The Shibboleth (39 page)

But there's a hard, unyielding bit of me that balks. The argumentative, petty, spiteful part of me rebels against the idea that this meatsuit I was born in, that I've inhabited for seventeen years, will become cat poop. No, I can't have that. I won't end up in a litter box.

The ether is clean. If there's even a whiff of Helmholtz, I can't sense it.

I'll not be trapped in this body when I die! I'll be like the Witch! I'll take over someone else. SOMETHING ELSE.

The thought is strange after it occurs to me. But I am beyond understanding by human means now. Post-human, they call it. I am a cloud, I am a mote. I am the water vapor on the breath of the mountains, I am the twitch in a lion's tail.

It creeps forward. Its tail thrashes back and forth and then stills. I can sense if not see the claws extending and retracting from its front paws as it prepares itself to strike.

I am huge and tiny all at once. I am breath and stillness. I settle upon the creature like some fog in a miasmic Arkansas jungle, the jungle that I come from. I settle like a thought, an instinct.

I seat myself in the flesh. I seat myself in the throne of savagery, red in tooth and claw.

I leap.

They come to get me out of bed, Negata and Ruark, standing over me with a flashlight. Jack's digital alarm clock reads 3:43. Hollis has returned from wherever he's been and doesn't even raise his head.

Negata positions himself back and to the right, his hands free and ready for anything. I have a sharp memory of the mountain lion crouching in front of me. Extending claws.

If only I could
find
Negata, I'd take him like I took the lion.

“Get up, Shreve. The director wants to speak with you,” Ruark says, kicking the leg of my bed like Jack does. Maybe she's where he got the bright idea. The ether buzzes, thrums with Helmholtz. She's come loaded for bear. Or mountain lion.

I blink and try to hide how much it hurts. My chest is sore now where the lion slammed into my torso in its mad, self-destructive leap. I had only enough time to retract the claws and clamp shut the slavering mouth. Inside the beast, I padded around my small, pathetic body, sniffing the crotch, the ass. I smelled my own blood and for a moment, a single instant, I felt the irresistible desire to devour myself, to sink my teeth into that bit of flesh and destroy my birth body forever.

Afterward, I ran. I hunted. I stalked the forest and the mountainside, shibboleth forgotten. Everything forgotten other than slaking my hunger.

I stalked the campus. In the tall grasses by the lower airfield, where the creek runs, I caught a doe as its hooves slipped on a stream-slicked stone and it fell. Its blood stayed in the fur of my muzzle, and its meat made my belly pendulous, my blood slow.

A thing of pure spirit and burning flesh. I feel tired and ashamed of all the memories I took and used up in Casimir like some junkie. The whole time there was
this
, the pure rush and joy of the carnal. The pleasure of the flesh of the predator, yowling and screeching and looking for a female to top and sire cubs upon.

When I came back to my body—to my humanity—I was wracked with shivers, my skin rippling with goose bumps. I stumbled back to the dorm, passing Roberto at the front door. He looked surprised at my appearance. Up the stairs slowly and into the creaky dorm bed. Hollis wasn't in our room.

Now Ruark stands above me. Would that I was a cat, stalking on padded feet.

“We brought you some fresh clothes, Cannon. The director wants you presentable.” Ruark tosses a short stack of folded white and tan clothes on my feet at the end of my bed. “Get up, get dressed. The director is waiting.”

From the light of the hallway, I see Jack stir in his bed. I make a patting gesture with my hand, letting him know to stay still. I don't have to worry about Hollis jumping in. Tap snores.

“Okay, mister,” I say.

She doesn't leave as I strip off my soiled undergarments and examine the stiff, scratchy clothes she's provided. Everything looks a little too big for me. Naked, I hold the pants, not even trying to cover my junk. I'm too tired and hurt for any modesty. It's just the meatsuit she sees. Not the real me.

“You could use some fattening up. I'll tell Cindy at the canteen to double up on the sausage and cinnamon rolls for you.”

“Laissez-moi tranquille! Il ya faims et il ya d'autres faims.” That just pops out there. There are hungers and there are other hungers.

