XIII. The Lord’s Prayer

Twilight.

Standing well back from the immense windows overlooking the line of US Air planes waiting for takeoff, Norbert snarled at the occasional travel-rumpled business drone who seemed to express an interest in using the particular phone he was guarding and otherwise kept an eye on the lowering sky, the dying daylight, the first few idle snowflakes floating through the harsh white runway lights. Dreaming of a white Thanksgiving... It wasn’t so much that any instinct sharpened by centuries of vampiric existence whispered to him the precise moment when the bloated sun touched the horizon somewhere behind the thickening grey clouds (and somewhere behind him, too, as these windows faced more-or-less east), as it was he found himself reaching for the phone and didn’t really see any good reason not to, by then. These things must, after all, be precisely if accidentally timed. He dropped the Susan B. Anthony dollar he kept in his pocket for just such an occasion into the coin slot and, without looking, stabbed the keys ten times at random.

“Boo-boo-beep!”

Cursing, Norbert slapped at the volume control on the face of the payphone, holding the handset well away from his ear until he got the volume down to a bearable level.

“—complete your call as dialed. Please check the number, and try again...

“Boo-boo-beep! We’re sorry. We cannot complete your call as dialed. Please check the number, and try again...

“Boo-boo-beep! We’re sorry. We cannot tell you what you want to know until you tell us what that is...”

He took a deep breath. “My first question is about the town.”

“We’re sorry. We cannot answer your question as asked,” said the bland, generic pre-recorded voice, with little hitches between the words as if the phone company’s computer were rapidly assembling the phrase as it did the phone numbers it read out. “Please check your wording, and try again...”

Norbert blinked. “Uh,” he said. “My first question is about—” Herschberg was somehow out of the loop? How? Why? Think, think—work with practicalities— “is about getting to the town.”

“You will have to walk through a lot of snow.”

He waited, listening to the hiss that wasn’t exactly silence until he was pretty sure the voice wouldn’t say anything more. Uncharacteristically specific, that. Then, “My second question,” and he paused again, this time because he still wasn’t certain about whether he should ask. Not that anyone would be eavesdropping (if any phone line in the world were secure, this one was), but because the possibility was so—remote—that he felt like a fool asking about it. But it wouldn’t go away; it kept flashing behind his eyes like the gleam of light along its blade, pearly, almost milky. The look in her eyes as she’d handed it to him. What its use had set in motion. “My second question is about the knife.”

“Ex cæli,” said the voice, blandly. “From without, it comes to say I am, you are not. It drives itself within and lets what had been in out, for good or ill. It is no longer within your hands. Your hands are not the ones that hold it.”

Well. That was staggeringly useful.

And this is a mistake.

Well? What are you going to do? You’ve got one more question, why not ask it?

“My third question,” he said, “is about—about the girl, Jill.”

Girl? What the fuck? What girl? You were supposed to ask about Alastair—

“Is this,” said someone who wasn’t the voice, wasn’t computer generated, wasn’t pre-recorded, who was breathing into the phone a little fast, a little shallowly, “is this you? Elgin’s friend? I’m sorry, I can’t remember your name...”

Norbert, his knuckles whitening, couldn’t really do anything at all except think, somewhat distantly, oh no, I’m not falling for that—

“You didn’t kill me, you know. I can see how you got confused, there’s so many mes running around out there... Could you help me?”

Norbert swallowed and said nothing. I’m not falling for that one, either.

“I’m somewhere under the ice, you see, and I can’t find—I can’t find my way back up. Everything’s spinning so fast...”

Static sparked and popped and somewhere far away he could hear an echo of that annoying three-note alarm. Lines crossed. The phone that rings, once, just after midnight; those times you dial your friend just as he’s picked up the phone to call someone else. Norbert hated phones. Calling cards—now those were so much less—contingent. Automatic writing; tea leaves; mirrors— Hang up, you idiot. Why are you still listening to this, you’re open now, insecure, you’re exposed, anything could come through this wire, she’s—don’t even think her name—

“You’re not going to see the end of this, by the way. Sorry to be so direct, but it’s pretty much inevitable.” A little breathy half-laugh. “I’m not normally like this. Something about how cold it is. Makes me cranky. It’s odd, how easy it is to see things from this perspective. Even though it’s so dark I can’t see anything at all.”

His ear was cold. Very, very cold. He yanked the phone away from it and stared at it in his white, bloodless hand. The whole handset was freezing—he could see frost clouding the greenish-grey plastic—

She was saying something else he couldn’t make out.

