Mortality Bridge (10 page)

“I’ll probably break a lot of them.”

Crow’s feet bracket her ageless eyes. “You do that.” And she slowly drives away.

Niko is just turning toward the Black Taxi when the Checker Cab’s brakelights flash and the backup lights come on. The cab whines toward him and the brakeshoes grind as it pulls up beside him and stops. The cabbie leans out the window. “Here.” She tosses the half-empty cigarillo pack. “Who knows when you’ll get hold of any more?” Then she’s driving off again toward the tunnel and the daylit world.

Niko puts the pack in a jacket pocket and watches the receding taillights until the engine sound has faded out and the ensuing silence makes him feel despairing and marooned.

Alone now Niko feels the tension in and past the marble walls, a carnival charge in the whipcrack air. It’s more than just the presence of the monstrous dog. It’s a quality of the walls themselves. As if the living stone has absorbed the pain and fear and tyranny of all that they surround.

A small metallic ping gives Niko’s heart a little kick. Not Auguste and his irregular hammering. A distinctive sound that he’d know anywhere. The crackle of a cooling engine.

BEFORE THE WALL’S pale marble the Black Taxi looks like a shadow of itself. As if abandoned by the thing that cast it.

Niko sets the hardcase on the ground, which seems to be a flat expanse of ochre stone, and walks around the huge sedan.

It truly is magnificent. Lacquered and curved and pristine like something poured or grown. Niko looks but does not touch. Not yet, not yet. The dog behind him watching. Niko cannot help but wonder if the car itself knows he is here.

There’s barely room to sidle between the Franklin and the wall. Niko doesn’t want to touch either one. The stone wall crowded with huddled figures beautifully rendered in marble agony, damned souls locked in stone who huddle and teem and yearn toward the unfelt space denied them, groping from their anhedonic orgy for some dimly conceived paradise of emptiness. Though motionless they suggest motion, a surging wave of sculpted humanity impeccably rendered. The alabaster snarl carved on one wide-eyed face with crooked teeth. The flaring nostrils on one reaching figure always at the onset of a scream. Tension in the tendons of a reaching wrist. Niko remembers viewing Rodin sculptures at the Louvre and at the Norton Simon and remembers thinking that the figures did not look like sculpture at all but like human beings made of stone, moments frozen by a loving hand. He starts to turn away from the beautiful horrible wall, then stops.

Rodin. Auguste Rodin.

He shrugs and turns away from the basilisk stares, certain they are aware of him. As the Black Taxi seems aware of him. He cannot help but feel the car holds some kind of awful coiled potential waiting to be sprung like a warhead silent in its housing.

Something grabs his jacket when he tries to move on. He jumps back and whirls, raising an elbow against whatever holds him. A faint rip as his jacket tears.

It’s an arm. A lifesized alabaster-muscled arm, marble fingers clutching frozen, leading toward a rounded shoulder eclipsed by a contorted blindeyed face halfdrowned in unformed stone.

Niko nearly laughs. You just snagged it, buddy pal, that’s all.

Still. He didn’t remember that arm being there when he’d started walking round the car.

Niko crabwalks out from between the wall and the monolithic car. Thinking as he looks upon the Franklin’s dreaded form, What are you?

Impulsively he grips the gleaming doorhandle and then jerks away as if shocked, though he hasn’t been. The handle is unblemished. He grabs again more firmly but the door is locked.

From behind him comes a growl so deep he feels it through his shoes. Niko glances back at the gate. The dog is up on all fours now and bristling. No question it could stop a truck.

Niko tries to ignore the dog as he bends and hoods his eyes and peers into the driver’s window. The mason jar’s not there of course, but how utterly damned he truly deserved to be if it had been and he hadn’t looked.

Now the growl is multiple and Niko feels it in his chest. He straightens. Okay, we’re in for the long haul, buddy pal.

He glances again at the gate. Takes a deep breath. Turns from the dark car to face the foaming dog strangling itself as it strains forward, restrained by that divided anchor chain attached to three humanleather collars big as weightlifter’s belts. Chainlinks thick as Niko’s thumb but Niko doesn’t trust them. They’ve been there a long time. And it’s a really big dog.

