The Night Sheriff, page 14
The décor in my office has changed over the years. Originally, I covered the walls with travel posters and photographs of exotic locales. Cities I had been to, like Prague, or New Orleans, or of places I wished to see, such as Rio de Janeiro during Carnival, or Las Vegas. But after ten years, they merely drove home the fact that I was not going to be visiting them anytime soon.
In the seventies, I was determined to prove the stereotypes correct. I painted my walls black and filled the room with assorted bones, skulls, and arcane trash one could purchase from the advertisements found in the backs of a certain type of magazine. It was all nonsense, of course; the only genuinely interesting thing was the executive mushroom farm, and no one I knew dared eat them.
These days, I have discovered that a monster working out of a perfectly normal-looking space is far more disquieting. The walls are a tasteful bone white. A little bit of faux diabolism seems to be expected, and these days you can buy enough fantasy and supernatural kitsch online that a respectable necromancer would fire his decorator. Thus, I allow myself to display the stuffed head of the Wendigo upon my wall. Everyone assumes that it’s something I pilfered from the props workshop. There’s a jolly travel poster of Transylvania (it keeps people guessing), and a charming little Bavarian clock that, frankly, I keep because I enjoy the sound of the ticking. The furniture is standard corporate issue. I even have a fern.
I have a hook upon the wall from which hangs an overly large, black, cowboy hat. In all our years together, Mr. Mortimer never let me forget my disappointment that he was not wearing one at our first meeting, and I discovered this one waiting for me in the castle chamber he had prepared for me, tucked neatly into a large, round Stetson box, with a note claiming that I obviously needed one, now that I was an American.
The one thing that people never even notice was the surprisingly fat pedestal table that holds my fern. If you did examine it closely, you might find the secret door, and if you managed to open that, you’d find a small freezer compartment that contains the frozen head of Bartholomew Zenon.
There are many people who have heard the persistent rumor that Mr. Bartholomew had himself frozen after he died and is now ensconced somewhere under the park, waiting for his beloved future to develop the technology to resurrect him. Well, that was certainly Mr. Bartholomew’s intention, but, unfortunately for him, the cryonics company he signed on with turned out to be an edifice of smoke and mirrors, and thus his fatally degraded remains were eventually interred in the family mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery, the same as many a lesser mortal.
This did not sit well with Mr. Bartholomew, which is why he returned from wherever afterlife he had been cooling his celestial heels in and began haunting the place. Explaining to him that there was as much chance of resurrecting a pig from a festering ham sandwich as there was of reconstructing his body—let alone his actual functioning brain—from his moldering corpse, was pointless (the dead are remarkably immune to logic). To make a long story short, he would not be laid to rest until someone dug up his head and put it in a freezer. Naturally, once it was there, it gave everyone who knew that it was there a severe case of the heebie-jeebies, so they moved it out of the employee break room refrigerator, and it eventually wound up in my office. I owe Mr. Bartholomew a great deal, and it feels nice to be able to pay some of it back by allowing him his eternal rest.
I settle in behind my desk and take a moment to rest my head in my hands. I must not allow the absence of the Happiness Machine’s effect to so exaggerate the distress caused by Vandy’s departure. Annoying he may be, but Orsynn certainly did not deserve that over-the-top display of rage. In many ways he is like a child himself. A child I had—however unintentionally—frightened.
If he didn’t annoy me so, Orsynn had the potential to be my favorite amongst the refugees here in the park. All of the monsters here are quite efficient when it comes to disposing of extraneous human bodies, but the Gremlins insist on them being chopped up, Xochemilchic is only happy if you drain all the blood out and offer it to him separately, and Cormangwöld won’t touch them unless they are wearing a hennin, one of those ridiculous, tall, pointed princess hats. I do not know if it is just an affectation, but I put up with it because she does such a good job of managing my mutual funds.
Orsynn, on the other hand, happily gobbles them down, clothes, electronics, prosthetics, and hats, whole and entire. If I examine my feelings, I must admit that the whole child-eating thing aside, Orsynn gets up my nose simply because I find him too overly familiar, and always have. I like to choose my friends, but Orsynn entered my life convinced from the get-go that we were “friends to the end.”
I’m told I have elitist tendencies and accept this as one of my few character flaws.
I am not often subject to feelings of guilt, but I feel it now. I shall simply have to go apologize in a few days. Perhaps I’ll make the effort to keep the next miscreant alive. If that doesn’t work, at least he’ll forget all about it in five years or so. This last thought so thoroughly depresses me that I slump even further, and it is easily ten minutes before I can raise my forehead from my desk blotter.
I do so only because I feel the hesitant patting on my arm that is as close as Bone Cat ever gets to trying to offer solicitude. It is not much, but I appreciate the effort. I sit up and scratch his ridiculous earbones. Wallowing in misery will accomplish nothing, and I still have things to do before the sun rises. I deal with my email, catch up on my reading (I might lose access to my computer for a day or so while they tried to fire me), and downloaded my project files onto a thumb drive.
Ah … my project. I briefly considered just letting the people who would no doubt sweep through and clean out my office delete it, along with everything else, but, no, I still thought the idea had merit.
