Chapter Thirteen: Temple of Saturn

 

 

Chapter Thirteen: Temple of Saturn

 

 

“Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross

To see a fine lady upon a white hoss,

With rings on her fingers, bells on her toes,

She'll have the best music wherever she goes.”

-Mother Goose

 

Spoiler: Bob Scieszka is the notorious Ghost River Skinner.

 

He had a brief notion he was still asleep and dreaming—that every fit of wakefulness was nothing but another tier within his slumbering, diseased mind. Behind him was the terror of the WADC-6 wave, bouncing all over creation, and the howling ghosts of Pluto Prectalis, unleashed on humankind.   He was Perseus, for the time being, but without a trace of Greek in his blood.  This was the classic quest—anything for Love. Anything at all, including wading through Hell's fire.

He was moving briskly through a crude, dim corridor spiralling gradually into the guts of the Earth and the air was quickly becoming stale and vulgar with must. He had a flaming torch in his left hand, made from rags and kerosene, back at the shack, and he had a small flash-light tucked into his filthy trousers, just in case the torch burned out. The ceiling was far too low, causing him to stoop, the rough walls were smotheringly close. Hard to breathe. And if he dwelt on any one of these details for very long he feared the panic and claustrophobia would cause his aching heart to burst out of his chest. Bang, dead. But he'd already been dead, maybe more than once, it was difficult to say how many times, and it hadn't managed to slow him down much, at all.

Fortunately, where the tunnel forked into two, there was a bit more room and he was finally able to stand fully upright. He stretched out his arms and breathed deep and good. The air now filling his lungs was two- or ten-thousand years old. He squinted and saw another torch-light flickering red/orange against the walls down there—way down there. He had no choice but to keep going, despite the fear.

“I can do this.”

He chose to go right.

He passed a family of skeletons, laid out in recesses cut into the tuff, and noted gold rings on their peanut-brittle fingers. Six mummified relatives wearing six gold rings. This story, the story of himself, was perfectly fluid, constantly changing. This had all been a dream, once upon a time, and now it was unfolding in familiar fragments.

The tunnel forked again into two more options.

A broken scream, only barely human, came bellowing down the west tunnel. It was the sound, he supposed, of falling into a chasm, of hitting the soup at free-fall speed. It was the sound of the plu-prectals, maybe having followed him down here, maybe waiting for him at the other end. His nerve endings turned to gravy. This was true, perfect horror—nothing in real life came close (though he could no longer say what real life actually was). Electric terror surged through his veins. And now there were more voices, many at once, including one that sounded like his own, echoing from the vicinity of the screams. Voices of the dead, beckoning him into the vortex, or of old men catching steam at the spa—

He blinked and found himself in a swirl of warm mist.

...

 

Old Berk telephoned Jim Codeman and told him, “The events of the end should mirror the events of the beginning,” and Codeman had nary a clue what he was talking about. The crazy bastard continued, “When you find that motherfucker's wife, I want you to bring her to me and I'm going to sew a big fucking cock onto her face—that way the two of them will match.”

Codeman said, “I already killed her, you nut-ball. Just like you said. You paid me five thousand to do it. I shot her twice in the face.” He had no qualms about discussing criminal activities over the airwaves, just as he had no qualms about committing murder by daylight. “Don't you keep notes? Aren't you keeping track anymore?”

“Who said to kill her?”

“You did—I don't want to play this stupid game with you.”

“What about CW? Did we catch him yet?”

“I'm hanging up, Berk.”

“Did we catch that little puke, or not? I have a brain cloud.”

“You have a lot more than a brain cloud, old man.”

...

 

Frank was thinking of another of his father's songs:

 

Whistle while you work,

Hitler is a jerk—

Mussolini pulled his weenie,

Now it doesn't squirt.

 

When he opened his eyes he found himself in the tepidarium, wrapped in warm steam, resting his head against a towel that he'd rolled up to use as a pillow. The room was wet and drum-like, made of dark brick, and the steam was rising thick through iron grates in the floor.

His skull throbbed. Too much booze, or dope, or bullets.

And there was a voice, a man's voice, going on and on and on about nothing important. The speaker had to be seated to his right, maybe within striking distance, but Frank could barely see through the vapor, and the room was under-lit to begin with. More ghosts. More damn ghosts.

