The Best of Lucius Shepard (84 page)

Once kindled, fear caught in me and burned. The flickering of sun on
water; the stirring of fallen needles; mica glinting on the face of a boulder;
these were unmistakable signs of an invisible beast who slumbered by the steps
of the prison. I heard a noise. It may have been someone starting a chainsaw
downriver, a car engine being revved, but to my ears it was a growl sounded
high in a huge throat, a warning and a bloody promise. I sprang to the gate and
slammed it shut, then rested against the cold metal, weak with relief. My eyes
went to the second level of the tier. Gazing down at me was a man in a guard’s
uniform, absently tapping the palm of his hand with a nightstick. I could hear
the slap of wood on flesh, counting out the time with the regularity of a
metronome, each stroke ticking off the ominous fractions of his displeasure.
Finally, as if he had become sure of me, he sheathed the nightstick and walked
away, the sharp report of his boot heels precisely echoing the now-steady
rhythm of my heart.

·
· · · ·

I spent the remainder of the day and half the night staring at the
discolorations on the wall opposite my bunk—they had never come in fully, never
developed into a complicated abstraction as had the walls of my fellow
prisoners, possibly because the walls upon which I expended most of my energy
were the ones in the anteroom of the new wing. Yet during those hours I saw in
their sparse scatter intimations of the scriptlike fungus inscribed upon the
walls of the chamber at the heart of the law, indecipherable to me now as
Arabic or Mandarin, tantalizingly inscrutable—I suspected they were the
regulations by which we lived and contemplating them soothed me. I could not
avoid recalling the chamber and the man suspended therein, but my thoughts
concerning these things were speculative, funded by neither fear nor regret. If
it had been Quires, one hundred and sixty years old and more, tortured for half
that span, this lent credence to Causey’s assertion that Czerny, LeGary,
Ashford, and Holmes were the original board of Diamond Bar who had been
photographed with the warden in 1917 … and what did that say about the
potentials of the prison? Time and again I returned to the truths I had sensed
as Quires cried out from his chains, the dualities of punishment and sacrifice
he seemed to incorporate. It was as if he were a battery through which the
animating principle of the place was channeled. This was a simplistic analogy,
yet when coupled with the image of a Christlike figure in torment, simplicity
took on mythic potency and was difficult to deny. Now that I had proved myself
unequal to traditional freedom, I was tempted to believe in the promised
freedom of the new wing, in all the tenuous promise of Diamond Bar. The
illusion of freedom, I realized, was the harshest of prisons, the most
difficult to escape. Ristelli, Causey, Czerny, and Bianca had each in their way
attempted to lead me to this knowledge, to demonstrate that only in a place
like Diamond Bar, where walls kept that illusion at bay, was the road to
freedom discernable. I had been a fool to disregard them.

Near
midnight, a skinny, towheaded man stopped in front of my cell door and blew
cigarette smoke through the bars from his shadowed mouth. I did not know him,
but his arrogance and deferential attitude made me suspect he was a familiar of
the board. “You’re wanted at the annex gate, Penhaligon,” he said, and blew
another stream of smoke toward me. He looked off along the corridor, and in the
half-light I saw the slant of a cheekbone, skin pitted with old acne scars.

In
no mood to be disturbed, I asked, “What for?”

“Man’s
being transferred. Guess they need a witness.”

I
could not imagine why a transfer would require witnesses, and I felt the creep
of paranoia; but I did not think the board would resort to trickery in the
exercise of their power, and, reluctantly, I let the man escort me down through
the annex.

The
gate was open, and gathered by the entranceway, in partial silhouette against
the moonstruck river, was a group of men, ten or twelve in all, consisting of
the board and their spokesmen. Their silence unsettled me, and once again I
grew paranoid, thinking that I was to be transferred; but then I spotted Colangelo
off to one side, hemmed in against the wall by several men. His head twitched
anxiously this way and that. The air was cool, but he was perspiring. He
glanced at me, betraying no reaction—either he did not register me or else he
had concluded that I was only a minor functionary of his troubles.

Czerny,
along with LeGary, Ashford, and Holmes, was positioned to the left of the
entrance. As I waited for whatever ritual was to occur, still uncertain why I
had been invited, he came a tottering step toward me, eyes down, hands
fingering his belt, and addressed me in his usual muttering cadence. I did not
understand a single word, but the towheaded man, who was sticking to my elbow,
said in a snide tone, “You been a bad boy, Penhaligon. That’s what the man’s
telling you. You seen things few men have seen. Maybe you needed to see them,
but you weren’t prepared.”

The
towheaded man paused and Czerny spoke again. I could find nothing in his face
to support the sternness of his previous words—he seemed to be babbling
brokenly, as if speaking to a memory, giving voice to an imaginary dialog, and
thinking this, I wondered if that was what we were to him, memories and
creatures of the imagination: if he had gone so far along the path to freedom
that even those who lived in Diamond Bar had come to be no more than shadows in
his mind.

“This
is the edge of the pit,” the towheaded man said when Czerny had finished. “The
one you saw below is only its metaphor. Here you were closest to peril. That’s
why we have summoned you, so you can watch and understand.”

Another
spate of muttering and then the towheaded man said, “This is your final
instruction, Penhaligon. There are no further lessons to be learned. From now
on we will not protect you.”

Czerny
turned away, the audience ended, but angered by his claim that the board had
protected me—I had no memory of being protected when I fought with
Colangelo—and emboldened by the certainty that I was not to be transferred, I
said to him, “If the pit I saw below was a metaphor, tell me where Causey is.”

The
old man did not turn back, but muttered something the towheaded man did not
have to translate, for I heard the words clearly.

“If
you are fortunate,” Czerny said, “you will meet him again in the new wing.”

