The unveiling, p.19
The Unveiling, page 19
“I’ll see what’s up,” she said.
The tandem was a few feet off the ground. The man was gripping his paddle. Though she’d watched it happen, she couldn’t figure out how the boat had gotten wedged so tightly in the rocks. Gingerly she reached out and touched the man’s shoulder.
“Hey there,” she said. She heard herself channeling her inner Grande Dame. “Fancy meeting you here.” When he turned and faced her, she stifled a scream.
Blood stained the front of his dry suit like a bright red bib. Then he grinned, his face contorting in a terrible rictus. His mouth glistened like a clown’s, red and dripping.
She wanted to look away but couldn’t. An image of a skating rink flashed in her mind. Three little fingers lying severed on the ice.
The man was shivering, his front teeth chipped all to hell. Somewhere between pushing off from the Yegorov and now the man’s upper incisors had completely shattered. She tried not to show her revulsion. What was left of his mouth gleamed like a vampire’s. Little white shards of bone poking from the gums. His bottom lip was completely shredded where he had chewed his own mouth to bits.
“Meeting you here meeting you here,” the man recited. The same affectless tone his daughter would’ve used. It was clear he was insane. A mental link had been severed. He turned his gaze fully on Striker, both eyes salt white. “Hand it here, wee one. It’s fur yer own gude,” he growled. Suddenly the sparkling air smelled like an outhouse, the rocks
where the man was standing on the shore. His two front teeth were chipped, his lip cut, but other than that, he seemed okay, mostly dead tired, the front of his dry suit yellow and spotless. Nearby the kayak sat beached several feet above the tideline. Having a boat on this side of the island couldn’t hurt any. From everything she’d ever heard, it was never a bad idea to have multiple escape routes just in case. Only thing was, Striker didn’t recall carrying it there or helping the man out of it.
“Come on, we gotta go,” Anders called.
The teen was standing next to Hector, the urgency front and center in their voice. Striker realized the kid was trying not to panic. She looked down at her hands. Between her palms she was gripping a large rock. What had Dark Striker intended to do with it? Slowly she bent down and placed it back on the ground.
“What’s the hurry?” she asked as she ambled over to where the two were standing.
“Are you for real?” said Anders. The kid didn’t wait for an answer. They turned and began hurrying back toward the volcano, one arm tight around their charge. “We’ve been through this,” they called over their shoulder. “The guy’s sopping wet. He must have fallen out of his boat.”
What, thought Striker. Percy said you could only last fifteen minutes max in water this cold. How was this guy still standing?
The skin on the back of her neck began to itch. She glanced back at the cluster of rocks where the kayak had been pinned, expecting to see the little girl with the fat gray rat balled up on her shoulder. For an instant in the shimmering mist, something did seem to be staring her way. It was the right size to be a child. She was about to shout to the others that she’d found Lucy when the mist thinned. She stood staring, waiting for the object to transform, reveal its true nature. But it was nothing more than one of the stones that had trapped the boat. She turned and rushed to catch up with the others.
Neither she nor Anders asked Hector about his daughter. It wasn’t the time for questions. They had to get him back to the cabin, set him up by the vent with a bowl of steaming-hot broth, let him rest. Hector was stiff but he could walk. The guy moved as if bearing a heavy box on his back, hunched like he wasn’t sure he was still alive. If you thought about it, he was carrying a tremendous burden. Striker imagined him and Bobbi Sue standing face-to-face like two mirrors, the grief infinite between them.
They were almost back up to the top of the volcano when she spotted a trail of footprints winding around a bend. She wasn’t surprised when Anders and Hector didn’t notice.
“I need to make a pit stop,” she said. She raised an eyebrow at Anders. “You got this?”
The teen eyed her warily but nodded. Before the two of them disappeared from view, she heard Anders say, “We gotta get rescued soon. Everyone’s falling apart.”