“As I was saying,” said the man to Frank's right, “it's nothing but politics. As soon as you table a project of such magnitude, you're going to face opposition from both sides. From more sides than two, actually. Some people don't think John Quay is a hero, at all. Some people are convinced it was his incompetence that caused the wreck, in the first place. And even Quay's supporters, it should be pointed out, aren't necessarily interested in throwing public funds after another monument. God knows we have no shortage of those.”

Frank was about to ask, “Are you talking to me?” but he was interrupted by the voice of another invisible man, somewhere in the fog to his left. The man said, “What could be more trifling than a rendition of Perseus? Quay as Perseus? It's ridiculous to the point of insult. We have roads in dire need of repair, and you're talking about another damned penis in marble. It's wasteful. Fucking wasteful.”

“That's an opinion.”

“That's a fact.”

A third voice, coming from behind Frank, somewhere on the bench above him, said, “Discord needs to stay in touch with her past. The monument is a snapshot of history, perfect and eternal, that encapsulates everything that's human about us. We cannot sever these ties. They are crucial.” He spoke in stilted East Indian English that struck Frank as vaguely familiar. “Or we can be like the mongrels. We can be like dogs and live only for the immediate minute.”

Frank was half-expecting a fourth disembodied voice to chime in, but it did not happen.

The first speaker said, “Hah!”

Frank said, “Can either of you gentlemen tell me today's date?”

The voice on the right said, “It's Monday, September twenty-sixth.”

The voice on the left said, “What do you think of this business in Hector Park, son?”

Frank said, “I think John Quay is responsible for the death of my wife's parents, and a whole bunch of other people. I think the man deserves a giant bucket of piss, not a monument. I'm glad he's dead. His name should be cursed. The statue is a fucking outrage.”

The man on the right sighed, stood up and said, “And if more of my brothers could speak up like you, without their heads lodged in each others' asses, we wouldn't be pissing away our funds on such frivolity.” He patted Frank on the shoulder and  left the room. His bare feet made slapping sounds across the floor. The furnace below belched and up came another blast of steam.

“Well said,” said the voice on the left. “It's a million-dollar joke.”

“I don't know how I ended up back here,” said Frank.

“Did you recently move back to Discord?”

“No, I mean, I think this is the same world as before. The same timeline.”

“What timeline were you looking for?”

“The one without the Street of Tombs, I think.”

“Perhaps you'd be better off in Tromso?”

“Perhaps.”

The man on the left rose from his spot, wrapped a white towel over his white back side, and followed the path of the first man, out of the room. Then, the East Indian speaker from behind Frank slid down and occupied the vacant spot. The steam swirled and parted like a phantom curtain and Frank was able to make out the face of Dr. Indy Bhugra.

The doctor said, “I don't disagree with your fair assessment of things. My brothers tend to forget that the president's place is not to veto, or behave like a tyrant, but to be the vessel and voice of the fraternity. If seventy percent of our members support the Hector Park monument, then I support the Hector Park monument. That is how it goes. You have to be all things to your people.”

“You're a Carolingian?” Frank asked.

Bhugra nodded. “I am the new president.”

“Cool. Congratulations.”

“I was present when John Quay drove that cursed engine into the river, my friend. I was present when the corpses were pulled from the water. I personally measured the toxicity of John Quay's blood—these things barely matter. What matters is that the men of my order have spoken, and they have deigned John Quay a hero. Who am I to say otherwise? The silver lining is that the monument will keep people talking for many decades, yet. If you cannot have justice, you can have something like a winking satisfaction, can't you?”

“Maybe. I don't know.”

“I do know. Sometimes I think I do know.”

He spoke like a man who liked to hear himself speak—even though he wasn't particularly skilled at it, or currently saying anything of any weight or merit. If this man was the new voice of the Caroling Club, then the Caroling Club was a broken, vacuous thing, indeed.

“Anyway,” he said, “the statue is built, and it's paid for, and that's the end of the story. Three men had to sign the check and my signature was only one of those three. People need to stop bitching to me. What is done is done, as they say, isn't that correct?”

“I'm not so sure that I'm sure, anymore,” said Frank.

...