Allow me to explain—it’s something I’ve been thinking about for quite some time. Basically, I contend that a significant percentage of the park is underutilized. Because of what I am, I can tell that there are places in the park where our guests feel neither excitement, or fear, or … anything, really. It wasn’t an issue sixty years ago when the park opened, but more and more I’ve sensed a growing impatience with these dead areas. Like I said, I didn’t really notice it when the park opened, but the wiring inside people’s brains is always changing. The interesting difference these days is that the changes are now recorded.
All you have to do to see it is to compare the editing in modern television and movies—all jump cuts and three-second pans—to the slow, leisurely takes of vintage films. Both are valid expressions of the film medium, but younger viewers increasingly find these older films almost unwatchable. Kids these days don’t watch enough opera, that’s the problem. The salient point is our park was designed and built by people who were a product of that more genteel mindset. They expected things to take a more leisurely pace, and this expectation is baked into the very architecture.
Oh, the newer exhibits seem to be dimly aware that people have less patience, and the lines for the rides have become much more of an interactive experience. But there are hundreds of areas within the rides, or even just scattered about the grounds, where there are nothing but blank walls. I believe that if we want the park to engage future generations, then we have to increase the density of the experience.
Let me give you an example: the pirate ride. I find this one especially inexcusable since they refurbished the whole thing after the success of the movie franchise. Oh, the set pieces are all very well done, but there are all these dark, empty stretches that the boats glide past, where I can’t help but think they could have put in something. I’m not saying wire the place up for another animatronic tableaux, but a diorama, a skeleton with glowing eyes, a wanted poster that winks at you—something to catch the eye and engage the mind.
Now you would think that this would be a fairly simple idea to explain, test, and execute. If only to shut me up. But I have been banging my head against this particular brick wall for almost fifteen years with nothing to show for it.
Bone Cat thinks I’m missing the point of what Zenonland is. He says that what I have never understood is that for many people, the Zenonland Amusement Park is, first and foremost, a park, and that a park should have areas that relax a person. He says that the problem with today’s world is that there is so much going on, so much instantly accessible entertainment, that people do not have a chance to get bored. If they don’t get bored, they never try to create.
I myself am skeptical about this. I have seen what children throughout the ages have done when they get bored, and it tends to involve recklessness, mischief, and hooliganism, often against perfectly innocent creatures who have no reason to expect their favorite bench to be weakened, or who wake up to discover that while they slept, their resting place has been filled to the roof with dandelions. No, I fail to see the benefit of this sort of behavior, and so, on this, as on many other subjects, we have agreed to disagree.
But as for management, at this point I am beginning to believe their refusal to even consider a test of my ideas to be some form of childish revenge for my invariably terrorizing the man in charge the first time I meet him. This was a revelation that I was loath to accept for quite some time, as it displayed a level of obstinacy and spite that I had not seen since I had left the old country, but purely for the sake of open-minded scientific experimentation, I had resolved to try to be positively pleasant when I met the next new owner. Well, it looked like that was foredoomed to failure, what with the looming attempt at firing me and all.
As it always does when a new boss appears, the faint hope that the new owner might actually have a way to break my geas, and thus allow me to actually leave, blossoms. That would certainly put a different spin on things and would definitely make for a better retirement gift than the traditional Preston Platypus watch (Though I still want one of those. They are pretty nifty). I snuff this particular line of thought out hard. I have tried for decades to find a way to short-circuit this particular spell, but every line of research has led me to the conclusion that my only hope lies in the actual dissolution of the company, and short of some sort of sci-fi, civilization-ending apocalypse, I just don’t see that happening.
It’s depressing. I mean, I do not want to be one of those strange people who live in Idaho hoping for some unspecified catastrophe to turn things so topsy-turvy that they would, by default, be considered qualified to rebuild some semblance of society. I like civilization. I am well aware that it has problems, but I can assure you that they are, as a rule, a better class of problems than the ones most people had to deal with several hundred years ago.
So, no. While indeed somebody someday might be able to break this particular enchantment, to allow myself to hope leads to nothing but bleak disappointment, and I’ve certainly had my fill of negativity today, what with Vandy and Mr. Shulman leaving, my shouting at Orsynn, the possible threat of Cormangwöld, and the ample evidence that the incoming administration will be bringing in its own bag of problems.
Suddenly, the thought of being cooped up in this miserable little office, which is merely the smallest of the confining matryoshka dolls I inhabit, was too much to bear. I may be trapped here forever, but I will not stop trying to break free. I erupt upwards and outwards, through the ceiling vent, out of the decorative grill hidden in one of the faux cacti in the Land of the Lone Prairie and up into the night sky. Upwards, ever upwards, I flew. Desperate to crack the invisible barrier and free myself from this place.
It has been over a decade since I tried this. Surely if any part the spell holding me were to weaken, it would be up here, far from the artificial and arbitrary lines constructed by mankind. Upwards, ever upwards. I once carried an altimeter up with me and saw that I was able to ascend over three miles straight up before I was dragged back to earth.
