All they had in common was a look, a very specific look. It said, You know me; or perhaps, You ought to know me. An instant familiarity that was also a distance, a look, or an attitude—the confidence that the world existed for them, and that it welcomed them, and that they were adored.
The fat kid moved among them with the shuffling walk of one who, despite having no social skills, has still become successful beyond his dreams. His black coat flapped in the wind.
Something that stood beside the soft drink stand in Mother Goose Court coughed to attract his attention. It was massive, and scalpel-blades jutted from its face and its fingers. Its face was cancerous. “It will be a mighty battle,” it told him, in a glutinous voice.
“It’s not going to be a battle,” said the fat kid. “All we’re facing here is a fucking paradigm shift. It’s a shakedown. Modalities like battle are so fucking Lao Tzu.”
The cancerous thing blinked at him. “Waiting,” is all it said in reply.
“Whatever,” said the fat kid. Then, “I’m looking for Mister World. You seen him?”
The thing scratched itself with a scalpel-blade, a tumorous lower lip pushed out in concentration. Then it nodded. “Over there,” it said.
The fat kid walked away, without a thank-you, in the direction indicated. The cancerous thing waited, saying nothing, until the kid was out of sight.
“It will be a battle,” said the cancerous thing to a woman whose face was smudged with phosphor-dots.
She nodded, and leaned closer to it. “So how does that make you feel?” she asked, in a sympathetic voice.
It blinked, and then it began to tell her.
Town’s Ford Explorer had a global positioning system, a little silver box that listened to the satellites and whispered back to the car its location, but he still got lost once he got south of Blacksburg and onto the country roads: the roads he drove seemed to bear little relationship to the tangle of lines on the map on the screen. Eventually he stopped the car in a country lane, wound down the window and asked a fat white woman being pulled by a wolfhound on its early morning walk for directions to Ashtree farm.
She nodded, and pointed and said something to him. He could not understand what she had said, but he said thanks a million and wound up the window and drove off in the general direction she had indicated.
He kept going for another forty minutes, down country road after country road, each of them promising, none of them the road he sought. Town began to chew his lower lip.
“I’m too old for this shit,” he said aloud, relishing the movie-star world-weariness of the line.
He was pushing fifty. Most of his working life had been spent in a branch of government which went only by its initials, and whether or not he had left his government job a dozen years ago for employment by the private sector was a matter of opinion: some days he thought one way, some days another. Anyway, it was only when you got down to the joes on the street that anyone seemed to assume there was a difference.
He was on the verge of giving up on the farm when he drove up a hill and saw the sign, hand painted, on the gate. It said simply, as he had been told it would, ASH. He pulled up the Ford Explorer, climbed out and untwisted the wire that held the gate closed. He got back in the car and drove through.
It was like cooking a frog, he thought. You put the frog in the water, and then you turn on the heat. And by the time the frog notices that there’s anything wrong, it’s already been cooked. The world in which he worked was all too weird. There was no solid ground beneath his feet; the water in the pot was bubbling fiercely.
When he’d been transferred to the Agency it had all seemed so simple. Now it was all so—not complex, he decided; merely bizarre. He had been sitting in Mr. World’s office at two that morning, and he had been told what he was to do. “You got it?” said Mr. World, handing him the knife in its dark leather sheath. “Cut me a stick. It doesn’t have to be longer than a couple of feet.”
“Affirmative,” he said. And then he said, “Why do I have to do this, sir?”
“Because I tell you to,” said Mr. World, flatly. “Find the tree. Do the job. Meet me down in Chattanooga. Don’t waste any time.”
“And what about the asshole?”
“Shadow? If you see him, just avoid him. Don’t touch him. Don’t even mess with him. I don’t want you turning him into a martyr. There’s no room for martyrs in the current game-plan.” He smiled then, his scarred smile. Mr. World was easily amused. Mr. Town had noticed this on several occasions. It had amused him to play chauffeur, in Kansas, after all.
“Look—”
“No martyrs, Town.”
And Town had nodded, and taken the knife in its sheath, and pushed the rage that welled up inside him down deep and away.
Mr. Town’s hatred of Shadow had become a part of him. As he was falling asleep he would see Shadow’s solemn face, see that smile that wasn’t a smile, the way Shadow had of smiling without smiling that made Town want to sink his fist into the man’s gut, and even as he fell asleep he could feel his jaws squeeze together, his temples tense, his gullet burn.
He drove the Ford Explorer across the meadow, past an abandoned farmhouse. He crested a ridge and saw the tree. He parked the car a little way past it, and turned off the engine. The clock on the dashboard said it was 6:38 A.M. He left the keys in the car, and walked toward the tree.
The tree was large; it seemed to exist on its own sense of scale. Town could not have said if it was fifty feet high or two hundred. Its bark was the gray of a fine silk scarf.
There was a naked man tied to the trunk a little way above the ground by a webwork of ropes, and there was something wrapped in a sheet at the foot of the tree. Town realized what it was as he passed it. He pushed at the sheet with his foot. Wednesday’s ruined half-a-face stared out at him. He would have expected it to be alive with maggots and flies, but it was untouched by insects. It didn’t even smell bad. It looked just as it had when he had taken it to the motel.
Town reached the tree. He walked a little way around the thick trunk, away from the sightless eyes of the farmhouse, then he unzipped his fly and pissed against the trunk of the tree. He did up his fly. He walked back over to the house, found a wooden extension ladder, carried it back to the tree. He leaned it carefully against the trunk. Then he climbed up it.
Shadow hung, limply, from the ropes that tied him to the tree. Town wondered if the man were still alive: his chest did not rise or fall. Dead or almost dead, it did not matter.
“Hello, asshole,” Town said, aloud. Shadow did not move.
Town reached the top of the ladder, and he pulled out the knife. He found a small branch which seemed to meet Mr. World’s specifications, and hacked at the base of it with the knife-blade, cutting it half-through, then breaking it off with his hand. It was about thirty inches long.
He put the knife back in its sheath. Then he started to climb back down the ladder. When he was opposite Shadow, he paused. “God, I hate you,” he said. He wished he could just have taken out a gun and shot him, and he knew that he could not. And then he jabbed the stick in the air toward the hanging man, in a stabbing motion. It was an instinctive gesture, containing all the frustration and rage inside Town. He imagined that he was holding a spear and twisting it into Shadow’s guts.