K Jeter - Noir

“What about guilt?”

The bishop pursed his lips, mulling over the question. “Actually,” he said, “I think guilt’s stayed pretty much the same since the beginning. There’s never really been a lot of incentive to improve on it. Not a lot of market fluctuations there. Whereas with sin… people want to enjoy themselves, don’t they? They just never want to pay the price.”

McNihil knew how that was. From professional-and personal-experience. “Was that this Travelt’s problem?”

“Guilt and sin?” The bishop twirled the cross in a vertical loop. “Man, it looked like he was covered in it. Like he’d been skinny-dipping in the tar pits. Metaphorically, of course; the most you’d have been able to see with your eyes would’ve been the way the guy was sweating and shaking. You know that sick gray look people get just before they disconnect the life-support systems in the hospital, when there’s no more reason to run up the electric bill? Only this poor bastard was still walking around.” Another flip, and the bishop caught the cross in his fist. “But I could see the rest; I’ve got a little expertise in the line. That dark, sticky stuff was spread on his soul an inch thick and rancid.”

Another thing that McNihil knew to be a fact. To his regret. You sleep with the wrong kind of people -he’d told himself this before- and there’s no telling what you’re going to wake up and find on yourself . The corpse on the cubapt’s floor hadn’t learned that lesson until too late. Or, seen another way, the late Travelt had learned it and had checked out early, rather than deal with the consequences. Not having to walk around caked in sin and guilt… maybe the guy hadn’t been so stupid after all.

“Did he talk about… anything specific?” The terminal had switched itself back on; the numbers on the screen tugged at the corner of McNihil’s eyes. Tran or con, substance or accident; it didn’t matter. The dead were still here in this world. The only difference between this Travelt and McNihil’s wife was that he could still talk to her. Whereas Travelt’s silence had to be picked apart, tweezed out of other people’s memories. “Something that he’d done, or had been done to him?”

“He talked about having been someplace, and having seen some things; that he wished he hadn’t gone there, and hadn’t seen whatever it was.” The bishop gave a little round-shouldered shrug, his own admission of guilt. “I suppose I should’ve asked him for the particulars, gotten him to let it out, tell me all about it. That probably would’ve made him feel better. The only problem is that it would’ve made me feel worse . I’m not interested in that sort of stuff.” His gaze moved away from what was hidden inside his fist and over toward McNihil. “And I’m not paid to be, either.”

“That makes two of us.” McNihil felt his own minor remorse, the awareness of wasted time. “I only came here because I was mildly curious about this guy. But I’m not going to take the job.”

“What job?”

“The one this guy’s old bosses are leaning on me to take. They want me to find out what happened to him. Besides bad luck, that is.”

For a moment, the bishop was silent. He laid the chain and cross over the flat of his palms, regarding it as though some reduced metallic pietà had been left in his care. “You’re a wise man,” he said finally. “You may not be a particularly nice one, but a certain degree of wisdom… you’ve got that.”

McNihil lifted the object from the other’s hands, letting the cross and the free end of the chain dangle from the other side of his fist. “Why do you say so?”

“You’re better off,” said the bishop, “not getting involved with this one. Some dead are… cleaner than others. This Travelt person… if he thought he was mired in sin, there’s a reason for it. Some of the things he told me, before he realized I’d stopped listening… or that I was trying not to hear… they weren’t pleasant kinds of things.”

“Like what?” Obvious to McNihil that the bishop had been avoiding the question he’d asked before. Theology was fine enough, but it didn’t provide any answers in this world. “Come on, tell me. That’s what I paid for.”

The bishop looked sulky. “You got enough for your money.”

“Not quite,” said McNihil. “And if I think I’ve got change coming back to me, believe me, you’re not going to enjoy the process.”

A lung-deflating sigh escaped from the other man. “All right. He talked about a woman-”

McNihil seized on those words. “Did he say what her name was?”

The bishop shook his head. “No. Because he was too frightened of her. He tried to, but he couldn’t say her name out loud. That’s why he was shaking so bad.” The bishop let a sickly smile appear on his face. “Isn’t that funny? In a way. Considering that she didn’t even exist.”

“How do you know that?”

“Not hard.” The bishop barked a sharp laugh. “This Travelt guy was obviously losing it.” His finger, still shining from the solvent, tapped the side of his head, close to the network of spider veins curving around his brow. “Up here. Where it counts. He was imagining things. Weird, bad stuff,” said the bishop. “Stuff that just can’t be. About this woman he was so afraid of… and other things.” A shake of the head. “I don’t get out much-I’m just too busy, taking care of my flock-but I can still tell when someone’s undergoing a psychotic break with reality.”

“You can, huh?” McNihil wished he could say the same for himself. Maybe , he thought, it’s because I don’t think it’s such a bad thing . He wouldn’t see the world he did, the one that continuously leaked out of his scalpeled eyes, if he’d been satisfied with the other one. The one that everybody else saw.

Darker thoughts connected with that notion. That he didn’t want to get into right now, or any other time. Maybe the world he saw wasn’t in his eyes, but was farther back, inside his head…

The bishop’s voice pulled McNihil away from that cliff.

“Sure,” said the bishop. “With the kinds of things this Travelt was raving on about, it wasn’t hard. Like that woman he was so afraid of. Catch this: He said what made her so scary was that she was realer than he was.”

McNihil heard that, and a sliver of soft ice threaded through his heart.

“He was afraid that he didn’t even exist at all.” This time, both the sickly smile and a shake of the head from the bishop. “Compared to her, that is. And then the loathsome gynophobic fantasies, all of his talk about contamination and disease. This Travelt guy might as well have been some nineteenth-century French decadent, rhapsodizing about syphilis or something.”

“Stigmata,” murmured McNihil. “He talked about stigmata, didn’t he? Some kind of mark or sign…”

“Yeah, he did, actually. Something that wasn’t just in his blood, but on his skin. Something that he’d caught from this woman, that she’d passed on to him like a black fungus…”

McNihil said nothing. He closed his eyes for a moment, and saw in that darkness a capital letter V , with serifs sharp as teeth, its slanting edges defined with a knife’s-edge precision against dead pale flesh.

“What he said,” continued the bishop, “was that he couldn’t even see himself-if he looked down at his body, or looked in the mirror. ’Cause he wasn’t real anymore; all the realness had been drained out of him. All he could see was this mark she’d left upon him.”

I know how that feels . McNihil opened his eyes, steadying himself against a faint current of stomach-roiling vertigo. An after-image of the black letter, as though burnt by some negative light, floated and ebbed from his vision of the small chamber. The woman’s unseen presence, con- or transubstantiated, bled away as well.