Mists of Everness (The War of the Dreaming) (7 page)

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Authors: John C. Wright

BOOK: Mists of Everness (The War of the Dreaming)
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“Was in prison. Not real, legal prison, but was like prison in Russia. Soldiers, not guards. ‘Protective custody,’ they call it. Was put there by wizard. But wizard is from old times, and does not understand our modern American constitutional system of rights and rule of law, not like I understand, I who must study this for citizenship. So I confess, you see?
“I killed Galen Waylock.
“But he is not killed on federal territory. Is not federal case.
“Is like with me; I am park police. Crime on park grounds, is federal land. Federal land, federal case. But I have no jurisdiction I see crime off park grounds, yes? So with them.
“Wizard think is like old days. He think his friends can throw me in dungeon like a king throw man in dungeon. No explanation. No warrant. But, aha! Cannot do in America. Perhaps wizard is gone that day. Perhaps his friends make mistake or are not so hypnotized as he think. Someone make mistake, perhaps. They send me to real prison.
“Real prison, I have rights. Right to a lawyer. But I have no lawyer. I only have one call; only lawyer I know is Wendy’s father, who does not exist. I call her house. Leave message for make-believe lawyer.
“Next day, mistake corrected; federal men come to take me back. Now is federal case; very secret, very high level. Have papers saying they can take me. Signed papers. Signed in triplicate.
“So I hit a guard with the leg from the cot. Maybe they think cot leg too thick to rip out of floor. Are wrong. I think I kill him. Maybe not. I thought they would shoot me. I tried to make them shoot me.
“Now they move me to stronger cell. Different place. Bars everywhere. Real prison. Maybe is mistake again, or maybe wizard no longer care about me.
“There was weight room. I work out. Make myself stronger. Other prisoners are bad men. One man, I broke his fingers, five fingers, when he say I must act like his woman for him; they leave me be after that.
“There was television there. I could see the things on television. The Princes in the hurricane. The Kelpie with the sick and dying. The giant in the snowstorms. The giant in the fires. All my fault. So many people dead. My fault.
“No one else can see them. All call me crazy.
“Guards start to not see me. They leave me in cell sometimes at mealtimes or leave me in exercise yard when we should go in.
“The news say the hurricane has killed many people; thousands have no homes, no food, many dying every day.
“It is my anniversary. I decide to kill myself.
“I hang myself with twisted pants leg from the light. Is no high place to jump from, so I must hang and choke myself. My eyesight goes dim. Darkness fills vision.
“I see a light, surrounded by ring of light. It is like moon on evening of mist, with ring of silver around. Light hangs from the smallest finger of most beautiful lady I have ever seen, and she is walking through the jail cells, and her slippers make no noise at all. There is wind blowing her hair, and her long skirts of green and silver. Hair is black as midnight. And long, all the way to her knees, it goes. Eyes are green as the eyes of a cat. Wind touches nothing else. Wind makes no noise. The lamp is the elf-lamp I have seen before.
“She speaks. Her voice is like silver. Like music. And I am terribly afraid of her.
“‘There is hope,’ she says. ‘There is always hope.’
“I tell her I can see no hope. Perhaps I only think I tell her, since, you know, I am choked.
“She says, ‘There are always stars, though you cannot see them by day. And they are larger and older than all your world and all its troubles.’
“I tell her I care nothing for stars; how can they help me?
“And she smiled so sweetly. ‘And you, a sailor, can say that? You cannot see my star with your eye, but it is there. It will guide you safe to port. To home, to your wife again, if you let it. But you must raise your eyes to see it. My husband comes to save you, but he must travel across the man’s world with man’s steps and cannot come with the speed of dreams.’ And she looks at me between the bars of my cage, and her light is shining like a star.
“I tell her my wife will never forgive me.
“And she laughs again, and she says, ‘If you kill yourself, she’ll never speak to you again!’
“But I killed a man.
“And she tells me there is no death.
“So I lift my hands and part the rope holding me to the lamp bracket. I fall. I breathe again. I see clearly again. She is gone.
“I tell my cell mate this thing. He tell me a story. My cell mate, he tell me there is a man who is the foe of evil. Invisible man, who clouds men’s minds. A figment, a specter, a shadow. All criminals fear this man. Many stories of this man; but they are foolish tales, meant for children. Like funny book hero, you know? But criminals are frightened of him. Cell mate, he tell me the man of darkness is coming for me tonight.
“I ask about this man to others when we are at mess hall. They look at me with fear. You are crazy, says one of them, only crazy people hear stories of this man; no one else can hear them.
“That night, a black shadow came to cell door. He wear long, black cape, black hat, face hidden in scarf. But his eyes. His eyes stab through things like knives. Like the eyes of a genius. Like the eyes of a judge in a court of law. Like the eyes of a king!”
