“Your friends will be all right, Father Callahan. ”
He whirls around again. It’s the man with the blood-spot on his forehead. He looks about sixty, but it’s hard to tell. He’s wearing a garish yellow shirt and a red tie. When his thin lips part in a smile, they reveal teeth that come to points. It’s Sayre, Callahan thinks. Sayre, or whoever signed that letter. Whoever thought this little sting up.
“You, however, won’t, ” he continues.
The low men look at him with a kind of dull avidity: here he is, finally, their lost pooch with the burned paw and the scarred forehead. The vampires are more interested. They almost thrum within their blue auras. And all at once Callahan can hear the chimes. They’re faint, somehow damped down, but they’re there. Calling him.
Sayre— if that’s his name— turns to the vampires. “He’s the one,” he says in a matter-of-fact tone. “He’s killed hundreds of you in a dozen versions of America. My friends” — he gestures to the low men—” were unable to track him down, but of course they seek other, less suspecting prey in the ordinary course of things.
In any case, he’s here now. Go on, have at him. But don’t kill him!”
He turns to Callahan. The hole in his forehead fills and gleams but never drips. It’s an eye, Callahan thinks, a bloody eye. What is looking out of it? What is watching, and from where?
Sayre says, “These particular friends of the King all carry the AIDS virus. You surely know what I mean, don’t you ? We’ll let that kill you. It will take you out of the game forever, in this world and all the others.
This is no game for a fellow like you, anyway. A false priest like you.”
Callahan doesn’t hesitate. If he hesitates, he will be lost. It’s not AIDS he’s afraid of, but of letting them put their filthy lips on him in the first place, to kiss him as the one was kissing Lupe Delgado in the alley. They don’t get to win. After all the way he’s come, after all the jobs, all the jail cells, after finally getting sober in Kansas, they don’t get to win.
He doesn’t try to reason with them. There is no palaver. He just sprints down the right side of the conference room’s extravagant mahogany table. The man in the yellow shirt, suddenly alarmed, shouts “Get him! Get him!” Hands slap at his jacket— specially bought at Grand River Menswear for this auspicious occasion—
but slip off. He has time to think The window won’t break, it’s made of some tough glass, anti-suicide glass, and it won’t break… and he has just time enough to call on God for the first time since Barlow forced him to take of his poisoned blood.
“Help me! Please help me!” Father Callahan cries, and runs shoulder-first into the window. One more hand slaps at his head, tries to tangle itself in his hair, and then it is gone. The window shatters all around him and suddenly he is standing in cold air, surrounded by flurries of snow. He looks down between black shoes which were also specially purchased for this auspicious occasion, and he sees Michigan Avenue, with cars like toys and people like ants.
He has a sense of them— Sayre and the low men and the vampires who were supposed to infect him and take him out of the game forever— clustered at the broken window, staring with disbelief.
He thinks, This does take me out of it forever… doesn’t it?
And he thinks, with the wonder of a child: This is the last thought I’ll ever have. This is goodbye.
Then he is falling.
SEVENTEEN
Callahan stopped and looked at Jake, almost shyly. “Do you remember it?” He asked. “The actual…” He cleared his throat. “The dying?”
Jake nodded gravely. “You don’t?”
“I remember looking at Michigan Avenue from between my new shoes. I remember the sensation of standing there—seeming to, anyway—in the middle of a snow flurry. I remember Sayre behind me, yelling in some other language. Cursing. Words that guttural just about had to be curses. And I remember thinking, He’s frightened. That was actually my last thought, that Sayre was frightened. Then there was an interval of darkness. I floated. I could hear the chimes, but they were distant. Then they came closer. As if they were mounted on some engine that was rushing toward me at terrible speed.
“There was light. I saw light in the darkness. I thought I was having the Kubler-Ross death experience, and I went toward it. I didn’t care where I came out, as long as it wasn’t on Michigan Avenue, all smashed and bleeding, with a crowd standing around me. But I didn’t see how that could happen. You don’t fall thirty-three stories, then regain consciousness.
“And I wanted to get away from the chimes. They kept getting louder. My eyes started to water. My ears hurt.
I was glad I still had eyes and ears, but the chimes made any gratitude I might have felt pretty academic.
“I thought, I have to get into the light, and I lunged for it. I…”
EIGHTEEN
He opens his eyes, but even before he does, he is aware of a smell. It’s the smell of hay, but very faint, almost exhausted. A ghost of its former self, you might say. And he? Is he a ghost?
He sits up and looks around. If this is the afterlife, then all the holy books of the world, including the one from which he himself used to preach, are wrong. Because he’s not in heaven or hell; he’s in a stable. There are white wisps of ancient straw on the floor. There are cracks in the board walls through which brilliant light streams. It’s the light he followed out of the darkness, he thinks. And he thinks, It’s desert light. Is there any concrete reason to think so ? Perhaps. The air is dry when he pulls it into his nostrils. It’s like drawing the air of a different planet.
Maybe it is, he thinks. Maybe this is the Planet Afterlife.
The chimes are still there, both sweet and horrible, but now fading… fading… and gone. He hears the faint snuffle of hot wind. Some of it finds its way through the gaps between the boards, and a few bits of straw lift off from the floor, do a tired little dance, then settle back.
Now there is another noise. An arrhythmic thudding noise. Some machine, and not in the best of shape, from the sound. He stands up. It’s hot in here, and sweat breaks immediately on his face and hands. He looks down at himself and sees his fine new Grand River Menswear clothes are gone. He is now wearing jeans and a blue chambray shirt, faded thin from many washings. On his feet is a pair of battered boots with rundown heels. They look like they have walked many a thirsty mile. He bends and feels his legs for breaks. There appear to be none. Then his arms. None. He tries snapping his fingers. They do the job easily, making little dry sounds like breaking twigs.
He thinks: Was my whole life a dream? Is this the reality? If so, who am I and what am I doing here?
And from the deeper shadows behind him comes that weary cycling sound: thud-THUD-thud-THUD-thud-
THUD.
He turns in that direction, and gasps at what he sees. Standing behind him in the middle of the abandoned stable is a door. It’s set into no wall, only stands free. It has hinges, but as far as he can see they connect the door to nothing but air. Hieroglyphs are etched upon it halfway up. He cannot read them. He steps closer, as if that would aid understanding. And in a way it does. Because he sees that the doorknob is made of crystal, and etched upon it is a rose. He has read his Thomas Wolfe: a stone, a rose, an unfound door; a stone, a rose, a door. There’s no stone, but perhaps that is the meaning of the hieroglyph.
No, he thinks. No, the word is unfound. Maybe I’m the stone.
He reaches out and touches the crystal knob. As though it were a signal
(a sigul, he thinks)
the thudding machinery ceases. Very faint, very distant— far and wee— he hears the chimes. He tries the knob. It moves in neither direction. There’s not even the slightest give. It might as well be set in concrete.
When he takes his hand away, the sound of the chimes ceases.
He walks around the door and the door is gone. Walks the rest of the way around and it’s back. He makes three slow circles, noting the exact point at which the thickness of the door disappears on one side and reappears on the other. He reverses his course, now going widder-shins. Same deal. What the hell?