The Shibboleth Read online

  –This is just physical pain and cannot touch me, inside. Inside I am impenetrable and—

  “What’s this?” The boys around me scatter, dissipate like smoke. It’s my buddy, the new bull. The thick one, the steer.

  He looks down at me, prone on the floor in outraged pain and silence, and smiles. “Ah, ward three thousand, four hundred and ninety-eight. Shreve Cannon, also known as ‘the Narc,’ ‘Moleman,’ ‘Hollywood,’ and ‘Candyass.’”

  Since it’s obvious he’s not there to assist, I lever myself off the tiles and stand upright, swaying, panting into the close air of the Commons as the hushed crowd of boys watch. I feel something warm on my back, and my hand comes away bloody when I touch the back of my skull. Split scalp, maybe fractured rib, possible concussion. I remember the mechanics of diagnosis like a dream, someone else’s memories, someone else’s pains and woes. Dr. Stevens. From North Carolina. I was him; he was me.

  “Read my file, did you?” I say, but my voice doesn’t sound right and I’m swaying more and then a great wave of dizziness washes over me and I sit back down, hard, my legs crumpling underneath me to keep me from falling over.

  The raw cacophony of mental noise pulsing in the air, and

  –oh no this little shit might really be hurt last thing i need is hours of paperwork but i wouldn’t piss on this piece of crap if he was on fire–

  –messed him up, man, messed him up good–

  –badass darrel’s the man, damn, that was sweet taking that thief out–

  –should put two in his head, goddamn I’d do it, just walk right up and blam blam and watch him fall–

  the images of me—me!—being wounded, killed, destroyed, stabbed by this maddened and intense crowd of kids, it’s

  –thief–

  –thieving piece of–

  –trick-ass bitch ho–

  –THIEF! THIEF!–

  I feel like a car-struck dog hiding under a porch. No more. I teeter, pitch over, and the world turns to black.

  FIVE

  –like all the world is new, shy, and coy, a doctor and his nurse between the dispensary and he stops in the hall as if we never kissed that night after the movie and spent that glorious moment, holding me, me holding him, exploring his body with my hands and he mine, he takes me away from that little hospital, holding my hand walking to his car, opens the door for me and when i slide over next to him he pulls me in tight and kisses me, tasting of listerine and the cigarette he had on break and the fecund bitterness of coffee, opaline and somewhat dank, but i couldn’t care less because his hands are sweet and he starts his plymouth with a roar, wagging his eyebrows at me in an exaggerated caricature of haste—lust—and to his house even though the radio interrupts the beatles “love me do” by blaring the news about korea and the battle at osan. But the world outside the car, the lobby, his kitchen, his bedroom doesn’t exist anymore despite whatever may come later because he’s a doctor and i’m just a nurse and there’s no balance there. and afterward, staring at the ceiling, smoking like in the movies and ashing into the tray he perches on his belly, it’s too warm and too sticky, both our bodies covered in sweat, so we wander about his house, naked as babes, both unrepentant and scandalized by our own nudity. finally we settle on the couch and when we’re spent, he turns on the television, a big one, we watch the news and dean martin’s variety show and then the midnight movie, dracula, the old one with the frog-featured romanian in formal wear, so dramatic, and he’s got his arms around me, slipping into a light slumber, exhausted from our earlier vigors, while the overdressed vampire rises from his stagecraft coffin, moving eerily through the play-act castle to proclaim, “listen to them! the children of the night” in a great bit of cinema histrionics but it’s not the movie or the day or the frisson of our sex or the sheen of sweat or the scent of his breath it’s just that burning circle of his arms holding me tight and for that one moment i know i’m worthy of love and able to give it in return something i feared had been burnt to a cinder within me. no, it sparks and kindles and i never want the sensation to end, never end the circle never broken stay like this forev–

  Ceiling tiles and fluorescent lights passing above me, through swinging doors and down hallways

  –remember what she did to you, Jack! Remember what she did!–

  in the bull’s big rough arms. He smells of sweat and the gym and gun oil and for a second I’m reminded of Booth, when he hugged me and told me not to get in trouble, so long ago. Everything is lost now, everything is gone, the lights, the stink of disinfectant on the dull Casimir tiles, everything, just this loathed swaying motion of the bull’s body as he carries me down the hall where once Jack and I fled from Quincrux and the Witch.

