“They’d go back to America, back to their father. How many years do you think you’d have with them, if you stay? They’ve already lost their mother. It would be easier for them now, a single clean break.”
Jack shouted angrily, “Get out of my house!”
The thing came closer, and sat on the bed. It put a hand on his shoulder. Jack sobbed, “Help me!” But he didn’t know whose aid he was invoking anymore.
“Do you remember the scene inThe Seat of Oak? When the Harpy traps everyone in her cave underground, and tries to convince them that there is no Nescia? Only this drab underworld is real, she tells them. Everything else they think they’ve seen was just make-believe.” Jack’s own young face smiled nostalgically. “And we had dear old Shrug weight reply: he didn’t think much of this so-called ‘real world’ of hers. And even if she was right, since four little children could make up a better world, he’d rather go on pretending that their imaginary one was real.
“But we had it all upside down! The real world is richer, and stranger, and more beautiful than anything ever imagined. Milton, Dante, John the Divine are the ones who trapped you in a drab, gray underworld.
That’s where you are now. But if you give me your hand, I can pull you out.”
Jack’s chest was bursting.He couldn’t lose his faith. He’d kept it through worse than this. He’d kept it through every torture and indignity God had inflicted on his wife’s frail body. No one could take it from him now. He crooned to himself, “In my time of trouble, He will find me.”
The cool hand tightened its grip on his shoulder. “You can be with her, now. Just say the word, and you will become a part of me. I will take you inside me, and you will see through my eyes, and we will travel back to the world where she still lives.”
Jack wept openly. “Leave me in peace! Just leave me to mourn her!”
The thing nodded sadly. “If that’s what you want.”
“I do!Go!”
“When I’m sure.”
Suddenly, Jack thought back to the long rant Stoney had delivered in the studio. Every choice went every way, Stoney had claimed. No decision could ever be final.
“Now I know you’re lying!” he shouted triumphantly. “If you believed everything Stoney told you, how could my choice ever mean a thing? I would always say yes to you, and I would always say no! It would all be the same!”
The apparition replied solemnly, “While I’m here with you, touching you,you can’t be divided. Your choice will count.”
Jack wiped his eyes, and gazed into its face. It seemed to believe every word it was speaking. What if this truly was his metaphysical twin, speaking as honestly as he could, and not merely the Devil in a mask? Perhaps there was a grain of truth in Stoney’s awful vision; perhaps this was another version of himself, a living person who honestly believed that the two of them shared a history.
Then it was a visitor sent by God, to humble him. To teach him compassion toward Stoney. To show Jack that he, too, with a little less faith, and a little more pride, might have been damned forever.
Jack stretched out a hand and touched the face of this poor lost soul.There, but for the grace of God, go I.
He said, “I’ve made my choice. Now leave me.”
Author’s Note:
Where the lives of the fictional characters of this story parallel those of real historical figures, I’ve drawn on biographies by Andrew Hodges and A. N. Wilson. The self-dual formulation of general relativity was discovered by Abhay Ashtekar in 1986, and has since led to ground-breaking developments in quantum gravity, but the implications drawn from it here are fanciful.
Obsidian Harvest - Rick Cook amp; Ernest Hogan
I have always liked you, my boy,” Uncle Tlaloc rumbled. He smiled at me, showing a row of jade-inlaid teeth.
I nodded politely, sipped my bitter chocolate and listened to my head throb. I wondered what the old bastard had in store for me this time.
Classical music keened and thumped to a crescendo on the main floor of the Hummingbird’s Palace as the tone-deaf current object of Uncle Tlaloc’s affections belted out the line about the unhappy ending of the romance between Smoking Mountain and White Lady. She didn’t even come near the high note. In the old days they skinned singers for performances like that. But times change and the world decays as cycles end; so she smiled, bowed and received enthusiastic applause as she blushed through her yellow skin dye. The combination of the blush and the dye made her look more jaundiced than attractive.
The pungent mixture of tobacco and drug smoke stung my eyes as it blended with the piney-sweet reek of burning copal incense, almost hiding the odors of spices, citrus flowers-and a hint of stale urine creeping in from the privy in back.
Uncle Tlaloc, as fat and ugly as his Rain God namesake, leaned back in his chair, the one with Death carved beneath his right hand and the Earth Monster beneath his left. “In fact I consider you more of a nephew than an employee.”
Something bad. Whenever Uncle went into that almost-a-relative routine it meant he had something especially nasty in store for me.
He signaled the kneeling pulque girl, and she glided forward to refill his cup. Her eardrums had been pierced so she could not hear, but he kept silent until she had withdrawn, as noiselessly as she had come.
He glanced around conspiratorially and leaned forward toward where I knelt at his feet, took a hefty swig of pulque out of the skull he used for a chalice and belched malodorously. “I have a small task for you.”
“I am yours to command, Lord Uncle.”
“Your cousin, Ninedeer…”
About as bad as it can fucking get! “I know him, Uncle-tzin.” My voice betrayed nothing.
“He is an acolyte of the Death Master, I believe.”
“So I have heard.”
“The Death Master has-something-in his temple. I would like to know how it came to die and whatever else your cousin might know about it.”
“Am I permitted to know what this thing is, Uncle-tzin?”
Uncle Tlaloc paused, as if considering whether to tell me, and leaned even closer.
“It is a huetlacoatl. An important one.”
It was raining when I stepped out of the Hummingbird’s Palace, a soft, warm drizzle that felt like Tlaloc Himself was pissing on me. Just like his whoreson namesake inside. I pulled my cloak tighter around me, fingering the single
