All Too Surreal Page 3

  The Guardian, the Guide, the Judge … all were gone. All that was left was Anpu, the Scavenger.

  Todd sipped his coffee. If he noticed Anpu had not touched his food or drink, he gave no sign. “So he was a god of Death.”

  Before Anpu could reply, the serving girl returned. “How is everything?”

  “Fine,” Todd answered.

  She looked at Anpu’s sandwich and frowned. “Not to your liking? I’ll see if I can’t find something else in the kitchen for you.”

  Anpu started to tell her it wasn’t necessary, but she departed before he could get the first syllable out. On the floor where she had stood, Anpu noticed a scattering of what looked like … sand? He sniffed. Hot, gritty, a hint of ancient, forgotten spices.

  He shook his head to clear the scent from it. Another hallucination, that was all.

  “Death,” Anpu said. “The word is so plain. A simple biological process. It doesn’t begin to touch on the majesty and wonder of the Great Passage. There are only two times when humans touch the Infinite. Birth is one. What you call death is the other.”

  Todd shrugged again. “That’s a poetic way of looking at it, but to me, death is just death. It’s when life stops. Nothing fancy, nothing special.”

  Anpu regarded Todd’s half-eaten sandwich. The bite marks were too even, and he could smell no saliva residue. Now that he thought of it, he hadn’t noticed Todd chewing either. The food seemed somehow to be just … gone.

  “There’s precious little room in that point of view for Mystery.”

  “Myths are for people who can’t face reality,” Todd said. “The simple truth is that people are meat. Sometimes that meat moves, sometimes it doesn’t. The end.”

  Anpu shook his head sadly. His memories of this world, this time, were fragmented and incomplete. As was he. But he recalled enough to know that Todd spoke the truth. Bodies mangled by machines in senseless accidents; babies and children starved, beaten or simply just ignored to death; old people left to rot away their final years in small colorless rooms. It was enough to disgust even a scavenger.

  He lowered his eyes to the floor. A layer of sand covered the wood now, the surface shifting, stirred by a sourceless breeze.

  The serving girl returned, her feet leaving no mark upon the sand. She dropped a plate onto the table next to Anpu’s uneaten sandwich.

  “How’s this?” Her voice was low, guttural, nearly a growl.

  Anpu stared at the food she had brought: a desiccated, hairless jackal’s head. He looked up into the girl’s yellow eyes.

  “It’s time, Scavenger,” she said, baring ivory fangs.

  With a startled cry, Anpu leaped up from the table, overturning his chair which thudded softly into the sand. Todd sipped his coffee, seemingly unaware that anything strange was going on. But even if it all was nothing but a diseased figment of Anpu’s shattered psyche, he couldn’t remain here another moment. He turned to run, started for the door, stopped when he saw the way blocked by a stone figure. It was the image from the museum relief, acting as the Guardian.

  Anpu turned back toward the table and saw that the coffee house patrons had become leather-skinned mummies with receded date-pit eyes and shrunken cheeks. They sat still, stiff, their funeral cerements torn and crusted with mildew.

  The serving girl placed hands on her cheeks and lifted, bloodlessly separating head from neck. The head winked at Anpu, and then the girl dropped it to the sand where it landed with a soft chuff. From behind the front counter scurried two stone jackals, the same animals which had flanked the Guardian in the relief. They raced for the girl’s head, savaged it with stone teeth, growled and snapped as they fought over meat, bone and blood.

  The girl, or rather her headless body, reached down and lifted the dried jackal head from the plate and placed it on her neck. The seams joined and the head swelled as it drew blood into itself. Skin sprouted coarse golden fur, eyes grew moist and full, tongue lolled wetly.

  Todd continued drinking his coffee, untouched by the insanity surrounding him.

  The girl — or what had been the girl — fixed Anpu with a cold, unforgiving gaze. “Step forward, Scavenger, and be judged.”

  Anpu felt fear, sadness and growing resignation. Still, he stayed where he was. “Why should I?” he challenged.

  The Judge knelt, plunged fingers into sand and pulled forth a golden hanging scale. She, he, it swept the plates off the table and set the scale down. Todd kept sipping coffee, staring off into space, unconcerned.

  “All things die, Anpu,” the Judge growled. “Even gods. All the great ones are gone. You are the only one who remains.” A chuckle. “I suppose it only fitting that Death should be the last to die. But the time for talk is over. Come here and be judged, so that we may rest at last.”

