We Will All Go Down Together (22 page)

That, he still wasn’t too sure about.

Joe stumped out onto the ice, boots catching a bit on last night’s snow, kicking up spray. Behind him, Judy Kiss lingered in the doorway a moment—her flat brown daytime eyes half-slitted, more slant than ever, against the dawn’s early light—before finally stepping through as well, resealing the flap behind her. She clapped Joe’s too-big back-up pair of ski gloves together and blew out one long plume of breath, a dragon’s phantom tongue, squeezed hot and flat between her set teeth.

“Creepy,” she said, of the corpse-ring. “You get that a lot, up here?”

“Not too much, no. Not in. . . .”

(
the normal run of things
)

And: “No,” she repeated. “So why
did
you decide to go camping at this lovely time of year, Joe? Always wanted to check out the heart of dead-frozen-forest-creature country, just for fun? Or were you hoping if you only sat here long enough, some big-city girl with shiny supernatural extras like me might accidentally wander by?”

Joe felt himself flush. “Hey, I never asked you to crash my bag and eat half my jerky, lady. Way I see it, you’re damn lucky I was out here at all.”

Judy all but turned her back on him then, thin shoulders squaring sharp against the wind, in an unbelievable show of—contempt? Disinterest? Her voice calm, as she said:

“Sure, and thanks a lot for that, seriously. But the funny thing is . . . ever since my—whatever—I’m just
full
of that particular kind of luck.”

“What d’you mean?”

Still looking away, like it was easier to form the words if she didn’t have to watch Joe’s eyes while she did it; looking down at her creepily dry feet instead, still clad in the same wet and flimsy Goth-Loli shoes as last night, with no sign of ice forming on them.“I
mean
that I probably would’ve been fine even if you’d just let me lie and kept on going, actually—not to undercut your heroism, Joe, but that’s the truth. Because I’m always fine, no matter what, so this would’ve been no exception. Not even if I’d fallen in a snowbank face-first, and they hadn’t found my skinny ass ’til spring.”

“’Cause you can hibernate, right? Like a goddamn garter snake.”

She shook her head, smiling slightly. “Come on. You know a little more than
that
, I think.” A beat. “What is it you do for a living, again? Exactly?”

Now it was Joe’s turn to shake his head, to look away. To think:
The hell.
And then, almost immediately afterwards:
All right, fine, okay; might as well lay all our cards on the table, before we both get frostbite. I mean, what have I got to lose?

(About as much—or as little—as her, in the end, he guessed. Though maybe not for the same reasons.)

“I fix things,” he told her. “Places, like this. When they go bad.”

She nodded, unsurprised. “For anybody specific? Or for anybody who asks?”

“For People, you know—
the
People, like me. First Nations, Inuit . . . all kinds. Native People.”

“Aboriginals.”

“Nope: never been to Australia yet, and don’t plan to. Otherwise. . . .” Joe allowed himself a dry smile, which she returned. “Yeah, you pretty much got it.”

“Ever met an ex-possessee before?”

“Not really. Seen all sorts of weird stuff, though, in my time. Rabbit totem fever-spirits . . . unlaid missionary ghosts . . . Eskimo fart-men . . . giant flying cannibal heads.”

“There’s giant flying cannibal heads?”

“Not as many as there used to be.” A shrug. “One less now, anyhow.”

They stood in the snow for a minute more, watching the sun rise further. The wind ruffled fur and feathers at their feet, spreading loose matter along with a delicate scent of musk, a hint of held-back decay.

“You really sure you don’t even know his name?” Joe asked Judy, after a long, silent minute. “Considering the guy still looks out of your eyes, now and then . . . seems like your blackrobes didn’t do too good a job, pea soup or not, is all I’m sayin’.”

“Yeah, well, I can do the same thing to him too, for that matter—just don’t choose to, most of the time. But I’m
me
again, I know that much, and I have Father Wale and Father Frye to thank for it. Anything else . . . that’s my business, not theirs.”

“You sure about that?”

Another silence filled with a low
shussh
of wind, plus the slow and steady beat of Joe’s heart. And—

“I call him Mister Nobody,” she said, softly, to her lightly smoking shoe-tops. In practically a whisper: “‘Nobody, ancient mischief, nobody . . . Harasses always with an absent body. . . .’” A swallow. “There’s a crack in me, and I know it; he blew me open—things get in. But they don’t get in
to
me. They get in
through
me.”

