Enigmatic Pilot (45 page)

Rage gripped the gambler’s face. “Too true,” he said, sighing. “I went to Boston and into hiding. Two weeks later, I read that
an enormous conflagration had swept through the estate. Whether it was an accident or a strategic retreat I cannot say. And what would provoke the need for retreat? It seems like an extravagant price to pay to withdraw, but who knows what resources such an organization or entity has at its disposal?

“Not long after, I learned that the Enigma Formulary and Gun Works had been acquired by a European consortium based in London calling itself the Behemoth Innovation Company. They have empty offices in several American cities, but there is no information about
any
of their directors. I poked and sniffed around a bit—made inquiries and checked records—but there were so many bank ledgers and writs and decrees, deeds and lawyer’s gobbledygook, there was no way to find the end of the knot. I withdrew and took up banal bookkeeping for the most colorless mercantiler I could find in Boston, where no one knew me, and I kept the hand concealed as much as I could. In time I came out of hiding enough to migrate West, using what wits I still had left to pursue the trade you found me in. I came to make peace with the hand, though it is an abomination and a constant reminder of the brutality. But it has often saved me from harm, as you have seen, and so it may be an unexpected and unintentional gift.”

“Up to now,” Lloyd answered. “Get as far away as fast as you can. Somehow I sense I am a lightning rod for these people, this other creature—whatever.”

“Say it is not so, Lloyd, please!”

“You may have gotten lucky before, although I understand you may not think so. But your luck may run out at the next encounter. Go far.”

“What about you?” the gambler garbled, the hand opening and retracting.

“I am destined for some confrontation of my own. Sooner rather than later, I believe. If you are my friend, you will take my advice and keep the hand hidden.”

“I know not what to say,” the gambler replied after a moment’s
pause. “You have shed light brighter than any moon or candle. And you have cast shadows darker and more supple than I have imagined. What should we do if this … thing … is among us?”

“There is no ‘if,’ ” Lloyd answered. “You told me at the start there was a time to cut and run. That time has found you. It’s possible that there are many people throughout the world who have stories similar to yours. Our insane asylums, prisons, and military hospitals may be full of them. But there are chinks … like the need to find human form. And they, or it, have some mission of destiny—a master stratagem. That is a strength and weakness, too. Great plans usually fail. On that we can perhaps hang our hats in hope.”

“Here’s to that then,” said the gambler, and tossed his fine brim into the river. “Good night, my friend, however old you are. Tomorrow we will play our last hand, and this hand will be kept under wraps. Perhaps when I reach my new destination I will find someone with the skill and discretion to remove it, as was my first inclination years ago. Sleep well, and may the dreams that find you be your own.”

The gambler headed for his stateroom. Lloyd remained on deck, watching the hat floating away in the moonlight. He had forgotten all about the music boxes—he was taken by the vividness of the hat bobbing along on top of the water. It was the vividness of the hat in the river that finally caused him to wake.

I waited for a moment to summon him outside the tepee—into the light of the deeper horror. He felt my call, even groggy and disjointed as he was. At first he imagined it was the creature somehow escaped from its chain and prowling about the camp, sniffing out the new arrivals.

As remarkable as he may have found that specimen, I knew that he would be more surprised to see me. Vague intuitions had flashed like ripples of star-strewn river through his dreams, but this would be absolutely different and decisive. It could cause untold rents in the spiral schema, but I had no choice.
He was a long silent moment longer gathering the concentration and the courage commensurate with his curiosity. Then he appeared—and the image was almost as shocking to me.

To discover yourself standing in the moonlight in waiting is not an easy thing. His jaw cracked, and my green eyes shone back at me.

“What are they? Who—?”

“I think you know too well,” I said as simply as I could. “You are not who you think you are. Or where—or when, either.”

“But!”

“Shh,” I said. “I cannot help the intrusion. And I cannot remain master of the spiral if you resist.”

“I’m still dreaming!” he gasped, for what other explanation could there be? Except for—

“You are in a different kind of wilderness than you imagine,” I said. “And now I must take your place, because I need a deeper hiding place, and to lay a snare.”

“Who?” he hissed, and I could tell that the trauma was already accommodating itself to some terrible new acceptance of the larger hellequinade.

“The Vardogers? The Spirosians?”

I let him gather his wits. Or try to.

“You must go through the door,” I said.

“What door?” he demanded. Just as I would.

“One I have made,” I answered. “The bridges I will have to build now from inside. You will find it right behind me. And you will understand.”

“Are … are you a ghost?” he queried, trying to make sense of what was beyond his grasp.

“I would not put it so.”

