Mortality Bridge (17 page)

Threading through them Niko catches a fleeting glimpse out of the corner of his eye. He turns to look but it is gone. Only the vast array of frozen figures. Niko continues on his ordained way, a strange pressure between his shoulderblades. He cannot shake the feeling the statues are watching him.

After navigating the marble orchard for an hour Niko realizes that the area is littered with motley pigeons. They peck the ground and scatter in waves at his approach. Though they are stupid useless birds he keeps an eye on them. On a sidewalk or in a park he would not give mere pigeons a second thought. Here where all is sinister and strange no thing is mere.

But the pigeons waddle aimlessly and peck at nothing and stare at nothing and ruffle their feathers at nothing and crap on statues— Niko stops.

A pigeon roosts atop the combat helmet of an American twostar general in field uniform holding stone binoculars in one hand near his leg, the other hand a fist. The pigeon shits on the general’s head.

Niko approaches the statue and the pigeon flaps threateningly, then flies.

The general’s face is worn and pitted. A deep gouge has eaten into the bridge of his nose as if someone gave up sawing it off. Below one marble eye a shallow runnel grooves the pitted cheek, steady track of geologic tears. The eyes are blind as a bust of Homer but Niko feels they see him nonetheless. Where the pigeon roosted a fresh white splash of pigeonshit bubbles and crackles as acidic excrement eats into living stone.

Niko reaches out toward the sculpted face and hears an unmistakable faint moan. He snatches back his hand. The fear that speeds his heart is quickly replaced by pity for the soul imprisoned in corroded stone before him. The man now monument to himself, frozen at the apex of his glory and feeling every atom of his slow decay.

Niko turns to gaze at acre after acre of corroded statues. One nearby pedestal supports nothing but a pair of sandaled feet, all else worn away by millennia of intermittent pigeonshit.

Niko hurries through their prolonged agony.

“EXCUSE ME, SIR? There has been some kind of mistake. I would like to see someone in charge.”

Niko has come to an astonishingly long line of the damned standing patiently in a roped off queue that twists and turns and doubles back like the worst imaginable wait for the most popular attraction at Disneyland. He’s a mile closer to the wall now and the numbers of the dead are growing. Demons with pitchforks—may as well call them that even if they are tridents—herd new batches of the sheeplike damned to the end of the line, which shuffles forward constantly but doesn’t quite keep pace with new arrivals at its everlengthening end. Throughout its snaking length are arguments, shoving matches, fights.

“Sir? Are you hearing me?” The voice is Slavic, faintly adenoidal. “I wish to see someone in authority.” Near the end of the line a tall thin sickly man with springy darkbrown hair and large intense brown eyes is waving his arms for a demon’s attention.

Which of course he gets. The demon closest to the clamoring man turns its twin heads away from the group it’s prodding and gives the man the once-over. ““A mistake?”” the demons ask. They look at each other. Its right hand passes the trident to the left hand and then thoughtfully scratches its left head’s left cheek. “What kind of mistake?” asks the right head, which Niko privately names Dexter.

“I am not supposed to be here.”

The damned around him laugh. There’s a polyglot murmur as others translate for the dead and then a second wave of laughter follows.

Sickly ignores them but he cannot hide the flush that darkens his pale face. Niko looks on wonderingly as the delicate man defiantly raises his chin.

“Hey hey,” says a swarthy little man with a thin moustache. “Issa fonny ting, Ima nah supposta be here too.”

Around him comes more laughter followed by a chorus of sis, ouis, das, hais, jas, and fuckin A’s.

“Okay look,” the left hand, Sinister, tells Sickly. “Did you wait in line for your ticket?”

“Of course.”

“Number called?” says Dexter.

“Naturally.”

“Naturally,” says Sinister. “Go to your designated line?”

“Yes.”

“Get your ticket stamped?”

“Yes.”

“Get a receipt?”

“At the next line they tell me go back to the previous line and get a receipt. Then in the next line I wait again for my receipt to be stamped.”

Sinister’s hand picks Dexter’s nose and then puts the jellied finger in Sinister’s wide mouth. “And of course,” says Dexter, “you took your stamped receipt to the Receipt Processing Window.”

“Yes, and there I exchange my stamped receipt for a Personal Information Form.”

“Excellent,” says Sinister.