Fuck it.

Norbert hung up the phone and peeled his hand away from it, backing away from the damn thing.

Cold—so cold—he never got cold—

He tucked his hand into his armpit, but it wasn’t until he’d gotten off the elevator at the top floor of the parking garage that it warmed up—so to speak—at all.

•

Typical, of course. The one time he wanted a specific car, a nice, big, solid automobile, the first likely prospect was fishing the keys for a tiny two-seater roadster out of his pockets.

Fuck it. A), beggars can’t be choosers, and B), when was he going to get a chance to drive one of these things again?

So Norbert unfolded himself from the shadow of the green van where he’d been lurking and walked quickly and purposefully down the line of cars, looking off towards a nonexistent car (a nice, unassuming sedan, he imagined; one of those generic American cars they usually name after a letter of the alphabet), fishing in his own pocket for a set of nonexistent keys, and when he was opposite the kid who was hefting a soft-sided bag into the small space behind the seats, Norbert took a step sideways and before the kid even knew he was there Norbert clubbed him behind the ear with his elbow and followed him down, catching him by the shoulders and slapping one hand over the kid’s mouth, bouncing his head lightly off the pavement for good measure. Norbert froze, listening.

Nothing.

“Owmfh,” said the kid, muffled by Norbert’s palm. “M’fu’?” Dazed and confused and far more puzzled than alarmed, which was a lucky break. Norbert wrenched the kid’s head around until he could catch and hold his gaze.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey.”

The kid blinked. A snowflake caught in one of his eyelashes and hung there, glinting, melting.

Norbert braced himself. Doing it this quickly was going to hurt—

•

Dazed, his head splitting, Norbert tried not to focus on all the different axes round which he seemed to be rotating. The forward momentum of the car, which seemed always on the verge of pitching over and down, like one of those abominable roller coasters at the top of its first big hill; the spin down the tightly spiraled ramp of the parking garage; the whirl of his light and fuzzy head around a point somewhere maybe a foot and a half in front of his eyes, and a little to the left; the motion of the planet, lumbering away from the howling roar of sunlight through the trembling æther, tumbling on its yearly course around that intolerable blast-furnace. He swallowed, and swallowed again, his saliva bitter and thin. The engine roared and the car lurched and damn, but that wall was awfully close, unrolling past too quickly—

“Slow,” he fought his rising gorge to say, “slow down—”

The kid did something and the car lurched and Norbert felt himself tugged forwards, dreamily, inexorably, as if he were about to melt through the dashboard and the windscreen except something—the damn seatbelt—was holding him back— He settled slowly back into the seat, feeling it fuzzily through the suit he hadn’t changed in—what—three days now? You’re going to start smelling the part, he almost muttered to himself. Walking undead. Undead. What a stupid frigging word—

The car was going much too slowly, now. “Look,” he said, hissing at the pain, “just drive out of here the way you normally would—”

The car leaped forward and tumbled around and down and end for end and if Norbert had had anything at all in his stomach he’d have puked up a puddle of lukewarm blood all over the kid’s fancy floorboard rugs. Somehow they survived and the kid even paid his parking ticket with a credit card, no problem, and then the road was, blessedly, straight.

And Norbert had nothing at all in his stomach. It had been two days—no, three—since even a sip, and airports aren’t the best places to go scrounging for vermin. He—

He squeezed his eyes shut, and rubbed his forehead into the heel of his hand.

He wasn’t playing by the rules anymore, goddammit.

“Hey,” he said. “You, uh. You want to pull over at the, the next place you can? Pull over?”

•

His belly warm and gurgling, a little, he fiddled with the radio, trying to find some news as they roared down the highway through the ever-increasing snow. Loud drums and a skittering bass startled him; he stopped long enough to listen. “And I hid in the briars out by the quick mud,” an old, cold voice was scatting, “stayin’ away from the main roads passin’ out wolf tickets downwind from the bloodhounds... And I pulled on trouble’s braids...”

He cocked an eyebrow and left it on. Settling back into his seat, he saw that a semi was wallowing through the snowfall up ahead, and the wake it was kicking up overwhelmed the little roadster’s windshield wipers.

“Um,” he said, but the kid was already doing something with a lever and his pedals and something ground and clunked and the little car felt like it was kicked forward, faster, juddering under his feet.