  In the infirmary, he makes me stand, and I can manage it long enough for Mrs. Cheeves to toddle around her desk, a startled expression chasing one of worry across her face until

  –oh, this one. the taker. back again and again and someday it’ll be with a broken neck and who would blame the boys? after what he did last year, what he does at night, stealing–

  she looks somewhat frightened, as if dealing with a small, personal apocalypse. A realization. She’s puzzled by her thoughts. And the word stealing stealing stealing echoes in her mind as she looks at me and wonders what I have stolen even though she knows with absolute certainty that I am a thief. I have taken something from her. Eventually she shrugs and her face solidifies.

  “Put him there,” she says, pointing at a bed in the small ward at the back of the infirmary. The bull puts me on the bed, and the nurse peels back my eyelids, shining a penlight into each. When the light migrates back and forth, she stands and retrieves cotton swabs, rubbing alcohol. A vial of something and a needle.

  The bull says, “This one’s got a mouth on him.”

  “I know. We’re old acquaintances. He turns up in here every couple of weeks. Black eye, broken nose. Seems he’s not very popular, despite his little brush with celebrity.”

  I want to say something barbed and witty, but she jabs at me with the needle and pumps my arm full of something, something full of sleep and the absence of pain. And I hope, forgetfulness.

  “You putting him under? He might be concussed.”

  “No,” she says, looking at me with a frown. “His eyes are responding and the rest of his vitals are fine and, honestly, I don’t want to hear him squawk when I sew up his scalp.” The frown disappears and her face calcifies into indifference now, just as much a sham as her medical professionalism. “Rotten right through, this one. A thief.”

  Everything’s blurry, but I can still see her lips purse, slack flesh working around her dentures. Oh, she really dislikes me.

  The bull says, “I read his public file. Remanded to Casimir for auto theft.”

  “More than that.”

  “More than what?”

  “Stealing a car. This little—” She pauses. Thinks a moment. “Word on the ward is that no one trusts him, and he takes for his own whatever isn’t bolted to the floor.” If everything wasn’t like molasses, I’d snort at that one.

  The bull says, “They toss his cell?”

  She nods. “Booth does, regularly. Never finds anything. They think he has a cache, somewhere on grounds. He used to deal candy—he’s got to have a few stashes around the building.”

  One in the yard, the foundation stone. One at the back of the gym locker. One in Allenby’s classroom, in the air duct behind the periodical case. All are empty. I haven’t stashed anything in over a year. I try to muster some feeling of outrage, but I can’t.

  The bull looks at me, eyes narrowed. He’s all puffed full of protein and arrogance, and I’d take a run at his noggin if I wasn’t so sleepy. I don’t even know his name.

  “He’s slight as a bird, though,” Mrs. Cheeves says as she rolls my body over to get at the back of my head.

  I close my eyes.

  I wake from a dream of smoke and war and the wreckage of men from a time before I was born. Not all bad, but
blood-spiked and desperate with the fear of death. We were brought in by the Hueys to Kham Duc to relieve the special forces encamped there as the Viet Cong pushed a full regiment toward us. Millar took one in the gut, and his intestines pooled in the open cavity of his body as he called for his mother in a voice terrible and sad and urgent, eyes wide as he pawed at my chest and gave one last heave before his body grew still.

  A blue torrent of moonlight spills into the infirmary from the barred, high windows like water from a busted pipe cascading upon the floor and casting the whole ward in a cyan-colored benthic haze. Late and quiet and I can’t sense Mrs. Cheeves anywhere about.