  Anpu couldn’t bring himself to move. He knew this was necessary, perhaps even ultimately desirable, but he couldn’t do it.

  Cold, rough fingers of rock clamped down on his shoulders, and stone arms propelled him forward. It was the Guardian, making sure he kept his appointment with destiny. Anpu didn’t bother struggling; he knew it would be useless.

  The Guardian marched him over to the table where the Judge waited, muzzle dripping with froth. And where Todd still calmly sipped his coffee. Anpu felt a sudden surge of rage, wanted to lash out and knock the mug from the boy’s hand, wanted to make the fool aware of what was happening around him. If Anpu was to pass from existence this day, he wanted at least one representative of the race that had once worshipped him, had in a sense created him, to be aware of it. The idea that he — and everything he symbolized — should vanish unremarked and unnoticed was far worse than anything the Judge could do to him.

  “Todd? Can you —” The Guardian reached around, grabbed Anpu’s throat, fingers tightened, cutting off air.

  Todd kept drinking.

  “Be calm, Anpu,” the Judge said, trailing an index finger down Anpu’s T-shirt, the dirty fabric parting at the touch of razor-sharp claw. “You want this. Or else why would you have summoned your other aspects, brought us back into existence? Why would you have come here, to this city, this place which holds distant echoes of the old world but is so much a part of the new? What better place for one cycle to end and another begin?”

  Cycle? Anpu experienced a flicker of memory, could almost — then it was gone.

  The stone jackals had stripped the serving girl’s head clean and now gnawed her fleshless skull. The Judge kicked the snarling beasts away from the grisly artifact. They whined in protest, but kept their distance. The Judge knelt, inserted a clawed finger and thumb into an empty eye socket and drew forth a small white feather.

  The Judge stood and placed the feather upon one of the scale’s two golden pans. “Behold, the Feather of Maat, which is Truth, Justice, Morality, and — in your case, Anpu — Balance.”

  The Judge raised a hand and brought it down upon Anpu’s chest, slicing it open. Anpu’s nerves screamed with fire, tears poured from his eyes, but he gritted his teeth against the agony, determined not to give the Judge the satisfaction of hearing him cry out. Blood poured from the open wound, ran slick across his flesh, soaked the tatters of his shirt, his pants, splattered in large, thick drops onto the sand.

  The Judge reached into Anpu’s chest cavity and gently, almost lovingly caressed the Scavenger’s heart. Then the Judge grasped the organ and tore it free from Anpu’s body. Despite his determination not to do so, Anpu screamed. But he did not die; he was not a being that could be killed in such a fashion.

  The Judge took the still-beating heart and placed it on the scale’s empty pan, opposite the Feather of Maat. For an instant, the pans hovered, balanced, but then the heart sank, lifting the Feather of Maat skyward. With a howl of triumph, the Judge snatched up the heart. Counterweight gone, the pan with the Feather should have fallen, but it didn’t. Instead it remained where it was, a frozen condemnation.

  The Judge grinned. “At this point, the heart should be cast aside for
Ammit the Devourer to feast upon. But the demoness is gone, as are all the others. Only we remain. Thus I must take her place.” The Judge lifted the heart, opened canine jaws and sank fangs into stubborn, ancient muscle.

  The Guardian released its grip on Anpu. He turned to see the stone figure collapse into dust, the two jackals following their master down into dissolution, sand returning to sand.

  Anpu felt himself being drawn into the void at the center of his being where his heart had been. He sighed, tired, defeated, but not altogether ungrateful. For better or worse, his time was done.

  He looked at Todd one last time. The young man lifted his coffee mug in salute, then set it down on the table.

  “Bon voyage, Old Man.” Todd reached toward his smiley face tattoo, pinched a flap of skin between thumb and forefinger, and bloodlessly peeled away the yellow disk to reveal a small skull with eye sockets like tiny twin black holes.

  “Have a nice oblivion.” Grinning, Todd discarded the round strip of flesh. It fell toward the sand, flaking away to nothingness before it could hit.

  Then Anpu became one with the darkness that was his ultimate, his only, self.

  Todd stood and offered his hand to the Judge. “Tough break, but I guess we all have to retire sometime, huh?”