“Um,” he said, again. As they came abreast of the big truck everything began to feel lighter; the ride smoothed suddenly, as the gritty texture of the road rumbling up through the tires and the frame of the car to his feet on the floorboard slowly floated disconcertingly away, and it suddenly came to him that they were doing, what was it called, that thing, with water—hydroplaning. Except with snow. Next to a wall of truck.

Norbert prayed to—something that no gust of wind would suddenly suck them under those wheels to come out scrap metal and torn meat on the other side. “You’re not going to see the end of this,” she said again in his ear, and he bit off a nasty Armenian curse. And the man on the radio was still singing: “And I pulled on trouble’s braids... I spanked cold red mud where the hornet stung deep and I tossed in the ditch in a restless sleep, and I pulled on trouble’s braids...”

And then they were past and the semi flashed its brights at them in some sort of salute, and Norbert sighed, and the kid said nothing at all, just kept driving, and so Norbert stared out into the black night, the twin beams of white light carving a startlingly clearly cut chunk out of it, nothing but snowdrifts and the blurred hints of where the highway swept along, and the falling snow leaping suddenly out of the night and splashing against the windshield, and he tripped over an odd memory of Herschel lecturing on why, exactly, it was easier to see falling stars after midnight.

“Tom Waits, that was,” the disc jockey was saying, “and the snow’s still coming down, and the Weather Channel out in the lobby says we’ve got another massive storm stacked up and waiting over the Dakotas like the planes at Minneapolis-St. Paul. Looks like we’re gonna have a really white Thanksgiving. Top of the hour, this is WSFU, community radio for the Twin Cities.

“Before we move on to the next song, a word about the weird unsituation out in Herschberg. As you may recall, there were isolated reports this morning that something had happened, that the National Guard had rolled in, and since then, nothing, phone lines dead. No word at all from anyone, Army denies involvement, the state government to a man not commenting left and right.

“Just got word from a longtime listener that the construction barricades thrown up on the Herschberg off-ramp this PM are currently manned by men in olive green instead of safety orange, and they’ve got automatic rifles instead of jackhammers, and they warned her off in no uncertain terms. Ask yourselves, loyal listeners, why you aren’t hearing a word of this from the commercial media. Ask yourself why there’s a complete blackout about the people there, the students at the university, the phone lines. Ask yourself how an entire town can be yanked off the grid just like that and no one says anything at all about it...

“Welcome to the New World Order, my friends. Rest assured that we here at WSFU are gonna keep pullin’ on trouble’s braids.

“Now for our next song, by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra. A little ditty called ‘Perpetuum Mobile’.”

His first thought was that it was all for him. The snow, that is. They’d unleashed a zzygyx on him, after all. But the idea was patently absurd—if they’d wanted to stonewall him with weather, they’d have snowed out Minneapolis-St. Paul last night, so his plane would never have landed in the first place. Not try to hold him up once he’d gotten on the ground.

And the Army?

What the hell was that all about?

Not Alastair’s style, not by a long shot.

No. This had nothing to do with him. They hadn’t called out the Army and a ithaqua or six out to deal with little old him.

This was something else. Aftermath. Repercussions.

God’s blood, but this song was driving him crazy—the piano nattering that little vamp over and over and over and over again, while the strings swelled and ebbed and flowed like his head—

He snapped the radio off.

“Hey,” said the kid.

“Shut up and drive,” said Norbert.

He wasn’t sure how much longer it would hold, and he just didn’t have the strength to brush it up, keep it going as they drove along. And he sure as hell didn’t have what it took for another burst.

He had to think. Think.

Everything keeps coming back to Herschberg. (Even me.) The Manitou. Alastair. Me. (Yes. We know.) Why?

It’s something about the place. Or about someone there. Or several someones.

What’s the link with Utah?

Is there necessarily a link with Utah? Well. You went there to steal a scientist. That scientist was going to Utah, no doubt about it. And—

Fuck.

So was Janis. So had Janis been. Going to Utah.

