Last Plane to Heaven (38 page)

We can make them die unknowing.
Oh, the joy that thought brings me. These traitors who have already brought the deaths of billions are beyond any redemption of suffering or vengeance.

Curling in my little nest of borrowed blankets in one of the old basement saunas, I am quite surprised when the girl comes to me. I know her by her footsteps and her scent already.

Her fingers brush my shoulder, the light pressure of them through the fabric of the blanket the first human touch I have known in almost nine years. We do not hug, or even clasp hands, in the Second Resistance. “I saw that you understood,” she whispers.

The hairs on my neck prickle, as my cock strains like a clothyard shaft. “I do,” I whisper, then immediately curse the echoed meaning of
those
particular words. I still wear my wedding ring, though my finger has grown around it until the band is almost invisible. Most days I cannot recall the faces of my wife and daughter.

“It is darker here.” She squats back on her heels, shadows against shadow, barely an outline through some stray bit of light elsewhere in the basement. It is enough for me to notice the swing of her right breast beneath the concert T-shirt, and I recall enough of women to know she has done this on purpose.

“Darker than California?”

“Yes.” She shivers slightly. I realize her nipple has stiffened to something pleasingly mouth-filling. “So many of the Old Ones love their cold.”

“They are creatures of space, and night, and the darkest depths.” For no good reason, I add, “Such bright and risen madness in our names.”

That hand touches me again as the breast strains against its enclosing fabric. “Are you lonely?” she asks in a soft, lost voice. I am too taken up in her to wonder at the question, for already I am lifting my blanket to shew her just how lonely I am.

IV

The woman is gone the next morning, a note telling me she heads north for the Aberdeen lodge, if it can still be found. Here in Oregon we've had no word from the Washington side this year since the river thawed in May, though in past years they've come across at Longview two or three times a month by boat during the free-flowing months. Priests burned out the Lincoln City Lodge last December, the members stripped and broken and laid before the dark tide of shoggoths, digital prints of their deaths tacked to walls and telephone poles all up and down the Northwest coast as a warning to the remaining feral humans.

No such word of Aberdeen, for good or ill.

I should go back to my own routines, but there are vats of jellyfish toxin to establish. Someone will have to scale the odd-angled walls of the Risen City and carry the stuff in. Or allow themselves to be captured, and pray for a slow enough death to be able to spread the poison first.

In any case, the sauna room smells of sex and me and her, and I know I shall never again experience the sweet caress of a woman. The scent-memories are precious, while they remain.

I work for days, as Madeleine stays with me after the last stragglers depart. She knows that I touched the girl with my body, just as I will never again touch her lidless, staring eyes, and damp, spotted skin. The painful memory returns, that it was she who gave me the wedding band I still wear.

Can she be jealous now, beyond the end of all things?

Still, the little cells grow, the trays glowing slightly in a curious echo of the walls just offshore. Madeleine's lips are no longer well formed for speaking, and neither is her larynx, but she grunts her fears to me.

The toxins will kill us all, or at least those of us who are transforming. Her. Me. Everyone but the girl from Crescent City. Or perhaps the toxins will kill no one, and this is all but a cruel hoax. Maybe the Old Ones toy with us, even now.

Finally I take her into my arms one night, in the old sauna. Though true coupling is not possible for us, I make love to my memory of who my wife once was, while her lidless eyes weep acid tears to scar my chest and shoulder.

V

In the morning, I find her shriveled corpse next to the toxin trays. A faint smear still glows around her lips. I wonder if I should cry, but tears are years gone.

There is nothing more to be done. I gather my strength and purpose. As we were instructed, I press the cells in old cloth, so the toxin can be more easily spread by air or contact. As it dries, I bottle the stuff into old light bulbs from which the metal stems have been broken off, then bind them with duct tape. If the priests beat me upon my capture, they will be very surprised.

I leave detailed notes and diagrams shewing our work, for when others of the lodge return. Eventually I step outside into the chilled mist and stare across the water at the Risen City. I shall take a dory and row me down to that watery hell, bringing blindness to the Old Ones, and death to my immortal enemies.

