The Cipher (27 page)

Nothing else.

I waited. I waited a long time, long enough for the skull and its steel armature to come humping across the floor to me, lie at my feet like some "hideous pet, in a grotesque excess of playfulness it even tried to nibble at my feet. I kicked it, hard, sent it rolling and it rolled right back and bit me, not hard but enough to make a point. I left it alone then, closing my eyes when it rolled onto its back, its whatever, to peer up at me. When I pissed I made sure the pot was close enough to splash it, but that was only an opportunity for it to mock me further, basking in the stream, a golden shower for a steel skull, it even sickened me and I thought I had gotten just about sick-proof. Apparently there were levels of unwitting perversion I had never even considered.

Nakota. Where was she. Wrecked cars and cracked heads and it was just the beginning because she was determined, oh my yes, she was the most determined person I had ever seen and

I had very likely been worse than an asshole to think I could keep her out if she wanted in; what I had accomplished, in fact, was at best a delaying motion, at worst a challenge. And of course she had Malcolm. And her goons.

What was the saying? There were new goons born every minute, no silver spoons but hunger, instead, fed by boredom and nurtured by spite? Of course there were. And who held the map for Goon Mecca, who knew the way?

Who had the video.

I was sure of it. What I was most afraid of was what I most suspected: they were showing it. To other people. Recruiting. Nakota needed an army to get in? Very well, she would raise one up. She could do it, too.

But what else to do?

And from outside, the croon, small and faraway, "Poor Nicholas," the talking head, sweet like poison, the giggle beneath like an acid bubble floating, floating, ready to burst. I had a lot of time to call myself names. I used it all, more when I remembered that Vanese had the padlock key, then: who cares? I thought, watching the skull turn lazy circles around the Funhole like a race car desultorily lapping a track. Who really gives a shit. They'll get in or they won't, and nothing I do now is going to matter.

Because they're out there, and I'm in here.

* * *

The next voice I heard was Malcolm's.

"Hey, Nick," he said. "How d'you like the mask?"

I didn't answer. Hot, I felt very hot. I wondered if it were some effect of the Funhole's, or if I had a fever, or what. The whole room smelled very pleasant, as if someone had just given it a thorough cleaning. I shifted, wincing, against the door; even to think of moving my hand caused me pain. I turned my head to consider it, saw more flesh chewed away, and in the perfect center of the wound a gruesome little caricature of Malcolm, a clay Malcolm, gesturing and talking as the real one talked and gestured beyond the door.

"This is giving me a headache," I said.

"You're gonna have more than a headache pretty soon," Malcolm said. The clay Malcolm, or skin, or whatever he was, giggled in my hand. "Nakota's really mad at you."

"That would be a novelty. Why don't you go away, Malcolm, and leave me alone? You did your mask, that's all you really wanted, isn't it?" . "All I wanted at
first,"
he corrected, and the head wrinkled its forehead, pursed its lips like some scab professor. "But there's much much more to all of this, right, Nick?
Much
more."

"You're right," I said. "And I'm keeping it all for myself."

Danger, inflammatory remark. He sure was easy to piss off, Malcolm, and since it was sort of fun and there was no longer any reason not to, I kept it up. "Yep," I said, snot-nosed cheerful, "a whole world of weirdness, Malcolm, you dumb motherfucker, and you'll never see any of it. There's enough going on in here to make fifty thousand masks, but none for you." I drank a little water. It tasted the way toilet water probably tastes, only not as cold.

"Wait till she gets here," he said, and the little Malcolm's face twisted up in a pink spiral, unrolled like fast forward to be Phantom of the Opera. Big deal.

"Don't threaten me with Nakota," I said. "I'm already scared of her," and abruptly weary of the game I clapped my hands together, ignoring the truly amazing pain this caused, ^gratified to see the little Malcolm squash flat and disappear, dwindling back into my flesh like scar tissue eroded by time.

