Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods (8 page)

‘Ah,’ said Ellat in a particular tone of voice.

He took gloomy satisfaction in knowing she was not as worried as he was.

Marianne spent the first week of her new job in a delirium of independence, the second week in a slough of homesickness, the third in a somewhat reasoned approach to the near future.

She looked for an old house, but there were few on the market. She had forgotten that young cities had a paucity of old homes – at least of old homes not already remodeled or wrecked in favor of urban renewal.

She reluctantly gave up the idea of owning her own place and found a pleasant apartment within walking distance of downtown, the upper floor of an old house owned by Mr and Mrs Apple, Patricia and Robin. Pat and Bobby. The four large rooms were freshly painted and carpeted. Cloud-haired mama had given Marianne a generous check to use in buying furniture. She bought Mexican rugs and chunky chairs covered in bright cottons and pictures full of swirling color and one Escher print of a fish, rising to the surface of a pond amid floating leaves and reflections of sky.

She settled into work, finding it one-fifth interesting, two-fifths routine, and two-fifths utter, implacable bureaucratic bumpf. Each helpful act had to be embalmed in forms and buried in files, until she found herself feeling apprehensive about being helpful because of the amount of sheer boredom involved in making records of it.

She met a pleasant young co-worker, went out with him, told him she would not go to bed with him, and was not asked out again. She met another pleasant young co-worker who told her that knowing her almost made him regret he was gay. She met no one else.

‘So this is living my own life,’ she snarled at herself in the mirror, fighting with her hair, which on this morning had decided to emulate Medusa and slither everywhere but where Marianne wanted it to go. ‘Not exactly what I had imagined.’

What had she imagined?

Meaningful work. Definitely. A certain amount of elegance. That, too. A certain amount of romance? Probably.

‘What’s a beautiful girl like you doing sitting home?’ asked Pat Apple, who had knocked at the door while Marianne was struggling with her hair.

Marianne only flushed, finding it hard to formulate an answer. ‘I guess I haven’t been here long enough to meet anyone, really, Pat.’

‘How about at the office?’

‘Mostly older and married. Only a couple of young ones. One of whom is a lech and the other of whom is gay. What can I tell you?’

‘There are a lot of eligible men who run around in the group Robin and I do things with. Come to a few parties with us. Maybe you’ll meet someone.’

Pat and Robin were at least two decades older than Marianne. She had little faith in the invitation, but considerable respect for the kindness that had prompted it.

‘I’ll think about it, Pat. Thanks anyhow.’

‘Not why I came up. This package came for you while you were at work, so I signed for it.’

It was an anonymous little package without a postmark. Marianne turned it in her hands, not liking the feel of it. Deep within her something stirred, a vertiginous feeling, as though some organ had come loose from its moorings and swayed. She gulped.

‘Well open it, for heaven’s sake. How can you just look at it like that?’

‘It might be a bomb,’ Marianne said with a weak, unconvincing laugh. She felt nauseated.

‘You know someone who’d send you a bomb?’

‘Not really, no.’

‘Well then?’

She opened it. The cardboard of the box seemed to leave a greasy residue on her skin. Inside was crumpled, grayish tissue paper, and wrapped in that a carving made from a dark, almost grainless wood.

‘What’s that supposed to be? And who sent it?’

‘It looks like a demon, doesn’t it?’ Marianne commented, disgusted by the anonymous gift or by the vagrant sickness that had gripped her. ‘Some kind of goblin or troll, maybe. I don’t know who sent it. There’s no card and no return address.’

‘Well, it’s a nasty-looking thing. You’ll probably get a card from somebody, telling you they bought it in Borneo or Tibet or someplace.’ Pat lumbered up from Marianne’s couch and departed, calling, ‘You think about coming out with Robin and me, you hear?’

