Council of Peacocks (39 page)

“As old as you are, Wisdom, you should know
something about women by now.”

Wisdom cupped her face with his hand. “No one
could ever take your place.”

Echo leaned into his touch and closed her
eyes. “What are you going to do about the boy, Wisdom? Are you
planning a visit tonight in the Dreaming?”

Wisdom reached his free hand down between her
thighs. “Assuming you don’t wear me out, yes. If things go badly
tomorrow, tonight may be our last night together. Are you finished
talking now?”

Echo answered with a moan.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Josh sat on a tiled floor, cross-legged. He
played Jacks with Tommy Delonki, vaguely aware that something was
not quite right. He stared at Tommy for quite some time before it
hit him.

“You’re dead,” he said. Yet he saw Tommy, 12
years old, dressed in the
Star Wars
pajamas he wore that
night when the Edimmu came for him. Josh was dressed in blue jeans
and a black t-shirt but he was the right age: 20.

“I’m dreaming aren’t I?”

Tommy smiled and bounced the pink ball
against the tiled floor. In a single swoop he gathered up three
jacks.

Josh looked around. They sat in the middle of
the Eaton Center. The mall was deserted, even though the bright
lights that shone through the glass ceiling showed it was the
middle of the day. The Canadian Geese sculptures slowly flapped
their wings, flying but going nowhere.

“You want to get away from it, don’t you?”
Tommy bounced the ball again and took four jacks.

“Get away from what?” Josh felt a chill
against his chest. He looked down and saw he was naked to the
waist. He wore only the pair of plaid Joe Boxer bottoms his mother
had bought in New York, only they were now big enough for his adult
body.

“Do you know why you’re here?” Tommy threw
the ball over his shoulder and it bounced away into the distance.
With each bounce the light around them dimmed. By the time the ball
stopped, there was almost no light coming down from above.

“What do you mean? In Toronto? I do not know.
Didn’t we come here on a school trip in grade 8?”

“Yep. We got to share a room. You, me and
that Brian guy. I never liked him, you know. He used to call me a
nerd. Made fun of me a lot. Do you remember what happened
here?”

“Um…”

“Think, Josh. Don’t you remember that guy you
saw? The one that made you run back onto the bus? It was outside
the ROM. Do you remember now?”

Suddenly the Eaton Center was gone. Josh
stood beside Tommy on a street corner. Cars drove by at turtle
speed and a cold wind blew his hair. On the opposite side of the
street, a steady flow of people stalked up and down the sidewalk.
Then his eyes fell on a figure standing as still as a monument. A
tall dark man dressed in a red suit.

“Wisdom.” Josh put a hand over his mouth,
confused. The wind picked up. The cars and the other people
disappeared. Suddenly it was just him, Tommy and Wisdom. “I saw him
and I knew him. Knew what he was. And it scared me. That’s why I
ran back to the bus.”

“How exactly did you know me?”

Josh looked to his left. There was Wisdom.
This one was not dressed in red. He wore a long charcoal grey robe
that swirled in and out of the shadows like oil in water. His
forehead shone lightly, almost like a halo hung around his head. He
seemed much more solid than anything else in the dream.

“How…?” He took a step toward the new Wisdom.
The city slowly faded away until it was little more than mist.

“Jessica isn’t the only one who can pop into
people’s heads, Josh. I thought it was time for us to have a little
conversation, the kind best had away from the others.”

“You tried to kill my father.” Josh found he
had a sword in his hand. It glowed like a lightsaber. Heat and
strength ran through his body as he tightened his grip on the
hilt.

Wisdom glanced at the sword but did not seem
threatened by it. “I’ve killed a lot of people in my life, Josh,
some for a lot less reason than I had to kill your father. I can
apologize for it, if it would make you feel better. Sorry. Now can
we focus on the matter at hand? How exactly did you know who I was?
If I am reading the situation right, you were about 12 years old,
right? That would place this little memory about four years before
Lebanon. That would be about three years before I was aware of your
father and how his little gang was getting in my way. I’m not used
to being in the dark. So, how did you know me?”