Past the dog the bearded sculptor on the ladder does not heed the monster’s histrionics but continues working, mallet tapping chisel, the tinking sound subsumed now by the worldconsuming frenzy of the guardian and multiform dog.

Niko pats his jacket pocket.

The dog barks in threepart discord and trembles before Niko like a bowstring drawn and held too long. No limb of him is still. The creature angles forward at the rusted leash’s limit, struggling, bulge-eyed, straining.

Niko says Nice doggy.

At the sound of Niko’s voice the dog goes absolutely mental. Three wet snarls reveal huge fangs of yellowed ivory rotting at the gumline. Three spiked humanleather collars each a handspan wide stretch creaking.

“Got a present for you, Sparky.” From his jacket pocket Niko pulls the jumbo milkbone taken from the kitchen of his worldgone home. He waggles it chest-high, eye-level with the furious bristling dog. “You want this, boy? Huh? You like that?”

The dog’s mad eyes glaze over and foam runs down its muzzles thick as the head on a beer. It rears up on muscled hindlegs now, thrashing and gnashing like something sleeping a thousand years on the ocean floor snagged on some hapless fisherman’s marlinhook.

“Come get it, sport.” Niko fakes an underhand. “Cmon, come get it, Rex.” The dog is fighting amongst itself as if contending for the chance to rage into Niko first. The wasp-nest tension, the rising note on the vibrating air.

Six wormveined eyes bulge as the insane dog’s straining grates the massive iron plate. Above the basso profundo chorus of snarls Niko can hear metal creaking.

He underhands the jumbo milkbone to the berserk dog and white foam flies as feral jaws snap it from the heated air. Two more sets of beartrap teeth clamp on the central massive neck from either side. The hot air boils with snarls and thickens with a tang of copper.

Niko grips his hardcase and broadly rounds the brawling mass of dog to hurry to the massive gate. The moment he touches it the ancient iron grows hot in his grip. Insomniac rust smears his callused palm. There is no lock upon the gate, no handle. Niko simply pushes and it moves. No creak of hinge or metal groan. Hell’s gate opens inward.

Niko looks up at the flickering neon glow above the archway. Red-edged against it that carven figure perches smirking, pointed chin on taloned fist and exulting in its outspread wings. Horned and smiling.

Niko shifts the case to his left hand and puts his shoulder to the gate and plants his heels and puts his weight into it and the iron gate shudders wide enough to admit a man. In patches of red light the ground across the threshold looks just like the ground out here, flat and baked and cracked. What difference had he expected?

Behind him now the snarling grows to yowls. Niko slides into the opening and his hiking shoe descends upon the undisputed floor of Hell.

Niko dodges as the massive gate slams shut. He tries not to think of the dull boom of its certain closure as omenous, or apocalyptic, or containing any note of doom.

VIII.

WALKING AFTER MIDNIGHT

IT’S DARK OUT there. The crashing echo of the gate’s decisive closure is all that fills the silent void surrounding Niko. Somehow the closing of the grated gate has cut off the intermittent neon light and all is starless and bible black. Before him might be a wall or a crevasse or an endless plain for all Niko can see. For all he knows horned cartoon demons leer and taunt with pitchforks just beyond his reach.

The air is sweatshop hot.

Niko takes a tentative step forward. He can sense the wall behind him, feel its mass and presence. Horrible as the wall is, he feels a strange security knowing it is there, the only certain solid thing between himself and utter isolation in a world that’s never known a sunrise, never felt a drop of rain. Endless uncarved marble the boundary between damnation and mere mortality.

Niko turns his hand before his face as if motion might make visible what is not seen when still. He shuts his eyes then opens them and cannot tell if they are open or shut. He stands there feeling foolish and observed and tells himself he’s merely acclimating, waiting for his eyes to adjust and his kinesthetic sense to absorb the notion that his universe might as well end at his skin.

The sudden churning fear. Jesus on a snipehunt Niko what the fuck are you doing down here?

He breathes in deep and summons up an image of a weightless feather in a mason jar.

All right. Okay.

He rubs gooseflesh beneath his coatsleeved arms despite the fact that there’s no wind, no sound, no light, no sense of here or there.