“Then I stand in the Pencils line to get a pencil.”

“We’re just whizzing right along here, aren’t we,” says Dexter. His other half smirks. “I’m getting a nosebleed.”

Dexter ignores him. “So with your official number two pencil and your PIF in its handtruck you waited your turn in the Forms Completion Room.”

Sickly grows sheepish. “I am completing it before a space becomes available.”

Dexter scowls. “You filled out all seven thousand six hundred fiftysix pages of your Personal Information Form—”

“—staying within the margins—”

“—no erasures, emendations, errors of spelling punctuation or grammar—”

“—bubbles completely filled in, no streaks smudges stippling or stray marks?”

“Well, I would have completed the form but the pencil is breaking.”

“Ah,” from Dexter.

“His pencil broke.”

“It happens.”

“What can you do.”

“Nothing to do but wait in the Pencils line again.”

“Management really ought to get better pencils. If they don’t break they wear out.”

“Well I’m not going to be the one to suggest that Management change pencils.”

“Me neither.”

Sinister looks at Sickly. “I assume you got another one.”

“Don’t assume,” says Dexter. “You know what they say about when you assume.”

“No, what?”

“You make an ass of you and me.”

“Really. You and me?”

Sickly plods on. “A year I wait again in the Pencil line—”

“A year,” says Sinister. “They’re really quite the welloiled machine these days.”

“It’s those Disney engineers. They get the trains running on time. You were saying, meat pie?”

Sickly is looking more and more flummoxed. “After I am waiting a year in the Pencil line they tell me I must to go to the Replacement Pencil Requisition Desk. And finally I get to that and they give me a hundred page form to complete if I am to get another pencil.”

Sinister shrugs onesidedly. “Well they can’t just hand out pencils indiscriminately.”

“Think of the chaos,” says Dexter. “There are people in those lines who’d kill you for a pencil.”

“If you weren’t already dead,” says Sinister. “But at least you completed your Replacement Pencil Requisition Form.”

“I certainly did not.”

Dexter is aghast. “You didn’t?”

Sickly’s jaw is clenched so tight he can barely speak. “I. Had. Nothing. To. Write. With.”

“Well,” says Sinister, “you should have asked for a pencil at the Pencil Window.”

“They don’t let me have one! They send me to the Replacement Pencil Requisition Desk!”

“That’s just for a replacement pencil for filling out your PIF,” says Dexter.

“Skilcraft Number Two Medium Soft Point,” adds Sinister. Dexter nods. “But the Replacement Pencil Requisition Form can be filled out with any old thing.”

Sickly looks as if he’s going to cry. Sinister clucks and shakes his head. “Poor little meat pie. All that time wasted.”

“If he’d only learned his way around the system.”

“Some people just can’t be bothered.”

“Guess they don’t think the rules apply to them.”

“Why make life any easier for some poor flunky who’s only doing his thankless job?”

“For want of a nail.”

“Or a pencil.”

“Sad really.”

“Yes, sad.”

Sickly’s dam breaks. “I did not go back in the line for a fucking pencil, you—you stupid freak! The broken one, I am sharpening it with my teeth.”

The demon draws himself erect. “My brother’s just as he was made, sir,” Sinister says.

“He was talking to you,” says Dexter.

“Nonsense.” Sinister narrows his eyes at Sickly. “I am curious, though.”

“I’ll say,” says Dexter.

“When your pencil broke that first time, I imagine it made a...stray mark?”

“A stray mark you certainly didn’t attempt to...erase?”

“Naturally I am obtaining another PIF. I am in this line now.” Sinister nods. “Adjustments and Closures.”

“Last line, by the way,” adds Dexter.

“Well why would I be in this line if I am not getting the forms taken care of properly?”

Sinister shrugs. “You could be cutting.”

“Oh this is—why would I do that? People who cut in line are torn apart by this, this mob. And no one will process me without the proper forms anyway.”

“Terrible isn’t it?” says Dexter. “You’d think people would learn their lesson.”

“All right, maybe you aren’t cutting,” says Sinister. “Maybe you’re just ignorant of proper procedures.”

Sickly looks insulted. “I am a master of proper procedures. In my earthly life I have earned a law degree and am employed at Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute of the Kingdom of Bohemia for fourteen years.”