Striker turned and followed the prints through the sparkling fog. They looked like small hands had made them, the right hand missing several fingers. Instead of going straight up the volcano, the trail wound around the cone. Maybe they would take her back to the scene of the crime where Kevin had brained his wife. Eagerly she trudged along, wondering what time it was, how many meals she’d missed, what her friends were doing for Christmas back in the city. Overhead the sun sat in its usual spot.
The trail ended by a large boulder. Something was propped up against it. Its face pale and bloodless. The back of its head not visible. Its eyes were closed but Striker knew it wasn’t dead dead. How it got there she couldn’t imagine. The snow around the spot remained fresh and powdery.
“What do you want?” she whispered.
Taylor the Tech Titan opened her salt-white eyes. “Nice to see you too,” she said. Her voice had dropped several octaves. Her red hair blazed, the color of fresh blood. “I want what you want. αηο θανειν θελω.”
Striker couldn’t tell what language it was, but she knew it was ancient. Wasn’t that what being dead was all about? Instant irrelevancy. Walking the earth in a space beyond human understanding. Speaking in riddles. Regretting what you’d done with your life. A tableau flashed in her mind of a woman perched in an iron cage, the woman older than time itself, a group of young boys gathered around to gawk.
“So what’s it gonna be?” asked Taylor. “You or them?”
Something fluttered down out of the sky and landed on Taylor’s shoulder. Its missing eye as if someone had taken a red-hot poker and cauterized the place where the eye had been. Taylor reached up and stroked the bird’s dirty wings. She grinned. A dark gap winked between her front teeth. She stuck her tongue in the space, lewdly wriggling it in and out.
“How long you been here?” said Striker.
“I knew you before you were,” said Taylor. “And don’t bother sending Kevin down. I think I can manage.” Her smile as if gouged in her face. “Though do ask him what he’s toting around in that dry bag of his, if it makes him feel like a man.”
“I try not to get involved in other people’s relationships,” said Striker.
“Don’t bullshit me, girlie,” Taylor sneered. “Really. Don’t.” She seemed like she might stand up.
“Okay okay.” Striker already knew what the answer would be, but all the same she had to try. “Is it really me or them?”
Taylor shook her head and clucked her teeth. “You gotta ask?”
“It’s just bizarre is all,” said Striker. “I see a little bit of me in each one.”
“There’s the problem,” said Taylor. “You never kept enough of you for yourself.”
Striker hated to admit it, but it was probably an apt diagnosis. Still, her modus operandi couldn’t be that bad. After all, she was the one who’d made it out alive.
“Is this about revenge?” she whispered.
It was the one-eyed bird who fielded this one. Its voice filling her head like the song inside a seashell.
Baby, this is about redemption.
Something landed on her forehead. When had it started snowing? It was really coming down, flakes the size of quarters. The sun was out, not a cloud in the sky, the day bright as a movie set.
Striker rubbed her eyes with the tips of her fingers. She gazed up into the blue. She hadn’t known such a thing was possible.
It sat shining in the sky, its colors sharp enough to touch. She knew it was for her eyes only.
Why not? It was Christmas Eve. Showtime. Tomorrow she’d be
gave the cabin door a good, hard yank, but the dang thing wouldn’t budge. Shizer. Bits of rust flaked off as she jiggled the ancient bolt. Okay then. This time she wrapped both hands around the bar and pulled.
It was like tugging on a thousand-year-old redwood.
Couldn’t the others hear her struggling out there, or had everyone skipped town on her again? She was about to walk around and slip in through the window when she heard the inner bolt slide out of its catch. The door creaked open. She thought of the mausoleum she’d encountered out on the ocean, the ice like a crypt.
The Baron filled the doorway. His face was puffy, his coloring off, but it was probably just from the geothermal radiance seeping up through the floorboards.
“We’re hundreds of miles beyond nowheresville,” she said as she entered. “Why is there a lock on both sides?”
“Keep out the riffraff,” said the Baron.
“Then why are you here?” she retorted.
The door blew shut. She could hardly breathe. Did no one else notice?
