Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

“No,” she said, “you can’t reach it.”

“How do I reach it?”

“You jump.”

“I don’t even know there’s an opening there,” Etcher said, “except that you tell me there is and I think maybe I hear something.”

“Do you hear the sea?”

“Yes.”

“Next to you, where you are now?”

“Yes.”

“Then it’s there,” she said. “Jump.”

He looked at the door down below him. “Is that the bottom of the stairs?”

“No,” she said.

“It looks like the last door.”

“It may be the last door or … it may not. I’m not sure. But it’s not the bottom.”

“How far is the bottom?”

“I don’t know.”

He breathed deeply. He kept studying the darkness to the side of him where the sound of the waves was coming, as though he might distinguish some profound pitch of black that constituted an opening. “How big is the opening?”

“I don’t know.”

He was annoyed. He was supposed to jump over a chasm of undetermined depth to an opening of unknown size, which he could neither reach nor see. He kept staring into the side of the stairwell and he knew no matter how long he looked or waited it all came down to jumping. He took off his glasses, folding them and putting them in his pocket. He raised his leg over the rail of the stairs and climbed out onto the outer edge of the steps, suspended over the dark of the stairwell below him. When he started thinking too much about everything, he jumped.

It was at least half a minute before she said, “Did you make it?”

One foot had slipped, and he’d wildly grasped the first thing he could put his arms around. He found himself sitting for that half a minute listening to his heart pound while she in turn had listened for his fading scream downward or a distant telltale splat or whatever sound the plunge to oblivion makes, finally deciding that either he had made it or been very polite about the plummet.

“Can you reach me?” he heard her ask from the stairs. She didn’t sound far away.

“What do you mean, reach you?” he said.

“Can you take my hand and pull me?”

He laughed.

“What’s funny?” she asked in the dark.

“Nothing.”

“I told you,” she said, “I can’t stay here anymore. He’s looking for me.” He was laughing because one thing was for sure and it was that this woman looked out for herself. Maybe she liked him or maybe she didn’t but in either case she hadn’t allowed sentiment to get in the way of his making that jump first, and now that he’d risked his neck once by getting himself across the dark pit of the stairwell, it was his function in the scheme of things to risk it again getting her across. He still couldn’t see anything. On his knees he felt the rock’s edge at his feet. He leaned out into the dark until he felt her hand, and then pulled her. “You’ve got the money?” was the first thing she said to him on the other side.

“You’re welcome,” he answered. Unfazed she led him out through the back of the opening to a tunnel that continued further down into the earth. They went for some way. The sound of the waves grew louder and the air in the tunnel colder. The two of them had gone ten minutes when the path turned to reveal a dark grotto, lit by torches jammed into the rocks. The ocean rushed in and out of the grotto through an opening in the distance that was located at the base of the cliffs far below the city. Inside the grotto was a small dock with several very small boats that wouldn’t hold more than two or three people, and standing around the boats were five men talking and smoking and drinking. A couple of them were playing cards. They looked up to see Mona and Etcher climb down the last stretch of the trail.

No one sailed in, everyone sailed out. This wasn’t a harbor for sailors on leave but a one-way station for fugitives unlikely ever to come back, and once you got this far the men running the operation weren’t about to let you turn around and go upstairs, where you could tell the cops about it. Now they gathered around Etcher and Mona and one of them took his cigarette from his mouth and dropped it on the dock and held out his open hand without saying a word. Etcher gave him the money. The man looked at it and shook his head. He waited.

“That’s all I’ve got,” Etcher said.

“It’s only enough for one,” the man said. Etcher looked at the man and Mona looked at Etcher. Frightened, she struggled with frustration to free her earrings from her lobes, turning them over to the man, who said, “These aren’t worth much.” Mona took from her coat pocket something wrapped in a scarf and handed that over as well. The man unwrapped it and held it up. “It’s a fucking rock,” he said.

“It’s a forbidden artifact,” she said. “Look, there’s writing on it.” She pointed to the rough side of the rock. “On the other side.”

“Give me your coat,” he said. “Yours too,” he said to Etcher.

“We’ll freeze out there without our coats,” Etcher said.

“Well, you’re not going out there with them,” the man answered. One of the other men laughed.

“We’ll give you one of the coats,” said Etcher.

“You’ll give us what we fucking ask for.”

“No.”

The man sighed. “Didn’t anyone explain this to you? Now that you’re here you’re going out on that tide one way or the other. Either you go out in a boat or you go out without one. You’re not going with your coat the first way and you won’t need your coat the second way. Doesn’t the logic of that impress you?”

“The politics of stalemate impress me,” said Etcher. “I’m completely versed in them. You can’t let us turn around and go back and if you don’t sell us the boat you have to kill us and it’s bad business because if I wash up on the shore somewhere it’s just going to be a lot of trouble. Really a lot of trouble. I work for the Church and have something they want and they’re breathing down my neck and the cops watch every move I make, even now they know I’m somewhere in the Arboretum. Why do you think I’m here? Why do you think I need to get out of this damned city so badly? Why do you think this is my last resort? I’m giving you everything I’ve got and she’s giving you everything she’s got and we’ll give you one of the coats but not both.” He added, “You can have the rock too,” nodding at the stone Mona had given the man.

“I don’t want the damn rock,” the man said. “I’ll take yours,” he said to Mona, nodding at her coat, and wrapped the stone back in the scarf. He handed it to Etcher, who put it in the pocket of his own coat, which he now took off and wrapped around Mona. The man led them to a boat. It had oars and in the bottom was water and what looked like the tatters of a sail, though there was no other sign of a sail or mast. Around the hull it appeared as though the wood was rotting. “Bon voyage,” the man said. Etcher got in the boat and helped Mona in, then he took the oars and pushed the boat off from the dock. Even wearing his coat Mona sat shivering at the stern. Struggling with the oars, Etcher began to row. The men on the dock returned to their drinking and cards, never glancing up to watch the boat’s progress.

It was an hour before the boat even got out of the grotto. Only then did Etcher understand the peril of the situation. A low ceiling of Vog billowing into the grotto continued to hang several feet above their heads, so it wasn’t until the walls suddenly fell away that Etcher realized they were out on the open sea, where the night came rushing in and the force of the swells threatened to smash the boat back against the rocks. Etcher fought futilely against the waves. They lifted the boat in the air and dashed it back down on the water. Several feet from Etcher at the stern of the boat, behind the gusts of the sea that rained between them, Mona’s cries sounded very distant to him, like a shout from the top of the cliffs that towered somewhere above the Vog.