Janis. Jill, who hadn’t been Jill. There’d been more than one Jill. The Manitou. Jack, who studied holographic molecules. Who’d been sleeping with Morowitz, your—well—professor, who had some really odd theories about medieval adolescents. The Jill, who’d set you up. The knife, that just happened to be there. The knife that was some sort of Knife, instead. Or Blade, probably. Fuck, it was probably the head of the Spear of Destiny itself, hacked off its haft and left lying around a fucking dorm room in fucking Herschberg, Minnesota, center of the goddamn universe. Your interview with Alastair, which thinking about it didn’t go any other way than the one Alastair probably had planned from the start. A puppet show for the Gaunt Man. Someone wants you dead, or out of the way, and showily. (You’re not going to see the end of this, yeah, yeah.) And it hadn’t mattered whether it had been done before you brought Jack back, or after. (Why would they try to fuck up a milk run like that? Alastair would just send somebody else...) Why? Why?

It sure as hell isn’t because of what you know, boy-oh.

If only he’d been able to get into the files, before he left.

Something I’ve done? Something I’m going to do? What did I do? It’s not Jack, no. It’s not blowing off my meetings with Morowitz, ha. It’s not telling the Chairman to go schtup himself with his Gaunt Pet. It’s not crates of silver bullets and Indonesian teak-wood stakes. (Is it?) We’d better just hope it’s something as simple as limping back into Herschberg with snow in your Guccis, because that’s about all you can manage right now.

It wasn’t, of course, any of those things. It was her, the Jill that wasn’t Jill. (You’re not going to see the end of this.) It was the knife. It was the gurgle, and the splash, it was the blood that shouldn’t have been blood, but mercuric quicksilver shimmerstuff. It was drinking one of his own, down to the dregs. It—

“Pull,” he said, thickly, “pull over! Stop! Just—oh, fuck, now!”

He slammed his shoulder against the door as the car slowed and leaned his weight against the safety belt, his retching tearing loudly over the crunch of the tires on snow. The blood was thin, but there was a lot of it still to come up, and it pretty much all did, eating black holes in the blue-white drift.

When he dragged himself back into the car, the kid, obedient-like, was holding out his red and swollen wrist.

“Just,” said Norbert, the blood and bile thick and coppery nasty at the back of his throat, “just drive. Okay? I’ll—I’ll let you know.”

•

“Where am I?” said the kid.

That, that was not a good sign.

Tooling past the Herschberg exit in a blizzard at fifteen miles an hour, Norbert didn’t say. There was, indeed, a roadblock of some sort. Bright white lights. A truck or two. People in dark uniforms which might very well have been olive green. Awfully showy. And awfully clumsy. Of course, all that attention focused on the obvious entrance made him wonder what the fuck was hidden in the woods...

“Pull over, at the next exit,” he said.

He would have liked to have had a plan, but plans, in the end, were overrated. The math was clear, and brutally simple:

You can’t kill a Manitou.

But I did kill a Manitou.

Ergo, I need that Knife.

His loyalties were clear, to himself, at least: He worked for the Community. Not whomever was chairing it at the time. Screw orders. Screw chain of command. He didn’t know what was going on? He’d scope out the field and figure it out. He didn’t like what was happening? He’d do what he could to fix it. Set things right.

Blade. Manitou. The Dark. Janis. Jack. Jill. Utah. Herschberg.

Hold these piece off to the side of the board, and gather as many others as you can, until you can start to fit them together. And then—

“Why?” said the kid.

Why? Why what? Oh. The exit. “I,” said Norbert, “am hungry—” He looked over at the kid.

He’d had an idea to make this quick and quiet and out of sight, but what the fuck.

I’m a vampire, he thought.

•

Well.

That hadn’t been the smartest thing in the world, maybe.

Of course the soldiers had sent someone to look into a suddenly stopped car a couple hundred yards down the highway from their blockade. Of course the someone had been armed.

I could probably, he thought, set off a metal detector naked.

Ow.

He would sleep, and over the course of the day most of the bullets would work themselves out to lie, black and damp, on the sheets when he woke at sunset. There were a couple of deep ones that might take a little longer. No big deal. The shredded muscle tissue, the battered calf, the wrenched shoulder that kept him from moving his right arm much at all? Sleep, and blood. In a couple days, good as new.

The suit on the other hand...

Oh, ow.

Still. He’d done something. Taken a step. Made a stand. Killed some people, but hey, omelet and eggs and all that. Well. Two definitely. Probably that third. But he was about some important business, here.

And at least he wasn’t hungry.

Fuck.

And ow.

His body aching, his thoughts bitter, his suit in tatters and his shoes full of snow that he didn’t notice, Norbert Ajax limped past the foundations of the old Wilsonsylvania town hall in the wee hours of Sunday, November 23rd, 1990 and headed down the county road which led to the Herschberg University campus center.

