We Will All Go Down Together (21 page)

(other places, about other things)

—they can be right.

Shivering, Joe felt newsprint dusted with ice under his fingers, and looked down to see Father Akinwale Oja’s name wink up at him through the crack between forefinger and thumb. But not really, since “Akin” and “Oja” lay caught just far enough under his knuckles to make it read just “Father,” just “Wale”: this alien name, in all its strange dignity, abruptly shrunk to somebody else’s affectionate diminutive. Pointing the way like an unmapped street sign.

Joe sat back on the ice, narrowing his vision until the hole became the world all around. From inside the tent, he could hear Judy Kiss’s sleeping breath wash in and out, harsh and hot, a slow tsunami separating sand from soil, dust from stone, flesh from bone. Her heart was a desert, nothing left standing, and her breath blew straight out of it, scented with emptiness. Even in this edge-of-freezing wasteland, what heat it held was utterly comfortless.

He closed his eyes and let it take him down further, freefall fast, into the zero where dream and memory meet.

Father Wale was a lot bigger than Joe thought he would be—big like a bull, brown like a macadamia nut. He found Judy sitting alone outside the courtroom, monopolizing the smokers’ area; a small knot of nicotine addicts watched her resentfully from the sidewalk, puffing like dragons, but made sure to keep a safe distance.

“Judy.”

“Father.” She got up, freeing the flimsy metal bench. Ironic: “Care for a seat?”

“No, thank you.”

And here there was some sort of glitch, a skip, an internal edit on the mind’s hard drive; happened a lot, when you were sifting the past from a particular person’s perspective. Because
We’re not flies,
Joe’s Grandmother used to say.
We can’t see everything at once, from every angle. And even if we could, that still wouldn’t be how we ended up remembering it.
A time-lapse splice from moment to moment, after which Joe rejoined Judy and Father Wale, already in progress, mid-debate: not
heated
, exactly, but intent. Made sense they were probably talking about God, then, ’cause—in Joe’s experience, anyhow—that never really helped.

“You
know
what happened was—”

“‘Real?’ Oh yeah, Father; got that part, thanks.” Judy sighed. “Listen: I appreciate what you did for me, I really do. . . .”

“What God did for you, you mean.”

“Do I?”

“God saved you, Judy. As you well know. Father Frye and I only said the words.”

Judy gave Father Wale a narrow look, while Joe found himself increasingly intrigued by the smell of the big man’s shadow: the usual incense-flavoured, paper-and-candlewax blackrobe scent, but under all that an odd lick of tall grass and predator musk, savannah heat. Wisps of the dreamtime of a land far hotter, rougher, and older than the so-called Old World. Granted, the Church ate faiths the way English ate languages, but not everything got digested completely; like his Grandmother, Joe himself was sufficient proof of that. But he had to wonder whether, in Father Wale’s case, toting around such an unstable mix of Old and New had really helped the big man cut a path through his ancestral undergrowth to true capital-c Catholic capital-b Belief.

Take this place, just one of many waystops between worlds—accessible mainly by, but certainly not restricted to, the Innu. Like most pocket dimensions, it came equipped with both a front and a back door . . . and if you went far enough up
that
particular cone, Joe knew, you’d inevitably end up smack dab in the middle of what Jung called the racial unconscious, the realm of archetypes. Like an overcast sky, a storm front, with little spiritual tornados touching down here, there, and everywhere. A place where everything converges, running together at the functions: Jesus and Dionysos, St. Francis and Lord Krishna, the Virgin Mary and Yemanya-of-the-Waters, Coyote and Bugs Bunny.

From where Joe stood now, he could see that Father Wale’s cone led straight back to Africa, Nigeria to be exact. Joe remembered having read somewhere that the Yoruba—Father Wale’s people—once had six hundred gods to choose from, if and when they wanted to put their damage on somebody. After that sort of spiritual smorgasbord, Joe couldn’t help but feel that the Three-in-One would seem like a pretty radical come-down. But hell: each to his own.

“God’s little helpmeets,” Judy said, eventually. “Father Frye, just a tool in His hands. So
eager
to be God’s tool, he lied to my folks—and you—to make sure they’d let him try. You do remember what happened to Father Frye, right? Ever wonder what’s gonna end up happening to you?”