“Am … am I … a ghost?”

“Say, rather, a hope. A strategy. A necessity. A casualty of war.”

“But you can’t be real!”

“Real enough.”

“But then what am I?”

Who does not seek the answer to that question?

“A desperate measure in a desperate contest. No more can I say that you could fathom.”

“What if I refuse?”

“You will not. The truth has come for you, and as difficult as it is to accept, you recognize it, as you do me.”

“You’re some kind of will-o’-the-wisp!”

I flung one of the stones I had picked up instinctively.

“Ow!” he whined. “Damn thing hit me.”

“I have more,” I said. “Everything is some kind of will-o’-the-wisp.”

“You’re a Vardoger trick! I’ve been trapped!”

“No, it is I who am in the trap. But they will not anticipate me
hiding
in the trap.”

He rubbed his eyes, trying to make me go away. An illusion of moonlight, a specter of the mind, a lucid dream. If only the technology were so simple. If only I understood fully how to use it.

At last a hint of a tear escaped from the brilliant green eyes, which was more than a little moving and disconcerting for me to witness.

“Am I going to die?” he asked.

“If life and dreaming are not what you have taken them to be, then how can death be, either?” I replied. “Think what Hattie would do.”

“What will become of her?” he asked. And I saw for myself how much he had grown.

“I can say no more about that than you can, now that I am here. I inherit all your uncertainties—save one.”

“Is this because of the slave, and the Ambassadors—a punishment?”

“I take responsibility for Mule Christian,” I said. “You are released. As to those you call the Ambassadors, they are more an enigma to me than to you. I take responsibility for what happened
to them, too, although I suspect I have even less to say about them and their fate than you did in the kite. But now you must face another trial. Remember your teachers—the gambler and the runaway girl. Honor them, even as you doubt me.”

Then he did just as I would have done. He rebelled, with all the force of the meaning I had conceived. For that is the wondrous and diabolical nature of the technology. The coming to life. The independence of tactics and vision.

He charged at me, thinking to wrestle me into the oblivion from which he believed I had emerged to supplant him, not seeing that it was more a change of rider. He had no idea that I was the door of which I spoke—and the instant that he touched me he stepped through, fluorescing in a puzzle of hierograms, like fireflies and lost symbols swept into the cyclone.

I crept into the tepee as the last of the luminous hierograms spiraled into vanishing. I was as sorry to see him fade as he was to have seen the twins blown over the river—and not to have said goodbye to Hattie.
Folks like us
.

And now the trial was upon me.

The scent of the interior was a moment in hitting—and when it did it hit hard. Astounding. The depth and the texture.

I straggled into the bedding where the talismanic objects lay secret in their bag. Hephaestus turned from his rumpled sack of sleep and mumbled, then wiped his face and stared straight at me without the slightest hint of the unfamiliar. It was an eye-opening sensation, to say the least.

“You all right, son? You scared?”

Talk about the child being father to the man.

“Indeed I am, Farruh,” I said. And indeed I was.

Out in the moon-mad dark of this Enigmerica, I heard the cry of things I knew so well—and the call of things more obscure to me than to all others. My own unknown. So many “squeschuns,” as they say in Gullah.

The next day would bring more lightning … and thunder. The primordial answer to the lightning’s question—the original
enigma that set the cyclone swirling. I lay down and closed my eyes, trying to master, for at least a few moments of illusory peace, the alien mechanics of this new sleep.

Rapture rolled over in her blanket. “De preechuh put on ’e shroud whin we beeried Boomer,” she said, sighing.

“It’s all right, Murruh,” I said. “It was just a dream.” The last time I would ever say those words.

Boomer
.

Poor old Tip. You see the need to be ever mindful? To be mindful of the details? Sometimes it is wise to count the trees before they become a forest. Because if you see a tree clearly enough, others will see it, too. Stampedes start one hoof in the mind at a time. But learn to see the thunder … then you can call the lightning down.

Powerful though they were, they had taken the bait. As wasps are drawn to raw meat they had come, and would come closer still. That is the one true trick there will ever really be in time.
Change the boundaries
. Everything genuinely dangerous is afraid of itself, and so cannot resist a mirror.

K
RIS
S
AKNUSSEMM
is the author of the critically acclaimed novels
Zanesville
and
Private Midnight
, which became a bestseller in Europe, and a collection of short stories entitled
Sinister Miniatures
. His latest works,
Reverend America
and
Eat Jellied Eels and Think Distant Thoughts
will be appearing internationally in 2012. A book of his paintings called
The Colors of Compulsion
is being published in France and Denmark.