“So I better watch out, the longer I’m around you. Is that it?”

Judy sighed, eyes downcast, like they were glued there. “God, I don’t know. From what I’ve seen, though . . . yeah, maybe. I mean. . . .”

(
. . . probably.
)

Joe had one hand in his pocket (just like the song), fingertips absently grazing the lump of his Grandmother’s tusk, as it shifted around under well-waxed sealskin; he felt a spark leap up from it at the word, unspoken or not. Caught a flip-book flutter of faces going by, some too-swift etheric undercurrent, here and gone before he could untangle its true significance: a woman with Judy’s same colouration, her face swollen double-size from chemo and painkillers, yet frozen rigid with what the drugs couldn’t reach. A kid a bit older than Judy still looked, face slack, hooked up to machines. A drunk on the corner, dirty dog collar poking out above a Goodwill hoodie’s V-neck—the other blackrobe from her exorcism, Father Frye?—while he hid his bottle in a Tim Horton’s donuts bag and waited for a gap between passersby to take another furtive slug. . . .

He didn’t know their names, most of ’em. Didn’t know their stories. Only that they’d once all stood close to Judy as he was standing now, and lived to regret it—

(or not)

Judy cut him a glance, like she could tell from the way he took his next breath he’d seen something, or (even) what he
had
seen. Adding, after a half-minute more: “My point is, me showing up anywhere is almost never a coincidence.”

Wouldn’t doubt it
, Joe thought. And had a weird lick of anger at her words run through him, nevertheless, unreasonable as that might seem. Like:
Hey, there you go
—
she
is
just another damn paleface, after all. Since everything’s always about
them
.

“Listen, girlie—far as I know, whatever’s gone wrong ’round here first started happening a pretty long time before
you
came on the scene.”

“Yeah, sure. But it still might turn out to have as much to do with me—or Mr. N., or his kind—as it does with anything else, which means I might sort of be a
good
person to bring along, too. Maybe.”

Joe sighed, and took a last long look around—the watching overhang of pines, dark even in daytime; the rustling ring of corpses, cutting them off from where the path to that abandoned nickel claim mineshaft the elders had pointed him towards could just be picked out, opening up between two particularly twisted-looking trees. The open ice-mouth beside them and the closed tent behind. And Judy Kiss to his right, his spare parka at least long enough to keep her torso warm, even if the pants she wore beneath weren’t meant for anything much more strenuous than clubbing; Judy Kiss, her breath like steam, her eyes perhaps downcast to hide the fact that they already looked far less brown . . . than yellow.

Thinking about just how much he didn’t really know concerning that other hole, even now—not how it figured, or if it did, or how deep it went down, or how best to find out. Or what might be waiting for him at the bottom, if and when he finally got there.

“Maybe,” he allowed, eventually. Finding he already knew what was going to happen next.

The trip took a good two hours—half an hour for hiking, an hour and a half for descent. They only had one harness between them, so there was more than a little time wasted tying off on a nearby tree and adjusting the straps to fit Judy, who’d never rappelled before, which meant Joe had to half lower her, half swing her back and forth, down into the depths. Then, once she’d hit solid ground and unbuckled herself, it was up to Joe to reel the whole thing back up, rinse and repeat, this time with his own ass in the sling.

Down under, he’d expected to feel colder than he actually did—but soon enough, he tracked the eddy of unnatural warmth back to its source: Judy, peering around at the bare rock walls, the slick-frozen ruts beneath her feet where tracks had been torn back up when the original claim failed to pay out, and the company who sank it retreated to Sudbury’s fresher fields.

“What were they after down here?”

“Nickel, but there wasn’t ever much, even before they got the shut-down order. Elders say they weren’t too sure
what
they found, ’cept it could’ve been radioactive.” Judy nodded, flipping hair from her eyes; as she turned and crossed by him, Joe felt himself suddenly ooze sweat like a tribute to her proximity, disproportionately wet and hot under his parka’s great weight. “Now the Rez and the OPP try to make sure people stay out, but something keeps taking the safety fences away—the most recent bunch’s probably still up top, under that big pile of snow we saw near the shaft-head.”

“Uh huh.”

