For an hour or so, I sat at a table putting myself back together. I had nearly finished when a Stranger sat down beside me. He was tall and lean and dressed to riverboat-gambler's perfection. Long white hair flipped inward at the nape of His neck.
The Stranger pulled three cards from His vest pocket. He started to toss them about-face down on the table. Each one had a single perfect, sharp crease down the midline.
"Do you trust Me?" He asked casually.
I tried to follow the motions of His hands. His fingers crossed over one another at times, so I couldn't quite follow the cards. I shrugged and looked at Him.
"Why should I trust You? You've never shown Yourself before. You've given me no cause to trust You."
He nodded amiably, though still aloof. "You don't have cause to mistrust Me then, either." He flipped over a card. King of clubs.
"I've played this game for a long time," He continued. Another card flipped over-king of diamonds. "I win, I lose. Mostly I win." He eyed me with a noncommittal gaze. "You look good enough to beat Me. But you've got to trust Me. Otherwise, you don't stand a chance of winning."
"If the game is straight," I said, "what would it matter whether I trusted You or not?" I tapped the last bit of skin into place on my body and leaned the whole patchwork mess back in the chair.
"If you don't trust Me, you lose."
"And if I trust You, I win?"
He smiled. "I didn't say that." He took another calculating glance of me. "I only said that you can't win if you don't."
"And if I refuse to play the game?"
He flipped over another card. The ace of spades.
"Then," He said, "I'm afraid you still lose."
"Sounds like a sweet racket."
The Stranger shrugged. "It's kept Me going. And it keeps My boys in chips." His fingers danced around the cards as He nodded at the men behind Him.
Half a dozen of His boys stood along the bar, grinning at me. They wore gamblers' clothes, all right, but their faces were all familiar.
The Ecclesia.
"It's a healthy game to play," the Stranger continued. "But you've simply got to trust Me." The cards sped over one another at an increasingly blinding rate. He flipped one card over to show me the ace. Following the card was useless-He pointed to it, turned it over, revealed the king of clubs.
"Don't try to follow the game," He counseled. "Just trust Me. I wouldn't cheat you. Trust is the basis of the most sublime relationships." The Ace popped up again, got moved around, and became the King of Diamonds.
I tried to concentrate.
"Just pick a card," He said, the soft shuffling sound on the green felt blending hypnotically with His voice. "Just pick a card and trust Me. There is no other game. There is nothing else."
Something intruded, though. A pair of delicate hands rested upon my shoulders. A scent of patchouli lightly caressed my nostrils. I could feel Her warmth.
"Take a walk, sister" the Stranger said. His gaze never deviated from me. "You never trusted Me."
"That's because he cheats," She whispered in my ear. "That's simple enough reason not to trust him. Ask for proof of his honesty."
I stuck my hand out like a department store dummy. "May I see the cards?"
He scooped them up off the table. "No one can see all three! You've got to trust Me!"
"Why?"
I didn't really need to ask. His boys stepped away from the bar toward our table. They'd stopped grinning.
"Because," He said, "those are the rules!"
"Then I don't want to play." I stood defiantly. No one suckers Dell Ammo.
"Then you lose." He leaned forward across the table, one fist clutching the cards, the other clenching up.
The lovely voice behind me whispered, "You can't win or lose if you don't play the game. He's bluffing and terrified that anyone might find out."
Her hands squeezed my shoulders. The Stranger swung His fist at my jaw. I ducked, thrusting my hand forward to seize His wrist.
Laughing, She snatched the cards from His hand. All three were kings.
"He palms the ace. The whole game's fixed." She threw the cards down on the table.
"You never trusted Me," He accused Her again. His voice was as petulant as a child's. He stiffened, regained His composure. "You might have won if You'd trusted Me."
She laughed like spring rain on crystal. "I've always won, precisely because I don't trust you." She released His hand. "You, however, can never win. Why else do you continue to play so desperately?"
"You-" He stared at me with vicious hatred. "You couldn't face Me alone, could you? You had to run to Mother for help like a little child."
"At least," She said, "I help those who ask. And I don't require their souls in exchange."
Somewhere, a coyote-or maybe it was a wolf-howled heartily. Suddenly, like a movie frame caught in a projector, all motion froze. A burst of flames evaporated everyone and everything except for the table and the cards. I turned them over.
All three had become queens of hearts.
25
Wheels Without Wheels
The street was littered with corpses.
I turned around to return to the saloon, suspecting that I was in for more fun.
The building had vanished. In its place lay an unending field of lifeless bodies. Some were mere skeletons with hardly any flesh at all. Others looked fresh. Most of them were in a condition somewhere in between, exuding that ripe putrescence that someone described as "the sickly sweet stench of freshly baked bread."
Only this smelled far worse. It choked the lungs and gagged the throat.
Animals and beasts of all kinds lay mixed in with the people. The flies might have gorged themselves if there had been any. Scattered over the corpses, though, were the husks of dead insects. Nothing lived. Nothing moved.
Except for whatever was making that repulsive smell. And me.
And one other… person.
Of course.
He dragged the body of a woman across that of a man in an attempt to lay them together, arm in arm. The woman's left arm separated at her shoulder, though, and he was forced to arrange the vignette as best he could.
"Fnord," he said. His gaze lifted to meet mine.
He was squat, scraggly, and covered with oozing boils. Clad only in a few rags, he waddled across the charnel morass barefooted.
"What do you want?" His voice was as harsh as sandpaper on a sunburn. "You're not supposed to be here. You're not rotting!"
"Is this hell?" I asked.
He stared at me as if I'd asked him if it were the Chinese Theater. Grubby-no, slimy-fingers smeared a few grey strands of long, matted hair away from his eyes.
"Of course this isn't hell, you stupid tit. There isn't any hell or heaven. You don't go anywhere when you die. Except maybe underground." He picked up a finger from one of the more advanced cases of decay and waved it at me. "And mind you not to start asking me about souls, you ignorant bastard. Your soul dies with you!"
"Energy," I repeated from high school physics, "can neither be created nor destroyed. My mind is electrochemical energy that cannot be destroyed. It's my soul, and it's got to go somewhere."
The squat little man (if it was a man) sat on the withers of a deceased horse. Its ribs caved in with a crunch and a sigh. He jumped up cursing.
After brushing away the excess putridity, he said, "Thermodynamics, eh?" He hefted a pair of bloated, purplescent bodies one on the other, then climbed atop to straddle them.