Люциус Шепард: Eternity and Other Stories

The elevator door, battered, defaced by graffiti, stood about twenty feet away. Chemayev had the impulse to run to it, to seek shelter in the relative sanity of the night club. But he was fed up with being given the runaround; he’d entered into a straightforward business arrangement and he intended to see it through to a contract, no matter what games Yuri wanted to play. As for Larissa, if she’d lied… he could handle it. Their problems were every one associated with this psychotic country populated entirely by lunatics and their victims. By tomorrow night they’d be clear of all that.

He turned back, intending to frame a few last words that would convey to Nicolai both a more rational, more dignified portion of apology, and his acknowledgment of how things stood between them; but his former friend was nowhere to be seen. Looking at Chemayev from an arm’s-length away was the swarthy old derelict who had been sweeping up the corridor. He had barely noticed him on first meeting, but now he marveled at the man’s ugliness. With his stubby arms and legs, his swollen belly and narrow sloping shoulders, his smallish head, he might have been a toad that had undergone a transformation, only partially successful, into the human. He had about him a bitter reek reminiscent of the smell of the vegetation in the garden. The chest of his grimy T-shirt was mapped by a large, vaguely rectangular brown stain, like the image of a spectacularly undistinguished continent whose most prominent features were bits of dried food stuck to the fabric along the south coast and central plain. His wool trousers were shapeless as those of a clown, supported by frayed suspenders. Filthy twists of gray hair hung from his mottled scalp, half-curtaining his eyes, and his face, sagging, pouchy, cheeks and nose sporting graffiti of broken capillaries, thick-lipped and dull… It reminded Chemayev of dilapidated hovels in the villages of his childhood, each habitation humbled by weather and hard times into something lumpish, barely distinguishable from a mound of earth, a played-out vegetable plot in the back, rusted garden tools leaning against bowed steps, its thatched roof molting, sided with unpainted boards worn to a shit brown, and something ancient, howlingly mad with age and failure, peering out through two dark windows with cracked panes. It was fascinating in its lack of human vitality. More than fascinating. Compelling. It seemed to hold Chemayev’s eyes, to exert a pull that intensified with every passing second, as if the mad absence within had the virtue of a collapsed star, a generating fire grown so cold and inert it had become fire’s opposite, a negative engine wherein chaos became comprehensible and physical laws were reworked according to some implausible design. He could not look away from it, and when at last he did, not due to his own efforts, but because the old man moved, extending a hand to him, palm upward like a beggar, thus shattering the connection, he felt lightheaded and confused and frail, as if he had been winnowing away, unraveling in the depths of that bleak stare.

In his frail lightheaded confusion there were a few things Chemayev thought he understood. This liver-spotted troll, this mud man with a black hole inside him, was Yuri—he was fairly certain of that. He was also fairly certain that the old bastard had his hand out for money. For the gold certificates contained inside his, Chemayev’s, money belt. What was he supposed to do? Just fork it all over? Fuck that! Where were the papers to sign? What guarantees did he have— could he have—with a creature like this? He wanted to establish some sort of security for himself and Larissa, but couldn’t summon the words, and he realized with complete surety that fear had nothing to do with his inability to speak, words simply weren’t part of Yuri’s program—no more talk was needed, everything had been said, and now it was Chemayev’s choice to give over the money and see what that bought him… or to exercise caution for the time being.

That he accepted this prescription, that he believed Yuri had so much control over the situation, implied that he accepted Nicolai’s assessment of the man. He would have liked to deny this, but it seemed undeniable. He should tell someone, he thought. Before leaving Moscow he should tip the media, get a TV truck out to Eternity, expose the fact that the great Yuri Lebedev was running more than a night club, the old geezer had become a minor fucking deity in charge of a franchise in the afterlife catering to murderers, hookers, and various relics of the Cold War… This trickle of whimsy, edged with more than a little hysteria, dried up when Chemayev noticed that the walls and ceiling and floor of the corridor around and behind Yuri were billowing in and out with same rhythm as the rise and fall of his chest, as if the old man were the central image of a painting, a portrait of squalor floating on the surface of some gelatinous substance in a state of mild perturbation. He backed farther away, but the distance between himself and Yuri did not lengthen, and he saw that his body, too, was billowing, rippling, ruled by the tidal flux of Yuri’s sluggish breath—it appeared they were both elements of the same semi-liquid medium. Horrified, he flailed and kicked, trying to swim away, but none of his exertions had the least effect… unless they played a role in the steady expansion of Yuri’s face. It was widening, distending, losing its cohesion like a shape made of colored oil, spreading to cover more and more of the fluid atop which it was suspended, resembling a face distorted by a funhouse mirror, and Chemayev felt that his own body was suffering a similar distortion, his legs elongating, his torso becoming bulbous, his head lopsided and pumpkin-sized, and that he and Yuri were flowing together.