Josh shook his head. He looked down at his
hand. The sword was gone. “I don’t know. There is so much I don’t
know. Can you help me remember? Like Jessica did?”

“That’s why I’m here. Just make sure you’re
able to deal with whatever we find. I don’t want to go through this
and have you wake up in the middle of it because it is too scary.
Are you ready?”

Josh looked back at the misty figure of
Wisdom from his memory and nodded.

“Then follow me.”

Wisdom pointed to the left, toward a
red-painted wooden door with a shiny blood-red doorknob. He
motioned Josh to open it. Josh looked down and saw that he was
dressed in a set of black robes similar to the ones Wisdom wore.
Everything seemed much more real than a dream. He could almost hear
himself breathing. He walked over to the door, turned the knob and
pushed. It opened to Tommy Delonki’s room. He saw the scene Jessica
had helped him remember. There was Tommy on the bed. Over by the
closet was the 12-year-old version of himself pointing a finger up
at the Edimmu. Nothing moved. It was like walking into a wax
museum.

“Now this is different,” Wisdom said. “The
way they are looking at you. I haven’t seen that expression on an
Edimmu since I was a child. I’d almost think…”

“They loved me.” Josh knelt down and studied
the frozen face of his memory-self. “I felt it. They cared about
me, like I was a nephew or something. How is this possible, Wisdom?
How can a person block this much stuff out of their mind? Until a
few days ago, I thought I knew everything there was to know about
myself. Now it turns out it was all a huge lie.”

“And how would you have gone about the
day-to-day routine of your life if you knew all this? Would a
12-year-old boy really be able to focus on his schoolwork if he
knew he was pals with the monsters that came out of the closet at
night? It’s one of the interesting things about the human mind: its
capacity to dis-remember is almost as great as its ability to store
things. Humans block out much more prosaic memories than this.
Rape, murder, adultery. It’s obvious, to me anyway, that you – or
at least a part of you – decided not to remember certain aspects of
your life because it did not fit in with what you thought your life
should be. So let’s not focus on the ‘whys’ or the ‘hows’ of you
not remembering. For now, let’s focus on the ‘what’. Shall we see
what’s on the other side of that closet?”

Josh felt his head swim. The images around
him became foggy and distorted in a blur of motion. Then they
snapped back into place even more solid than before.

“Focus, now, Josh. I have a bit of control
over what’s going on here, but if you are going to lose it, we
might as well stop right now. We haven’t even seen the fun stuff
yet.”

“I can hardly wait.” Josh maneuvered his body
around the frozen memory of himself and the Edimmu and walked into
the closet. Whatever he had expected, he found something else.

Instead of clothes hanging from hooks or toys
scattered like landmines on the floor, he found an entrance to a
cave. He stepped past the threshold and looked back at Tommy’s
room. It looked so bright and human compared to where he was now.
The cavern floor was smooth and grey, covered with dirt and
pebbles, but the walls were sharp and jagged. Stalagmites jutted
down like teeth while the rocky wall reached out toward him like
claws and barbed wire. The ceiling was only about 12 feet from the
ground, and the cave was no more than 6 feet wide. It left him
feeling claustrophobic, as if he was literally walking through an
esophagus and into the belly of the beast.

“Well, I didn’t expect us to get here so
quickly.” Wisdom still stood at the threshold. He surveyed the
cave, hands on hips.

“Where is here?”

“Nowhere on Earth.” Wisdom stepped forward
and motioned for Josh to walk with him. They moved away from the
door, deeper into the cave. Josh had to duck several times to avoid
the sharp teeth hanging from the ceiling. “Some call this place
Axeinus. Others call it the Black Sea. You could call it a prison
if you want. Close enough for our purposes. Remember Elaine telling
you about the Orpheans, the demons that made you all Anomalies?
This is where they live.”

Josh felt a shiver run through him. The
knowledge that he could feel something at all, even though this was
supposed to be a dream, made him feel all the more vulnerable.