“Cillian Frye has already answered for his lies.” Anger rose in Father Wale’s voice. “Should I ask how you plan to answer for yours?”

“You’ll notice I never took the stand.”

“No. You let your lawyer lie
for
you—say that what happened was a sickness, a madness. To demean in public the name of Christ, who saved you—”

“Why would Jesus care what anybody says about Him, Father? He knows what He did.” A pause. “And besides . . . that wasn’t even
about
me, was it? Any of it. Ever.”

“Oh, Judy. . . .”

And here, right here, was where Joe began to feel . . . spied on. Like there was somebody else hanging invisibly there, aside from himself. Like at any minute, a too-blue corner of the half-recalled sky above might suddenly peel away to reveal an unblinking eye, staring down.

He could almost see it now. And somehow, he knew exactly what it would look like: yellow. Slant-pupilled, like a goat’s.

(The same shade Judy’s eyes were already starting to dim to, even as he watched. The same thin angle her pupils were already beginning to rotate towards, mechanism-quick—parts in some infernal clockwork, set whirring once more by an unseen, magickal key.)

But: “You must not be bitter, Judy,” Father Wale cautioned her, cluelessly sympathetic. “You do not have that right, not even with all you have suffered. Not when one considers what you have been given in return.”

Judy nodded, slightly. “Yup. Got my body back, finally, with all that entails—bounty of Adam and Eve, fruit of their Fall: sin, despair, degradation, death. And almost as good as the day I first got it too, barring a little property damage. . . .”

“Judy, really. Enough of this.”

“Oh, but that’s what
I
said, Father—over and over and over. And
over
.” Her voice dropped a hard half-octave on the last word, velcro-silky, its very register almost more disturbing than the actual words’ content. “But I never did get an answer, that I remember—and you know, considering how long I spent with that spectral motherfucker, I never did get a
name
, either. So don’t talk to me about gifts anymore, okay? Truth is, for all you were there, you really don’t know the half, or even the quarter. Sure, you got the dog collar, but you still have to take it all on faith, like everybody else. Everybody but—”

(
me
)

And oh, Joe knew the feeling, yes indeed. The one which says, give or take a few regional variations:

Let other people strain for meaning and fear the ultimate lack of such, eking out their dismal little lives under the looming shadow of Eternity, with no hope of proof that what they want to believe about some sort of World Beyond is anything but a pretty lie told to soothe old ladies into filling collection plates. Not me, though. I don’t have to worry about any of the above, let alone the Below; I don’t even have to try.

Because . . . I already
know
.

Like the night after his
Nukum
’s funeral, so long gone now, when Joe first put on his bone suit and took the Old Road to the nethers,
Tshishtashkumuku
’s trackless waste. Out on the ice, where he’d met with what was left of his Grandmother once more—just the ghost of her smile, peeking out from the dark under her half-lowered sealskin hood, its white new teeth
atshen
-sharp. Whether it was even really her wasn’t something Joe let himself wonder very often, especially whenever he needed professional advice; one ghost’s perspective on things was probably about as good as another’s, when you got right down to it. But she’d given him a gift to mark the occasion, and he’d accepted it gladly: Something she’d caught in her wide-flung net, to be his personal between-Worlds totem. The narwhal-tusk crow.

And when he’d woken that next morning, it had still been in his palm, frozen fast to it like metal, like ice. Scarring him far deeper than his skin, as though (without entirely meaning to) he’d taken a breath of addictively toxic wind from a whole other world.

Joe’d really known what he was from then on, along with what he wasn’t. Judy, meanwhile . . . she knew
something
, that was certain; probably one part of the equation only, though—the question
or
the answer, not both. She wouldn’t be staring at Father Wale in quite the same scary-hungry way if she did.

“So you punish your parents, because they’re the only people you
can
punish? Judy, they don’t have the resources to pay back that sort of settlement, and you know it. All you will succeed in doing is to bankrupt them.”

“You think this was about the
money
? Listen, Father . . . believe me, it’s a moot point. I mean, it’s not like I’m gonna be around to collect.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Judy. . . .”

“Doesn’t
matter
, Father.” A pause. “Do you think God is cruel?”

