The Shibboleth (21 page)

Bruno approaches the van. The driver—a middle-aged woman with short-cropped gray hair and a Bluetooth headset—ignores him. But the passenger has a familiar face, one I remember from the old days at Casimir Pulaski Juvenile Detention Center for Boys. Good old Sloe-Eyed Norman.

That means the Witch, Ilsa Moteff.

Bruno's heart and mine jump as one at the sight of him. Jack killed her. Broke her neck in a fierce explosion of desperation and force, but she took over poor, hapless Norman's body and never gave it up.

When Bruno raises his sidearm, both Ilsa and the driver show puzzlement ratcheting up into alarm. He empties the clip into the engine block.

I'd wanted to have him shoot her with all my heart, but it seems Bruno is not a totally bad guy, after all. Part of him struggles with me enough to change the aim. Good for you, Bruno Conti. Now you've let a monster live.

What feels like the mental version of a charging rhino caroms into Bruno's brainmeat, and I'm booted out of his head. If you can mentally reel, I'm reeling like a steer with a sledgehammer blow between the horns.

The Witch. Damn, she's strong. The pressure ebbs as I gain distance. But my brain feels slimy, filmy, like she's left a residue all over it. There's really no words for how bad she is.
Her mind is a wormhole to hell.

There's honking behind me. The light is green. I gun the Beemer onto First Avenue, whipping by people and cars and cabs. I'm nabbing directions from pedestrians' brains as I drive—
steve michonne ahmad tony jennifer another jennifer ANOTHER JENNIFER dj willum joe helen johan eduardo petrova chanda bobbi weston liz jim.
Like the car I'm in, I can feel the shibboleth shuddering around me as I play mental ping-pong, bouncing from head to Shreve from head to Shreve again while barreling down the road.

I've got to get off the island.

Hands at twelve and two, just like I learned in one of my many teenage memories. Up the on-ramp and onto the FDR and into traffic. Heading south and upping the speed now into the fifties, low sixties. That's as fast as the traffic will allow.

Approaching the bridge, the cars bog down, slowing. I adjust the mirrors to point up into the sky as best as I can. For an instant, I catch a glimpse of black wings, or the raven's flutter of the jumping girl. Like Jack. Tailing me from on high.

The cars grind to a halt, and I feel the mental pressure building again—the Witch is back in range. I crane my head, looking for the van, but can't see it. And she's strong. Unimaginably strong.

Once, when I was in junior high, I smarted off to the wrong guy—Barry Levitt—and when he came after me, I tried to fight him off, grabbing his arms, his wrists. But he was enraged and fueled by whatever hatred or desire propelled him and his arms were like pneumatic pumps pushing toward me. I remember being surprised, thinking,
He's not supposed to do that!
That's what she feels like. The Witch. She's like a boa constrictor choking
out my air. Tightening. The pressure of her mind is a house collapsed on top of me, lumber and stone too heavy to lift. But in the end, no metaphors can match her.

Blood pours from my nose, and I taste the warm, salty flow of it. My head feels like a watermelon with an unpinned grenade inside.

The Beemer slams into the car in front of me—making another terrible crunching sound. It's my turn to have an air bag explode in my face.

The pain drives off the Witch for a moment.

I feel stupid and clumsy. I've left a nice blood spatter across the silver material of the air bag. Opening the door, I lurch out into stalled traffic and stumble between the cars to the median and pull myself over into the northbound lane, where the cars are whizzing past. A fat man from the car I hit stands by the driver's door and screams profanities and shakes his fist at me. I ignore him. Look to the skies, buster. You see anything?

It's like a game, trying to judge the speed of the oncoming cars, except,
unlike a game
, if I screw up I'll be splattered across the pavement. So screw that. Again I employ the psychic whiz-bangery and hop into the head of the nearest oncoming car—hello, Mrs. Schulte!—and make her slow her car and slew it at an angle, blocking most of the lanes.

I stumble across the road and climb the fence into what Mrs. Schulte's brain tells me is the East River Park.

It's not even eight in the morning, and it's already been a long day.

I run. Not movie-star fast. Not fancy.

My breath comes in great painful heaves and my side is in stitches and the pressure of the Witch is back in my head. Through the canopy of trees shading the promenade, I can make out the dash and flutter of black clothes high above. They're following me. Many of them.

I'm not going to make it. The cover of foliage will give out in just a few paces, and I'll be exposed to them. No telling what they'll do to me. What she'll do to me.

I slow. Stop running. There's a water fountain. I drink. Let my heart slow and my breath come more slowly. I let my body calm. Joggers and folks with dogs stare at me uneasily. I wipe my nose, leaving a long red streak up my forearm.

There's a thick-bearded jogger staring at me intensely, and I don't even have to peep him to know he's got a Rider straddling him.

“Before the elder awakens!” he says.

“Yeah, I heard you the first time.”

“These …” He pauses as if searching for words. Distant. “Embers, they will take you away. Away from the elder.”

“They'll try.”

“You cannot hope to resist. And you must away to Maryland.”

“Damn, man, why you have to talk like that?”

“If the elder wakens, all will be lost. You cannot hope to resist!”

“Resist?” Screw this guy right in the eyehole. “Watch me.”

I turn and walk to where the trees give way to sky. There's a short wall with steps down to a lower level—closer to the water—full of planters. Some of the park denizens seem demented and sleepless—there are two hobo preachers, a couple of junkies, some human bits of flotsam and jetsam. Other people in the park seem rested. Some scowl at me and look murderous. None of them seem happy to see me. None of them seem to see the flying people in the sky.

