Стивен Бойетт - Mortality Bridge

A distant thump. Auguste scowls. Blinks rapidly and tosses his head. Another thud. The pressure lets up on Niko’s throat. Auguste’s eyes cloud and he pitches forward against Niko. Who worms from under the unconscious lump and draws a great long wheezing gasp. His hands go to his throat as if to open it wider. Air just won’t come fast enough. Breathing through a clotted straw. The dark veil slowly lifts and the cabbie’s standing there. Her mouth says Are you all right? All he hears is steady ringing. Helps him to his feet. He tries to tell her I’m okay but nothing will come out. Nods instead and thinly coughs. Hockey puck in windpipe. Every time he coughs a sharpened wire stabs his broken rib. Niko motions I’m okay, let’s go, get in the cab. She agrees and then he sees she holds a tire iron in one hand. Ah. Thank you. Again.

The cabbie swipes broken windshield glass off of the seat and helps Niko get in the cab. He huddles round the mason jar and stares at chunks of glass that rim the windshield. Bet it doesn’t grow back on this car.

The cabbie shuts the door and seals him from a universe of wretched suffering and pain. Give it a parting glance? Can I do that now? Give it the finger? Give some goodbye anyhow. Isn’t that what the forgery of Jemma said?

The cabbie brushes glass away and dusts her bloodstained palms and gets behind the wheel. She shakes her head at the jagged windshield frame. “Man.”

Auguste’s mallet lies between them on the seat. The cabbie picks it up and tosses it out over the hood. “Poor Auguste. Wish I hadn’t had to do that.”

She shuts her door and buckles up. “Seatbelt.”

Without looking Niko points to where the battered gate lies broken open. He hoods his eyes like a ship’s lookout and points at himself and then points again at the gate and draws a question mark in the air.

The cabbie purses her lips. “Orpheus held Eurydice’s hand all the way to the entrance of Tænarus cave. He never looked back the whole time. Until he stepped into the sunlight and turned to tell her how happy he was they’d made it. But she was still in the shadows and he lost her.”

Niko draws a ragged breath and looks heavenward. Brings the jar up and turns it in his hand and forces himself steady. It isn’t over. Won’t be over till they’re back up on the world. Okay. All right. He nods and shrugs.

“We’ll get there,” the cabbie says. “They won’t go past the gate. The hard part’s over.” She slaps his leg and smiles. “Besides, I never dropped a fare off anywhere but where he said he was going.” Then she glances at the wall and her expression changes.

Niko tugs her sleeve but she shakes her head. “Nothing. Never-mind. Let’s ramble.”

They inch forward.

“Wave bye bye.” The cabbie’s cheer sounds forced but Niko does it anyhow albeit listlessly. Goodbye. Goodbye.

The cabbie edges forward around the unconscious body of Auguste. “Désolé, Auguste,” she calls. “Pardonnes-moi.”

When she’s past the laidout Frenchman she tells Niko to shut his eyes and she turns the cab in a wide circle. Headlights sweep the screaming figures frozen in the stone and shifting shadows lend them motion they will never know. Then the headlights reveal nothing but the cracked bland floor of the empty plain until the cab is heading away from the gate and all that lies behind it. Niko uncovers his eyes. A deeper well-like darkness far ahead must be the tunnel entrance.

Hot air buffets them through the glassless windshield. “This is gonna be a pain,” the cabbie says. “I better not go too fast. One good bug and pow.”

Niko ducks his head and lifts the jar to his face and breathes in deep. Faint sachet fading. The glow seems dimmer too. We have to hurry. He wants to tell the cabbie but his throat clamps shut whenever he tries to speak. He starts to check on Nikodemus and stops quickly. Looking Nikodemus’ way is looking back. God damn.

Niko shuts his eyes. The hot wind against his skin. The gate and all the fractured plain behind him dwindling. The endless demolition of the hopeless damned receding. Goodbye, goodbye. I am escaped yet not delivered.

Niko taps the cabbie’s shoulder. “How. you. know. be. there?”

“How’d I know to be there?”

Niko nods.

“Well.” She fidgets on the seat. “I dropped you off and drove away and I got maybe as far as we are now and I heard this huge crash. I thought Wow, it didn’t take him very long to get in trouble, and I turned around and headed back to see what happened and there you were.”

Niko stares. “How. long?”

“How long what? How long did it take me to get there?”

Niko shakes his head. “How long. from let me off. to pick me up?”

The cabbie looks him up and down. Trying to reconcile his gaunt and weathered ruin with what she tells him next. “I couldn’t have been gone three minutes,” she says.

RIDING ON THE rails again. In the distance a pale green glow.

Unlike Niko the cabbie can check her rearview mirror and she does, continually. But every time Niko croakingly asks her what she sees she only shakes her head. In the back seat Nikodemus stirs. The cabbie lights a cigarillo. “So who’s your friend?”

Niko watches the brown tube of tobacco like a predator. “My demon.” He taps his forehead.

She takes a drag and nods. “Ah,” she says in smoke as if that explains everything. Maybe for her it does. She catches Niko’s longing expression. “What happened to the pack I just gave you?”

“Fell in a river. Long time ago.”

“Oh.” She pats her pockets and fishes out a fresh pack of Swisher Sweets and hands it to him and he taps one out and sniffs. Oh yeah.

The cabbie indicates the jar in his lap. “That what you came for?” The lighter knob pops and Niko lights up. The happy scratching in his injured throat, the little death inside his lungs. He holds up the jar and turns his head to blow out smoke that dispels in the hot breeze blowing steadily against them. “That’s her.”

She nods. “So. Where to, mister?” She says it lightly like a joke but Niko thinks a moment. Fueled by nicotine his mind feels widened. He feels he’s thinking clearly for the first time in a long time. What was it the cabbie had said? I never dropped a fare off anywhere but where he said he was going.

Three minutes. I’ve been gone three minutes.

And the final act unspools before him like a scroll.

The mason jar. In the absence of Jem herself returned to him Niko had naively thought that Jemma’s soul would somehow turn back into Jemma when they crossed over. The spell would lift and she would change like some enchanted frog into a sleeping princess. Yet they had crossed over and her bottled soul remained a glowing feather. Not that this light, this essence, isn’t Jemma. A lifetime’s length it rides within the flesh, a passenger bound until the vessel makes some farther shore.

But if what the cabbie says is true the rightful container of Jemma’s soul lies in her bed not one hour dead. Not found, not taken in an ambulance, not cut up and examined, not made over and exsanguinated and filled with alien fluids, not eulogized and wept over and bid goodbye and sealed inside a coffin and ensconced within the quiet earth and left to dwindle to the elements during all the long and struggling time of Niko’s absence from the roofless earth.

Not an hour dead. And Niko holds her outcast soul upon his lap. But she diminishes. She slips out through the cracks. I cannot let her gutter while I hold her in my hands. What will I do?

What he will do—oh. Oh.

Faust in all his hubris never contemplated such alchemy as Niko now considers.

“Home,” he tells the cabbie. “Take me home.”

THE FAINT GREEN glow around the speeding cab is phosphorescent mold jellying the tunnel walls. To either side the afflicted stumble, pale-eyed Morlocks absent of past or future. Unwitting guardians of this borderland adorned in ragged relics of a dim-remembered world long left behind. Greateyed Jeremy out there somewhere, side pierced like some mutant christ. Niko hopes the simple monster will recover from his wound. Compared to creatures he encountered later Jeremy was a muppet.