Shuttered Sky

irritation worse. “Funny thing,” he said. “I stopped by the cemetery to pay my respects, but I couldn’t find Michael’s grave.”

“Ask his father.” Drew suggested. “Maybe he’ll take you there.”

Martin nodded a polite thank you, and Drew left to hit the showers.

He put Martin Briscoe out of his mind until much later that night, when the news chanced to report on a stolen Chihuahua found hang­ing by its leash in a eucalyptus grove.

* * *

The bible in the stolen Taurus said it was placed there by the Gideons. This was, of course, untrue. Not the fault of the bible, which had neither motive nor capacity to lie, but the fault of Martin Briscoe, whose scriptural void had been easily filled upon checking out of the Marriott.

Somewhere in his Gideon bible, toward the middle of Exodus, it said, “Thou shalt not steal.” But such moral ballast had no place in the ship he now sailed. He sailed higher waters now, and was, by divine appointment, above the law.

Still there was a vestige of ambivalence within him. A conflict that kept bringing his hand to his head to scratch his flaking scalp, giving himself over to the compulsion—as if his fingertips could reach right through his skull, and into the convolutions of his cortex, digging out all the brain-jam he imagined had collected in there; a gelatinous waste product of too much thinking, and feeling.

He wondered how the three Heavenly Hosts that had visited him felt about the mental bilge that clogged his brain, seeping into his every action. They certainly did have a window into his mind—he could feel that, too. There was a membrane in the midst of his thoughts, stretched thin as parchment and clear as glass, through which the hosts observed from a telescopic distance. He had spoken to them occasion­ally, after the grand satori of purpose they bestowed on him in the ruins of his dental office. He would call on them now and again, asking them for advice as to how to proceed, but they never answered. They stayed at the other end of their tunnel. “We must not deliver ourselves into your world,” they had told him. “Not until you have completed your task.” So for now they sat as silent voyeurs of his mind, and he could feel both their intimate presence, as well as their distance. It made him want to scratch his head all the more.

The oldies station he had tuned in played a queue of feel-good sixties standards. Marty sang along with the derivative voices of the Association, getting only about half the words of “Windy” right.

He continued unhurriedly down Pacific Coast Highway, relishing the clean-air innocence of the song. It was ten o’clock—still a bit too early to begin his evening’s work, so he drove back and forth through Corona del Mar—a Laguna Beach wannabe at the heel of Newport. On either side of him, the storefronts showed a string of coffee houses close together, uniformly bohemian. The only dim spot on the street was the Port movie theater, a dinosaur with boarded doors that had given up the ghost. Its unlit marquee read “Rosebud,” in mismatching letters.

After cruising back through Newport, and Corona one more time, he turned left, heading down narrow residential streets toward Corona Del Mar Memorial Park.

All considered, the day had gone well to this point. With the un­witting help of Drew Camden, he had located James Lipranski, and had gained access to his home with little difficulty. Long before actually finding him, Marty had decided it best to kill the man—and when he put the suggestion forth to the Heavenly Hosts, they predictably of­ fered neither resistance, nor encouragement. Surely if “Thou shalt not kill” were a commandment they expected him to follow, they would have spoken up to prevent him from the act.

But when Lipranski opened the door, Marty found the man scarcely worthy of execution. The stench of bad scotch permeated the air around him, and he held a stance Marty himself had grown familiar with; a hand high on the door jam to keep one’s feet in place, and stop the world from spinning. Not at all what Marty had expected from the man who spawned Michael Lipranski, Perverter of Nature.

“Yeah, what do you want?” he had said to Marty, who could only gawk. He had worked out an elaborate scheme for getting in—some­thing involving the neighborhood newcomers club, and a new key to the association pool, but his words left him. So instead, he picked up a stone the good lord had provided in the flowerbed beside the front door, and smashed Lipranski over the head with it. It was inelegant, and in full view of the neighborhood, but no one was watching, and Lipranski’s reflexes were far too slow to fend off the unexpected blow. He fell backward into the house and ceased to be an inconvenience. Once the door was closed, Marty once more tried to impel himself to kill the man, but shied away at the last moment. He consoled himself by realizing that homicide was an acquired taste, and his palate was not quite ready for it.