Raven had rolled off the bunk and stood up. His cell mate, on the rack above, had not stirred, but lay sleeping, mouth open, grizzled cheeks looking pale and sickly in the dim light from the cell block corridor. Evidently his cell mate had not heard the man speak.
“Of course I can see you,” Raven answered the man in black. A black-gloved hand rose up. Redder than a spot of blood, redder than the planet Mars at night, a cool fire seemed to burn and flicker on his ring finger. It was a scarlet opal.
The dark man said, “Then you are farther gone than I suspected. We must have you out of there.”
The man took a length a wire from beneath his cape and connected the alligator clips to contact points on the cell door and wall. Then he took out what looked like a thin, metal instrument, painted with a nonglossy black paint. He turned the instrument in the lock, and there was a click.
The door he opened only as far as the wire would allow.
“Come!”
“But I am criminal. Murderer. I belong in cage.”
“Galen Waylock is not dead.”
“What?”
“He is only under a spell. You can save him. You can save yourself. Come! I have no time.”
Raven slipped carefully out through the partly open door. The man in black shut it, relocked it, removed the clips, wiped the bars. Raven admired the swift, certain precision of his motions.
“Follow me. I know how little noise you can make when you try. Try now.”
With a whispering rustle of cape, the figure turned and glided off down the walkway.
The cells rose tall to either side. There were men sleeping, turning on their bunks; one or two were awake. If any of them saw the pair, they did not cry out.
The man in black took out a thin, telescopic length of rod from his cloak. When they arrived at the corner of the cell block, the man in black reached up with the rod and plucked away the Polaroid photograph that had been taped across a wire in front of the lens of the security camera. Raven saw it was a photograph of the walkway where they stood, a picture taken from the height and angle of the security camera.
The man in black whispered, “Guard station at the end of the walk. I will spread my cape. Stay exactly behind me. You must always keep me between yourself and them. Understand?” And he held up his ring and stepped forward.
When they had finally climbed down and were outside the last wall, and the man in black was winding the cable of the grapnel back into the silent, air-powered catapult beneath his cloak, Raven asked in a voice of awe, “Who—Who are you?”
The man pulled aside the scarf he wore doffed his hat. His features were dark and harshly handsome, hook nosed, high of cheekbone. His hair was silver.
“You don’t remember me? That’s a good sign. Think of me as your attorney. I am a man of law; I bring justice where no justice is otherwise possible. Come. I arranged to have a cab waiting this way. The cabbie is a friend. He’s insane enough to be able to see us, but stable enough to fake sanity, at least to the degree as will satisfy New Yorkers.”
They began walking in the tall grass along the side of the road. The night was crisp and cold, and the starlight glinted from frost along the roadside.
“Don’t walk in the road. Motorists won’t see you.”
Raven said, “Tell me what is happening.”
“I arrived too late to stop Azrael from taking the mansion. Gwendolyn had flown away by then; and you and the Waylocks were in custody. I suppose you noticed how normal men could not see the mythical beings? That’s a phenomenon of the so-called mist.”
“Mist?”
“Think of it as a psychological barrier. You are familiar with hysterical blindness? No? Men who are hypnotized into thinking they are blind will still move to avoid objects placed in their path. They react to those objects but do not consciously remember them. There is a state of being whose objects are to normal men as normal objects are to men suffering hysterical blindness. I am one such object in that state. The mythical beings are other such objects, which, unlike me, are native to that state. You may soon be another, if you do not take steps immediately to prevent it.”
“You must say more.”
“Listen. Sometimes men, through despair, or madness, fall into this condition. It’s rare. People can’t see them. If they do, they can’t remember later. Most Men of the Mist start stealing to live. They can’t keep jobs, because their employers forget they are there. Relatives can’t feed them, because the relatives forget.”
“What about pictures? Documents?”
“The phenomenon is psychological, not physical. Normal people simply cannot see any object that would remind them of the affected person.”
“How is this possible?”
“Unknown.”
“What about touching? Hitting?”
“If you try to attract too much attention, you start fading. You go blind, or maybe you turn transparent. You go numb, maybe insubstantial. I have limited data on this point. Maybe legends about incubi are based on this. The point is: once you are in the Mist World, if you start to steal from the normal world, or hit people, or wreck their belongings, the Mist gets thicker around you until you lose all contact with the real world altogether.”
Now they were cutting across a field. They went over a split-rail fence and down through a copse of trees. The tangled branches were like a net overhead.
Raven was shivering, and his breath came in clouds. The man in black handed Raven his cape. Beneath, the man wore a black jumpsuit with a harness to which dozens of tools, weapons, and pieces of equipment were attached.
“Why do you dress in this way?” asked Raven.
“Childhood hero of mine. Ever listen to old radio programs? ‘The weed of crime bears bitter fruit’? No? I thought it was particularly apt, considering how I’m turning this curse to my benefit.