Maybe I'm shithouse rat insane and gibbering in the Tulaville Psych Ward.

But they look so normal. No capes or spandex costumes. They look like a floating SWAT team.

There are six of them out there, hanging above the sluggish gray waters of the East River like ungainly, spastic blackbirds. Two seem to be orbiting each other, as if each one has a personal gravitational field that constantly asserts its power over the other. Two just float like they're standing on an invisible platform, holding long, slender tools that look too much like hunting rifles.

There's the brunette jumping girl hopping back and forth.

And then there's Sloe-Eye Norman, current home of the Witch. Floating calmly in the air.

When she—he?—sees me, she holds up her very male hand and points. She says something to her cohorts that the river wind whips away.

The cyclists, joggers, miscreants, derelicts, and hoboes of the East River Park stop, keel over, and fall to the ground.

That's a neat trick.

I trot over to the nearest. Check his pulse. Still living and breathing. Just asleep. He probably will appreciate it when he wakes up.

When I look back, the Witch wearing Norman's body floats closer, hanging fifteen feet in the air and within a stone's throw of me. She's waving her hand like someone directing a friend into a narrow parking spot. Eventually, she bunches her hand into a fist and comes to a stop.

She's not flying under her own power.

“Delicious boy, so nice to see you.”

“Looks like you've lost some weight.”

S/he laughs. Not a man's rich, bellowing laugh. Not a woman's high, bell-pitched cascade. Both and neither, all at once. “How droll. I might say the same for your appearance. You look positively
famished
.”

I don't like where she's going with this, and I wish we could just get to the main wrestling match, but I'm scared. Okay? I'm scared. I've got balls big enough to admit it.

“Yes, it's been a while since you've indulged yourself, has it not?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Of course you do, my little
greedy guts
.” Wearing poor Norman's face, she licks her lips. She waggles her hand behind her, telling her handlers to bring her closer, and she floats near, not ten feet away. I get the impression of some ancient potentate waggling his glistening, fat, and beringed fingers to his couch bearers and porters, too large to move on his own.

The ground beneath the Witch is lower than where I stand, sloping down to the river, and we look at each other eye to eye.
“You and I contain multitudes, do we not? We can remain immortal as long as we have the sustenance we need.”

“I don't…”

“Nonsense. I know this is true. I've inhabited some of your victims, the poor unhappy souls of Casimir Pulaski Juvenile Detention Center. Those boys, those men and women you cannibalized.”

She tosses the word out there like a grenade. And she's right. I did feed from them. Their happiness, I siphoned it away to ease my own existence.

You're born into pain, your constant companion through life. How could I have forgotten that?

But never again.

“All that's over now.”

“It doesn't have to be. You come with us. You join your friend Jack, and you will have all the sustenance you require.” S/he chuckles, and it's the same piggy throat sound I remember from so long ago.

I try to remember the light and the heat on the roof where much of me burned away, sublimed into the air. I remember the clatter of raven wings and the feel of the thousands of people I've been and who live inside me. I let my heart expand and the shibboleth swell.

Because I'm gonna fight the Witch.

Before, in the BMW, I was on the run, driving, snatching directions out of drivers and pedestrians. But now …
I'm here.
I'm centered.

And I'm not just some crappy punk kid she can push around.

I'm the original crappy punk kid.

“I'm stronger than you,” I say. And I believe it.

This makes her laugh and laugh more.

So I prove it.

It comes from somewhere beyond me, from the black unlimited spaces between atoms or the empty spaces between the stars or the finite space between my molecules. It comes from the blood surging in my veins, pulsing, driving forward, the unspent semen in my testicles. The saliva swelling in my mouth and the tears at the corners of my eyes.

It comes from my youth, the pure tenacity of the young. It comes from my age, having lived countless lives. It comes from guilt, from those I've hurt, I've stolen from. It comes from the leathery beef jerky of my soul. It comes from the million times I've wiped my brother's ass and dressed him for school and fed him breakfast and fed Moms dinner and served her drinks. It comes from scarcity and a life of discomfort and hunger and want.

It comes from the pain. It comes from love. The love I bear Coco and Vig, Jack and Rollie. Booth and poor, doomed Sloe-Eyed Norman.

It comes from the multitudes that infest me and the multitudes I infested.

I am Legion, for we are many.

No dicking around now. No fancy footwork or strange visualizations.

I am the sharpened stake. I am the bullet in the brain.

And I am stronger than her.

Her eyes widen in alarm, terrified, but I'm already past. I'm inside her. I'm inside him.

I am you and you are he, two makes one and one makes three.

She was born in 1824 in Switzerland with a caul over her oblong, glistening head. Her father, on spying her, wanted to snatch up the bundled infant, take her into the snow, and dash her brains out on the cobblestones leading to their small house, down the lane from the mill. But her mother, fat-chested and full of love and the milk of human kindness, clutched the newborn to her breast and cooed over and over again, “
Ilsa. Mein liebes kind. Mein geliebtes kind, Ilsa. Ilsa
,” leaving Herman, her father, to look on in shame and disgust and question how he could hate something that was so new to the world.

One thing is clear: they should have walked the child into the frigid waters of Lake Brienz and drowned the damned squalling thing.

It's a foul place, the vaulted chambers of her mind. Filled with thousands of moments ringing like a chorus of bells swelling into some hideous chord. It mocks the idea of music and happiness. Each memory is a moment of cruelty, a moment of hunger.

It is almost too much for me to bear. But I am stronger than her.

All those moments of cruelty. Three lifetimes' worth.

I eat every one.

I am you and you are me.