Very few boxes had been unpacked in the house, although the man must have been living here for several weeks. An exuberant voice from the living room called out a hearty “good-bye,” making Marty jump, but it was only AOL timing its connection out. It seemed Lip­ranski had wearied of the real world, and was injecting himself into the Internet. Marty could extrapolate Lipranski’s life; chat rooms filled with anonymous pretenders. A virtual masquerade party, and side trips to higher voltage stimulation.

Marty found what he was looking for right there on the dining table, as if it had been set out as a buffet for him. Photo albums lay open amidst legal documents and other paperwork. Birth certificate, certificate of death, newspaper clippings . . . and those wonderful mor­tuary bills. It was as if Lipranski was putting together a lugubrious memory book of his son’s life and death. Near the computer, the edge of a newspaper article stuck out from beneath a scanner that was turned on. This wasn’t for a memory book, Marty realized, but for a website; an on-line shrine to Lipranski’s preternatural son. The thought so re­pulsed Marty that after collecting the mortuary papers, he gave the unconscious man a swift kick to the ribs. Then, as an afterthought, stole the computer and scanner, realizing that it would not only ruin Lipranski’s plans, but would veil the real motive of Marty’s visit be­ neath the robbery. By the time Lipranski came to, he would be too busy dealing with the theft of the computer to notice the missing mortuary documents.

But this next part—this was the meat of his task, and although his hallowed taskmasters most certainly had their noses pressed to the pane of his mind, they remained silent, offering him no encouragement to ease his way into this indelicate duty.

He picked up the Gideon bible and randomly flipped it open, hoping to find some passage that might sandbag his will against the fear raging within him. Fear of what, he wondered? Dead was dead, and Michael Lipranski had been so long exposed to the elements that there would have been little left to bury. A shredded sack of bones. Nothing frightening there.

But what if he was more than a sack of bones? What if he was down there, lying in wait like a vampire? After all, he was a Star Shard—who knew what their flesh was capable of? What if, when he opened the casket, Michael’s eyes were open and aware?

His finger fell in Proverbs, chapter ten, verse eight: The wise in heart will receive commandments: but a prating fool shall fall. Humility not being one of his stronger points, Marty was certain on which side of the line he fell, and the knowledge motivated him to step from the stolen Taurus, taking the shovel from the back seat.

When he found the plot, as shown on Lipranski’s paperwork, Marty felt certain something must be wrong, because the unmarked grave showed no sign of being new. He began digging. The roots of the ivy turned out to be soft, and had done much of the job for him, having broken up the loosely compacted soil so that the first few feet was like digging through an earthen meringue. If nothing else the silent seraphim in his mind were stacking the odds in his favor. And so he hummed some golden oldies to pass the time as he dipped deeper and deeper into the grave, each shovel stroke another moment closer to exhumation, and the irrevocable destruction of Michael Lipranski’s remains.

* * *

Even from his grave, Michael was curving space around himself, pulling Drew Camden into an orbit that spiraled inexorably toward its center. As Drew climbed the cemetery fence, he could hear the bang of a shovel, which had hit wood, doubled by its echo from the mon­olithic mausoleum wall at the top of the hill, glowing a black-light sapphire in the moonlight. Briscoe had already reached the casket—but the fact that Drew could hear the shovel at all meant that he wasn’t too late.

Drew now knew where he had seen Briscoe before. It had come to him even before he found James Lipranski in his home, icing the blow to his head. Briscoe had been one of a thousand followers who had worshiped the Shards, from the grounds of Hearst Castle all the way to Black Canyon. He must have stood there at the rim as the dam burst, and the four hundred were taken under. Drew didn’t even want to guess at what had brought him to this.