Shifters (30 page)

Authors: Edward Lee

BOOK: Shifters

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“Gott… Blut…”

In the murk, Locke could only see the palest form of her coltish legs wrap around her paramour’s jacketed back. The legs squeezed, and she squealed. After that… Just more greedy sucking sounds.

Then, more vaguely, Jason’s form rose—

“Here’s one more for ya—”

A sharp, splattering sound now, like someone upending a bucket of beef stew onto pavement.

Jason threw up into what Locke guessed must be the girl’s face.

“Eat my puke, ya cum-dump. You like it, it’s the best meal ya had in a week, like Campbell’s Chunky Style, huh? Don’t get jealous—tomorrow
you
get to puke.”

Locke couldn’t actually see what happened next, but he could hear it. A more steady, fainter splattering, and an accommodating ink-shape in the darkness. The shape of the macabre driver standing over the girl, urinating on her with verve.

“Good action?”

Locke’s heart stopped when someone from behind tapped him on the shoulder. He was fainting from the shock as he pinwheeled, then collapsed.

Fading.

A repugnant stench flurried: decomposition. It seemed to reach down and touch his face like curious fingers, and in the second before his consciousness sailed away, Locke saw a dilapidated figure standing before him, and heard this:

“I told you not to come here. Nothing can stop the transposition now, so you better get ready for it…”

(iii)

Professor Fredrick awoke to the sound of—
What?
he thought. His mind felt clotted, a once-reliable machine now slowed down by pitted bearings. A clock fitted neatly with Phonetician numerals ticked on the wall.
Three in the morning?

God. He’d fallen asleep grading papers after his last class.
Seventy-five years old,
the realization creaked along with his office chair when he leaned up. Ten years ago they’d told him he was too old for anymore field work; as an archaeologist, that was like telling a veteran mechanic he was too old to pick up a box wrench.
Now I’m too old to stay awake at my desk.

Fredrick was the Chairman of the University of Washington’s Department of Archaeological Studies. For the past half a century, he’d seen it all, done it all, and was perhaps the most esteemed living member of his profession in the world. No, no more digs—he was a health insurance risk with the mid-stage osteoporosis and borderline emphysema—not from smoking but from breathing the dust of buried civilizations and a thousand ancient sepulchers that he himself had opened. The revenge of the gods, the price of daring to look into the mummified faces of Ramses III and Duncan I, of kings and queens and princes and peasants.
At least I got a nice office out of it,
he thought now.

His fax machine was slowly spitting something out—the noise that had wakened him. But who would be faxing him at this ungodly hour? He started to get up but flinched and sat back down, a bite of pain in his lower back that had plagued him since he’d pushed over a vault lid in Nequada twenty years ago, searching for the body of one of Herod’s bastard sons. The damage was for nothing; all that filled the crypt were pieces of broken tabby urns—
potsherds
—used to store flax and millet for the world’s first zymurgists. In the respite, his hooded eyes gazed around the office and at the relics that filled it. Brooches and jupon-clips. Masks of bronze and wristcuffs of primal iron. Stave-caps, armlets, breastplates, and even Princess Canessa’s chastity belt. A slate-palette from King Narmer’s scribes, an ivory macehead from a Basque grave. The stuff of history?
Or junk?
he wondered now at this wee hour.
Rubbish that no one cares about.
The gold inlays of a priceless robe-clasp once belonging to Queen Nefertiti had now, after, oh, say, 3,500 years, disintegrated, infinity taking back what it was owed. Why let Fredrick have it merely to sit unlooked at in his droll office? Lastly, in the corner by a bust of Nergal, hung his clay-flecked leather boots, the same he’d worn on countless digs. From Galli to Nineveh, from Jericho to Troy to Knossos. He abstracted, wanting to smile. He thought of himself as a specter of the future. All these cities, once great, had been predestined to be trod upon by Fredrick’s old boots thousands of years later. Time buried. Whole civilizations locked in layers of clay. He had spent his life walking on worlds, and some day, he realized, someone like him would walk on his.

The fax machine’s whine ceased, the single sheet of paper lolling like a sheet of skin. Just once he wished he’d get a decent inquiry, something to sink the few teeth he had left into. Sometimes he wished he could be dead rather that serve out the rest of this prison term as a teacher.

With an audible groan, he leaned forward again and snatched up the fax paper. Just one sheet, with a curious header that read:

STATE MACRO-ANALYSIS COMPUTER (MAC) TOPIC/NAME/SUBJECT SEARCH CONCLUSION.

PAGE ONE OF ONE (1) PAGE

RECIPIENT: YOU HAVE BEEN IDENTIFIED AS A POSSIBLE CONSULTANT FOR THE FOLLOWING SEARCH REQUEST INITIATED BY:

CORDESMAN, J., CAPT., SEATTLE POLICE DEPARTMENT/NORTH PRECINCT HOMICIDE/ ASSAULT UNIT.

Fredrick’s tired eyes squinted at first, as if bored. He got these things all the time, technical inquiries from the state and county governments, or lawyers, usually just questions about foreclosures on land that might be of historic value, and every now and then he’d get one from the police regarding museum thefts.