Behind her, Marianne stared at the hideous carving, aware that it had been done with great artistry, for the tiny, wicked eyes seemed to stay fixed on her face no matter where she moved the carving itself. She set it on the mantel, facing the wall, wanting to throw it out but unable to do so without knowing where it had come from. She sat down, huddling around herself, protecting her core without knowing she did it.

‘Not Cloud-haired mama,’ she said with conviction. ‘Not Papa. Then who?’ Some friend from college? Making some kind of obscure joke? Someone from the office here? Making some equally obscure joke? ‘Stay there until I find out,’ she directed the thing as she pulled on her jacket. Her bracelet caught on the lining and she cursed, briefly, telling herself it was silly to wear Makr Avehl’s gift all the time, even though he had begged her to do so.

‘It really is silly to wear that all the time,’ a voice said in an insinuating whisper. ‘You don’t need it. You’re not in any danger.’

The large clock in the lower hall began to bang away the quarter hour. Marianne stopped her effort to unlatch the bracelet and ran for the door. If she didn’t leave that moment, she’d be late for work. Behind her on the mantel the carving brooded, its face toward the wall.

While fixing her breakfast the next morning, she stumbled over a featureless chunk of wood on the kitchen floor, fist sized, obviously gnawed by something with sharp, determined teeth. It was dark, almost grainless wood. She was only then reminded of the strange carving and looked for it on the mantel. It wasn’t there. She had not seen it there the night before. While she was at work, someone or—or something had moved it. She stood in her kitchen with the lump of gnawed wood in her hand and shivered, very slightly, as though she had felt an icy wind. Again there was that shift inside herself, as though something sleeping had been awakened.

On her way out she asked, Tat, you and Robin don’t have a dog, do you?’

‘Robin’s allergic. I used to have a cat. Why? You have mice or something?’

‘No. I just … thought I heard a dog, that’s all.’

The day at work did not go well. The computer files on artificial insemination and experimental breeding programs, which she had spent the past three weeks building, were now fatally corrupted, and she screamed silently at the thought of rebuilding them. Everyone who called seemed to need information from the corrupted files.

‘How did this happen?’ she demanded from the world at large.

‘Software,’ the hardware consultant opined.

‘Hardware,’ the software support person snarled.

Neither of them was helpful. In her mind a demon face watched her from tiny eyes, and she found herself remembering the carving that had been on her mantel.

She had driven to work that morning in order to use the car for shopping after work. When she went to the parking lot, she had a flat tire.

On the way home, late and weary, a scant twenty blocks, she narrowly escaped an accident when two cars in front of her collided.

In her apartment, the chewed chunk of wood had found its way back to her mantel. She laid wood in the fireplace and set it ablaze, waiting until a crackling fire was going before tossing the featureless chunk of wood on top. It hissed agonizingly, finally exploding in a shower of glowing coals. The firescreen caught them, harmlessly. There was an odor of sulphur. She shivered, something she could not quite remember teasing at the edges of her mind.

In the morning, she went to her office in a fatalistic mood, prepared to spend all of the next few weeks restoring the ruined files. She was greeted with smiles from the software support woman. ‘Good news. You’ve got your files back. I got into the system last night and got around the glitch, whatever it was.’

The morning went by in a flurry of productive, interesting work. Just after lunch, the phone rang and Pat Apple said, ’A package came for you, Marianne. I signed for it and put it up in your apartment. Hope that’s OK?’

She assured Pat it was okay, then turned to the restored files. They had disappeared again. Only gibberish came up on her screen.

She sat very still for five minutes, then left the office and walked home. She did not really believe there was any connection, and yet – the two events had followed very closely. A hex, perhaps? If there were any such thing. She laughed at herself unconvincingly.

In her living room she found the remnants of a cardboard box, scraps of grayish tissue paper, a faintly musty smell. On the carpet lay fragments of grainless wood, obviously chewed.

She built a fire and put all the remnants on the flames. When they started to burn, she heard her own voice saying, ’All right. Which one of you is it?’