  “The cycle is the cycle,” the Judge said, taking Todd’s hand. “The wheel turns.” The Judge’s voice grew mushy, fur fell out in clumps, skin dried, shriveled, drew tight and hard against bone.

  “Whatever. Take it easy.” He released the Judge’s papery claw and the twisted, shrunken corpse fell to the sand.

  Todd walked out of the perfectly ordinary coffee shop. None of the patrons so much as gave him a glance, which was just the way he liked it. After all, there was nothing special about him, not really. He was completely ordinary, utterly random and absolutely without meaning.

  Death was dead; long live Death.

  Picking Up Courtney

  “On the q.t. — was I staring at you when the incident occurred?”

  Brent looked at the old woman for a moment, trying to decide if he’d heard her right. He chose to play it safe and shook his head.

  She smiled, relieved. “Good.”

  They stood on the sidewalk in front of Haven Falls Elementary. Cars zipped by only a few feet from where they stood, drivers ignoring the SLOW: SCHOOL ZONE signs. For the thousandth time, Brent wondered what genius had decided to build a school on one of the busiest streets in town.

  “We bring her here to get her used to the noise.” The woman had an accent that he couldn’t place. He recognized it as European, but that didn’t narrow it down much. She was alone, so Brent wasn’t sure who the “we” she referred to was, but the “her” was plain enough. The woman held a thin leash attached to the collar of a tiny tan dachshund. The animal’s tail was between its legs and it was shivering as if it were the dead of winter instead of early October. Its eyes were moist, and Brent thought the dog might start crying any second.

  “She’s afraid of loud sounds,” the woman said. “Every day I come to get my granddaughter, and I bring Peanut. The cars, the children, they make plenty of noise, and we hope she’ll become … inoculated? No, acclimated, yes, that’s it.”

  The dog didn’t seem to be doing much “acclimating” to him. The way it was shivering, it looked like its tiny heart was close to bursting.

  Brent glanced at his watch. 2:24. Six minutes until the bell rang. He wished they lived on the bus line. Dropping off their daughter in the afternoon for half-day kindergarten and picking her up again every school day was getting to be a real drag. Not to mention cutting into his work.

  “Each day, she seems to be a bit better, I think.”

  The dog pressed against the woman’s leg and started to whine. This was better? Better than what?

  “I’m sure she’ll do fine. It’ll just take a little time is all.” He didn’t pay attention to his own words. He’d been a realtor for seven years, and in that time the small talk portion of his brain had become so developed it operated on autopilot.

  The woman grinned, displaying slightly crooked teeth that were yellow at the edges. “Yes, exactly so!”

  Brent had never seen the woman or her dog before. He was usually five minutes late to pick up Courtney, sometimes ten. This was the first day he’d managed to get here early. At first, he’d congratulated himself on being a Good Daddy, but now that he was stuck talking with Frau Non Sequitur and the Amazing Vibrating Wiener Dog, he regretted it.

  Brent replayed the woman’s strange question in his mind: On the q.t. — was I staring at you when the incident occurred? They’d been talking about the school’s open house last week. It had been crowded and hot as hell, far too many glassy-eyed parents trying to cram themselves into closet-sized classrooms to stare at enigmatic creations of construction paper and glue. It had been so stifling that Sandi, Courtney and he had ducked out early after making a token appearance in Ms. Watson’s class. Had something happened after they’d left? Perhaps the old woman had fainted from the heat. Naturally, she would’ve been embarrassed by such an incident, and confused as well. She might have seen him in the hall earlier and later couldn’t recall whether or not he’d been there when she’d fainted.

  Then again, maybe she suffered from Alzheimer’s or something. Or maybe she simply was a loon. It didn’t matter. A few more minutes — three, to be precise — and Courtney would come running through the school’s glass front doors, and he’d hustle her into their mini-van and get the hell out of here.

  The dachshund’s whining grew louder, it pushed harder against the old woman’s leg, as if it hoped it might be able to slip its molecules in between its owner’s and vanish into her flesh. Brent wondered if he were making it more nervous, if he should excuse himself and walk away. But the little dog yapped then and nipped at the old woman’s leg. Not hard enough to draw blood through the woman’s slacks, probably not even hard enough to make a dent in her skin. Still, the old woman scowled, her lips contracting into a tight ring of flesh that made him think of a puckered anus.

