NINE
CALVIN HIKED ALONG the crimson spine of the ancient god, all but buried in ponderosa and scrub pine. Every so often, an underground stream branched off, a line of nerves revealed only by a stand of bone-white aspen. When the wind rolled up these cuts in the god’s back, the aspens’ leaves danced, dark green and ash, on and off, hissing. The sweat cooled on Calvin’s brow. The leaves tried to hypnotize him, root him, make him forget. He smiled at that. It would take more than a pretty stand of trees. His memory was cut stone. Some parts were older than the god upon which he walked. Some parts were almost older than all gods. He focused on a crooked aspen, listened to it hush in the wind, and imagined it burning. Calvin walked on, gray dust puffing at his heels.
He’d been moving along the spine of pink granite on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon for two days now, off the marked trail since yesterday. The spine was trail enough. If he went too far left or right it would remind him with a sheer drop to the Kaibab Plateau below. Calvin’s daydreams would shatter as his foot slipped on some scree. He would shout a liquid sound full of instant regret and slam into the rocks a hundred feet down. The vultures would corkscrew down on thermal columns to help him along his way even as the echoes of his fall faded.
A fly droned past his ear, fat and lazy. The afternoon was perfect: hot and dry, clear. The shade kept most of heat at bay, but the sun managed to spear through the canopy and mark him every now and again. Undulating pencil-beams pierced the forest gloom, columns of light. Calvin could almost hear them humming as he walked, feel the lines of warmth they drew over his shoulders and scalp. It felt like he was being cleaned. He took a bite of a granola bar and chased it with a sip of water from his squeeze bottle. His dusty throat sparkled.
His senses, already sharpened by years of training and application, had become even more finely tuned over the past couple of days. By moving into the forest, he felt as if he’d shrugged off a coat of grease. By the time the sun began to slip toward the western edge of everything, he was clear and ready.
As the first stars began to burn behind him, John Calvin emerged from the forest onto the barren end of the rock serpent. To the south, the Canyon cleaved the land, a river of purple velvet. To the north, the Kaibab Plateau rolled out, an ocean of old pine, cobalt in the half-light. Calvin walked to the serpent’s head. Across the valley the sun was just melting behind the tree line, edging the rim of the world with a line of blood. This is the border, it seemed to say, you have crossed into the dark places.
Calvin nodded. Whatever had been coming over the past several days was close. It would be here soon. He didn’t bother to pull out his sleeping bag or make a fire. He sat cross-legged a few feet from the edge, the red stone warm from the day’s heat. He closed his eyes and breathed. The night sky opened and a downpour of stars rang around him. The air began to cool and the evening wind muscled through the trees. Calvin breathed and began the work of emptying his mind. He tried not to think of nothing, but instead to let nothing find his mind and fill its corners. He exhaled and heard his breath . . . and nothing else.
It was here.
Calvin opened his eyes. Across from him, legs crossed just like his, sat a teenage boy. His hair was long and clumped in filthy dreadlocks. His face luminesced in the starlight, streaked with dark grime. He wore an old t-shirt blackened with dirt. A line of dark, shiny liquid ran from a small hole an inch from his heart. The boy noticed Calvin looking at his wound and smiled, his teeth neon tiles. The whites of his eyes glowed around irises so black they might have been tiny rips in the fabric of space-time. Behind his head, the purple band of the Milky Way flowed.
Calvin’s heart pounded as it were making a steel fist over and over in his suddenly fragile flesh. Liquid nitrogen slid from his hair line and slicked down his temples. Hot mercury lined his tear ducts. This boy was why he feared nothing in life. This boy was why he could stay cold in his head when a situation called for panic. He had known a demon. Everything after that was a fucking joke.
It wore his child’s body like a coat, staring, smiling at him.
Calvin had a lot of patience, but not as much as it did. “What do you want?” he asked.
A shooting star streaked behind the boy’s head. He giggled as if it had tickled him, but said nothing. A line of drool slipped from the straining corner of his mouth.
Calvin yanked in a shaky breath, tried again. “Why’re you here?”
The boy’s face didn’t change, all smiles and bottomless eyes. He could wait forever.
Calvin’s fists clenched. “What do you want from me this time?”
