The Cipher (29 page)

"Nicholas?" Breathless, as if she had just run a mile instead of a few yards. "You okay?"

"I'm fine," I said slowly, rubbing my chest. "Vanese," more slowly still, "don't come here anymore. I know I asked you to, but don't. Even if someone tells you I asked you to again. Because I won't. Okay?"

Silence.

"Okay?"

"Yeah. Okay."

"Things are just going to get worse."

"Yeah." Sure, and sad in the certainty. "Will you just promise one thing?"

"I'll try."

"If it gets too bad, will you get out?"

Quiet metallic rattle in the darkness behind me, a sound like knives in a drawer. "No," I said. "You know I can't."

"Can't what?" Cruelly abrupt, Nakota's voice, and then Vanese in a tone I had never heard: "Can't not save your worthless ass," and a whack, something hit hard against the door and Nakota's snarl, Vanese's high-pitched curses and a sound at my feet, looking down in anxious impatience, now what, to see the skull spinning in happy little circles. A brief impotent kick, of course I missed in the echo of Nakota's damaged howl, and Randy's voice saying, "What the
hell
is going on here?" and then a bunch of voices, and I sat down and shut my eyes.

When I opened them the skull was lying placidly close, staring up at me with its stupid sockets, one of which closed in an impossible wink and without thinking a second I reached blind behind me, came up with a glass bottle of something and, right-handed, smashed it down with all my painful weakness, all my tired rage, and incredibly the skull splintered, chunks of steel and splits of glass, orange juice in my face and I cried out, pawing and blinking, and when I looked again the pieces of the skull were scuttling to the darkness, joining as they went.

I sat in the darkness and thought about Vanese, arms held to embrace the sorry mess of me, the look in her eyes as open wide. I never saw her again.

Later, through the murmur of her goons clustered around the door like cancerous cells: "Not funny, Nicholas."

"Shut up, Nakota. Okay? Just shut up." Sometimes, I thought, it would be worth it to die, just to stop hearing that voice. Like an ache in the ear, like a bad tooth audibly rotting. Like a cancer that talks. My one and only.

Malcolm, a cheap indignance that somehow sat well on him: "That bitch could've broken her
jaw."

The mask spoke before I could: "You shut up too. I wouldn't mind killing
you."

Nakota's sudden cackle, it was her kind of joke, mostly because it wasn't. Then, but seriously folks, her eternal one-note tune, "Nicholas, you have got to realize we're going to get in. At least one of us," crude transparent threat, I covered my closed eyes with my fingertips, gently patted the tiny cuts left there by the skull-splitting glass. The mask kept talking, its comments directed to none of us, the principals, ha-ha, instead to the widening circle of usual geeks; it used my voice but I couldn't understand the words. Big deal. Bad enough I could still understand Nakota. "It would be so much easier if you—"

"You never used to be boring," I said.

"We're taking the door off," Malcolm said. "Today."

"I don't give a shit what you do." So tired, inside, that it was almost true. "I don't care what happens, I don't care if you chew your way in, if you use yourself as a battering ram, whatever. Do what you want. But I'm not helping." They kept talking, arguing with me (when had it ever mattered if I was listening or not?) and each other, and the muttering others who milled close and far, the tempo of their voices drifting like scum on an incoming tide.

I did my best to ignore them all, sat finishing my meal: a warm ginger ale, chewy antique sal-tines, and raisins, a little red box of raisins and my eyes filled with quick and stupid tears: I remembered eating them in my lunch at school, saving the box to prop on my desk and pretend the Sun Maid was winking at me. As I thought this the little face on the box came alive, melted like living wax to become Nakota's, complete with her customary impatient sneer, the basket she held filled not with grapes but tiny skulls. Sickened by this cheap cruel grotesquerie—was it really necessary to fuck with
everything,
did it all have to twist into the same gleefully ugly shape?—I flung the box away, heard the minute dusty sound of its landing, the immediate and larger sound of its retrieval, fetched back to me with the box turned so I could see the face again, the Sun Maid again, her little eyes rolled backward. in terror as the crooked teeth of the skull bisected her.

