Arcane II (12 page)

The phone buzzed. Susannah fumbled with her purse, pulling out the pack of cigarettes and lighting one. Smoke plumed from between her shaking lips. “Get a hold of yourself,” she snapped, wishing frantically that the cars would start moving soon and she could get home. She had to tell her mother. She hadn’t slept at all last night or the night before, and she knew she would never sleep again until she did.

The cigarette kept the panic at bay.

The radio crackled. “
Know... what... you... did...
”

Susannah nearly choked on the cigarette as she fumbled to turn off the radio, dousing the car back into silence.

Then something tapped on her window and Susannah flinched so hard she dropped her cigarette and had to fish around by the pedals to retrieve it. When she sat up, she saw a man standing outside her door with one hand on the glass, wearing a tattered brown coat, fingerless gloves, and a beanie. He looked homeless: there was dirt crusted in his yellowed fingernails, stubble speckling his weathered face, and a slew of missing teeth amid the crooked, yellow ones jutting from his gums. There was something deranged about his eyes. He tapped again on the window.

Weighing her options, Susannah reluctantly rolled it down. Usually she ignored beggars who stood on the side of the road—but usually she could drive away. The man grinned at her, and when he spoke, she could smell rotten fish on his breath. “Road’s shut down,” he grunted. “Probably ’til mornin’. Ain’t no gettin’ through tonight.”

“Do you know
why?
” she snapped in frustration.

“Accident,” he said, his leer entirely too close to her. “Just an accident.”

Susannah flinched. That’s what she’d told herself already countless times—
It was an accident. Just an accident.
She started to roll up the window, but he reached his gnarled hand inside, gripping the top edge of the glass.

“It’s gonna get nine kinds of cold tonight,” he said, his breath fogging up the window, his eyes sliding down to her chest. He slowly licked his chapped lips. “Might need some help... warming up.”

Susannah punched the button to roll up the window, his fingers now in danger of getting crushed. “Pervert!” she shouted, and he quickly pulled his hand away before the window slid up.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” the beggar’s muffled voice swam through the glass. He pointed in the direction of Lake Michigan. “Cocytus is already frozen.”

“Are you on drugs?” snapped Susannah, then turned away from the window to finish her cigarette, heart thumping, hoping the hobo would get bored with her and move on. She saw him sidle away out of the corner of her eye and cracked the window to blow her smoke into the bitter air.

She tossed away the butt and settled back in the seat, the snow on the windshield too thick for the wipers to clear. Trapped in a white tomb, Susannah closed her eyes.

Just as she was beginning to drift off, a deep cracking sound rent the air, and she was jarred awake. It had sounded like the grinding of a massive boat against rocky shore, and Susannah had to shake away the image of a skeletal ghost ship with ragged sails floating ominously on Lake Michigan.

Panic burned low and steady like a candle flame, egged on by every burst of wind. She watched the minutes plod slowly by on the dashboard clock, drumming her fingers more and more furiously against the steering wheel. When the deep, unearthly sound came again, she elbowed open the door and stepped into the howling wind. Only darkness and whirling snow greeted her.

She stumbled a few steps through the snow, her socks soaked beneath the thin leather of her boots. “Is there anyone out here?” she shouted, curling her arms around her chest. “Hello!”

There was no answer. The cars slept peacefully around her, blanketed and white. Susannah spotted a cardboard sign sticking out of the snow on the side of the road, something that beggars might use. The man from before had disappeared entirely. She wondered briefly what he’d written on the sign, then went and pried it from the snow.

In black marker was scrawled:
ABANDON ALL HOPE
.

Susannah dropped the sign.

Shivers ran through her as she lurched back to the car. Who would write such a sign?

Falling into the driver’s seat, Susannah scrambled around for a cigarette, hearing nothing but her pulse in her ears. She flicked open her lighter to an empty click, tried again, and again. Dropping the lighter to the floor, she found a pack of hotel matches in the glove compartment, blindly struck one—nothing. She tried another, and another, and it wasn’t until the ninth match that she realized all the heads were charred black as if someone had used them and put them back in the pack.

