Entity 10 7
Deputy Silverstar at the Edge of the Universe
7.
Deputy Silverstar had prospected for gold with his father in the streams of the Olympic Mountains and the Cascades, as well as in the black sand beaches of Harbor County. They found enough gold to pay for gas and saw a lot of rugged country. But he’d never seen perfectly white stone in these parts. The Gatekeepers’ courtyard must have been shipped piece by expensive piece. A hole in the clouds haloed a piercing sun that he hadn’t seen since Honduras. A shimmering glare of the polished stone washed out the rest of the scene. Between the sunbreak and the glare, Mike expected to feel warmer, but he still felt the usual Northwest Chill.
Mike held his hat up to shade his eyes, and his movement felt dream-like, out-of-body. The stone rose from the far end of the courtyard to climb the face of a huge, square-topped structure that looked like the pyramid he’d seen at the Battle of Copan. The Google map on his eviction paper showed this area covered in wild rose and dangerously undercut by the unrelenting surf. No temple. Mike swallowed hard.
When did they build a brand-new Mayan temple?
His first time near a Mayan temple he’d seen reality turn to illusion, turn deadly, turn real again. Mike took a step back.
Serafina smiled at him. “Take a look,” she said. “It won’t bite.”
Mike backed into the doorway.
“I saw one in Honduras that did,” he said. “You conjured this out of my head the way you conjured that migraine into fruit. Or you slipped me something.”
Serafina pouted in mock disappointment and gestured him to join her at the foot of the steps, but he stood fast.
“I just need to deliver this paperwork,” he said. “I’ll be out of your way.”
A sudden humidity plastered his clothes to his skin, and the sunlight focused hot air inward off the white stone courtyard. Mike loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top of his shirt. Heavy perfumes, strange but pleasant, further thickened the humid air, and a smoky incense nearby added to his sense of disembodiment and disorientation. Copal, the heady incense of the Copan Maya, wafted throughout his unit’s two-week bloodbath at the temple. He couldn’t believe his senses at Copan, either. Somehow the enemy projected false visuals complete with background sound to disorient them.
He was spotting for a sniper and thought that something was off with the electronics in his scope. The image in his rangefinder looked like two digital photographs overlapped, each taking turns fading and solidifying. He watched a dozen Unit Green scouts stroll across a clearing, a perfect green pasture inter-imaged with a huge, shimmering patch of sky-blue. In a blink, the pasture became a cenote, a water-filled cavern that swallowed the scouts, burdened with their heavy field gear. Before their cries of surprise and alarm reached Mike on the hilltop, the pool shifted into a grassy clearing again. Wind, a loud crack, a punch of a pressure-wave into his chest.
“Holy fuck!” his sniper said. “What did we just see?”
No amount of probing through that pasture solved that mystery. The men tried to write it off as side effects of the battle drugs issued with their meals, but Mike thought that for just a moment he’d seen two worlds collide. Now he suspected he was having a PTSD flashback of some kind.
Maybe here it’s the leftover weedsmoke in the walls, he thought.
His department had investigated the Gardeners for weed because of a meteoric rise in the ranch’s power consumption. Nobody could track how many people were here at any time, made more difficult when people discarded their names like their clothes and took on new identities like “Loving Raven” or “Cedar Bark.” The FBI butted in without saying why but didn’t find any drug activity. They tromped around the local turf and left without so much as by-your-leave.
Mike shook his head. This gimmick the Gatekeepers employed was almost as good as what he’d encountered in Honduras.
“Now, you know I should’ve seen all this from the road,” he said. “Virtual reality, right?”
Serafina said, “You have to know where to look.”
He followed her gaze behind him into the ranch house overhanging the bluff—
Gone!
Just a wall of stone skulls loomed behind him where, moments ago, the bluff ended under a west-facing bay window. Tropical vines and green, blue-collared lizards lazed in the eye orbits and through crannies between the skulls. Mike touched a pale orchid beside the steps and his hand tingled. He jerked it back like he’d been stung.
Serafina walked to him, touched his arm and leaned close. “It’s not an illusion,” she said. “I don’t know how it works.”
Mike shook the prickling out of his hand.
“Was that some kind of electric fence?”