Niko spent a night once in a sensory deprivation tank. A large plastic coffin sealed away from light and sound, holding amniotic saltwater on which he lay suspended and unfeeling. It was easy to believe he was the only thing in the universe, that he was himself a universe and beyond his reach lay untenanted infinity. He had lain still and waited. For what he did not know but that was the sense of it. Waiting. A sense of imminence, of always arriving. Floating soulless in the briny dark.

Then the hatch yanked open and light slammed in and there was Gus’s drunken silhouette to deliver him slapped into the world and saying Hey was that a trip or what?

Like a disembarking argonaut Niko climbed out from the tank, wet and blinking at the alien world where he had beached, beckoning oblivion abandoned.

And there was Jemma naked on the sauna bench and keeping watch outside his little world, a faint worry crease between her eyebrows as she looked at him emerging, a curling paperback book-marked by her thigh, and Niko had smiled remembering why he’d come back to the world and why he always would.

Now in sultry darkness with his back against the wall to end all walls he blinks and catlike shakes his head. It had been so real. Jemma had been sitting right there in front of him on the redwood bench, turbaned in a bluestriped towel, paperback dampened by her sweating hands.

“Stop.” Startled by his own voice in this pregnant dark, as if whispered close beside him by some unexpected other.

A world unto himself he walks.

AS HE PASSES on into the unconstellated night there grows around him a persistent murmur. The cumulation of untold millions in torment giving voice to their despair, wailing their pain, howling their rage, sobbing their unalloyed separation from all the sanguine world. A ceaseless threnody of anguish that constitutes a white noise of the suffering world, the hubbub of Hell. Its collective growl and purr the endless operation of a factory of misery, churning mindless yet somehow alive. It will be with him always here, and he will never get used to it.

Bring up chorus as the Greek approaches stage front.

VOICES HE HEARS voices.

“Oh hey thanks for leaving the gate open, asshole.”

“What’s he got in his hand?”

“They let him in with something?”

All is so amazing dark.

“Shit, they let him in with clothes.”

Dimly as he walks he starts to sense their outlines in the faint infected light. The total darkness giving way to intermittent sickly orange light from somewhere high and far away. Beyond him in the blind world waiting is a sound of shifting figures, murmured voices flattened by enormous open space. How do they see him in this fetid gloom?

“Whose ass you be kissin fuh to get in here like this, mon?” The ground crunches and crackles beneath him as he walks. “You deef, son?” another voice calls. “Boy done ast how come you rate.”

“Now Judge mon. Ah tell you bout callin me boy, hey.”

“You kin tell me all you wont, porch monkey. I’m still gonna—”

“Ah don take yuh shit no more Judge, hey. You don’t be remembrin how long it take yuh to pull yuhself back together after Gombe take you apart like fresh bread mon? How much it hurt? Yuh scream like the woman, Judge. It sound like the old work whistle an yuh know it true. Yeh an it take you longer ta heal every time too.”

“Fuck you nigger. I hung more a you Ubanges than Carter’s got pills, an I taken enough a yo big fat lip to—”

A sudden scream pierces the gloom. Terrified, highpitched, cracking. It does in fact sound very like a work whistle. It goes on longer than any living being could possibly scream.

Niko heads off to one side, aware that those ahead of him have been down here so long their eyes can detect him, aware too that down here the dark at times will be his friend. His instinct is to see why the man is screaming. To help someone in pain. But this is not the country for Samaritans and the dead lie well beyond his aid.

The screaming stops.

“Always save the troat fuh last,” comes Gombe’s voice. “Here yuh go mon. Catch.” Something lands close by with a soggy sound of wet mop slapping concrete. “Now yuh tell old Gombe,” the voice says, closer now, “who are yuh that come here before yuh time?”

So much for stealth. Niko takes a long deep breath, releases it slowly. Readies himself for the violence he hears in the man’s tone.

Again pale orange smears the distant starless air. Niko makes out human shapes again, dozens of them, closer than he’d realized. The closest is dreadlocked and only a few yards away.

“He’s wearing shoes,” an Englishwoman says.

Someone screams at him in Cantonese.

“Is that a guitar?” a husky voice.

Gombe laughs long and loud. The orange light fades and the shapes coalesce with the heated dark. “Yuh don belong here fuh certain. What happen mon? Yuh dig yuh swimmin pool too deep?”

Laughter all around him not quite sane.