  “Bad Peanut. Nasty Peanut.” Her tone was calm, but her eyes glittered with anger. She began wrapping the leash around her hand, taking up the slack until the black leather strand was taut.

  Brent thought she would stop there, but she didn’t. She continued winding the leash around her hand, pulling Peanut’s head upward, baggy skin wrinkling around the collar. The dog’s front paws lifted off the ground, dangling almost daintily before it rose onto its haunches, sitting the way dachshunds do when they beg. Brent thought she would finally stop there, but she kept wrapping, her fingers now starting to redden and swell.

  Peanut rose onto her feet, then her tiptoes, and then there was space between her hind feet and the concrete of the sidewalk. Not much, maybe just enough to slide a child’s construction paper drawing under, but it didn’t matter how much space was between Peanut and the ground, did it? When you’re at the end of a noose — and that’s what the leash had become — a few inches is the same as a hundred feet.

  Peanut hung slack, not struggling, oddly calm after her earlier display of terror. The only sign that she was strangling was the way her wet black eyes bulged forth from their sockets. Dark streaks rolled from the corners of those eyes, and Brent realized that the dog was crying at last.

  The bell rang then, snapping him out of his daze. He reached for the old woman’s wrist, intending to make her drop the dog. But before he could close his fingers around her arm, she opened her hand, releasing the coils she’d gathered, and Peanut fell back to the ground, back paws first, then front. She didn’t gasp, didn’t pant for air. But she started shivering again.

  He looked up at the old woman. She smiled at him as if she hadn’t just tried to strangle her dog.

  “What the hell —” he started.

  “Daddy!”

  He turned at the sound of his daughter’s voice, saw her running down the school’s front walk toward him, so beautiful she shone like a
star among the crowd of awkward, mussed-haired kids around her.

  “Lovely child,” the old woman said, then she turned and walked off, heading away from the school. A girl with long black hair broke out of the pack of running, laughing children and jogged in her direction. She caught up with the old woman and fell in step beside her, but neither of them spoke. And, Brent noticed, the girl didn’t reach down to give the dog a hello pat, didn’t so much as acknowledge the animal’s presence.

  A tug on his sleeve. “Daddy, what’s wrong? Aren’t you glad to see me?” Courtney gave him the pout which he always called her monkey face. He knelt down and kissed his daughter on the cheek, grateful she hadn’t seen the old woman abusing her dog.

  “Course I am, Pumpkin. You have a good day at school?”

  “I sure did!”

  He stood, held out his hand. She took it and they started toward the car.

  “What did you do today?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

  It was her stock answer, one he usually teased her about, but today he said, “That’s nice.” He watched the old woman, her granddaughter, and Peanut continue down the sidewalk, and again he heard the strange question she asked, saw Peanut’s tear-slick bulging eyes, and without realizing it, he gripped his daughter’s hand tighter.

  The next morning, Brent told his wife he was getting backed up at work and asked if she could pick up Courtney after school. Sandi said she couldn’t take off in the middle of the day, he knew that. She’d just started back to work at the doctor’s office full time only a month and a half ago. She couldn’t start asking off yet.

  They’d argued a little, but it didn’t go far. Brent couldn’t tell his wife the real reason he wanted her to get Courtney was because he didn’t want to see the old woman and her dog again. He knew he wouldn’t be able to make her understand; hell, he didn’t understand it himself.

  That afternoon, Brent arrived at the school ten minutes early. He wanted to pick up Courtney and get the hell out of there before the old woman showed up and did something else disturbing — something his daughter might see this time. He parked at the curb and sat in his van, thinking about why his encounter with the old woman yesterday had so unsettled him. He supposed it had something to do with the death of his uncle. When Brent was nine, his Uncle Larry — or “Red” as everyone called him— was like a father to him. More so than his real father, who was a salesman and always on the road. His dad never had time to play catch with Brent, teach him how to throw a football, take him fishing. But Uncle Red had time, and even when he didn’t, he still found a way to make it. Brent had loved Red, practically to the point of worship. And then one day Red went to the doctor’s for a check-up. The physician saw Red, gave him a clean bill of health, and then Red went out into the reception area, sat down and waited for his name to be called so he could pay his bill. He never got up again. His heart gave out, the doctor said, and he died instantly, probably didn’t feel a thing. As if that were any consolation.