 

 

Killer bees were in the news again. Bees and carbohydrates and extra-tiny micro-processors—and some fucking senator had knocked up his step-daughter, but that kind of shit happened all the time, these days. There was a bit about the mud-hole in deep space, too. The CER announced that they expected to have everything cleaned and patched up ahead of schedule and under-budget. The guy on the TV screen was grinning like a lunatic. “Great job, everyone's doing a great job.”

The light from the TV danced across the striped pattern on Frank's chest.

It was late. Kayla was upstairs, too freaked-out to move.

It was supposed to be Monday. That's what the old guy at the spa had said. But he was two days off—two days—and the other bather hadn't bothered to correct him.

It was Wednesday. Late Wednesday.

Frank was fucking dead and his brain was everywhere. Bits on the drapes, pieces clinging to the lampshade, bloody skid-marks down the wall. The room smelled of shit and urine.

And then upright Frank came in through the front door and found his own body.

His crazy mother, Dora, had warned him he'd have days like this one. That merry prankster called Doom always had its eye on him. Now here he was, face to non-face with himself, mouth filling with puke, eyes welling with tears, knees buckling from sheer horror. That was the living him. The dead him wasn't doing anything at all.

There was nothing above the neck but a piece of mandible, clinging by tendons, two molars sticking out of it. Seeing that made his jaw ache in a way that it hadn't in ten years. This was no ordinary corpse. It was his own corpse. He didn't think there was a word in the English language to describe the dreadful feeling it instilled in him.

“Fuck me, Jezus.”

Kayla came the stairs and found Frank at the threshold of his bedroom, standing gape-jawed, beholding his own corpse with impossible awe.

“The angels in my walls told me you would come back,” Kayla said, “and I wasn't sure if I believed them. But there you are. Here you are, I mean to say. I hope you're the real one.”

“Where were you all weekend?” Frank asked without looking at her.

“I was with friends, at Tawny's party, at first, but then I went with Uncle Bobby.”

“Who the fuck is Uncle Bobby?”

“He took me to his cottage and tied me there.”

“Who the fuck is Uncle Bobby?”

Now he was looking at her.

“Uncle Frank, is the dead one of you a trick? I guessed maybe it was.”

...

 

Frank had arrived home far too late to save Gia from Jim Codeman's gun.

She was already in the basement morgue, at the hospital.

Frank said to Kayla, “What Uncle Bobby took you to what cottage?” He was aware that his grammar was shit. “Were you tied up, did you say?” He saw that her wrists were five shades of purple.

Kayla said, “It was your friend, Bobby. He had my hands behind my back. He took me to the cottage and he left me there, all tied up, and he said he was going to go to town for the night but would come back. And then he didn't come back—except I got my hands out, anyway. And then I walked home, but it wasn't far because Sandy, who is Cheryl's brother, saw me walking and gave me a ride. I didn't tell him about being tied up because Uncle Bobby said he would murder me if I ever opened my mouth to anybody. So I was quiet.”

Frank wanted to tell her how stupid she was.

It bordered on retardation.

“You went along with a middle-aged man who called himself Uncle Bobby?”

“He said he was your friend. He said I could trust him.”

“You don't make a lick of sense to me, Kayla. You never did.”

“Where's Auntie Gia?”

“I told you, she's fucking dead—like me—and I need to save her.”

Frank stepped over his corpse and grabbed a change of clean clothes from his chest of drawers. Blue jeans, underwear, socks, and t-shirt. The shirt was black, with the words, in red and blue letters, When I Was Young We Had NINE Planets!

When he emerged from the bedroom, buttoning a plaid work-shirt over the tee, he told Kayla,  “I'm going to leave and you're going to be alone. I don't really know how it all works, so I can't tell you that you'll be okay. Maybe you just need to pray to those angels in the wall. Anything's possible. And maybe call the funeral home to come and get my body. Or don't. It probably doesn't matter.”

The girl seemed pretty stunned, still.

He left her there, alone in the house.

...

 

At a point in the future, Mr. Sharky found himself in Mr. Filch's ultra-white kitchen, at ultra-white Moncton Estates in New Hampshire. Very upper-crust, paid for by the late Mary Filch, PhD. The place was worth a couple million. Leonard Filch was well taken-care of.