“But…”

“Yeah, I know. There’s not supposed to be a
connection between the Edimmu and the Orpheans. If anything, given
their past, they should be mortal enemies, not in bed with each
other. But what I’m most curious about is how you, a human, found
your way here. We would only be here if you had a memory of this
place, a dimension where no physical being should be able to
go.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means my father was right. I am an idiot.
Someone changed the rules of the game and I know nothing about
it.”

For Josh, it felt like they wandered through
the dark cave for hours. Like a normal dream, reality moved in a
strange way. His movements felt doubly removed – more like watching
stop action photos than a movie of himself. Each footstep was a
moment in time placed side-by-side with the others without any
sense of continuity. It was impossible for him to judge the
distance they travelled. At times, Josh was certain they were
spiraling downwards or walking sideways even though the path before
them continued to move in a straight line.

Eventually the air in the cave grew
brighter.

“There’s something up ahead.”

Wisdom nodded. “Let’s hope it’s an
answer.”

Abruptly, the cave ended. They stood on a
cliff at the edge of a large cavernous valley. The ceiling rose
high above Josh, disappearing into the shadows. The ground dropped
sharply at least forty feet to the floor of a vast mechanized area
that reminded Josh of a factory. The valley spread out as far as he
could see in all directions. He also noticed they were no longer
alone. Hundreds of workers moved about on the floor below. He was
so overwhelmed by the numbers that it took him several moments to
realize the workers were not human. Most of the creatures had
horns, and a few had tails. Aside from the grey overalls they wore,
the workers had almost nothing else in common. Some had blood-red
skin while others looked like solid shadows, animated patches of
night sky moving among the machines. There were also pockets of
Edimmu, some in their angelic disguise – all blond hair and
white-winged majesty – but the majority were in their natural
reptilian form. Their black wings hung limp on their backs. Several
flew or hovered near pipes that ran along the ceiling. Most of the
valley floor was filled with conveyor belts and robotics, large
metallic arms moving metal parts from one belt to another, streams
of sparks where mechanical devices welded objects together. He
followed the flow of the assembly line until his eyes fell on
something that looked like flesh.

“What the hell is that?” Josh saw patches of
red that glistened like raw meat covered in blood stretching for
yards. At the edge of each patch was a row of metal rings and thick
wires.

“You’re looking at it too closely,” Wisdom
said. Something in the tone of his voice made Josh shiver. He
glanced at Wisdom and saw the man’s lower lip quiver slightly. “If
you keep looking only at the parts, you’ll never see the big
picture. That’s what Propates meant. I have been so stupid. Look
higher up and take in the whole thing at once.”

“The whole thing?” Josh let his eyes race to
the top of the machine. It was several kilometers above him and it
took his brain a moment to process what he was seeing. He covered
his mouth. He was not sure if he was going to scream or laugh.
“That’s … that’s not possible.”

At the top was a head. From this distance, it
was hard to judge how big it was, but he guessed it was as large as
a football stadium. Now that he acknowledged what it was, he could
easily make out the flicker of eyelashes and the slight flare of
the nostrils as it took in each breath. Even though this was a
dream, he was absolutely certain that what he was seeing actually
existed. At the same time, he knew there was no way it
could
exist. A gigantic ring of metal encircled its very-human looking
head and another ran around its chin. Large metal spears jutted out
of each of the head’s temples. These were connected to tubes that
ran down to various parts of the machinery below. There was no skin
on the face. It glistened like a recent scab, blood glistening over
blue veins and tender tissue. Josh shook his head, not wanting to
believe what he was seeing. The whole area beneath it, all the way
to the ground, was a humanoid body, also skinless and punctured
with metal tubes. Small tumors protruded from various parts of its
body, tumors that moved like dreaming eyes behind closed lids. Josh
prayed the creature did not open its eyes.

“Unless I’m mistaken,” Wisdom said, “that is
Propates. The real one. I think I’m beginning to see what’s going
on here. This might be a good time for us to leave. Technically
this is a dream but you never can tell how real things like this
are. Shall we?”

Josh was about to leave when something caught
his eye. Over by one of the machines was a figure he recognized: a
man in a tuxedo of maggots and beetles, a man with eyes that were
far too much like his own. Around the man were a number of Edimmu,
their wings tight against their backs.