The boy straightened. The voice was that of a wizened, sexless crone. “This time?” he said, leaning forward. “But I never left you. I may have left the meat, but I have always been near.” Now, his voice changed, rolling into the timbre of an older man, American Bronx at the core, but Italian at the edges. “You’ve led quite a life since our time together, Johnny.”
“You’re not Thom Neary.”
The boy chuckled, fresh blood oozed from the puncture in his chest. “I am... Not.”
“Thom Neary cast you out.” Calvin dared to stare it in the eye. “A long time ago.”
The demon-boy’s smile faltered, one eyebrow lifted. “Cast out? Hmm.”
Calvin blinked and the boy was gone. He closed his eyes tight, squeezed, and opened them. He was alone. He had not imagined this. To think so would be foolish, cowardly. He tensed, senses open, but only the night came to him, quiet and cool, but there. The cone of silence seemed to have departed with his child self. Was that it? Was the mere mention of his friend, his savior from that nightmare of so many years ago, enough to cause the demon to depart? Calvin looked around, his mind a knotted cable. Nothing happened. He waited.
After the stars had noticeably rotated in the sky, he began to relax. The sounds and scents of the night flowed in and were welcome. The wind howled through the valley below. It painted the trees a soft peach as it caressed their trunks. Calvin could see it glowing in the dark. He could feel the sharp-edged polygons of pine scent wafting in the air. The starlight tasted like cold milk.
Hold on a minute.
He could taste the starlight?
Something laughed in his head. Calvin felt the grin on his face even as his heart sank. His field of vision tilted as he was forced to look into his crotch. Hot urine streamed out of his penis and soaked his lap. He heard a strange voice, a combination of his own and the crone’s, slip in a harmonized whisper from lips that were no longer his.
“Cast out?”
The intruder made him laugh until he tasted blood in the back of his throat and tears squeezed from his eyes. When it felt like his sinuses would burn and his lungs explode, the laughter died away, melding into a scream of terror and pain. That was Calvin’s.
He fell over and panted in the dust, his throat a shredded mess and his lap a cooling embarrassment. After a couple of minutes, Calvin opened his eyes. The grinning monster’s face was an inch from his own. The boy lay on his belly, feet up, face propped between his hands like a kid watching television. It looked from Calvin’s right eye to his left and back. The smile faded and a look of paternal concern drew down its features. “I am due more respect than that, boy.”
“I’m sorry,” Calvin whispered. A final tear slid from his eye, and in that moment he experienced the purest feeling of his life before or since. He hated the demon.
“You see how simple it is? How easy for me to slip in and out of your stinking meat? Never believe, for even a moment, that I left because some choirboy cocksucker ordered me to do so.” The demon reached out and ran a long finger down the side of Calvin’s face. “You will always belong to me. That little white flea collar in which you place so much faith can’t protect you. There is no god for you. Only starless night. Only blindness.”
That finger on his face. Calvin’s guts lurched, but he kept it
together and even managed to sit up. “What then?” he croaked. Close to fainting, he couldn’t say anything more.
“The boy,” the demon crooned. “Mine, mine, mine.”
Dark descended and Calvin lost consciousness. He slept the rest of the night, but tossed on the cooling stone, full of bad dreams. He dreamed of two boys, one close and dark, the other far and fair. The dark boy had deep maroon skin and shoulder length black hair. He stood on blasted hardpan, waved to Calvin and cried, Missionary! The ground opened and swallowed him. The fair boy lay in a field of white, sprouting tubes and machines. People bustled all around, clucking, and worried. A man stepped in between Calvin and the boy, his back to Calvin’s dream view. His broad outline pulled at the light. He turned to look at Calvin, but there was no face.
Calvin woke the next morning as the temperature shifted once again and the wind scraped up the back of the serpent’s spine. He sat up and stared out toward the Grand Canyon. He had come to this end point in the world to find clarity, and instead had found only misdirection and a monster. When he tried to sit and think about his life, he found nothing clear, nothing certain. The only clarity was in doing. He thought of the assignment he’d been sent out here to complete and spat a copper taste into the dust. There was a martyr to be made. He got up, turned away from the open valley and moved back into the shadows.
* * *