Sharky was something of a jet-setter, now, moving from place to place, time to time, and getting shit done. His home-base was a hidden island in the South Pacific, but he hadn't been there in damned-near forever, it seemed. His whole life, these days, was about keeping the wheels greased and tying up all the loose ends. The man behind the curtain, the Wizard. He was God.

The two men were drinking chamomile tea. On the table between them was a basket of apples that had ripened to bright yellow. Mr. Sharky was dribbling tea on his shirt because the nerves in his face were burnt and paralyzed and he often couldn't tell when his own mouth was open.

Filch said, “I wouldn't have expected to see you again.”

Sharky said, “Would you believe that I feel the same about you? It might be difficult for you to believe, but where I come from, you're dead. You're as dead as your wife.”

“What do you mean? Where do you come from?”

“I come from somewhere up along the N-string. I murdered you. It's absolutely true. We were in the vertical hadron collider and I decided to do a bit of an impromptu experiment. I pushed you over the edge, headfirst into the Ru-Nexus, Leonard—into the plasma. Do you have a memory of this? I wouldn't think you do. You perished. There was nothing left of you. And I think you wanted to die, on some level, to tell you the truth.”

“Are you having me on?”

“Not at all. I wanted the code to your wife's formula, in order to fire up the machines, and you gave it to me, of course, eventually, and only after much pleading. There were billions of lives and trillions of dollars at stake. I found you quite arrogant, Mr. Filch, and so I decided to test certain theories. I wasn't entirely sure that our paths would cross again, but I had a hunch and I went with it.”

“It doesn't seem likely to me. I wouldn't ever have given you the code. Mary was adamant that her work be used only for the betterment of humankind.”

“Four is five, Leonard. I'm not lying to you.”

“How did you—”

“You told it to me, yourself. I'd truly like to explain the mechanics of it all to you, but you're not likely to understand. A decade and a half ago, when our Mary was only just discovering her true potential, she confided in me that her husband was a very dull-witted fellow.”

“You think I'm stupid, don't you?”

“I do, as did your adoring wife, but it's only because you can't think in five dimensions. It's not your fault. A great multitude of people are in the same boat. Listen to me: You have to imagine a line bisecting an arc through the Earth-sphere, connecting our Emathios station with the station at Rebowken, and continuing through to the the N-39 warp junket in space.” He picked up a mealy apple and jabbed a ballpoint pen through one of its hemispheres, at a twenty degree angle. “Can you picture it? Can you see the connective thread?”

“I think I can,” said Mr. Filch.

“It's not just a line from A to B to C, Lenny, but an arrow through time itself. It's like using a tethered harpoon to spear two whales from two distinct pods, one of which lives on the other side of the world and won't even be born until next year. Got that?”

“I got it.”

“Everything that occurs along that line,” said Mr. Sharky, “can be directly affected.”

The tea was shit. It was weak. Mr. Sharky didn't bother finishing his cup. As he rose from the table, he said, “How is saving the world not for the betterment of humanity, Leonard? If I can divert an asteroid, send it deep into the infernal realms where it can't affect a living soul, how can I possibly be the bad guy? You seem to assume that because I'm making money at it that my heart must be in the wrong place, but that's a foolish thing to think. We all have to live here, even if here isn't exactly the same place we left off at. Capische?”

“Umm,” said Mr. Filch.

...

 

 

Frank went to the Street of Tombs and found the entrance to the catacombs. It was an iron grate, rusted by eons, hidden under a cluster of mossy brush, at the base of an ancient elm tree.

“Here we go again,” he sighed, pulling the grate open.

His guts turned over.

What would come next?

Everything was a nightmare.

...

 

Great green gobs of greasy, grimy gopher guts...

...

 

More tunnels. More darkness and fear. More slots carved into the pumice—old Saints and pagans, pioneering Jezus freaks, Romans and Greeks, men and women, leathery with time, stashed away like last season's Christmas ornaments. Ghosts squealing on the breeze. Stale air. Dust and bones. Nowhere to go but straight ahead. No choice, otherwise what was the point?

All Frank had was the mini-flashlight. The beam was long but weak.

What was left to be afraid of? Why did it scare the shit out of him?

Then, the aroma of fresh-baked cookies. Oatmeal and raisin, with cinnamon.