"Oh you motherfucker," I said, and a calm, the stilling sensation of absolute rage descended on me like the slowly settling mantle of a saint and I grabbed the skull, ignoring its snapping mouth, moved not toward the Funhole—my first impulse, but none of that Brer Rabbit shit today, nice try but I'm not buying—but toward the door to open it, who gives a shit, who really cares anymore because I am TIRED, I am TIRED to DEATH and I yelled something, yelled as I pushed the skull at the door

and my hands went right through it, skull and all.

Malcolm shrieked. I heard the skull hit the floor of the hallway, felt something, Nakota's slippery clutch most likely, as I pulled my own hands back through the seamless door. To stare at them, rocked back on heels and haunches, gaping like a monkey with a nuclear device. To stare particularly at the hole of my right hand and note, with a kind of dreamy detached nausea, the living leakage crawling up my fingers, painlessly chewing the flesh as it went.

Eating me alive.

And the more I watched, the less I feared. Because it really couldn't get any weirder, now could it? Weirder or any worse, no. Just more of the same, world without end, Funhole forever.

Skin and bone, dissolving. Matter over mind.

Nakota pounding on the door, Malcolm yelling something about the skull. Other voices. I hoped Randy was there, it might make him happy to see his skull-thing capering around, baby's first step and in front of company, too. I heard my own voice once removed, the mask issuing some kind of proclamation, hear ye hear ye, that guy in there just lost it for good.

Which was for once the truth.

Close by the Funhole, back curled C-shape and aching, red eyes so sleepless they rubbed against my lids like dry rubber, I sat watching the relentless creep of the fluid on my body, as if given free run it was going for broke: up, now, past the mountains of my knuckles, leaving a transparent reddish coating that was somehow not strictly devouring but dissolving the flesh beneath to form something—new.

All of which for some reason made me remember Nakota, the clot I had once caused to form on her sleeping shoulder; childish pique, the way you might deliberately spill some coffee in the house of someone you don't like; just a little meanness. Maybe I had done a greater wrong than I knew. Not from her point of view —she would love it, probably had and just hadn't bothered to tell me—but from my own. but it was kind of late in the day to worry about morals, or fairness, especially as regards Nakota, who considered the concept of fair play as quaint as that of true love.

Outside, the mask's jabbering sermon droned on and on, swill unworthy of a TV preacher, twice as insulting because it was using my voice. Stabbed in the back by a broadcasting mask giving off bullshit the way garbage gives off a stink, attracting the same kind of shiteaters, all of whom were ten times scarier than me. On a good day. I wanted to tell them all to go home, that unwashed gaggle of the crouching faithful, imagining them slack-jawed in their bulky coats, grinning as they bit their nails, but they were too busy listening to Radio Free Funhole and besides, I had my own concerns. Selfish? Yeah, but then again I hadn't been myself for some time. Ho
-ho.

Up the hand. Watch it crawl. Blinking my burning eyes and I thought, Do you really want to do this? Do you even have a choice? Of course I had, we always do, isn't that what free will is all about? Freedom of choice. Just like a beer commercial.

And all the while behind me the holy smoke rose, pervasive and praline-sweet, approval's incense because apparently, finally, I was doing it right. Whatever the plan was, I was falling in with it. Maybe literally, someday? No, that's too big a leap, too much faith for me because I had none, only the certainty, dry as my eyes, that things would continue just the way they were.

You would think, I thought, it would hurt more,
feel
more, something. But no. Just the march of fluid and the trickle of smoke, the drone outside and the mumble of the worshipers, stupider bastards there never were unless you count me, lying like a fetus beside the mother of all holes, watching myself be painlessly eaten alive, a living chrysalis. And proud of it, too, which was maybe the funniest part of all. Or the sickest. But it's so
nice
to feel wanted, isn't it.