•

XIV. Sanctus

Honestly—I don’t remember what I intended to put here. Something flashy. But I’m running out of time and space and people are bugging me to rush the chapter out already and all my books are pretty much packed away at this point. (And then the computer melted down. —Ed.) There is this copy of Pagans in my Blood by John Magor sitting here, which is mostly incomprehensible—but he does point out that Saddam Hussein has, on more than one occasion, claimed to be the reincarnation of Nebuchadnezzar.

Otherwise, it seems to be some sort of creation myth of the Magyar people involving a diaspora from Babylon led by the brothers Magor and Hunor, who followed a white stag all the way from the Tigris and Euphrates to the Danube.

Apologies. Maybe I’ll work it up into something for next time.

Nah. Next time I’m keeping it light and simple. And quick. And really fucking short.

Holy, holy, holy, holy...

•

XV. Agnus Dei

“Well?” said Cecil. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

President Hoover folded his arms and said nothing.

“You know we can’t take much more of this,” said Cecil.

The sudden arc of Hoover’s eyebrow was a terribly eloquent we? What “we?”

“There’s enough evidence already to damn you and your little club thrice over. None of you committed any of the murders—so far as I can tell. Thus far. Though the composition of the slug removed from Albert Feinstein’s body is certainly suggestive, when viewed in the proper light...”

Hoover’s face was so impassively immobile that he didn’t even register the slithering whumpf! of paper caused by Dave’s blundering.

“Oops,” said Dave. “Sorry. I’ll just put these back. Best to keep busy.”

“Well?” said Cecil, doing his best to ignore his misbegotten partner. “Nothing..? Perhaps a beaded cop’s uniform means something to you? Part of a surplus from the Henshaw Comedy Club’s Mardi Gras benefit last year, purchased at, or so I’m told, bargain basement prices by Hiram Leavitt, owner of Second Chances and prominent member of your little club? Certainly the fact that it was found on the corpse of a homeless man who was apparently a resident of our morgue until almost a week ago, when someone apparently absconded with his body so as to dangle him from a tree branch in the woods outside my apartment?”

One of Hoover’s thick, soft hands lifted itself from the desk and stroked, once, his pursed lips, then moved languidly off to one side, fingertip brushing rhythmically against thumb for no good reason Cecil could see. His eyes never left Cecil’s, and his expression didn’t flicker a whit.

“Or perhaps what appeared to be Cardinal’s robes, similarly beaded, of similar provenance, draped art­fully around a nondescript stainless steel funerary urn? Also in the woods around Hiawatha, near an electrical substation. I am, as you might note, somewhat limited in my capacity to get up and go, but I rather imagine you’d agree with me that a team of strapping and industrious youths could, with some little effort, find two more corpses, one drowned, the other, perhaps, crushed in some fashion, dressed in green and grey outfits—or maybe green and brown...

“Or perhaps you could imagine my utter lack of surprise, then, to find, subsequently, when investigating Hiawatha Towers itself, on a shelf in the super’s storage shed—”

“My partner found,” said Dave, from somewhere on the floor behind him.

“—my partner and I found a severed human hand, in a jar full of formaldehyde. It was tough, but Doctor Shriever was able to lift a marginally useful set of prints. We’re having them checked as we speak, but I rather imagine we could get as conclusive a result by exhuming the corpse of Jeremy Slattery and determining whether his left hand had somehow, after his burial, gone missing.” Hoover scratched idly at the beachhead of hair high upon his unfurrowed pink brow. “Mister Slattery, of course, being the rather infamous pæderast—”

“Pedophile,” said Dave, cheerily.

“—pæderast who died in 1988 of autoerotic asphyxiation...”

“I suggested we look into that one,” said Dave. Cheerily.

Cecil tried not to let his mouth sour at the memory of Dave’s rather testy lecture about what became of people who couldn’t be bothered to keep obscure specifics of their own culture’s occult arcana at their fingertips. And he did quite a good job of not sidetracking down that fruitless line of inquiry which insisted on attempting to ascertain whether any of this, this watch-wyrd, Hand-of-Glory, Manitou stuff was, well—real. Or not. Piffle. Work with what you’ve got. “Grave robbery,” said Cecil, dragging this particular conversation back onto topic, and wishing he could tick the points off on his fingers as a rhetorical flourish. “Mutilation. Vandalism and theft. Obstruction of justice not only at the Federal level, with the FBI, which normally I couldn’t give a toss about, but also locally, with me. Which I tend to take personally. And while the case is perhaps circumstantial at best at the moment, I’m sure, President Hoover, that you are well aware: conspiracies never last. Someone will lose their nerve. I have no doubt a case could, in the end, be made—especially given how gung-ho the courts have been lately for law and order—for accessories after the fact, to the murder of Jill Mankevich, and the attempted murder of Jill Mankevich... Which brings us to an interesting side note, to wit:—”

“Cecil!” squawked Dave.