I feel a tightening on my flesh, and frost forms. I grin in exhilaration. I can feel the cold now. Refreshing. My coat goes stiff, and the wind whistles through it as I continue to rise. How I miss the freezing winds of the mountains. I miss snow. I miss everything. I am sick unto death of my entire world being confined to seventy-five hectares of artificial reality. Higher. Higher. I will break free of this one way or the other. Even if I have to sail off into space itself, I long to be free of this place where no one even wants me.
It is a strain now, to continue to rise. I have no idea how I fly. I’ve never been scientifically minded, which the gremlins tell me is for the best, really, but as I shudder at my apogee, I find my lack of knowledge frustrating in the extreme. As a rule, I never bother with exploring my limitations, because I tend to settle into a lifestyle where I never have to know what they are. I suppose it’s analogous to a human knowing exactly how many push-ups they can do. But in this case, I don’t even know what it is that I should be doing more of.
Suddenly I realize that I am straining as hard as I am able, and yet am not actually moving. I feel fatigue beginning to seep through me. This is a rare feeling, and one I welcome, as it quells the desperate fury that drove me upwards. I feel myself beginning to calm down, and since it is why I am here, I glide towards the west—
And again smack into the invisible barrier. Seriously? I throw my head back and again scream into the night—though a faint and thin scream it is, at this altitude. I am then suffused with a great wash of sadness, which causes me to draw into myself. I shake my head, bemused at my foolishness. Not at my inability to break free, but at this evidence that I still had that most terrible of dangerous emotions: hope. I had thought I had managed to crush that completely. Obviously not. Obviously not.
I spin slowly, preparing to return, and received an unexpected reward for my efforts. The stars. Far above the smokes and lights of civilization, they are still here, as they were in my youth a thousand years ago, as they will be when I am dust. Here they are, before me in all their magnificence, and I lose myself for a timeless space and bask in their eternal glory.
Suddenly an unexpected lance of pain impacts upon my consciousness. I detach myself from my gazing. It takes a bit of effort to turn, as the frost that rimed my muscles has now solidified into actual ice; parts of me have started to freeze solid. Serves me right for not paying attention. But that is not the source of the pain. It is the sun. I feel a moment of panic, and then realize that it was merely a fluctuation in the horizon’s atmosphere that allowed a premature shaft of light to wash over me. Actual sunrise is still a way off, but it is definitely time to return.
I spin and dive, aiming for the deceptively small patch of land surrounded by the not quite sleeping city. I roar downwards, exulting in the sensation of speed and motion. I have never gone this high before, and for an instant I wonder … what would happen if I did not slow down, if I allowed myself to strike the earth like a meteorite, smack dab in the center of the park. Would I die? Would this be enough to keep me from slowly coalescing back to consciousness? Probably not.
So I spread myself out and begin to control my fall, turning it into a magnificent swooping glide that takes me around and around my home, my prison, my world, in a series of slow, looping spirals that allows me to see every inch of the place that I know every inch of.
When I touch down, a great weariness fills me, both of the physical and mental variety, and I seek out one of the more reclusive of my resting places. Mr. Mortimer was a man who insisted on redundancy, and we always had more than one safe house in any given location. Thus, while there are the “official” locations that Mr. Mortimer had prepared for me, bless his heart, there are also secret ones that I have constructed myself. Hidden even from the Zenonland records so that, when I must, I can brood and not have to worry about the outside world. I have been in these moods before, but moods are all they are. I slide into my chosen resting place, and seal it behind me. After a second, I feel a hesitant pat-patting upon my hand. “You okay?” I say nothing, but make a space for Bone Cat in the crook of my arm, and he flows up against me and begins to purr. Tomorrow cannot help but be a better day.
I sleep.
Chapter Six
I awake the next evening with Bone Cat still tucked within my arm, and take a moment to examine him as he sleeps. Our relationship was not always so cozy.
If you have even a passing acquaintance with Animism, you are no doubt familiar with the idea that all things have spirits. Well, I’ve lived with one in my pocket, as it were, for the last sixty-some-odd years, so I’m here to tell you that whatever you think you know, you probably have it wrong.
I had long been familiar with the basic concept, of course, even back before I knew there was a name for it. Any person who has ever had dealings with an obstinate drawer or appreciated a sheltering tree cannot help but subconsciously assign it a personality, no matter how dormant. After long observation, I believe that this is a universal trait amongst humanity. Certain cultures take it to a greater degree than others. The Japanese, to cite just one example, believe that if you discard a long-used tool or other manufactured object in an inappropriate manner, then it could turn evil. Some special places are also said to have a spirit to them. This is rare, especially these days, if only because Americans don’t tend to think in these terms.
However, on that long-ago night back in 1955, Celeste awoke very strong magics indeed and did so regarding a very specific part of the land.
Places like Zenonland, a place where people congregate and routinely pump out strong emotions, can generate their own spirits. But these are usually crafted by the people who use the space for a long time, sometimes over generations, such as a secluded glen with excellent lighting that is used for magical ceremonies. A place like that can acquire a natural spirit that exemplifies the feelings of the congregants, and there is a sort of feedback loop that, over the years, can result in very impressive manifestations indeed.