I fell asleep, I must have, numb and dumb in the darkness with my tickled nose drunk on smoke and woke to Randy's voice, saying my name with the insistence of a ringing phone. I still had no real sense of the passage of time, day or night: it was just lighter or darker or variations thereof. Now it was darker, definitely, and there were definitely more people outside. Lots more people, some of them loud, most of them clustered around the door; shit around an asshole, one might say if one were Nakota. They were talking to me, or more accurately the mask, which of course to them was the same thing, Nicholas Nicholas blah blah blah, mumble blurt and giggle and still Randy's voice, harsher now:
"Nicholas,
man, are you okay? Nicholas!"

"Yeah," and raising my hand I saw it coated to the wrist now, the congealing fluid a salmon color that was very beautiful if you could ignore its amazing textural mimicry of tinted chicken fat. It didn't gross me out but then again by this point I was no man for the niceties anyway.

Wondering if he'd heard me, I said it again and louder, into a quiet, so quick it seemed artificial, was the joke on me again? Embarrassed, "I'm fine," I said. "What's going on out there?"

Commotion, sudden and vast for such a small space, war of voices saying my name and Randy's bellow and somebody's cry, elbow work, yeah, Randy's fuse was getting shorter as the days went by, and so was mine. Manifesting in my case as extreme passivity. It really does take all kinds.

"Shut the fuck
up\"

"Randy," my mouth right by the door, "Randy?" and Randy's shouted answer, "Tell them to shut
up,
man!" and so I said it, in my own voice.

And they listened. And obeyed.

Which made me feel nothing. I should have felt frightened, shouldn't I? But I didn't. Not nervous at the implications of control, not guilty, not even sneaky-pleased; the usual rules did not seem to apply. Maybe when you give yourself over to an anomaly it automatically negates all the rules? Certainly Nakota thought so, that was why she was so hot to be where I was now. One of the reasons anyway. Besides the fact that she had always considered herself the uncrowned queen of the bizarre.

But what she failed to notice, or maybe had and didn't care, was that no rules also translates into, and past, no safety, to the chilly land where no one's in charge and that most specifically means you. Or in this case, me. Maybe she'd thought about that, too, and just didn't give a queenly shit. I did; not enough to stop, obviously, but enough to wonder, what would it be like to pass at once and finally into that daunting atmosphere, that place where the rug stays permanently pulled out from under you, where the murderous tilt is the lay of the land? How would it
feel?

Still silent outside, except for Randy's tired breathing, even a horse gets tired. I opened my mouth to talk to him and realized I was shaking.

Little fatty drops of fluid trembled pff my arm, dropped onto my knee and lay atop the rank material of my jeans like fastidious oil on water. The sense of people listening.

Randy spoke again, something about did I have enough to eat and drink and what was goin' on in there anyway, man, what's happening with you? Are you all right? "Been hearing some noises," he said.

"Me too," though I had no idea what he was talking about. "What's going on out there?"

"Well for starts we got the usual shitload of assholes out here,
Shrike's
friends, and they're hanging on every word this fuckin' mask has to say—"

"It's not the mask talking!" A girl's voice, nasally indignant, a seconding chorus and this time I said it louder: "Shut up!"

"Like I said, it's a real
crew
out here," and in each word I read Randy's lessening control, scaring me because Randy was the one, now that Vanese was gone, the only one I could trust or depend on, "and plus which they keep watchin' the fucking
video
when they're not out here listening to this stupid-ass mask."

The video, wonderful. "Randy, where's the skull? Your steel skull?"

"Around the doorknob. I mean its mouth is. Kind of clamped around the knob." A ghost of creator's pride, I didn't mention how glad I was to have it gone, or at least away from me.

Randy kept talking, I was glad he couldn't see my yawn. Just so tired. Of talking, of listening. Tired of this smelly room, my smelly self, of the father of stinks there on the floor. Call me Nakota: What would it be like to go down there? Charnel house? Garden of unearthly delights? And why don't you find out, you chickenshit? And tired, of course, of that, too. Speculation becomes meaningless when it never blossoms.