“No,” she said. “Just a handy side-effect.”
“What about that?” Mike asked. He nodded towards the temple. Red flags lined the steps and snapped with the breeze while a fog of incense corkscrewed into the bright blue sky.
“It’s real,” she said, “but it’s not really here, exactly. Or we’re not there. Something like that. ‘Entanglement,’ The Entity calls it. ‘Quantum mechanics.’”
“Oh, that clears it up!”
Mike kicked the stone. It felt real. Now heat-waves swarmed the air before his eyes, and a dizzying shimmer threw his stomach for a dangerous lurch. He’d heard that this guru had some parlor tricks, but this…
“I feel the stone,” he said. “I smell the smoke, hear those flags flap…”
He stopped cold at the sight of a half-dozen red-robed figures who stared at him from the temple-top. They hefted staffs with small glistening globes at the ends, and Mike chilled when they pointed at him.
“Yes,” Serafina said, as though all was perfectly normal, “as I said, this is real. But what’s real, anyway? A map is real, but it’s not the territory.”
She held that bemused smile, and her dark-eyed gaze had room for everything but fear.
Mike hadn’t eaten for nearly two days because his migraine wouldn’t let him, but his stomach grumbled when he whiffed sweet cakes baking nearby.
“If this is the map,” he whispered, “where is the territory?”
Serafina took his hand and sat him down beside her on a hot stone bench. Two young men in traditional Mayan dress fastened large fronds of shade into position over their heads.
“Let’s just say we’re not in Harbor County anymore…Sheriff.”
“Okay, okay,” he said, and dropped her hand. “I’m impressed. This is high-quality shuck-and-jive, and it might even replace air travel. But I still need to see your boss.”
As he was speaking, Mike felt the electric buzz in his mind fade out and his feelings of disorientation dissipate. The eviction notice fluttered in his left hand, and he resisted looking lest he discover it turned into a bat or a bird or something. He looked. It was still a real eviction notice, still a real tropical breeze.
And I’m still a deputy, he thought.
“Did you feel that buzzing in the head?” he asked. “Or was it just me?”
Serafina shrugged and Mike glanced at a shift of nipples under her thin, cotton top.
“I feel a lot of things,” she said, and took his hand again. “This ranch is like a vortex, you know? Those old 20th-century crystal-gazers had some things right. “‘Entanglement’ connects us with this temple on the other side.”
“On the other side of what?”
“Well,” she said, and averted her gaze, “that’s complicated. How do you feel about parallel universes?”
Oh, Gee!
“They’re fine,” he said, “as long as I don’t have to pick up after them.”
“Is that how you see your job, see us? ‘Messy people’?”
Mike tried a smile that he didn’t feel. “It was a joke,” he said. “’Parallel universes.’ What can I say to something like that?”
A hint of a frown puckered between her eyebrows, and she said, “You could say that quantum physicists are right and parallel universes overlap our own, or that parallel universes don’t exist, and I’m nuts.”
Mike saw that she was serious, and that she did her best to be patient and kind.
“Those people.” He pointed out the robed figures atop the temple. “Are they real?”
She nodded. “They breathe, breed and bleed like the rest of us.”
Mike appreciated the spectacle and relief from his migraine, but he’d played along because of Serafina. Now he was awash in the post-headache numbness and fatigue.
“Dispatch 17, what’s your 20?”
Mike felt an electrical snap in the air when he keyed his radio.
“Crystal Gardens.”
“Are you 10-98 yet?”
Mike felt distance open up between him and Serafina, though neither had moved.
“Negative. I’m still looking for Lucinda Light to serve the papers.”
“Sheriff says to deliver to any resident and return. You’re on security detail for the guv’s erosion speech at one.”
“Roger. 17.”
Mike sighed, massaged his stiff neck, felt embarrassed for taking so much time just to be amused by a brilliant illusion and to stand next to Serafina Hanson.
“Lucinda Light,” he said, louder than he’d intended. “Is she here?”
Serafina looked disappointed and deflated, but she nodded toward a large stone stage beside the temple. A thatched sun-shelter shimmered into being atop the stage, and a group of people in white cotton pajamas like Serafina’s materialized at the edges. At the back of the stage, a single white figure glowed deep inside the shelter’s shadow.