As I ply the oars, I wonder if the girl and Madeleine planned this for me. The waters around me roil with evil, the sky is Armageddon-dark, and I find it does not matter.

“I love you,” I tell the world. Then I row some more.

 

Her Fingers Like Whips, Her Eyes Like Razors

I always thought the fair folk Under the Hill were creepy as hell. So I set about showing that.

Mother never has been patient. Old as she is—and there are hills Above of which she can remember the birth—time has never blessed her with the sort of wisdom lore informs us is inevitable with the assumption of the grace of age.

This does not bother me. I am not one of the mabkin. They toil at her leisure, they sweat to her pleasures, they suffer to her pains. Sooner be a worker ant in a burrow than one of those pretty, pretty, doomed butterflies. Mother always pulls the wings off her children and eats them in the end.

No, my purpose in this life is different. Someone must keep the Doors, after all. The great copper hinges on which the boundaries of night and day swing do not clean themselves of verdigris. Neither do the shadowed locks forged by Chronos himself in the time before the light first came into the world oil their own tumblers.

You who live Above tell stories. I am never certain if this is a sickness or a blessing, though in my weaker moments over a glass of lifewater I have confessed a time or two to envy. I have even caught the way of it from you. Everyone who comes begging at the Doors launches their plea on the wings of some tale. They tuck their feet beneath their knees amid the riot of spring flowers, or a moment later they huddle fast amid the snowdrifts and the winter wind, or a moment after that lean with the stiffness of their aging against some patient draft animal and croak out a querulous plea against the final bloody sunset of their mayfly days.

The Doorkeeper listens to all. The Doorkeeper hears all. The Doorkeeper is the keyhole to Mother's heart, here Below. Mother is not patient, but I am, for I hold her heart in my left pocket along with a hawk feather, three apple seeds, and the list of True Names, which is so short and infinite that it has been scriven on the inside of a silver thimble.

Come, then, and tell me your story, for Mother will never listen, and I always will. Like the icy seed of winter hidden inside a summer rain, Below is always here. Like the golden fire of summer hidden inside a winter freeze, Below is always here. And you will never be on the right side of the Doors, unless your tale makes the seahawk fly from my vest, the three trees bloom, and the thimble whisper your True Name in the voice of the distant, amniotic sea.

Then Mother's heart will take another beat, she will age another day, and we will all be a moment closer to freedom.

Come. Tell me.

*   *   *

The chemo port implant scars on Addison's right chest still ached a little, and she ignored the continuing sensation that the surgeons had left a Bic pen inside her. Another twinge, to the chorus from her ribs and the partial thoracectomy that had removed her tumor. Besides, she was away from all that now, for a little while. Or maybe longer, despite the appointments next week back in Laramie.

The day here was fine and cold, the wind brisk, and she was outdoors. Addison climbed through what felt like more bracken than any hills had a right to be covered with. A week earlier, she hadn't even known what bracken was. Ferns and flowers?

Hills without mountains seemed strange to her, but she was a long way from Wyoming. The last few nights camping in her little tent, she'd felt a long way from anywhere. It had taken her great mental effort to remember the name of the little airport she'd flown into over the weekend, after changing planes four times and crossing an ocean.

“I'm not worried,” she told the empty sky, over which not even a hawk circled. The sky held no answers.

She slipped a half-eaten Clif Bar from her pocket, which slowly became a three-quarter-eaten Clif Bar before her gag reflex kicked in.
Figs, who the hell ever thought figs were a good idea?
Addison was eating less each day, which was odd, because she wasn't really at any significant altitude.

Just the top of the world, from this view.

Her grandfather Locke's words kept coming back to her.

Start at the Heartbeck

The sunset behind you

Always climb higher

You'll find your way true

He'd sung her to sleep with those words when she was a baby and a little girl, and later on made her memorize them. Addison had spent her winters with Grandfather Locke in the little house in Laramie, while her parents and brothers worked their high-country ranch. She'd been too weak for the deep snows, she'd been told all her childhood. Too delicate a constitution.