The
towheaded man nudged me forward to stand by Czerny and the rest of the board,
inches away from the line demarking the limits of the prison and the beginning
of the world, a dirt path leading downward among boulders to the river flashing
along its course. I have said the river was moonstruck, yet that scarcely
describes the brightness of the landscape. The light was so strong even the
smallest objects cast a shadow, and though the shadows beneath the boughs quivered
in a fitful wind, they looked solid and deep. The dense firs and the overhang
of the entrance prevented me from seeing the moon, but it must have been
enormous—I pictured a blazing silvery face peering down from directly above the
river, pocked by craters that sketched the liver spots and crumpled features of
a demented old man. Sprays of water flying from the rocks in midstream
glittered like icy sparks; the shingle on the far shore glittered as though
salted with silver. Beyond it, the terrain of the opposite bank lay hidden
beneath a dark green canopy, but patches of needles carpeting the margins of
the forest glowed a reddish-bronze.

Who
it was that shoved Colangelo out onto the path, I cannot say—I was not
watching. It must have been a hard shove, for he went staggering down the slope
and fell to all fours. He collected himself and glanced back toward us, not
singling anyone out, it seemed, but taking us all in, as if claiming the sight
for memory. He wiped dirt from his hands, and judging by his defiant posture I
expected him to shout, to curse, but he turned and made for the river, going
carefully over the uneven ground. When he reached the river’s edge, he stopped
and glanced back a second time. I could not make out his face, though he stood in
the light, but judging by the sudden furtiveness of his body language, I
doubted he had believed that he would get this far, and now that he had, the
idea that he actually might be able to escape sprang up hot inside him, and he
was prey to the anxieties of a man afflicted by hope.

Oddly
enough, I hoped for him. I felt a sympathetic response to his desire for
freedom. My heart raced and my brow broke a sweat, as if it were I and not that
ungainly pinkish figure who was stepping from rock to rock, arms outspread for
balance, groping for purchase on the slick surfaces, wobbling a bit, straining
against gravity and fear. I had no apprehension of an inimical presence as I
had detected that morning, and this made me think that it had been nerves alone
that had stopped me from escaping and increased my enthusiasm for Colangelo’s
escape. I wanted to cheer, to urge him on, and might have done so if I had not
been surrounded by the silent members of the board and their faithful
intimates. That Colangelo was doing what I had not dared caused me envy and
bitterness but also infected me with hope for myself. The next time I was alone
at the gate, perhaps I would be equal to the moment.

The
wind kicked up, outvoicing the chuckling rush of the river, sending sprays higher
over the rocks, and along with the wind, the brightness of the river
intensified. Every eddy, every momentary splotch of foam, every sinewy swell of
water glinted and dazzled, as if it were coming to a boil beneath Colangelo. He
kept going past the midpoint, steadier, more confident with each step,
unhampered by the buffets of the wind. Close by the gate the boughs bent and
swayed, stirring the shadows, sending them sliding forward and back over the
dirt like a black film. The whole world seemed in motion, the atoms of the
earth and air in a state of perturbation, and as Colangelo skipped over the
last few rocks, I realized there was something unnatural about all this
brilliant movement. The shapes of things were breaking down … briefly, for the
merest fractions of seconds, their edges splintering, decaying into jittering
bits of bright and dark, a pointillist dispersion of the real. I assumed I was
imagining this, that I was emotionally overwrought, but the effect grew more
pronounced. I looked to Czerny and the board. They were as always—distracted,
apparently unalarmed—but what their lack of reaction meant, whether they saw
what I did and were unsurprised, whether they saw something entirely different,
I could not determine.

Colangelo
let out a shout—of triumph, I believed. He had reached the shore and was
standing with a fist upraised. The sand beneath his feet was a shoal of
agitated glitter, and at his back the bank was a dark particulate dance, the
forms of the trees disintegrating into a rhythm of green and black dots, the
river into a stream of fiery unreality. How could he not notice? He shouted
again and flipped us off. I realized that his outlines were shimmering, his
prison garb blurring. Everything around him was yielding up its individuality,
blending with the surround, flattening into an undifferentiated backdrop. It
was nearly impossible to tell the sprays of water from sparkling currents in
the air. The wind came harder, less like a wind in its roaring passage than the
flux of some fundamental cosmic force, the sound of time itself withdrawing
from the frame of human event, of entropy and electron death, and as Colangelo
sprinted up the bank into cover of the forest, he literally merged with the
setting, dissipated, the stuff of his body flowing out to be absorbed into a
vibratory field in which not one distinguishable form still flourished. I
thought I heard him scream. In all that roaring confusion I could not be
certain, but he was gone. That much I knew. The world beyond the annex gate was
gone as well, its separate forms dissolved into an electric absence of
tremulous black, green, and silver motes, depthless and afire with white noise,
like a television set tuned to a channel whose signal had been lost.

The board and their retainers moved away, talking softly among
themselves, leaving me on the edge of the prison, of the pit, watching as—piece
by piece—the forest and river and rocks reassembled, their inconstant shapes
melting up from chaos, stabilizing, generating the imitation of a perfect
moonlit night, the air cool and bracing, the freshness of the river sweetly
palpable, all things alive with vital movement—boughs shifting, fallen needles
drifting, light jumping along the surface of the water with the celerity of a
charge along a translucent nerve. Even after what I had seen, I stood there a
long while, tempted to run into the night, disbelieving the evidence of my
senses, mistrusting the alternatives to belief, and so oppressed in spirit that
I might have welcomed dissolution. A step forward, and I would be free one way
or another. I stretched out a hand, testing its resistance to the dissolute
power of the world beyond, and saw no hint of blurring or distortion. Yet still
I stood there.