“That’s her,” Serafina said. “That’s Sister Light, Entity Ten. But you can’t evict her.”
Mike bristled. This trip into dreamland already cost him too much time. He glanced at the men atop the pyramid, and he felt for the reassuring bulk of his radio and pistol.
“Why not?”
“Because right now she’s not Lucinda. She’s The Entity. And we’re in Chacben Kax, not Harbor County. Technically, we’ve self-evicted. But you can go ahead and try, if you want.”
Now he felt sorry for Serafina. She was as culted-up and as dazzled by theater as the rest of them.
“Thanks,” he said. He dusted off his pants. “Thanks, I’ll do just that.”
He’d seen the headache-into-edible-fruit trick in a USO show when he’d had R&R in Guatemala, so Mike was pretty sure Serafina hadn’t slipped him a drug. Tailor-made drugs ordered up for each operation during two deployments gave him some experience with trips to the Interior while on trips to the interior. He rolled his head on his neck to relax and took a deep breath, let it out slow, like Lou taught him. He wished he had his hat, the boss said he wasn’t official without his hat, then he shrugged and walked to the thatched stage.
He tried unsuccessfully to shake off his dizziness and disorientation. No one spoke or moved, not so much as a leaf rustled. Fragrance disappeared from the air, replaced by the odor of fresh, dead dirt. The tap-tap of his boot-heels on stone no longer spiked a cold staccato through his forehead.
The white figure inside the shade was lanky, a woman nearly his height, seated cross-legged in a too-bright white robe. Her short-cropped blonde hair framed a serene face and very long white eyelashes. Her hands held something long and white that might have been a bone.
“Lucinda Light?” he asked.
Silence.
A heavy gold pendant creased the robe between the women’s breasts, and he saw no rise and fall of breath. Another thick wave of incense billowed around them, and Mike repeated his question.
“Lucinda Light? I’m Deputy Silverstar of the—“
“The entity you seek is not here.”
A resonating voice boomed from the woman’s mouth, a clear, clipped voice long accustomed to authority. Lucinda Light did not open her eyes.
Ordinarily, Mike would’ve dropped the paper into her lap, as he’d seen Lou do several times, but this wasn’t ordinarily and Lou was two months dead by his own hand.
Okay, he thought, I’ll play.
“Is this the body of Lucinda Light?”
The eyelids snapped open and the blue intensity of her crystalline gaze nearly took his breath away. Not out of beauty, though she was beautiful. Mike chilled to the core despite the heat and humidity. He had that helpless, stomach-churning feeling of dread—dread that he might do anything this person, this entity, ordered him to do.
The entity smiled, but the chill remained in those ice-blue eyes. It spread the fingers of both hands before itself, palms upward to the unrelenting sun.
“These…appendages…carry the fingerprints of Lucinda Light,” it said. This voice was accustomed to addressing large crowds without the help of microphones. “Did this poor body break your petty laws?” it asked, “or did the entity using it?” Another cold, toothful smile.
The men in red with staffs and globes stepped ceremoniously down the temple stairs. Deputy Silverstar rested his hand on the butt of his weapon for reassurance. Something live and scaly wriggled under his palm. He jerked his hand away and a fat lizard, shimmering green and yellow with a bright red crest, struggled out of his holster and flicked its crest at him with menacing bobs of its head. The lizard shrugged itself free and lit with a weighty plop at his feet. Mike backed up, and the lizard followed, past Serafina to the doorway, came nose-to-toe with Mike’s left boot and shot out an inquisitive tongue.
Pop!
A bright, hot flash stung his toes, Silverstar jumped back and the lizard was gone.
Like a cutting torch, the white-hot light sizzled from the ground in front of him and fried a line clear to the top of the pyramid. The earth tore apart at the incision and light spilled out with such force that it knocked Silverstar to his knees. Everything, temple and trees and the ground itself, rippled and twisted like liquid and swirled toward some great drain under the impossibly bright light.
“Oh, gee,” Mike said. “Shit oh gee.”
Blue bones glowed through his arms as he tried to protect his face.
draft portions of novel in progress, Bill Ransom