From behind the curtains came the Dingo Dog, yellow eyes gleaming at her. She sat, head turned a little, regarding Marianne out of the corner of her eyes. Marianne caught her breath, a deep, choking gasp, as though she could not get enough air in her lungs to speak. She had thought all the old hallucinations and visions were behind her. She was grown-up now. Real was what real was. She wanted no more of this fantasy, and yet here were her childhood visions, come to life again. Her voice asked, ‘Did you chew it up because it was dangerous? Is that why?’ It was her voice, and yet she had not asked the question.

The Dingo whined. She remembered then that the Dingo had never spoken, not like the others.

‘Are the rest of you around, too?’

‘From time to time,’ said a breathy voice in a peculiar accent. ‘From time to time.’ The Red Foo Dog came from the bathroom, jauntily. Just behind it the Dragon Dog came slithering, crawling on its belly, as though begging to be petted. Her bedroom door creaked open. She could see the Wolf Bitch lying on her bed, her huge head pillowed on her crossed paws. Beside her lay the Black Dog, asleep, eyes shut and red mouth agape.

‘Why?’

‘Bad thing, that was,’ the Dragon Dog said. ‘That thing you got in the boxes. Very bad creature, that one, as us creatures go. Had to chew it up, get it to go away.’

‘You have to burn them,’ the foreign, not-herself voice said, ‘or you’ll not get rid of them.’ In the fireplace the thing she had tried to burn had turned into something quite horrible that screamed as it incinerated. So, she was dreaming. There was no need for rejection of what was going on around her. She would merely play along, waiting until she woke up.

‘Fire isn’t one of our things,’ the Foo Dog said. ‘We have others, but not fire.’

‘Someone’s after you,’ the Wolf said from the bedroom. ’Someone very nasty.’

‘Have you been here all along?’ she asked, ignoring what the Wolf had said. She didn’t want to hear it.

‘Off and on,’ said the Black Dog. ‘When we had time.’

‘I thought maybe … maybe’d you’d gone back to—to wherever
Marianne
got you from.’

‘She got us from our own loci,’ the Foo Dog said. ‘Every locus in the universe has one of us attendant to it. We give material space its reality by giving time its duration. Each moment is dependent upon us. Hence, momentary gods.’

‘But if you’re not in your proper – locus, then what happens to the universe?’ she asked, trying to keep her mind off the mess in the fireplace that had stopped screaming and started hissing as it boiled away to nothing.

‘We’re there,’ said the Foo Dog. ‘And here. Being in two places at once is very common for a momentary god. We’re basically a wave form with particular aspects.’

‘Someone asked me if I had dismissed you,’ she said, trying to remember who.

‘We were very gratified when you did not,’ the Wolf Bitch said, licking her nose. ‘Being away from one’s nexus is stimulating.’

In the fireplace, the thing subsided with a final whimper into a pile of ash. Marianne looked at it. She was not sure what it had been. She did not want to see it again.

‘What do you think that was?’ she asked, pointing.

‘It could have been one of us,’ the Foo Dog said, turning to the Dragon Dog. ‘Do you think it was one of us momegs? I thought for a moment it looked rather familiar. When it started to yell.’

Dragon Dog nodded, ‘One of us. Whoever summoned it had built a dismissal in, however. When you burned it, Marianne, you dismissed it. It went back, wherever it belonged.’

‘But it wasn’t shaped like a dog. I thought maybe all momentary gods …’

The Black Dog rolled over and laughed at her out of blood-red eyes. ‘Momegs for short, Marianne. Why should it have resembled a dog? Among the infinite loci in the universe you will find an infinity of gods, momegs, one of every conceivable shape and kind and power, no two alike, though many may be similar. We five are merely similar. We are not alike. That we are doglike is not coincidental.
Marianne
picked us for that reason. She needed doglike creatures for what you – she – meant to do.’

‘It wasn’t me, but pass that for the moment. How did I – she – know where you were?’

‘If you don’t know that, how do you expect us to know? Somehow you knew. She knew. You summoned us.’