The cigarette hung limply from her lips, unlit. Leaning back in the seat, she thought she might call her mother, but she was too afraid to pick up her phone in case it started buzzing again. She knew who was calling. Her mind unraveled.

If only she could sleep, she wouldn’t bother asking for forgiveness, but her conscience had been contaminated by religion in her youth. Try as she might to cleanse her mind of it, she couldn’t help but hear her mother’s fire-and-brimstone lectures.

Her hair was set in crisp black curls, her shoulders broad as a linebacker’s but clad in a matronly affair as she bore down on her nine-year-old daughter, saying, “You’re a sinner, Susannah,” and, closing the closet door and leaving her in darkness, “and you’ll stay in there until you realize that and start being a good girl.”

Susannah shook her head to clear away the past. She could imagine her mother now, sitting in the living room in the wooden rocker, staring into the fireplace, crucifixes pinned to the walls like a morbid insect collection.

She had to get home, and when she did, she would kneel before her mother and tell her everything. And her mother would either forgive her or damn her forever. Susannah knew in the back of her mind which it would be, but she felt compelled to go anyway. It was hard work, undoing eighteen years of self-flagellation.

The hours passed wrapped in these unsettling thoughts, and Susannah had to continually press her hands against the vents, wondering how long the car battery would last and if she could afford to turn up the heat any more. The slow creeping of the clock into the early morning kept Susannah’s bleary eyes busy, and she chewed on the end of the unlit cigarette which was now stained blood red with her smeared lipstick, her bones aching with cold.

Anxious over the battery, she turned off the car entirely, and it puttered into silence as an unbearable chill seeped under her clothes. Claustrophobia and restlessness churned through her muscles, her skin crawling the way it did when she was stuck in the middle seat on a ten-hour flight. “What is going on?” she murmured, her breath manifesting in the air like phantom cigarette smoke. “What is going
on?
”

Half an hour later, she could no longer feel her fingers or toes;
Damn the battery
, she thought viciously, and turned the key to a stuttering cough. “What...” she breathed, trying again, but it was like the matches, producing nothing, and she gave up with a cry and chucked the keys at the windshield, beating her fists futilely against the steering wheel. Her eyes prickled, and she peeled off her contacts and flicked them from the tips of her fingers, blinking against the burn in her corneas.

“I’m going to die,” she whispered, her voice shivering with her torso, “I’m going to die.”

She thought of the sign,
ABANDON ALL HOPE
.

She saw Virginia in her mind, shattered on concrete.

“Damn it,” she snapped, punching herself in the thigh and steadying her breath. Her hand found the phone and flipped it open, fingers ready with her mother’s number, but the screen was dark. Dead.

Susannah was alone.

She closed her eyes.

***

They stood on the roof of a 36-story building, the wind off the lake cutting through Susannah’s coat and tugging her hair into a straggly imitation of Medusa. The clouds hung heavy with snow that had yet to fall.

“You can’t quit,” said Susannah.

Virginia’s arms were crossed. “I know I’m your big sister, but I can’t take care of you forever.”

Susannah scoffed. “When did you
ever
take care of me? How about when Mom would make me kneel for six hours a day to repent while you were off drunk somewhere, pretending to be at a church youth group?”

Virginia’s eyes went cold; they reminded Susannah of their mother’s. “That’s because you told her you killed the neighbor’s cat. You
wanted
to be punished.”

“Fuck you.”

“I’m quitting,” said Virginia. “And I’m leaving. In nine months, I’ll be married, and we’re moving out of Chicago. It’s poison here. I can’t keep letting you drag me down, Anna. I’ll help you find another roommate if you can’t make the rent on your own—”

“You can’t leave,” snapped Susannah. Dark hair whipped across her eyes. “You can’t leave me here with her.” She paced the roof, staring out over the gleaming, star-like city lights.

Virginia shook her head. “You can leave, too. You just won’t let yourself.”

“Go to hell.”

“According to Mom, that’s where we’ll all end up, anyway,” said Virginia. She started walking towards the propped door to the stairs, but Susannah jumped into her path, stepping close to her sister.