“Second reason: if the universe can explain any action as if there is no mist, then the mist doesn’t get any thicker. If I dress in black, and hide, then maybe the reason why a person doesn’t remember me is because he didn’t see me.
“Third reason: did you notice how Azrael de Gray was dressed? Even when there was nothing but a bedsheet, he had to have a cape. Magic works by impressing an image on the racial subconsciousness of mankind. Simple images, old images, work best. Capes are impressive; sweatshirts are not. Swords are quaint and poetic; machine guns are not. Imagine a blindfolded statue of Justice with a balance in one hand and a machine gun in the other. Absurd image. It is the impressive, poetical things that have magic in them.”
“You carry guns.”
“Half the things in the Mist World are immune to gunfire. Guns, as a symbol, have not percolated down into the racial subconsciousness.”
“But you carry guns!”
“There’s always the other half.”
“Other half?”
“Evil men who use the Mist to hide their crimes. Police cannot see them. But I can. Some crimes are subtle, and it takes a while before the mists thicken around such criminals, thick enough to eject them from the universe. If I reach them, I eject them first.”
“But how do you live? Without stealing?”
The man in black answered, “In the old days, people left food out for fairies. Must have been easier then. Now there are several ways. If you take up a new identity, a new life, sometimes the universe will let you back in, if the new person is sufficiently different from the old. I have many such false identities: a wealthy playboy, a fighter pilot, a janitor, a newspaperman.
“Some jobs you can keep without having to see people face to face. Stockbrokers, accountants, certain types of news writers. I have several of such men in my employ. Others can live on the fringes, seen, but not looked at: cab drivers, street bums.
“I have set up a network of such men, to combat the network I found in place among the maniacs and madmen serving Azrael de Gray. By keeping these men away from crime, I can keep the mist from closing over them.
“For example, my cabbie here; he still lives in his old house, and sometimes the mist gets thin enough that his wife, who thinks he is dead, can have a reunion, which, the next day, she thinks was an erotic dream.
“And my broker, he just does his old job entirely by phone, making sure he never gets to know his clients personally; lonely, yes, but he is the only one in the mist who has been able to keep open a bank account that the tellers don’t forget about. He’s the only one of us who is overweight, since he can actually order food delivered and pay for it.”
In the distance, Raven could see an automobile, sitting, lights off, by the shoulder of a dirt road.
Raven asked, “Who is Azrael de Gray?”
The man in black said, “I was hoping you could tell me. Back when I was in the real world, I was a rather important figure. You would not believe how important. There just aren’t that many inventors and engineers who are also attorneys, financiers, and who own their own newspapers. Without my consent, I had become sort of a political figure, a standard-bearer, a focal point for those who wanted to work hard, be free, and keep the money they earned for themselves. My editorials made quite a stir; but they also brought me to the attention of Azrael.
“Let me tell you something of my past: My greatest joy in life was solving problems; I made quite a bit of money solving other people’s problems for them. Then the government regulators did their best to take away as much of that money as possible; people who did not know my business tried to tell me how to run my business, whom I could hire, when, where, how, and why. That was why I became a lawyer, you know; I wanted to be able to defend the wealth my inventions had brought me. But when the people vote in unfair laws, knowing those laws does not help; the only way to defend yourself then, is by molding public opinion. I bought a newspaper. I made it successful. I hired private detectives for some of my staff to help me track down a conspiracy I had noticed in the halls of power. Politicians, media bosses, criminals were showing a peculiar degree of cooperation. I tried to find why, tried to find how to solve the problem.
“They found me first.
“Azrael’s people approached me with an ultimatum: join them or else. They said they could strip away my family, my wealth, my position, all my accomplishments, my fame, everything—make it as if I had never existed. They showed me clear evidence of their supernatural power. Naturally, I defied them.”
“And Azrael cursed you.”
“Yes. This was four and a half years before he came to Earth.”
“What?!”
“Azrael’s scheme has been long in formulating. He has been communicating with his recruits here for years, in their sleep. His coming to this world was the culmination, not the first step, of long-laid plans.”
“And the curse?”
“I admit it was difficult, at first, to have all one’s accomplishments and life stripped away and forgotten. But my mind, my discipline and dedication, are what created those accomplishments, and nothing and no one can strip me of them. So I keep telling myself.”
They approached the cab. The man in black continued. “At the outset, I estimated it would take five years to overthrow Azrael’s plans and, after that, about ten years to get back to the same wealth and status as I had had before. One advantage, of course, is I wouldn’t have to go back through law school if I sit for the bar in a state that allows open examinations. Also, certain applications of the magic I’ve learned might lead to new scientific developments that will be widely marketable. Just the use of hypnosis as a safe anesthetic has immense potential. I can’t wait to get this Azrael problem out of the way so I can get back to work!” He rubbed his hands together and smiled.

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