I tug the pants over my swollen nuts and wince. I studiously
do not
look at her face then, so as not to see her smile. She refrains from commenting any more as I tug on the clean white T-shirt, slip on my Chuck Taylors.

Everything's jumbled in my head as they march me downstairs and out the front doors. A golf cart waits, Negata directly behind me. I've become Public Enemy #1.

We buzz through the early morning air, through the campus. Somewhere, out there, beyond the campus buildings, there's a mountain lion slumbering meat-heavy and whiskered with blood.

At Admin, they escort me up the steps, past the blankly staring statue of Armstead Lucius Priest, and through a warren of small, overlit yet bland offices. There's no Helmholtz field.

We stop in front of a large wooden door. Ruark goes to an empty desk and presses a button on an intercom device that squelches. She says, “We've got him here, Director.”

Quincrux's voice responds, “Wonderful. Do come in.” And the door opens.

It's the office I popped into when I hijacked Quincrux. It stinks of cigarettes and coffee. I have the brief sense-memory of Moms and the trailer we lived in for so many years.

Tanzer, a short-haired woman with boyish features and lively expressions animating her face, stands nearby holding
a clipboard and scratches at it with a pencil. Quincrux, sitting behind his desk, gestures to a chair in front of him. Ruark settles herself in a small, nearby desk covered with monitors and computer screens, and places a headset over her short-cropped blonde hair. I take the seat. Negata silently positions himself in the corner of the room, hands loose and free. Quite a party.

“I'm sorry to have to wake you this early in the morning, Mr. Cannon,” Quincrux starts. He's not, truly. He knows it; I know it. “I only just arrived back on campus, and my lieutenant”—Quincrux nods toward Ruark—“informs me we've had an impenetrable appear on the grounds. Imagine my surprise when she showed me the video, and it had some dialogue with you.”

He rummages in a drawer, pulls out a small crystal ashtray and a package of Peter Stuyvesants. He shucks the package a couple of times, gets a square, and pops it in his mouth. The room is still and quiet, and I can hear the tobacco and paper crackle when he lights it and draws the smoke into his lungs. I guess guys like him—and guys like me—don't have to worry about lung cancer: we can just boost someone else's body if the big
C
comes a-calling.

I wait. He's going to do this at his own pace.

“I am disappointed in you, Mr. Cannon. I thought we made clear to you your position here. Yet you withheld information regarding the impenetrables. The Riders, as you call them.”

“Not really.”

“You didn't withhold information?”

I shrug. “Possibly. I can't really recall if you asked me about
the Riders before or after threatening my little brother. Or holding me in the dark.”

“So, you meant to keep us in the dark as payback?” He takes another drag on his cigarette, holds it a long while as if considering blowing the smoke into my face, expels it toward the ceiling. He sets the cigarette down in the ashtray and takes a dainty sip of coffee. Somewhere, overhead, a vent kicks on and I can feel the air stir in the office and the smoke whisk away. “It is unfortunate that the situation has to be this way.”

“Yep, it sure is.”

“So, to preserve your brother's delicate state—it seems he's been having some trouble with a foster brother—why don't you tell me how much intercourse you've had with the Riders.”

“We've moved past first base and are at the heavy petting stage of our relationship.”

“How droll, Mr. Cannon. I am coming to the conclusion that we will need to have a contest of will for me to get to the truth.”

This is the reason for the lack of Helmholtz.

“Okay, boss.” I raise my hands in a helpless gesture. “We can do it that way, or I can just tell you.”

“You've had opportunities to tell me before and haven't.”

“True.”
You kept me in a hole in the ground!
“I didn't feel like it then because you were being such a prick.”

He blinks at my language.

I say, “How many people have you killed?”

“There are greater things at stake here than I can make you understand. I do not have to answer to you, regardless. Tell me what you know of the Riders.”

“How 'bout a little tit for tat, huh? And I don't mean your
assistant.” Ruark bristles, shifting in her chair. Somebody wants to Tase me.