“—the Manitou—” said Cecil, annoyed, of course he was going to bring this up, it was their Big Gun, goddammit—

“Much,” said Hoover, “as I might enjoy professional suicide as a spectator sport, I am compelled to ask: what are the three ways?”

Cecil performed the rhetorical equivalent of galloping his horse up to the next-to-last and highest bar of the steeplechase and then tumbling head over heels into the moat before it as said horse balks at the last possible moment. “I—ah—three, I’m sorry, ways?”

“You said,” said Hoover, annoyed, “that you could damn me and my ‘little club’ thrice over. I’ve been listening to you for, what, five minutes now? And I still haven’t heard word one about the three ways. That you can damn me.”

That’s because I was speaking rhetorically, you buffoon, he thought the better of saying. “Federally,” he said, and for this, he managed to lever his arm up at the elbow past the frame of the immobility cage and thrust aloft an index finger that didn’t tremble overmuch. “Locally,” he said, adding a second finger. “And,” he said, smug at thinking so quickly on his feet, “in the court of public opinion.” Adding a third finger, making his point, and then letting his hand drop back to his side.

“Have you, then, forgotten,” said Hoover, “the press blackout?”

Cecil, who had, merely cocked an eyebrow of his own, as if to say, your point?

“AP, Rueters, Knight-Ridder, Gannett—they’ve all agreed. And without a wire lead, the networks couldn’t find a story if you gave them a Norton’s anthology and a strong pair of bifocals. You could, I imagine, go to the Weekly Examiner or, heck, the University paper; I wouldn’t do anything about that. Wouldn’t want to step on the First Amendment, after all.” He, ghoulishly, smiled. “Or take it all the way to the top! I’m sure the National Enquirer would be interested.”

Cecil blinked.

“I like you, Detective Graves—”

“Inspector,” said Cecil, automatically. “It’s, ah, an affectation upon which I’m afraid I must insist.”

“Inspector, then. I like you. So I’m going to point a few things out to you. Quickly.

“One.” He lifted a finger and held it firmly in the air. “Hiram owns the land around the Hiawatha; he’s been looking to develop it for some time. Not really any of our business what he does with some of his surplus merchandise, a flour can, and a medical dummy, but if it bugs you, you could always swear out a complaint. Take it to court, Inspector; the system does work, after all.

“Two. The matter of the hand is, I agree, a serious business. If I were Sheriff Little Bear, I’d be asking you to run a background check on the current supervisor—and, heck, go back a few years. Turnover there’s pretty high, I imagine.

“Three: you forget yourself, I think. You aren’t here to find the truth, Inspector.”

Cecil raised both eyebrows at that.

“You’ve been reading too damn much of whatever the hell it is you read. Cops are supposed to maintain order. Not find the truth. I agree with you—it’s pretty hairy out there, right now. We can’t take too much more of this. I don’t think there’s going to be to much more of it to take, though. So get out there and maintain some order. Do your job, Cecil. Hell, do it well enough, and maybe the next time you apply we’ll get around to letting you in.”

“Hey,” said Dave. “Not to bug anybody or anything, but did you want these in date order? Ascending or descending? Because I was just ordering them by size, and color, see, and—”

“I take it,” Cecil said, over his partner’s yammering, “we are dismissed?”

“Can you wheel yourself out?” said Hoover.

•

Cecil stood, carefully, oh-so-very carefully, by the open car door, preparing to climb in. The cage extended from above his head to points about his skull, there, and there, to his collarbone and clavicle, and down to just below his ribcage, an elaborate suspension armor of thin flexible bars held in place with screws and wingnuts and tension, and he tried not to think about how some of those screws were drilled straight into his bones. He couldn’t lift his arms much past his elbows and walking, really, was, as the doctor put it, contraindicated, but damned if he was going to force Little Bear to requisition the one wheelchair-accessible van available to the county just to haul him around on this—this—

This fucking farce, that’s what it is.