Addison had never had a cold a day in her life. Not a moment's illness.

Not until now.

She crossed a ridge so low and subtle she almost missed the fact she wasn't climbing anymore. The sun stood overhead, directly at its zenith. The scent was different here—the slight rank of bracken overwhelmed by the underlying acidity of the stony soil and a damp tang of metal.

The smell of magic, when you feel like you've been chewing wires.

Where the hell had that thought come from? In Grandfather's voice.

There wasn't any higher to climb. Not here, not now. No beck to put at her back, either. The watercourses had vanished to rivulets a day ago, and she was carrying her last two quarts on her hip. All she saw in front of her was a shallow bowl of a high valley, a place that by rights should have cupped a little tarn reflecting the blue sky with the indolence of water.

Close your eyes and follow your nose.

Grandfather Locke had died last winter with a smile on his face, looking no older than he ever had since she was born. Not even tired, just finished, as if his life work had been carving a young adult Addison from the stuff of childhood.

Now he was talking to her.

So she listened. That's what she was doing here, right? Walking east from the Heartbeck.

Addison closed her eyes and breathed in the place she stood. Trace of bracken. Soil. Wind, bearing a bit of damp from some more fortunate locale. The droppings of something small and herbivorous. Metal.

Metal.

Copper.

Mouth open, she turned, facing first one way then the other, until she thought she knew where the metal tang was strongest. She advanced slowly, her hiking pole a cane now. No point in breaking an ankle in the one gopher hole for forty miles on this high, hollow hill.

Did they even have gophers on this side of the Atlantic?

Step, sniff. Step, sniff. Step, sniff.

When she bumped into the solid mass on the ground, Addison was not the least bit surprised.

She opened her eyes to see a pair of copper slabs stretched before her. No, not slabs, doors, for all that they were flat against the bottom of the little valley. They looked like nothing so much as the blast doors to a Wyoming missile silo, if the air force had been hiring Italian espresso-machine designers to build the Cold War infrastructure.

The margins of each door were worked in high-relief chasings of snakes and trefoils, which themselves seemed to form a script, though not one she recognized. Tiny eyes winked between the leaves. Tiny mouths screamed ecstasy and terror. Battles and seductions worked their way across the vast spaces between the margins. The doors seemed almost alive.

She looked about to find a girl who hadn't been there a moment before sitting on one corner of the doors, twenty feet away. A young woman, much her build and age, wearing a rather smart denim miniskirt and a hunter green ragged wool vest far too large for her. And apparently nothing else, which made Addison's heart skip a beat before she looked away from the curve of exposed breast, then found herself drawn back again.

The girl was the girl in the mirror.

“Hello,” the stranger said. Her voice was soft, familiar, though the accent was strange, like nothing Addison had ever heard.

“Uh, hello.” Addison's own voice sounded odd in her ears now.

They stared at one another, ordinary brown eyes locked on ordinary brown eyes. She'd never been anything special, had always longed for the fiery red hair and green eyes of all the brave servant girls who were future queens in the books she'd devoured from the library, but Addison's looks had remained resolutely plain.

On this girl in her ragged, open vest, here in the crown of the high hills, those looks were as exotic as any raving beauty on the page. Unthinking, Addison plucked at her own hair.

“Do you bear sorrow or joy?” asked the girl.

“You—” Addison blurted, then stopped. “You look like me.”

Laughter that could have rung the bells of morning.
Why don't I laugh like that?
“Better to say you look like me, stranger.” A long, thoughtful pause, something deceptively close to compassion in those brown eyes. “No one finds these doors by accident. Well, almost no one. But surely not you.”

“No, no…” Addison paused, stared at her own slender, callused fingers a moment. She was still thirty feet from the other girl, but she could
smell
her. A far-too-familiar scent somewhere between sex and sleep. It was … disturbing. “Grandfather sent me.”