He smokes and thinks. He has my brother. He could easily just force the issue. The fact that he's even considering it makes me think that he needs me. A little, at least.

“All right. You begin, and I will determine if what you tell me has any bearing.”

I tell him about the boy in Casimir, how the Rider told me to leave before the “elder” awakened.

His eyes remain locked on mine. When I'm through talking, he looks at Ruark, who glances at me and then says, “He's not lying. He rarely lies, but he's definitely not now.”

Quincrux nods and turns back to me, stubbing out his cigarette in the crystal ashtray. “What would you ask me?”

“The ‘elder.' What is it?”

He shakes his head. “We don't know entirely. It is alien.”

“Like from outer space?”

He looks at me for a long while. “Possibly. It is absolutely foreign to the experience and knowledge of humankind because it is perceptible to very few. Myself. You. A few others. Did it come from outer space in a spaceship? No. Most definitely not. But it is
la grande outre.
”

A big other.
Other, as in, from elsewhere. From beyond. The veil of night, maybe. Beyond darkness itself.

“Some kid went crazy talking about the ‘dragon in the East.' This what he was talking about?”

“I think it is your turn to answer questions.”

Shrugs all around. “All right. Can I get some ibuprofen or something? I was attacked by a mountain lion earlier. And my nuts are the size of grapefruits.”

He glances at Ruark. She only nods, indicating I'm telling the truth.

“Will you, please, Amy?”

I refrain from messing with her about her name. But the urge is worse than giving a monkey a handful of poo. It just
wants
to be flung.

She leaves the office and returns with two pills and a plastic bottle of Ozarka water.

“Okay,” I say after downing the pills. “Shoot.”

“How many conversations have you had with the impenetrable entity?”

“Three.” A nod from Ruark confirms my statement.

“What occurred in the second conversation? I know the events of the third,” he says, tapping his computer monitor.

“That was when you had the goon squad chasing me.”

He remains silent. Staring at me, humorless as an inquisitor.

I run over the event: getting out of my car, dashing across the parkway and into the East River Park. “He—
it
—said that I ‘must away' to Maryland to face the ‘elder.' I hate it when folks talk all
Lord of the Rings
and shit.” I meet his gaze steadily. He's got gray eyes and a calm demeanor. Hard to tell how old the body he inhabits is. Older than fifty, but somewhat youthful and unlined. “My turn. You once said that you were weakened by your encounter with the thing in Maryland. What happened?”

He rubs his chin, passing the back of his hand across his mouth. Thinking for a long time.

“That is hard to describe, and painful to recall. But in the spirit of our conversation, maybe I shouldn't tell you. Maybe I should
show
you.”

“No, I—”

“Yes, Mr. Cannon.” He doesn't smile. “I think you need to see.”

He reaches forward and touches my hand. And suddenly I see.

The report from Delacroix indicated that an inordinate number of people in the Maryland area are impenetrable, if not posing a definite and growing security risk to the Society and, consequently, the fabric of the American government. Through some sort of statistical or mathematical chicanery, Delacroix—an agent with a technician's demeanor, to be sure—gave his report using the word
algorithm
over fifteen times as he flipped through its PowerPoint slides and nervously directed a laser dot at the maps displayed on-screen. He had located, he assured us, what he thinks the epicenter of the impenetrable infection, a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Towson, Maryland. With Moteff in Lancashire tending to a new report of a strong adolescent extranatural, I venture there to canvass the area and sense what I can in the ether.

Coming off the flight at Baltimore International, I find the air uncommonly bright and humid. The hired car, low-slung, painted black with mirrored windows, whisks me away like some automotive thanatopsis, the interior cool and dark as a coffin, the air conditioning stripping the moisture from the air. The patches aren't working anymore, and I desperately want a cigarette.

The driver, a thickset and remarkably furry man dressed uncomfortably in a rumpled cheap black suit, asks me for directions. I hand him the packet Amy prepared, including a suggested route with maps, and say, “Feel free to take as much time as you need to get familiar with the material.”

“What's all this?”