  I rise.

  Shrouded in darkness, it’s easier. Without a body, I can’t see my reflection in glass, and that’s a blessing. I look back at my carcass, lying there, disheveled and gray and lifeless. I move like a specter through the old beast of a building. I pass out of the room, into wild blue yonder, through the door, and into the hall and down to the Commons and its guard station where the bull whose name I don’t know sits, feet kicked up on the desk and rows of video monitors pulsing with monochromatic light, reading a copy of Men’s Fitness and the recent issue of Ducks Unlimited Magazine. He sees me approach and half rises, his hand going to his waist and the Taser there, but then he shakes his head as if he’s been drugged and turns back to his magazines. He looks up for only a moment but doesn’t flinch when I invade his mind.

  –now that I have your attention, Mr. Schneider, I would ask to say a few words and you won’t be able to recall them, not immediately, for they will live under the surface of your awareness until you are with their proper audience. Merely stones at the bottom of the stream of your consciousness, if you’ll permit me a moment of indulgence into metaphor.

  No, do not struggle, I shall not hurt you.

  My name is Hiram Quincrux, and I am now speaking to Shreveport Justice Cannon, inmate three thousand, four hundred and ninety-eight and ward of the Casimir Pulaski Juvenile Detention Center for Boys.

  The recalcitrant boy, I’ve come to think of you. Names are important.

  Mr. Cannon, by now you’ve expanded enough to test the limits of the cage in which I—and the very pliant state of Arkansas—have placed you. I imagine that there’s a large possibility that you’ve discovered some of the pleasures available to men of our stripe, and now you might be learning some of the dangers of an unguided person of extranatural ability.

  For example, you cannot speak in any meaningful way about your abilities, can you? Not due to some mental block, but due to your overwhelming isolation, true?

  No, I do not even need to be with you to know your answer. There are certain shibboleths to our condition–

  I’m shocked, and that’s not easy.

  Out. Out of the bull, disembodied, looking down at him, his body now a loose, ungainly collection of bones and muscles. His expression is vacant, abject, absent. Quincrux has infested this man with his memory. The bull—his name is Alex Schneider—is just a letter, a message, a package wrapped in a uniform and addressed to me.

  And when I hear the word shibboleth, something shifts in me, a sudden understanding uncurling. Shibboleth.

  I know what the word means in a way deeper and rawer and more penetrating than how he just tossed it off. It has such weight in his mind, I can tell by the trill in his voice, how his mouth moves around the word, even in the bull’s secondhand memory. It’s what we share, this thing, the shibboleth, between him and me beyond that, between me and the rest of mankind—the common utterance, the universality of mankind’s thoughts.

  This ability I have is the shibboleth.

  The bull—Mr. Alex Schneider—stirs, opens his eyes long enough to see me standing here, above him, in my phantom disembodied form—my shibboleth form—and I go back in to finish reliving the memory of Quincrux. His message for me.

  a certain gravity that draws us to others of the same ability. That you are not gibbering madly in an asylum, frankly, astonishes me. And piques my interest again in you …

  And so.

  And so that is why I have come to you again to say that we would have you here with us. Jack would have you here with us. There are events and forces moving in the world that will soon become evident, and we need all of the strength we can muster to harness these events to our advantage.

  You venture forth at night into the void. I do not need to be told this; I have felt your passing, sensed you moving upon the etheric heights toward your friends, your family. Searching for us. For Jack.

  Things happen in patterns, child. The patterns reveal us.

  You won’t find us. I’m old, Shreve, and have remained concealed for more years than you can imagine.

  And because we share this … the shibboleth … you know what I hide from. The impenetrables. The entity. Whatever lies there slumbering in Maryland. It becomes more active. The sleeper stirs and the impenetrables are moving, and I will not allow you to fall into their hands because I do not know their purpose and cannot risk them collecting you.