“That’s it, then?” said Susannah. “You’ll get married and have 2.5 kids and a white picket fence and leave me in the dust picking my fingernails. And when Mom gets old and broken down,
I’ll
have to take care of her, and
I’ll
have to endure the abuse, just like when we were kids.”

“I’m sorry, Anna,” said Virginia, trying to get around her sister, but Susannah was determined to hold her there longer, and she grabbed her by the arms and drove her back a few steps.

The wind took them a little farther than Susannah had intended, but she held her ground. “You don’t get to leave.”

“Let go of me.” Virginia tried to tug herself free, but Susannah was stronger. “Let me go!”

Susannah’s grip nearly slid away at Virginia’s struggling, and they stumbled together near the edge of the roof, Virginia pulling and pulling away and Susannah grabbing and shoving, until Virginia tried to duck around her, and Susannah gave a frenzied cry and pushed her, and then—

Virginia wasn’t on the roof anymore.

Susannah didn’t even see her fall. When she peered over the edge of the roof, the tiny body was already sprawled on the pavement. The note she typed up on Virginia’s computer was frantic and incoherent, but it sounded well enough like the ranting of a suicide case, so she hit print and then stumbled down the darkened hallway, past the shells of empty cubicles, out to the back parking lot, and waited for the call.

***

As she was wondering how long it would take for frostbite to settle into her numb digits, the phone began to buzz.

Susannah stared wonderingly at the still-dark screen, thinking that perhaps in the delirium of hypothermia and sleep deprivation she was hallucinating the sound, but the phone vibrated steadily in her hand. Every time it had rung that day, the Caller ID had borne an impossible name which had sent her into fits of terror, but now Susannah, limbs aching in the cold, desperately grasped the phone and flipped it open.

“Hello?”

“Anna,” said the familiar voice. “Where are you going?”

She had to press the phone to her ear with two hands, they shook so badly. Her breath came ragged, almost but not quite a sob. “Home.”

“Is the city your home?” Virginia’s voice crackled in her ear.

“What?” Susannah asked breathlessly. “I’m going home. Virginia—I didn’t mean to. You know I didn’t mean to. It was an accident.”

“Stop telling yourself that. You don’t believe it.”

“Please,” said Susannah, and out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw a rotting body in the passenger’s seat, dried blood caking the cracking skin, hair matted with spilled bits of gray matter, face a puzzle of stitched-together flesh—but when she turned her head to the right, there was nothing there.

“
This is nine
,” said Virginia, her voice more and more distant in the raspy static. “
You’ve entered the city. Vexilla Regis prodeunt inferni.
”

Susannah dropped the phone and threw open the car door, blustery wind slapping her in the face and pulling violently at her hair and coat. She stumbled through the snow past several rows of cars which were now only mounds of white. In the distance she could just make out the city lights, staggering upwards in slanted lines as if the skyscrapers had become old headstones jutting crookedly from the frozen earth. The lights plunged up into the writhing clouds as the snow swirled in thick pellets.

The echo of her sister’s strange, unearthly voice guided her on. She had to find a way out. She had to get home.

Ahead, on the shoulder of the road, was a hunched figure. Susannah came closer, recognizing the tattered brown coat of the homeless man and desperately glad that there was at least some other living creature around, even if it was him.

“Hey—” she called, her voice tugged away in the wind.

As she neared, she saw him gnawing on something like an animal, and it took several minutes of staring to realize that it was a human leg in his hands, blood and bits of torn-off flesh hanging from his greedy mouth.

He looked up as if sensing her approach, black eyes boring into hers. Susannah stumbled away and took off down the expressway, weaving around the hulking, white-clad cars.

There was a sign up ahead, the big blue kind that gave the name of the exit. Susannah tilted against the wind, eyes streaming, mouth sour, until she was right under it, and looked up at the blurry letters.

WELCOME TO THE CITY OF DIS
.

She shook her head, terror pounding into her skull. Too bad, too late.

Her mother’s face floated into her mind, along with her biting, unforgiving words. Jesus glared accusingly from where He hung crucified all over the walls, body emaciated, hands nailed down, crown of thorns cutting into His bleeding head.