“No, Judy, I don’t. Do you?”

“Is gravity cruel?”

“Not necessarily.”

“No. But just because it holds the entire universe together, we don’t usually assume it’s
kind
, either. Do we?”

And: watched,
watched
. Joe could feel the many-legged weight of what-the-damn-ever’s attention, sticky on the back of his mental neck; it scurried to and fro, spreading disease. Judy’s eyes were topazes, their twisted cores burning, pupils crooked as swastikas—she fixed Father Wale through lowered lashes and sulphur-smell boiled up, a slow-mo explosion in a match factory.
How the hell could he not notice?
Joe wondered.

The eyes switched his way, a cool little flick.
Because it wasn’t
like
this, of course,
a voice replied, in Joe’s head.

Not Judy’s voice, though, and not a
voice
, either. Not in any human sense.

Who are you?
Joe made himself ask, guts churning.
Blackrobe devil? Ghost?
Mishpateu
?

Maybe all of the above. Maybe none. Maybe . . . 
It grinned, using Judy’s face.
No, I don’t think so. You know a fair deal, Joe Crow, but when it comes to stuff like this? You’re just not ready.

Joe grimaced, scrabbling to hold onto his point of reference as he felt Judy’s memory suddenly pivot around him, flight simulator-style.
Okay, whatever . . . but what’s your damn
name
?

Oh. That’d be telling, wouldn’t it?

(Because:
Weren’t you listening? I didn’t even let Judy in on that. And we’re
so
close, so much closer than you and I, Joe, could ever be. . . .
)

The sulphur lit Joe’s lungs lurid yellow, a burning butterfly’s wings, fluttering and gasping. But the
thing
wearing Judy Kiss’s memory-face simply broke eye-contact and looked away, dismissive. Like he wasn’t enough fun to be worth the effort of playing with, anymore.

You can wake up now,
it “told” him, tonelessly. And Joe did.

Joe Tulugaak, shaman for hire, snapped from his trance to find himself still kneeling by the hole, who knew how many hours later: waist-deep in snow, his hood-flaps frozen fast to his beard, with Judy Kiss—the real Judy, her slant eyes safely brown once more—slapping him back and forth across the cold face, cursing. Then wrestling him up and shoving him headlong inside the tent again with all her disproportionate strength, like she was the one saving
him
, or something. Which, embarrassingly enough. . . .

. . . she obviously was.

“So,” he said, teeth chattering, after he’d warmed up enough to eat some of the soup she was trying to feed him. “Was any of that true? In the paper?”

She frowned. “You went through my pockets?”

“Just answer the question, girlie.”

“What, how I’m Toronto’s answer to Regan MacNeil, ’cause I had an angel in my head?”

“‘Angel?’”

“Sure. That’s what being possessed means—that’s who possesses you. Of the Fallen variety, but. . . .”

“In other words, a devil.”

“No difference.” Off his look: “Seriously, we’re talking about the
exact same thing
. No qualitative difference at all. . . .”

Looking away as she said it, squeezing hard on the rolled-up soup package to get that last little bit out. Adding, underneath her breath, as she did so—

“. . . and that’s the
really
scary part.”

They sat there for a moment, Judy just staring down at the tent floor and breathing, Joe trying his level best not to fall asleep; the sheer amount of trouble he’d had swallowing his last mouthful had made him abruptly aware of exactly how tired he really must be. Nevertheless, he made his eyes focus, and asked her:

“You could’a froze right to the ice, alone up here. Ever think about that?”

She glanced away again, faint black smattering of brows knitting in an oddly embarrassed way. Like they could both hear her own memory-voice playing back, behind Joe’s eyes:
Listen, Father . . . believe me, it’s a moot point. I mean . . . 

(not like I’m gonna be around)

“Yeah,” Judy said, finally. “I thought about it.”

And left it at that.

The next morning, when Joe unzipped the flap, he found the sun had already risen to reveal a wide yet surprisingly unbroken ring of dead animals—all sizes and varieties, most indigenous species, stacked tail by tail or claw to claw in every possible direction—completely encircling their tent. Not wholly unexpected, though not something he’d been looking to see quite this damn quick, either; a definite escalation, in other words. A thrown gauntlet, even. But thrown by what?