tramps—”

“—and thieves, yes. You betray yourself. Travelers.”

“The destination,” she said, thickly, “doesn’t matter.”

“It’s the destinating.”

“The traveling.”

“Of course. The play’s the thing, my dear. And it’s not the blade that kills, you know. It’s the loss of blood.”

“Fluids,” she said. “Fluids. My water broke.”

“Oh, I know. Some time ago. And yet the labor is long, and difficult... Protean, as I said, but procrustean as well. Forcing the issue. Breaking the mold. Square pegs—does it hurt?”

“Only,” she said, raising herself on her toes so she could relieve some of the tension in her arms, stretched up and over her head as they were, “only when I cha-cha.”

“You see?” he said. “You see how you can do that?”

“What?” she said, pressing her forehead against the column, wishing she didn’t have to twist her head so to keep him in sight, not liking him being behind her like this, with that knife.

“Quickening,” he said. “Protean. Procrustean. Mercurial. Hermetic.” She pressed her back against the column as his hand slid towards her through the thick, thick air, the point of the coldly burning knife sliding until it touched her, tip, right there, at the base of her throat, in the notch of her clavicle, and she just managed not to scream. “Sealed away,” he said. “Admitting nothing, not anymore. Not that you ever have. But more importantly, for our purposes, my purpose, here: not letting anything escape.”

“Please,” she said. She could feel the point of the blade burning against her bare thigh, and she did not dare to look up to see; she saw him shift his—weight, a little, on scribbled legs, felt the point scrape along her skin, closer and closer, and she closed her eyes and thought what might have been a prayer, oh please, please, “Please,” she said, aloud, again, “please let me go...”

“I thought about it,” he said, stepping back. “I did; thought long and hard. I came here, in fact, to let you go. I’d thought it was the next step to be taken. But imagine my surprise, once I’d cut through wards never meant to hold the likes of you, or me, imagine how I felt when I stepped through to see—” He spread his jumping, twitching arms wide, taking it all in. “This.”

“Please,” she said, and she was, perhaps, gratified to feel a little anger surging through her. She still had that. Didn’t she. “Please. Just—cut me down. Let me go. I’ll—” She swallowed, bent forward, at the waist, to let her weight dangle from her wrists a moment, which still hurt, but differently. “I’ll do anything.”

He—blinked. “I’m sorry. It’s just so fascinating to watch you do that. Topologically, of course, nothing’s changed at all, which is why I think they haven’t noticed; then, they are quite dim. They didn’t even notice they’d grabbed the wrong girl.”

“Hamburger? And Hot Dog?” she said.

“Never send a lunch meat to do a man’s job. Why on earth would I want you now, dear? When first we met, you were full of fire. You bit. And now?” He was behind her, somehow—she faced the column, her arms wrapped around it—the blade, she could feel it, a freezing presence hovering over the small of her back. “You beg,” he said. “You’d gladly pay me, Tuesday... All that’s changed is a few welts, contusions, cuts and bruises, and a mild case of stir-craziness. That, and I’ve found myself a toy.”

He pulled the blade away from her thigh, stepped back, and she hated herself for the tears of relief that seeped over the bridge of her nose, tangling in her eyebrows, sliding along her forehead to catch in her dangling hair. So she said, “You always were most at home with trivial things.”

He might have smiled. “Oh,” he said, “but this, this is most decidedly not trivial. The cigar, I’m afraid, will have to go to someone else. And even if I did want you, now, as you are, like this, the somewhat sticky fact of the matter is we are no longer colleagues, you and I.”

“But,” she said, the word snapped off, spat forth, “but—but Christian told me,” she said. "He was warned. I have it on the best authority, you silly little—man: I am in league with the forces of Darkness.” She jangled her handcuffs—wherever the hell they were—against the column. “So let me the fuck go.”

And he, he said nothing.

She blinked.

“Oh,” she said.

“I bear,” he said, “in case you hadn’t noticed, the Blade of Ashura.”

“Which,” she said, “I also note, you can’t touch directly.”

“Details.”

“You’re,” she said, “not so much turning your coat... as wearing it inside-out, as you pass the crossroads by the dark of the moon..?”

“Where can I go,” he said, sliding the blade through the thick, thick air, bobbing in weaving in time with his sing-song words, “poor drifter in this world? Where will my song take me, child that I am? Evening is my father and dusk my nurse; the dark night is my keeper and dawn my rouser.”

“I have nothing but the wind to rely on,” she said, though she didn’t know why, or how. “I shall keep my hands from play, and close my mouth to song.”

“Now that’s a shame,” he said. “Because, you see, the play’s the thing.”

“It’s the journey that matters,” she said. “Not journey’s end.”

“Travelers,” he said. “Not arrivers. Though the labor be long, and difficult...” He leaned in, kneeling, so that he could whisper in her ear. “There is hope for us all.”

“How?” she said. “Why?”

But he said nothing, and try as she might, leaning back from the pillar so she could stretch her head over her right shoulder, then her left, seeing almost all of the room but the bit right in front of her, blocked by the thick, soft, industrial mint pillar, she could not see him, at all.

Gone.

“Drug reaction,” she said to herself, leaning her head back against the pillar—

Fuck.

How in God’s name am I doing that?

And why?

•

And at the end of the fifth day Jeff came to her room alone. Brittany remained silent.

He unchained her wrists and said, “Please to follow me.”

And she did.

•

XII. Offertory (De Profundis, Part 2)

Captain McConnell walked over to the fax machine and picked up the flimsy, curling sheet of thermal paper that had just come through. On it was a list of forty-one names, written in General Cortlee’s round, sprawling hand. Eight of those names were circled.

“I don’t understand,” she said into the phone. “How can they be sure the person they’re looking for is one of these eight? These can’t be the only people in town haven’t been tested yet.” Of course, she had a pretty good inkling how. And she didn’t like it, not one bit.

“Apparently,” said General Cortlee’s voice, made even more dry and sardonic by the flattening effect of the scrambler, “we neither of us need to know that piece of information.”

“I see,” said McConnell.

“You want it in writing?” said Cortlee. “Not that I’d blame you at all, Captain. I’m covering my ass, you’d best believe.”

“Yes,” she said, after a deep breath. “That’d be best. I’ll get things rolling in the meantime, but I would appreciate that, General.”

“Done deal,” said Cortlee, who then abruptly—as was his wont—hung up.

McConnell scanned over the list again, committing the eight names to memory. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out this was Big Boy stuff, black budget CIA or NSA or God alone knows. And it didn’t take a General to point out that having her orders in writing would do absolutely jack shit for ass coverage.

She methodically wadded up the slick thermal paper and dropped it in on the tray that held the last crumbs of her sandwich. The she fished out her lighter, embossed with her battalion’s red bull logo, and flicked it open, lighting it offhandedly with her thumb and touching the flame to the fax. It burned quickly, leaving tendrils of thick black smoke and very little ash.

She picked up her field phone and punched four digits into it and stared out at the thickening snowfall as she listened to it ring twice.

“Good evening, C Company Field,” said the soldier on the other end. “How may we help you?”

“This is Captain McConnell. Get Lieutenant Smythe in my office, a-sap.”

“Yessir,” said the soldier.

•

(continued)

•

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