  You must make a choice now. Come to us, or we will take you. I cannot have you out there as a loose cannon, if you’ll pardon the pun. I will give you a very short time to decide.

  All right, Mr. Schneider. I will release you now. You will remember nothing of this conversation …

  In and down I go, into Schneider’s brainmeat, into his unconscious, like some psychic cliff diver in a Speedo.

  I’m drawn to one bright memory, pinging like sonar from one of the old movies, bing, bing, bing. I dive and snatch it up, not so much swallowing it—but I am—as immersing myself in it and there’s this flash of white light and—

  –squalling again, the little brat, snot flying and bellowing from his crib. mom doesn’t even stir her fat ass from the sofa and dad is gone, again, again, and again, as always. the brat’s really getting the volume up into eardrum-piercing registers, so I put down the controller to the nintendo, stand, and walk to the crib, where he’s looking at me and bawling, hands on the bars, like a cellmate in the pen, mouth wide in an O, howling now, his cheeks streaming with tears and his face crusty with snot and I look over at mom but she’s blubbering, a box of wine perched on the couch end table.

  “come on, buddy, shut the fuck up—” it’s all I manage in the blast of noise coming from his mouth. It hurts my ears.

  i just wish he’d shut up. be quiet. be silent.

  standing in front of him, his mouth is like a foghorn blasting me, and I wince and don’t even think when I grab the curtains behind him and wrap his head in the fabric, to shut him up, the little punk, and hold him like that until he quiets. he stills in his crib.

  he is quiet.

  he is still and mom never even stirs.

  but i’m not quiet, i’m not still, there’s this rushing feeling throughout my body as the knowledge seeps into me and it feels so good and I unwrap his head from where he lies, blue-lipped and faceup. it surges through me, the power. i feel dirty and strong and terrifying and powerful and electric all at once and the silence is clear and I want the silence to go on forever like that, never interrupted. i gave it to him, the silence. and now it will never be broken–

  It’s like blood, the memory, blood from a broken nose flooding the back of my throat, repellent and delicious. Taking it into myself is like drinking poison, and at that moment, I don’t care.

  When I’m done, my whole shibboleth self wavers. Alex Schneider lies splayed before me like a sacrificial offering, and his mind, that massive field of coral that I floated over before, shimmers and blooms, colors deepening, life returning. We are what we do. And I just undid something that has diseased his whole life.

  I ate the cancer that has been killing him.

  And now it’s in me.

  Something inside me snaps, like a slingshot, and I’m reeled back into my body, the meatsuit, incarcerado.

  The sensation of Schneider’s memory curdles in my stomach, and I sit up on the infirmary’s cot, sweating and s
tark. The room is washed in the blue light from behind the bars, and I can see Nurse Cheeves standing above me, her face stern and unforgiving.

  “I don’t know what you are or how you do it, but your thievery disgusts me. You took something beautiful, and now I can’t even remember what it was—”

  She stops as she sees the expression on my face.

  Something’s rotten in me now, and I feel like I’m about to slide into the abyss.

  –cheeves schneider graves booth dubrovnik stevens masters wilbourne erikson desalle–

  Faces and other lives flashing before my eyes, like cruel waves, washing me away. I open my mouth to speak, but something is so very wrong and all I can manage is, “Je ne peux pas arrêter. Je ne peux pas m’en empêcher. Je ne peux pas arrêter. Aidezmoi. Je peux lire dans vos pensées. Je suis désolé. Donc désolé,” and each word rings clear as a bell, the tolling of some great bell, shaking me to my foundations.

  “Stop this, Shreve. Stop!”

  “Pardonnez-moi. Je suis tellement désolé pour avoir volé de vous.” It’s stuck inside of me, the French—Desalle and I can’t even remember when I read his mind, but his name is Peter Desalle—and the words bubble out of my mouth, fluid and glossy, the language of love and madness, and I can feel my shibboleth self still juddering and shaking inside of me, full of cancer.

  There are no walls now, and everything comes crashing in.