But after reading the following few lines of
this
query, he chuckled to himself and whispered, “Oh, thank you, God. Thank you for giving this old heretic something fun to do.”

(iv)

Was it a dream?

A blazing blue sky nearly blinded him from above. A lone finch seemed to dive out of the sun, right toward him, then was gone. He thought he heard tiny waves lapping a shore but couldn’t see water. Then came the smell of burning leaves. Where was he, dream notwithstanding? The Downtown Waterfront? Gasworks Park? It didn’t really matter. It was a place of tranquil beauty, of placation and sunlight…

Then the dream-world turned dark.

“Do you hear me? Do you recognize my voice?” Locke heard through the vale of black. Yes, he did.
But this is just a dream,
he realized.
So why should I be afraid?

“Because I’m a fuckin’ dead man talking to you…”

“Byers… White Shirt…”

“You got it. And let me tell you something—” but then the words drained down to vocal drizzle, nothing left intelligible.

“What!” Locke snapped. “What!”

Warbling, and the sound of a dead surf. A single word worked through it all, and it sounded like, “
…
malefactor…”

What was this? More drunkenness? An alcohol-reaction to the hypothalamus? More pre-D.T. hallucinatory effects? He’d drunk a lot, yes, but he’d also eaten a lot—had stuffed himself, actually, on Lethe’s charity of French cuisine.
Drunks always look for an excuse, and this is just a dream!
Locke thought in the dream.

Then the dream turned hot. Hot as hell.

Caverns of charred rock, caverns of skin whose pores eddied oily smoke. An imprecation, a visual melange: chaos in the scape of his mind. Reefs of blood-red clouds roved past a black moon. The sky shone smoky pink like begonias patted with industrial soot. Beyond the vale, a range descended, a range of more sizzling rock black as anthracite. The zenith behind him—if it could be called that—was studded by plinths, by black cenotaphs and dolmens old as the world. Then Locke’s hot eyes recast to the pit below. Ringed by unspeakable bushes and weeds limp and slimy as snakes, a tarn glittered the black moonlight off its crystal face. Tiny rovings could be detected beneath the death-still surface: faces? Tendrils of mist crawled upward, and eventually Locke saw bubbles emerge.

Then came a fat
splash,
like dropping a stone into hot tar.

An agonized head stuck up from the surface. A flayed arm waved, but not in greeting, in terror.

“Locke!”

The heat drew sweat from the skin of Locke’s eyeballs. His sweat poured off his chin like tap water from a spigot. He strained his vision at the head—

“Oh, no…”

—and recognized Lehrling’s blood-sheened face.

“My, God, help me get me out of here! What did I do to deserve this, Locke?”

Locke couldn’t imagine.

It wasn’t water that filled the marsh, it was smoldering blood. Nevertheless, Locke dashed forward, reaching out for his friend, but before he could even make it to the shore of sulfurous black sand—

My, God—

Several
other
figures emerged behind Lehrling. These figures were not human but instead indescribable
things.

“Locke! Get—”

“I can’t hear you!” Locke shrieked.

“Get out of the house!”

Lehrling gagged amid the struggles of his terror, while his hosts toyed at him. Like golems, they rose, picking at Lehrling with greedy, stunted hands. Locke detected only rudiments of facial features, crude ridgelike brows, slits for eyes like knife slashes in spoiled meat.

“Get out of the house tonight! It’s not really—”

“Not really what!” Locke shouted back.

But by now, Lehrling was drowning in blood, gargling in it. Then one of the things pressed a subhuman hand to the novelist’s mouth; Lehrling bucked. Vomit sprayed from his nostrils as his face bulged, but next he had no face at all when another of the blood-creatures promptly sucked it off the skull.

What a gross-as-shit dream…

Then these things, these ushers, dragged Lehrling back down into the depths of the hell-marsh. In a few moments a violent rip of bubbles broke, then crushed organs and hanks of flesh rose to the surface—

Locke jerked back into cold darkness.

Another dream…

“You’re unfulfilled,” came the most plush voice. A woman’s, and a scent like lilacs. Locke couldn’t see her, he could only calculate her beauty.

Devastating
beauty.

But…where was he now?

A dead room in the dead of night, laved in twilight. Just a bare mattress, bare walls streaked by dust and discolor. Bare wood floors. Behind him, where a headboard might be, a small window framed the moon.

“I can taste it,” she said.

“Whuh-what?”

“Your despair.”

It’s only a dream,
he reminded himself. But even in dreams, could he be scanned so easily? Or had his despair merely sharpened to the point of bleeding, part of his soul running out of a cut?

The shadow listed beside him. “What means more to you than anything?”

“Truth, I guess,” he answered through chattering teeth. He sat huddled on the bed, naked. Freezing.

“But now you feel there is none.”

Not a question, a statement. She knew, whoever
she
was. A shard of dream symbology, a siren of sleep?

A succubus?

“Your love is your truth—”