Yuri’s mouth stretched wider and wider, becoming a dark, gaping concavity that reduced his other features to tiny irrelevancies, like the glowing lures above the enormous mouth of an angler fish. It was curving to surround Chemayev, preparing less to swallow him than to incorporate him into its emptiness, and he thought briefly of the garden, the dark oval through which he had passed to reach it. If he could have screamed he would have made a cry that reached to heaven, but he was as voiceless as a strand of seaweed floating on an offshore billow, going out on the tide toward the great hollow places of the sea, and as he passed into the darkness, Yuri’s darkness, as it closed over him, his fear—like his voice—was subsumed by the myriad impressions that came to him from the place into which he was being absorbed.

He had a sense of the man Yuri had been, a quick mental rumor that left flavors of crudity, brutality, lustfulness, intelligence… an intellect that had aspired too high, that had sought a godlike invulnerability and created the means necessary to achieve it, but had lost everything of consequence in gaining it, for Yuri’s character was merely a component of the thing, the place, he had become. Through a mingling of magic and science and will he had triggered a sort of spiritual fission, all the particulars of his flesh and mind exploding into an immense, radiant cloud that did not dissipate in the way of a mushroom cloud, but maintained its integrity at the moment of peak fury, sustained by a surface tension that might have been the residue of the spell he had caused to be pronounced. Not a god so much as an embryonic entity of unguessable nature, striving to reach its maturity, extending its influence through various human (and perhaps inhuman—who could say?) agencies, populating its vacancy with dead souls, partly just for company, to ease its aching emptiness, but also utilizing their knowledge to engineer plots designed to increase its power, always feeding, growing, becoming… This was among the last thoughts Chemayev recalled before he was utterly subsumed, drowned in Yuri’s black essence—that all Yuri’s energies were being desperately directed toward the process of growth, of fulfilling whatever evolutionary destiny was now his—though perhaps he had no real destiny. That had come to be Yuri’s torment, the one feeling of which he was capable: the fear that he had trapped himself inside the prison of his own power, that he could only grow larger, that no matter how much power he gained, the dissolution and chaos of his new condition would never change, and he could impose no order, no equilibrium that would satisfy his original wish to be both man and god, he could merely unify his environment—whether this consisted of a night club, Moscow, Russia, or the entire planet—under the disordered banner of Eternity. His circumstance posed an intriguing intellectual and philosophical puzzle. Through his machinations, his alliances with generals and politicians and the mafiyas, might not Yuri be responsible for the chaos overwhelming the old Soviet states, or were the two forces feeding into one another? And if Yuri came to dominate the world or a substantial portion thereof, if he could avoid being absorbed by a creature like himself, but vaster and more cruel, would anyone notice? Was not the current chaos of the world all-pervasive, were not genocides and serial killings and natural disasters and the unending disregard of one soul for another sufficient evidence of this? And that being so, could it be possible that this chaos had always been the product of sad invisible monsters such as Yuri, a ruling class gone unnoticed by everyone except for saints and madmen?… Chemayev was amused by the formulation of these questions. He thought if he could sustain his awareness a while longer he might learn the answers, and they in turn would lead to subtler questions, the ones Yuri himself had asked, and if he could learn those answers, benefiting from Yuri’s experience, he might be able to avoid Yuri’s mistakes. But at the moment it didn’t seem worth the effort. Blind now, all his senses occluded, uncertain of his location, even as to which plane of existence he occupied, by all rights he should have been more afraid; but having practiced death once before, and having since witnessed a condition worse than death, he felt prepared for anything.