“Why? Is it going to blow up?”
“Something like that.”
“I’ll be back.”
Will rang the bell. Albert Bergin answered. Will’s gun backed the older man up.
“There’s your shit. Where’s my money?”
The 9 was heat-soaked stone ready for blood. Bergin knew it.
“He’s dead?”
“No, Fuckhead. I put him on a plane to Vegas with a blonde. Yes. Dead as yer grandmother’s pussy. My money—now!”
“Of course. I just want to see the book first.”
“Then look.”
Bergin opened the backpack.
“This is not it.”
“It’s all I could find. The thing on the cover looks like you said it did. You said it was written in French. That looks like fucking French to me. And there’s no fucking doubt it’s old. The fucking thing’s falling apart. The old fuck was crying before I shot him, said it was a copy. Look at that can-thing I grabbed while I was there.”
Bergin removed the object from the bag. If a demon could be delighted with an unexpected present, his eyes said he was.
“This is… Navarre’s. How? Where was this?”
“With the book. It’s got the same logo thing on it as the book. Figured they went together or something. Now where’s my money.”
Bergin began to open the container.
“Fuck that! You ain’t openin’ that fucking thing while I’m here. I seen shows on TV about when they opened those old tombs in Egypt and I ain’t breathin’ in any old germs that would lay my ass over in Potter’s Field. You can wait ’til I count my money and leave.”
Bergin sat the container on his desk.
“It’s all there. Count it. And leave.”
Will picked up the brown manila envelope and began counting.
“We’re square. You have fun with yer fuckin’ shit there and forget my name and that you ever saw me.” Will leveled the 9 at him. “You understand?”
“Yes.”
And Will was gone.
Bergin’s hands opened the vessel containing Navarre’s Vapors. Coughed. His hands burned. Cold and shadows came into the room…
Tentacles of yellow/greenish curling smoke. A burnt odor. The sound of roaring fire in howling wind and a great grinding. Albert Bergin has It in his hands and It has him in its hands…
Will had been locked up in labyrinths and abysses for years and years, passed from hand to hand by creatures with demonic faces and demonic hearts of utter blackness. Cast into a life of Hell by the demonic hands of his father. Will heard a scream inside the house. Remembered the first time he’d screamed when the creatures had him in their hands…
Will remembered some bookworm in a bar once saying something about the child is the father to the man. He wasn’t sure just what the guy meant by it, but he knew his take on it. “Just returning the lesson, Daddy.”
The real world in slow motion. Will lit a cigarette. Starting walking away from Back. “Who says that’s just the way it is? I’ve never hit a woman or sold dope to kids.” Never killed anybody that didn’t have it coming. “Maybe I still have options.”
He took a drag off his smoke. The sun was out. He started walking toward Daniel Washington’s house…
∇
The Shallows
John Langan
Il faut cultiver notre jardin.
—Voltaire, Candide
I could call you Gus,” Ransom said.
The crab’s legs, blue and cream, clattered against one another. It did not hoist itself from its place in the sink, though, which meant it was listening to him. Maybe. Staring out the dining room window, his daily mug of instant coffee steaming on the table in front of him, he said, “That was supposed to be my son’s name. Augustus. It was his great-grandfather’s name, his mother’s father’s father. The old man was dying while Heather was pregnant. We…I, really, was struck by the symmetry: one life ending, another beginning. It seemed a duty, our duty, to make sure the name wasn’t lost, to carry it forward into a new generation. I didn’t know old Gus, not really; as far as I can remember, I met him exactly once, at a party at Heather’s parents’ a couple of years before we were married.”
The great curtain of pale light that rippled thirty yards from his house stilled. Although he had long since given up trying to work out the pattern of its changes, Ransom glanced at his watch. 2:02…pm, he was reasonably sure. The vast rectangle that occupied the space where his neighbor’s green-sided house had stood, as well as everything to either side of it, dimmed, then filled with the rich blue of the tropical ocean, the paler blue of the tropical sky. Waves chased one another towards Ransom, their long swells broken by the backs of fish, sharks, whales, all rushing in the same direction as the waves, away from a spot where the surface of the ocean heaved in a way that reminded Ransom of a pot of water approaching the boil.
(Tilting his head back, Matt had said, How far up do you think it goes? I don’t know, Ransom had answered. Twenty feet in front of them, the sheet of light that had descended an hour before, draping their view of the Pattersons’ house and everything beyond it, belled, as if swept by a breeze. This is connected to what’s been happening at the poles, isn’t it? Matt had squinted to see through the dull glare. I don’t know, Ransom had said, maybe. Do you think the Pattersons are okay? Matt had asked. I hope so, Ransom had said. He’d doubted it.)
He looked at the clumps of creamer speckling the surface of the coffee, miniature icebergs. “Gus couldn’t have been that old. He’d married young, and Heather’s father, Rudy, had married young, and Heather was twenty-four or -five…call him sixty-five, sixty-six, tops. To look at him, though, you would have placed him a good ten, fifteen years closer to the grave. Old…granted, I was younger, then, and from a distance of four decades, mid-sixty seemed a lot older than it does twenty years on. But even factoring in the callowness of youth, Gus was not in good shape. I doubt he’d ever been what you’d consider tall, but he was stooped, as if his head were being drawn down into his chest. Thin, fraiclass="underline" although the day was hot, he wore a long-sleeved checked shirt buttoned to the throat and a pair of navy chinos. His head…his hair was thinning, but what there was of it was long, and it floated around his head like the crest of some ancient bird. His nose supported a pair of horn-rimmed glasses whose lenses were white with scratches; I couldn’t understand how he could see through them, or maybe that was the point. Whether he was eating from the paper plate Heather’s uncle brought him or just sitting there, old Gus’s lips kept moving, his tongue edging out and retreating.”
The coffee was cool enough to drink. Over the rim of the mug, he watched the entire ocean churning with such force that whatever of its inhabitants had not reached safety were flung against one another. Mixed among their flailing forms were parts of creatures Ransom could not identify, a forest of black needles, a mass of rubbery pink tubes, the crested dome of what might have been a head the size of a bus.
He lowered the mug. “By the time I parked my car, Gus was seated near the garage. Heather took me by the hand and led me over to him. Those white lenses raised in my direction as she crouched beside his chair and introduced me as her boyfriend. Gus extended his right hand, which I took in mine. Hard…his palm, the undersides of his fingers, were rough with calluses, the yield of a lifetime as a mechanic. I tried to hold his hand gently…politely, I guess, but although his arm trembled, there was plenty of strength left in his fingers, which closed on mine like a trap springing shut. He said something, Pleased to meet you, you’ve got a special girl, here, words to that effect. I wasn’t paying attention; I was busy with the vice tightening around my fingers, with my bones grinding against one another. Once he’d delivered his pleasantries, Gus held onto my hand a moment longer, then the lenses dropped, the fingers relaxed, and my hand was my own, again. Heather kissed him on the cheek, and we went to have a look at the food. My fingers ached on and off for the rest of the day.”