Everywhere the air shimmered. Faint shapes like silvery clouds hovered around each of the survivors though the glow haloing Anders remained faint. The clearest glintings were huddled around la Grande Dame, the shimmerings thronging the old woman like mosquitoes. Though featureless, one seemed to tower a full head taller than the rest.
Striker closed her eyes, overwhelmed by the stifling sense of bodies packed in tight spaces. It’s just an illusion, she told herself. Back on the Yegorov, a lecturer had explained how a sun dog forms when clouds filled with ice crystals float close to the earth, creating a ring around the sun. Antarctica is the land of illusion, the lecturer had concluded. All this endless white tricks the eye.
Striker took a deep breath.
When she looked again, the glintings were gone.
The way the group had arranged themselves on the furniture reminded her of the cover of that old board game Clue. Anders at the table with their nose in a book. Bobbi Sue by the vent mindlessly stirring the pots. Kevin swinging in a hammock, the thing sagging where his flabby ass brushed the ground, both dry bags tucked in tight beside him, a pair of rubber teddy bears. The Baron propped up on one of the beds, cleaning out what appeared to be an old pipe. The Dame in the room’s only armchair, Vadim looming behind her and furiously stroking her neck.
And the newest member of the band was there too. The man she and Anders had rescued from the shifting tides. Lucy’s dad. The brown one. Hector with his mouth full of rubble, or was it just his two front teeth? A sour odor wafted from where he lay shivering under a mound of blankets, the smell a mixture of mildew and an acridness Striker associated with fear.
“Where’ve you been?” asked la Grande Dame.
“Nice to see you too,” said Striker. She was still carrying the walking stick Anders had handed her before they’d hiked down the volcano to the far shore. She leaned it up in the corner with its twin, careful to turn the dark and murderous dent toward the wall. “Anyone notice the rainbow?”
“Rainbow?” scoffed the Dame.
“I guess technically it’s a snowbow,” said Striker. “It’s coming down pretty hard. Look at me. I’m covered in—”
She glanced down at her arms, but the sleeves of her Burberry were bone-dry.
In the silence, Vadim continued stroking the anterior muscles in the Dame’s neck, running his fingers up and down the sides of her throat as if stropping a razor. Suddenly he grabbed a fistful of the old woman’s hair and wrenched her head, the sound like wood cracking.
“Nostrovia, darling,” the Dame sighed, patting both his hands where they lay on her shoulders.
“Yes, thanks muchly, young feller,” said the Baron without looking up from his pipe. “Janey needed her a good adjusting.”
La Grande Dame ran a jeweled finger over Vadim’s knuckles, the emerald big as a scarab. “Anna and Hector came back ages ago,” she said in a slow, thick voice. Sheesh, why couldn’t the old girl get the kid’s name right? “So I’ll ask one more time.” She pitched her voice light and kittenish, which only intensified its sinister undertone. “Veronique,” cooed the Dame, “what have you been up to?”
Striker decided the best defense was a good offense. She pointed to the bed where Hector lay wheezing. “And while Anders and I were out rescuing him, what were you doing?” She toggled a finger back and forth between the Dame and Vadim. The memory was still fresh in her mind of the empty grotto, the two of them nowhere in sight.
“I was hunter-gathering with Sarah,” said Vadim proudly. At the mention of her name, Bobbi Sue looked up and blinked. “We work up big appetite bringing home the bacons for dinner.”
Dinner? Striker glanced at her watch. 12:14 p.m. “Anyone know what time it is?” she asked, already fearing the answer.
“Almost seven,” said Bobbi Sue. Her voice was small and factual, the voice of a woman committed to keeping her distance from something painful.
“No it’s not,” said Kevin, struggling to get out of his hammock. “It’s a little before midnight.”
“Then why are we all wide awake?” asked Anders.
“Adrenaline,” said Kevin. He gave up and sank back down, the fabric groaning as he moved.
“Doesn’t anybody have a watch that’s working?” asked Striker. She turned to the Baron. “You there. Isn’t your Rolex analog?”
“Mine stopped telling time at a quarter past noon,” he said, holding his wrist out for proof.
“Rolexes suck,” muttered Kevin.