The real Malcolm: no answer, no shitty retort, and for one cold moment I wondered if his silence had anything to do with my applause. Then: "Let's just forget about her, okay? You give me the key, Nick, and we can talk about it. Okay?"

"I don't think so."

"I'll tell you about the mask," he said, as if this was the rarest of treats. "It's—" "No."

"I bet you don't even have it, do you?" pissed off again; too bad; did he really imagine that two seconds' worth of transparent man-to-man bullshit would mean anything to me? "You probably gave it to that stupid bastard Randy, you—"

"I didn't give it to anybody."

'Then where is it?"

"I threw it down the Funhole."

A deep and complicated pause.

Then: "You're a liar, Nicholas."

Nakota's voice, and it gave me a chill, not because she was angry, not because she sounded crazy, or violent, or even particularly upset. Because she was happy. Why was she happy?

"You're right," I said. "I am a liar. I didn't throw the key down the Funhole, I stuck it up my ass. I stuck it up
Randy's
ass, Malcolm, how's that? What do you care anyway? You're not getting in and that's the end of it. When it's safe, safer, I'll—"

"You're no judge," Nakota said, calm and reasonable, what horrible shit was she up to, there where I couldn't see. "In fact you're not even worthy of what's happening to you. Saints and idiots, angels and children."

"Are you fucked up, or what?"

Malcolm, exasperated: "It's a quote, you dumbshit."

"What it means," Nakota said, and as she talked a stink blossomed, a smell like corrosion and waste, like the biggest garbage pile in the world decomposing all at once, "what it means
now
is that I should be in there, not you. Because I know what's going on. You stopped me from copying the video, Nicholas, but now I see that would never have worked, because it doesn't need to work. It doesn't matter."

I put my hand over my nose and mouth. It didn't help.

She kept going. "I know what all this means. I know about the gateways and the paths, I know that the Funhole's just an avenue to change. To transcursion."

I pulled my shirt off and wrapped it around my face like a bank robber's makeshift mask. She kept talking, on and on about transcursion, giving me first the dictionary definition—a passage beyond limits; extraordinary deviation— and then her own, infinitely more twisted interpretation: a change effected so deep, so fundamental, that when you emerged on the other end (if there was an other end, she wasn't sure and seemed content not to know; for now it was the trip that mattered) you would be yourself a process, an agent of the change, a branch office, say, of the Church of the Transcursion. And as her explanation continued, twisting and turning in upon itself and ranging into the wildest gibberish, not black holes but dark spots, not Funhole, in the end, but Fungod, the smell kept escalating, ranker and hotter and curling down my throat like a clotted rag and finally I screamed, "Shut up, just shut up! I'm suffocating in here!"

She stopped. The smell didn't go away but it didn't get any worse, either. No one said anything for a few minutes, then Malcolm: "The mask can talk, Nick."

Nakota, distant irritation: "His name is Nicholas, you asshole."

"I know it can talk, Malcolm. I can talk, too. Even you can talk, so it can't be that big of a deal, right?"

"It tells us things," Malcolm said, and Nakota's laugh, a dark humor: "Oh shut up. Nicholas doesn't want to know about those things, he might be scared. But he'll find out. He won't be able to avoid it."

Oh God, I thought. What things.

"Do you know what transcursion really means?" she said, laughing, she couldn't seem to stop laughing, and the mask joined in. My voice. My laugh. Dwindling to satisfied whispers, back and forth, and the movement of others outside, who was there? The burned guy? Was he there? Back for more? What others had she found for her stupid crusade, her blind sacrificial march the blood from which would somehow end up on my hands?

And I didn't want to know. And I wanted to open the door, find out, run away, was it my want at all or a reflection of Nakota's, was it some echo of self-preservation or a tricksy bit of Funhole business, this is all too much for me, I thought, this is all just too fucking much for me and I crawled over to the Funhole, my hand one greasy trail of pain and the smell gone overwhelming, I didn't care. No way out but down, right? No way out but farther in.