A ragged corpse appeared in the dim light ahead, animated, wrapped in torn white linen. She was black and burnt—dancing like Death as a marionette puppet. His mystery sister. Seeing her in dreams was one thing, in person was wholly another. She came toward him without touching the floor, floating like a banshee, horrid with intent. Her joints made clicking sounds and her teeth clacked. No nose, no eyeballs, no innards. She said, “Bear left, ever left, Frank, and follow the fish.” Her voice was unnaturally high-pitched, almost a hiss, like she was intentionally trying to frighten him.

He was surprised that he had the strength to respond without vomiting. He asked her, “Where will it take me? Home, to Gia? Will it lead me back to my own world?”

“Oh Frank, you've been out of your world for a long time now.”

“How do you mean?”

He was quickly settling into it, familiarity coming over him like a warm calm.

She put a bony hand upon his shoulder and said, “There was a terrible quantum explosion at Emathios, under Lake Nero, last year. When the machines burst to life, you and Gia, and hundreds of others, were knocked sideways into alternate realms. The world you knew no longer exists, in any form. The one you've come to know, in the meantime, exists at the opposite end of the spectrum.” She was flitting about, posturing, suggestively. Sensually, even.

“I've been to various worlds,” Frank said, oddly sure of himself now.

“You've been to variations of the latter world, yes, but no axial shift could return you to your place of origin, nor any copy of it. You're creatures out of water, you and your beloved, both.”

“You've always had my back, haven't you?”

“I'm not a me, Frank. I'm not what you think I am.”

“You're the—”

“I'm a construct of your own imagination, nothing more.”

“I had a sister. She died before I was born.”

“Her name was Corona.”

“Yes, it was.”

“She is part of the universe-matrix, even still, and existing in several spheres, simultaneously, but I am afraid I am not her. I am you, only you, just a fragment of your own psyche. And your sister didn't burn, as Dora had you believing—she bled. Either way, there's no reason a person's glorious essence ought to look like this, is there? Why would a soul bear the grievous wounds of a physical form it has already shed? It's not logical.”

“I haven't encountered much logic, lately.”

“Haven't you?”

...

 

He saw more phantom forms darting through the air, further ahead. He wondered aloud if the catacombs were infested with those fucking plu-prectal things, as he'd previously suspected.

She told him that those things were not to be feared, that they were nothing but tachyon-based grey shades from the lowest places, roused from slumber and scattered along the N-string by the impact of Roman-581. “The killer rock was diverted into the realm of shadows, through a re-calibrated version of the mud-hole. Removed from four-dimensional time-space and dropped into the flat, singular abyss of the seventh plane. And while the shades can seem mighty noisy, at a certain frequency, they are incapable of having any effect on the physical universe. If you believe you saw them harming living humans, you are mistaken. The destruction of that particular world was entirely the result of the WADC-6 lightning wave.”

He didn't think she sounded much like his psyche, at all.

...

 

Not-Corona told him, “As you've heard, the universe is like a mind, not like a machine. There are infinite possibilities. There are infinite outcomes. But, unless you move very far down the string, there are core events that are not likely to change. The Kennedy assassination is a perfect example. There are very few universes wherein JFK was not murdered. Certain events make up the very backbone of reality. As checkpoints, these are fairly mandatory.”

...

 

Not-Corona told him to ignore the plu-prectals and to follow the fish, always bearing left, and that's what he did. Said fish were etched in the walls, symbols of the early Jezus-people, like directional arrows indicating, This way, dear pilgrim, come along.

He emerged at the other end of the Street of Tombs. Everything was wet. From the sheer amount of water running along the curb, Frank supposed Discord had been deluged. He didn't know if it was a favorable sign—there had been no rain in the weeks leading up to Gia's murder. He was either in another timeframe, or the events of September, including the weather, had changed.

Two motorcycles zipped past, spraying Frank with dirty water.

“You motherfuckers!”

The Corsairs were the worst—filthy, dirty criminals.

...

 

Mutilated monkey meat,

Perforated birdie feet

...

 

Gia once argued, “Those aren't the right lyrics.”

“Which ones?”

“The line about the bird feet.”

“How does it go, then?”

...

 

Great green gobs of greasy, grimy gopher guts,

Mutilated monkey meat,

Dirty, turdy birdie feet

...

 

And something about “concentrated porpoise pus,” perhaps.

...

 

[Lacunae]

...