“So said the man who couldn’t afford one,” replied the Baron.
“They’re like diamonds, just for show,” said Kevin. “Everyone with half a brain knows they’re not worth the money.”
“Yeah but what time is it really?” said Striker, trying to move things along.
“Quality knows quality,” the Baron replied.
“What does big friend sun say?” said Vadim.
“We’re a couple of days out from the summer solstice in freaking Antarctica,” said Kevin. “The sun hasn’t moved all damn day.”
“What about the tides?” asked the Baron.
“Yeah,” said Kevin. He turned to Vadim. “You’re supposed to be a sailor. Enlighten us.”
“Tide shifts all over planet,” said Vadim, still focused on the Dame’s neck. “You need chart to read them. You need reference point. You have reference point?”
“I’m pretty good with time,” said Anders. “In school, each period’s like fifty minutes. I got a feel for it. I think it’s like nine o’clock–ish.”
“It’s Christmas morning,” rasped Hector from his nest of blankets.
Outside the windows the sky gleamed clean and white like newly washed linens. What if they were all correct? Didn’t modern physics teach that time and space were now optional, some unlucky cat trapped in a box both alive and dead? The faint stench of rotten meat drifted through the room. Or was it just the odor of feverish Hector wallowing in a heap of hundred-year-old blankets?
“For Chrissake let’s just open the gifts like the kid wants and then hit the hay,” said Kevin.
“Gifts?” said Striker.
“Santa is big secret.” Vadim held up a tiny piece of paper with something scrawled on it, then crammed it in his mouth and started chewing.
“Hey!” said Anders. “You were supposed to label your present with that.”
Vadim shrugged. He kept his eyes on Striker. “Santa says you are big naughty girl,” he said.
“Second that,” said the Baron. From a small bag he poured some dark clumps in the bowl of his pipe and lit a match. Striker watched as he sucked rapidly on the mouthpiece. A thin braid of smoke curled up from the chamber. Instantly his eyes slitted. “Splendid,” he slurred. He lay back and blew a gray ring up toward the ceiling.
Didn’t his mama ever teach him not to smoke in bed?
Striker could smell it. Incredible. A hundred years old and it still had the same skunkiness to it. The Baron sat back up and held out the pipe. She didn’t even have to ask. Game knows game. Why not? She could use a good fake laugh, everything temporarily hilarious. The only thing she feared was the terrible hunger that would inevitably arise, and the fact that there would be nothing to satisfy it when it did.
She took the pipe in both hands and inhaled down to the tips of her toes. Instantly the dread that had been massing in her chest began to slow. She was about to hand back the pipe and thank him for playing nicely with others when he turned to face her.
Both his eyes burned salt white. He put a hand to his ear. “What was that now, dearie?” he asked.
Striker found her voice. “Danke schoen,” she whispered. She had never seen him without his old-man sunglasses. Each pupil veiled with a pearly film. They were cataracts. His cloudy eyes made him look like a seer, someone with knowledge of the deeper truths of life.
He smiled and went back to staring vacantly into the corner. She followed his gaze across the room. Her eyes landed on the walking stick. Hadn’t she positioned it so that the dent in the wood was facing the wall? Even from where she was standing, it was plain as day.
Something dark and viscous was dripping from the dent and running down the wood. Holy shit, she thought. Can a piece of wood form a stigmata?
Of course we can, said the Walking Stick. When we crucified our Lord, we were forever stained with His blood.
Shizer.
Striker’s inner radar pinged hard, the paranoia already ramping up. You’d think she would’ve learned her lesson three years back from that second location setup in Portland. Never get stoned around white people. It was going to be a long, pale night.
They were seated around the table. Striker wondered how many people had sat in this very spot, in the cloying light their faces grayed like overcooked meat. Amazingly, the hundred-year-old matches still sparked up at first strike, the room strewn with candles. She ran a finger back and forth through the tip of a flame. Every time there should be pain, there was nothing. With each swipe she left her finger in the fire a little longer, hoping to feel something, anything.
