Люциус Шепард - The Best of Lucius Shepard

I was unable to line up all the trash she’d told me about her mother, how it had warped her, with her capacity for betrayal. Yet what she had said smacked of a childish willfulness and a clinical dispatch that, I realized, functioned as a tag-team in her personality. Until that moment, I had not understood how dangerous these qualities made her.

“I can lose them in the fog,” I said.

“You can’t. You don’t know them.”

“I’m damn well going to try. You think they’ll let me go after what I’ve seen? They just wiped out twenty people!”

“I’m sure they didn’t kill them all.”

“Oh… well. Fuck! That’s all right, then.”

I punched in the ignition; the engine sputtered and caught, rumbling smoothly.

“Don’t, Jack! Please!”

“I’m fucking dead if they catch me. Do you understand? I am dead!”

The barrel of the automatic wavered.

“You’re not going to shoot me,” I said.

I pushed the throttle forward. Jo said again, “Don’t,” and I felt a blow to my back, a wash of pain. I was out of it for a while, and when I was able to gather my senses, I found myself lying on the deck, with my head jammed up against the base of the control console. I knew I’d been shot, but it felt like the bullet had come from something larger than a.25. The guy in the harness, maybe. I was hurting some, but a numb feeling was setting in. It was a chore to concentrate. My thoughts kept slipping away. Jo knelt beside me. I locked on to her face. Looking at her steadied me. “Did you…” I said. “Did you shoot…?”

“Don’t talk,” she said.

Silhouetted against the gray sky, a man was being lowered from the helicopter overhead, along with a metal case that dangled from a hook beside him. It seemed as big as a coffin. The sight confused me visually, and in other ways as well. I closed my eyes against it.

Jo laid a hand on my cheek. The touch cooled the embers of my anger, my disappointment with her, and I was overwhelmed with sentiment. Bits of memory surfaced, whirled, dissolved. She lay down on the deck beside me. She became my sky. Her face hanging above me blotted out the chopper and the man descending.

“I’ll take care of you, I promise,” she said.

Her brown eyes were all that was holding me.

A gurgling came from inside my chest. She started raving, then. Getting angry, swearing vengeance, weeping. It was like she thought I’d passed out, like I wasn’t there. Half of it, I didn’t understand. She said they would regret what they’d made her do, she’d make certain I remembered everything, and I would help her make them pay. I didn’t recognize her, she was so possessed by pain and fury. She laid her head on my chest. I wanted to tell her the weight was oppressive, but I couldn’t form the words. The lengths of her hair were drowning me. Her voice, the helicopter rotors, and the fading light merged into a gray tumult, an incoherence.

“Jack…”

…Jack…

A jolt, as of electricity, to the back of my neck.

Jack… Jack Lamb…

My eyelids fluttered open.

A gray ocean surrounded me, picked out by vague shapes.

Jack Lamb… Jack…

Another jolt, more intense than the first. I tried to move, but I was very weak and I succeeded only in turning my head. Someone passed across my field of vision, accompanied by a perfumey scent. Wanting to catch their notice, I made a scratchy noise in my throat. The effort caused me to pass out.

Jack…

“Jack? Are you awake?” A woman’s voice.

“Yeah,” I said, my tongue thick, throat raw.

Something was inserted between my lips and a cool liquid soothed the rawness. My chest hurt. My whole body hurt.

“How’s that? Better?” The voice had a familiar ring.

“I can’t see,” I said. “Everything’s a blur.”

“The doctor says you’ll be seeing fine in a few days.”

I asked for more water and, after I had drunk, I said, “I know you… don’t I?”

“Of course. Jocundra… Jo.” A pause. “Your partner. We live together. Don’t you remember?”

“I think. Yeah.”

“You’ve been through a terrible ordeal. Your memory will be hazy for awhile.”

“What happened to me?”

“You were shot. The important thing is, you’re going to be fine.”

“Who shot me? Why… what happened?”

“I’ll tell you soon. I promise. You don’t need the stress now.”

“I want to know who shot me!”

“You have to trust me,” she said, placing a hand on my chest. “There’s psychological damage as well as physical. We have to go cautiously. I’ll tell you when you’re strong enough. Won’t you trust me ’til then?”

I asked her to come closer.

Something swam toward me through the gray. I made out a crimson mouth and enormous brown eyes. Gradually, the separate features resolved into a face that, though blurred, was indisputably open and lovely.

“You’re beautiful,” I said.

“Thank you.” A pause. “It’s been awhile since you told me that.”

Her face withdrew. I couldn’t find her in the murk. Anxious, I called out. “I’m here,” she said. “I’m just getting something.”

“What?”

“Cream to rub on your chest and shoulders. It’ll make you feel better.”

She sat on the bed—I felt the mattress indent—and she began massaging me. Each caress gave me a shock, albeit gentler than the ones I had felt initially. Soft hands spread the cream across my chest and I began to relax, to feel repentant that I had neglected her. I offered apology for doing so, saying that I must have been preoccupied.

Her lips brushed my forehead. “It’s okay. Actually, I’m hopeful…”

“Hopeful? About what?”

“It’s nothing.”

“No, tell me.”

“I’m hoping some good will come of all this,” she said. “We’ve been having our problems lately. And I hope this time we spend together, while you recuperate, it’ll make you remember how much I love you.”

I groped for her hand, found it. We stayed like that a while, our fingers mixing together. A white shape melted up from the grayness. I strained to identify it and realized it was her breast sheathed in white cloth.

“I’m up here,” she said, laughter in her voice, and leaned closer so I could see her face again. “Do you feel up to answering a few questions? The doctor said I should test your memory. So we can learn if there’s been any significant loss.”

“Yeah, okay. I’m feeling more together now.”

I heard papers rustling and asked what she was doing.

“They gave me some questions to ask. I can’t find them.” More rustling. “Here they are. The first one’s a gimmee. Do you recall your name?”

“Jack,” I said confidently. “Jack Lamb.”

“And what do you do? Your profession?”

I opened my mouth, ready to spit out the answer. When nothing came to me, I panicked. I probed around in the gray nothing that seemed to have settled over my brain, beginning to get desperate. She touched the inside of my wrist, a touch that left a trail of sparkling sensation on my skin, and told me not to force it. And then I saw the answer, saw it as clearly as I might see a shining coin stuck in silt at the bottom of a well, the first of a horde of memories waiting to be unearthed, a treasure of anecdote and event.

Firmly, and with a degree of pride as befitted my station, I said, “I’m a financier.”

I was smoking a joint on the steps of the public library when a cold wind blew in from no cardinal point, but from the top of the night sky, a force of pure perpendicularity that bent the sparsely leaved boughs of the old alder shadowing the steps straight down toward the Earth, as if a gigantic someone directly above were pursing his lips and aiming a long breath directly at the ground. For the duration of that gust, fifteen or twenty seconds, my hair did not flutter but was pressed flat to the crown of my head and the leaves and grass and weeds on the lawn also lay flat. The phenomenon had a distinct border—leaves drifted along the sidewalk, testifying that a less forceful, more fitful wind presided beyond the perimeter of the lawn. No one else appeared to notice. The library, a blunt nineteenth century relic of undressed stone, was not a popular point of assembly at any time of day, and the sole potential witness apart from myself was an elderly gentleman who was hurrying toward McGuigan’s Tavern at a pace that implied a severe alcohol dependency. This happened seven months prior to the events central to this story, but I offer it to suggest that a good deal of strangeness goes unmarked by the world (at least by the populace of Black William, Pennsylvania), and, when taken in sum, such occurrences may be evidence that strangeness is visited upon us with some regularity and we only notice its extremes.