Dave folded the wheelchair with already-practiced snaps and heaved it into the trunk.

“What,” he said, frowning, “did Great White Man mean by ‘next time’?” he said.

Shit. “Nothing,” said Cecil.

For once, Dave just let it go. His grotesquely painted face split in a wide and what might well have been a disarming grin, were it not for the aforementioned paint. “On to the Mayor’s office? Repeat performance?”

Cecil sighed. “Bag it,” he said.

“Good,” said Dave. “Because I think we got pretty much what we were looking for.”

The hand Cecil hadn’t noticed was behind Dave’s back flipped out and this impossibly large thing came tumbling towards him. His ineffectual hands ineffectually slapped at it and managed not to catch it at all, but it was heavy, and it hurt, and it was drilled into him hard enough to fold him at the waist and knock him back into the car, clipping his cage and wrenching his head and his collarbone and his clavicles on the way down, so in the end he managed not to drop it.

“Ow—” he said.

And then he said nothing at all. It still hurt, mind, but he didn’t say anything more about it.

The—thing—was a large book. Big enough to cover most of his lap and more than a handspan thick. It had a lock, or at one time had had a lock, attached to a thick leather strap. The lock appeared to be broken. The ridiculously ornate cover proclaimed the book to be a Bible.

“Well?” said Dave, who was standing in front of him, grinning. He was at least wearing sweatpants and a vast over-sized fisherman’s sweater under his trenchcoat today. But his feet, for whatever reason, were bare.

“What the fuck is this?”

“Open it,” said Dave.

Cecil opened it, carefully, given the lack of mobility in his arms. He let the lock strap flap loose against his thigh.

It was, indeed, a Bible.

A Bible whose inside cover and flyleaves and margins were covered with a faded, brown-toned antique copperplate hand, a little shaky, with odd spikes and dips.

Cecil started flipping through pages. Handwriting scrabbled for space along every margin, overlapping the crudely cut black type. The Old Testament. The Psalms and Proverbs. The New Testament. The Epistles—

Cecil froze.

There, on the page.

In that handwriting.

His name.

—and Cecil Graves, and his colleague Dave, who will not have spent much time on our fair shores—

“What the,” said Cecil.

He tried again.

“What the,” he said.

One more time.

“Fuck is this?”

“Like it?” said Dave. He was climbing into the driver’s seat.

“Where did you get this?”

“Um. Hoover’s office? Where we just got done being? The second bookshelf over by the window? You want to climb all the way into the car there and shut your door?”

Cecil delegated those tasks to lower portions of his brain, as the rest was sufficiently boggled as to have made a hash of it. “You stole this. From Hoover.”

“Yeah,” said Dave, cheerfully.

“How?”

“Misdirection. You think it’ll be useful?”

“I,” said Cecil, “I don’t know. It’s certainly—remarkable...”

“Oh, heck, that’s nothing,” said Dave. “You should see what Little Bear’s got in her desk.”

•

XVI. Fraction: “Things Get Broken”

Over and under. Sideways and down.

The Martian laid a white key at one corner of a black square of linoleum in the middle of the black-and-white checkerboard of his kitchen.

Now and then; there and yonder.

Diagonally opposite, he laid a black key. Oppositions. Dialectics. Diametric opposition.

Like night and day, but also dusk and dawn.

Above the black key, he laid another white key.

Take the masculine. (Please.) The phallus, the lingam, the pego: it stabs, yes. But it is also enveloped.

The feminine? The vagina-yoni-cunt? It envelops. It’s also stabbed.

Diagonally opposite that white key, he laid another black key. Below the first white key.

Neither of which takes into account the fact that men can easily play the catamite. And women can use their fingers. Or knives.

“Suppose,” said the Martian.

“Oppose the supposition.

“Negate the supposition.

“Oppose the negation of the supposition.”

He (for want of a better term) was—he felt—starting to get a handle on this. The Door would open both ways, to be sure, but there was the further question: What would go through the Door?

And what would the Door go through?

Sword and pen. Cup and—saucer?

Chicken and egg; omelet and—and—

Light? And Dark? And—?

Sighing, the Martian scooped up the piano keys.

“Suppose,” he said, and he set a black key down at the corner of a white square, carefully, carefully standing it on end.

•

XVII. Pax

•

“—like a cornucopia of genius poured out with no restraint.”
—from the New York Times review of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass.

•

•