Dexter slaps his own forehead. “Hear that? Meat pie here’s an insurance lawyer. I love this guy. I could kiss this guy.” He cranes forward to do just that but Sinister looks disgusted and puts his chin on his fist and watches his other head attempt to close the distance to Sickly.

“We don’t go anywhere till I say,” says Sinister.

“Just because you’re older.”

“Yeah but Mom always liked you best.”

The demon reaches up and from out of nowhere produces a clipboard with a thick sheaf of printed fanfold paper attached. “Name?”

Sickly gives his name. Niko is startled to recognize it.

The demon opens up the stack and the heads bob up and down and mutter as they read. Suddenly they both grin unpleasantly. “You thinking what I’m thinking?” says Sinister.

“Not if I’m thinking at all. But sure, why not.”

They turn to Sickly and Sinister says, “Well, France old buddy—”

“Franz,” says Sickly.

“Whatever,” says Dexter. “I’m afraid you aren’t on the Exemptions list.”

Before Franz can reply the demon leans forward. Sinister lowers his voice while Dexter glances around melodramatically with narrowed eyes. “But I’ll tell you what. Seeing as how we’re colleagues and all—”

Now Sinister looks around conspiratorially while Dexter picks up smoothly: “—and seeing as how it only took you since nineteen fiftytwo to make it to the last line in the bunch—”

“—I’m gonna make a command decision and take it upon my selves to pull you out of this line and put you up at the very front.”

“How’s that by you?” Both heads regard Franz enthusiastically.

Franz brightens. “Oh that—that would be capital.”

The demon looks at himselves. “Capital he says.”

“Oh wouldn’t it be evah so?” Dexter pretends to swoon while his left half slides the clasp on the chain holding it to the post and lifts the chain to let Franz out. From behind the pale thin man come astonished looks and multilingual curses. Dexter/ Sinister tut tuts the crowd and raises his pitchfork. “Now now,” says Sinister.

“Okay, Fritz,” says Dexter. “Let’s go.”

“Franz.”

“Whatever,” says Sinister.

Niko steps forward tentatively. “Uh, excuse me.”

The demon eyes him and does a quadruple take. Sinister scowls and Dexter glances at his brother. “Qu’est-ce que c’est, mon fil?”

“L’homme.” Sinister points at Niko. “C’est l’homme mortel.”

“Sacre merde. He must be the musician that Onyx got obliviated over.”

“Well she let him play Deutschland Uber Alles or something.”

“It’s never anything but trouble when one of them comes down here.”

“How many’s it been now?”

“Not counting spiritual visitations?”

“The ravings of celibate monks and the hallucinations of oppressed Catholics hardly signify, I should think.”

“Maybe forty.”

“That many?”

“We should sell tickets.”

“Sporty jacket though.”

“Nice shoes too.”

“What do you think is in the big violin case?”

“A big violin?”

“You know there’s a pool going on him?”

“Sure. I’ve got a fiver riding on him. Thousand to one but what the hell.”

“You bet for him? Where was I.”

“Hitting on some babe in line.”

“I never. I am a consummate professional.”

“Of course you are. I meant to say you were acting in your capacity as punishment liaison with one of the guests.”

“Just for that I’m putting five against him.”

“Your money, pal.”

““So what can you do for me?””

It’s a moment before Niko realizes the question has been directed at him. “I’d like to follow you.”

“He’d like to follow us.”

“Ooh, we’re attracting followers.”

“I always say there’s two kinds of people in this world.”

“Followers and leaders.”

“I know which one I am.”

“Follow us where?”

Again Niko lags. “To, um, the front of the line.”

The demon exchanges a look. “I suppose you’d like to be put right behind Frances here.”

“Franz.”

““Whatever.””

“No, I’m going to the Battlements, and I’d—”

“The Battlements. Tourist boy wants to go to the Battlements.”

“And him without a camera.”

“Why you want down there, organ bucket?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Old story too from what I hear.”

“Guess we shouldn’t ask him to play us a song.”

“Maybe if it’s depressing.”

“Know any depressing songs, bloodbag?”

“A shitload.”

“Shitload he says. Can you play and walk at the same time, wormfood?”

“Yeah.”

“Then here’s the deal—”

“Watch it, there, hermano. Spoken deals with these things are binding as gravity.”