Joe kept on talking, as the small of his back got steadily slicker. “This last fall, two Rez kids went missing; Elders think maybe they fell in, but they could’a jumped, too. Broke their legs when they hit bottom, then starved to death, but not ’til they’d spent some time cuttin’ on each other and writing stuff nobody recognized on the walls. Should’ve been right about . . . 
here
, supposedly. . . .”

He cast about, scanning the walls at low- to mid-level, trying to figure out how high a crippled teenager could reach. Judy did the same, squatting to get closer. And because that sulphur-sweet
smell
of hers was back in his nostrils now, stronger than ever, he found himself throwing out jokes to clear his head—shallow, hollow-toned, a slaughterhouse stand-up’s don’t-act-like-death-is-watching “wit”—

“‘Judy Kiss.’ That just doesn’t get less funny.”

Without stopping: “Says the guy who calls himself ‘Joe Crow.’”

“Where’d your folks come from, anyways?”

“Eastern Europe, mainly. Hungary, Romania.”

“Huh: Dracula country.”

She nodded again, hair already slopped back over, shadowing her gaze. “My Dad’s even named Bela.”

“Must be fun at Hallowe’en.”

“He’s never fun.” She stood in one smooth move, took a half-step back. “I think . . . yeah, this might be it. See?”

Joe took a look. There, under a new coat (or two) of ice: brownish, smeary, all loops and dots and weird little circles made from bloody palm-prints mashed together, curled so there was at least a prick of empty space left untouched in their middles. Grey lichens crusted around and through what Joe supposed must be sentences, fuzzing the already-uncertain lines even further. It wasn’t any sort of Native script he’d ever encountered, and definitely not English—an old-style witch-code, like Crossing the River? Ogham? Runes?

“Those kids didn’t write this,” Judy said, quietly, from beside him.

“What do you mean? Look at the colour—red turns brown, then grey, then black. It’s not like they scratched it into the rock, or anything; it’s gotta be fresh. If it was older’n a few months, we wouldn’t even be able to read it.”

“No, I mean . . . 
people
didn’t write this. Not your People, not my people—no
people
, at all.”

In his heart, Joe knew she was right—but though that was the first phrase which sprang to mind, it wasn’t really there the intuition rested like a frozen, unswallowed seed. More in that cold spot at the base of his neck, between the first and second vertebrae, through which most possessing spirits enter.

“I’ve seen this kind of alphabet before, though . . . he wrote in it on my walls. Made
me
write in it. Like graffiti.”

“Your Mr. Nobody?”

“The very same.” She crouched again, closer this time, so her nose almost grazed the wall. “This looks like a name.”

And—when had she taken off her glove? Because now she was skimming the wall with her bare fingertips, heedless of the rising mist, her touch already melting through: One sigil, another, another. Her lips parting to sound them out, as she did so—

“
Zem-ya-za
,” Judy said, carefully. “
Husband to—Anah and—Aholibamah . . . brother of—Azazel . . . sower of seed . . . father to giants. . . .
”

Joe’s own lips were dry, abruptly numb, too clumsy to do anything but purse, part, tremble—a strange thrumming current seemed to build with every syllable, thickening the air around him with static. Like they’d somehow gone to Europe without knowing it, plugged the wrong kind of appliance in the wrong kind of socket, and now the whole hotel room was going to blow up.

He coughed, phlegm like blood in his cracking throat. Offered, weakly: “Maybe you shouldn’t be, uh, saying that kinda stuff . . . out loud. . . .”

She didn’t seem to hear, though. And now, over her shoulder, he began to catch a cast-off light from her eyes on the melting wall—that brownish glint dimming, the yellow inflection (
infection
) mounting—

It was enough to make him flinch as she finally started to turn, his entire body tensing, expecting to see Mr. Nobody’s shadow come over her whole face, the way a flicker might come (or go) in someone else’s pupil. One huge flash of wakeful malefice, lidding open and shut across her entire head at once.

But no, not yet: just her, just Judy. For the moment.

“
The sons and daughters of our enemies shall wander amongst the tombs, in the unclean places
,” she told him, “
and cut themselves with stones
. That’s what the rest of it reads.”

“’Cause this guy—Zemyaza?—says so.”

“Well, yeah.” She gave an odd, little half-smile. “And they did, didn’t they? That’s what they’ve
been
doing, around here. All this time.”