My right hand in as far as it could go, thrust in, jammed in, you want sexual metaphor, watch me, I'll fist-fuck the blackest hole of all. I was shivering, but the heat of my head was so intense it hurt, I felt sick like flu and sick from the smell and outside the voices getting louder, either it was a riot or my hearing was screwed up. Who cares. I'm in here, and I

love you

and my hand was
squeezed,
squeezed like caught in machinery, and I screamed, oh did I scream, my broken fractured finger bent and twisted and my other lesser bones twirled and blended in my flesh, and I thought as I screamed. This is what the bugs must have felt, as the sensation of swirling became that of suction, a deep and complex pressure, was it taking back what it had given or extracting from me what was mine, blood or slime, there was no getting away now, no, I would have to rip my arm off. Maybe it would do the favor for me, huh? Maybe it—

and the pain rose as I did, agony's levitation, drawn completely upright in an arrow line with tears running not down but up my face, dripping into my hair
"—don't—"
more; higher oh help me

and still more to a point that, oh God, I had never imagined there could be so much pain in all the world, certainly not contained in the stupid simple vessel of my body,
my
body, and as I wondered why I was still alive my conscious eyes closed, taken by tunnel vision to a vanishing point, but though I couldn't see I could still
feel,
oh my yes, oh my God, wouldn't this ever
stop?
It didn't. But I did.

For a while at least.

Piss smell, and a pain in the small of my back. My thighs hurt, the creases at my crotch, an itchy pain that was so puny compared to what I had been feeling before I fainted, or passed out, whatever, it was barely worth noticing. I could see again. I could hear, too, although there wasn't much to listen to, no more yelling from the other side of the door.

No more voice from the Funhole.

Lying lover-close, almost atop it and my arm still sunk to the elbow, unwilling to test the theory of independent motion, luxuriating in the absence of excruciation: a man of simple pleasures, that's me. Eventually I would have to move, of course, if only to scratch that god-awful itch between my legs. I must have pissed myself in my pain, and now, best guess, I had diaper rash. I had to laugh at that, a little hoarse chuckle that ended with the beginnings of a retch, then a full-fledged heave and without thinking I sat up, assumed the position, head between knees as I coughed and choked in my dry nausea, nothing coming up.

When it was over I stayed slumped, arms balanced on my trembling knees, until I realized I had moved, my arm was free, and more amazingly free of pain.

Well, I thought. Do you really want to see this?

No.

Look quick and get it over with.

No.

I was afraid to wiggle my fingers, I was afraid I didn't have them anymore. I was afraid of what the hole, my hole, looked like now, after such intense communion, afraid, at last, not to look; nothing's worse than not knowing, right?

Right?

And that giggle, from outside, echoing in my ear like a tickling tongue.

I looked.

And retched again, helpless rushing nausea of disgust, my mouth loose and dripping with saliva, and I looked again and couldn't stop, retching and I couldn't stop.

No palm at all, now. Nothing but hole, the fingers jutting impossible like the scared tines of a starfish, my wrist protruding beneath like some useless .object left behind in an inappropriate spot. Shaking, all of me shaking, I turned my hand over; the back looked normal, as normal as it ever got. I turned it back again. Hole. Hand. Hole. Hand.

There would be no covering this with a bandage, no. No more hiding possible. The best I could ever hope for would be amputation, self-inflicted naturally, I'll cut the fucker off, that's what I'll do, I'll throw it down the Funhole, or maybe I'll tie a string to it and go
fishing,
talk about your catch of the day and I realized I was talking out loud, muttering,
smiling,
and a calm tiny part of me said Well, that's it, you're finally crazy. Congratulations. You've been ridden to the point where all you are is motion. Perpetually. And I stared at my hand, my hole hand, ha-ha, and flexed my fingers to watch them move, amazing, they look just like puppet fingers but where are the strings, hmm? Just where exactly are the strings to—