Hot air buffets them through the glassless windshield. “This is gonna be a pain,” the cabbie says. “I better not go too fast. One good bug and pow.”
Niko ducks his head and lifts the jar to his face and breathes in deep. Faint sachet fading. The glow seems dimmer too. We have to hurry. He wants to tell the cabbie but his throat clamps shut whenever he tries to speak. He starts to check on Nikodemus and stops quickly. Looking Nikodemus’ way is looking back. God damn.
Niko shuts his eyes. The hot wind against his skin. The gate and all the fractured plain behind him dwindling. The endless demolition of the hopeless damned receding. Goodbye, goodbye. I am escaped yet not delivered.
Niko taps the cabbie’s shoulder. “How. you. know. be. there?”
“How’d I know to be there?”
Niko nods.
“Well.” She fidgets on the seat. “I dropped you off and drove away and I got maybe as far as we are now and I heard this huge crash. I thought Wow, it didn’t take him very long to get in trouble, and I turned around and headed back to see what happened and there you were.”
Niko stares. “How. long?”
“How long what? How long did it take me to get there?”
Niko shakes his head. “How long. from let me off. to pick me up?”
The cabbie looks him up and down. Trying to reconcile his gaunt and weathered ruin with what she tells him next. “I couldn’t have been gone three minutes,” she says.
RIDING ON THE rails again. In the distance a pale green glow.
Unlike Niko the cabbie can check her rearview mirror and she does, continually. But every time Niko croakingly asks her what she sees she only shakes her head. In the back seat Nikodemus stirs. The cabbie lights a cigarillo. “So who’s your friend?”
Niko watches the brown tube of tobacco like a predator. “My demon.” He taps his forehead.
She takes a drag and nods. “Ah,” she says in smoke as if that explains everything. Maybe for her it does. She catches Niko’s longing expression. “What happened to the pack I just gave you?”
“Fell in a river. Long time ago.”
“Oh.” She pats her pockets and fishes out a fresh pack of Swisher Sweets and hands it to him and he taps one out and sniffs. Oh yeah.
The cabbie indicates the jar in his lap. “That what you came for?” The lighter knob pops and Niko lights up. The happy scratching in his injured throat, the little death inside his lungs. He holds up the jar and turns his head to blow out smoke that dispels in the hot breeze blowing steadily against them. “That’s her.”
She nods. “So. Where to, mister?” She says it lightly like a joke but Niko thinks a moment. Fueled by nicotine his mind feels widened. He feels he’s thinking clearly for the first time in a long time. What was it the cabbie had said? I never dropped a fare off anywhere but where he said he was going.
Three minutes. I’ve been gone three minutes.
And the final act unspools before him like a scroll.
The mason jar. In the absence of Jem herself returned to him Niko had naively thought that Jemma’s soul would somehow turn back into Jemma when they crossed over. The spell would lift and she would change like some enchanted frog into a sleeping princess. Yet they had crossed over and her bottled soul remained a glowing feather. Not that this light, this essence, isn’t Jemma. A lifetime’s length it rides within the flesh, a passenger bound until the vessel makes some farther shore.
But if what the cabbie says is true the rightful container of Jemma’s soul lies in her bed not one hour dead. Not found, not taken in an ambulance, not cut up and examined, not made over and exsanguinated and filled with alien fluids, not eulogized and wept over and bid goodbye and sealed inside a coffin and ensconced within the quiet earth and left to dwindle to the elements during all the long and struggling time of Niko’s absence from the roofless earth.
Not an hour dead. And Niko holds her outcast soul upon his lap. But she diminishes. She slips out through the cracks. I cannot let her gutter while I hold her in my hands. What will I do?
What he will do—oh. Oh.
Faust in all his hubris never contemplated such alchemy as Niko now considers.
“Home,” he tells the cabbie. “Take me home.”
THE FAINT GREEN glow around the speeding cab is phosphorescent mold jellying the tunnel walls. To either side the afflicted stumble, pale-eyed Morlocks absent of past or future. Unwitting guardians of this borderland adorned in ragged relics of a dim-remembered world long left behind. Greateyed Jeremy out there somewhere, side pierced like some mutant christ. Niko hopes the simple monster will recover from his wound. Compared to creatures he encountered later Jeremy was a muppet.
He remembers something with a start. “Hey. Do you still have those candybars?” He’s already reaching for the glovebox when the cabbie says sure. His mouth floods as he opens the glovebox and pulls out a shapeless foilwrapped Chunky bar. His hands shake as he hurriedly unwraps the halfmelted candybar and shoves it into his mouth. The sweet explosion almost unbearable.
The cabbie nudges him and points out the swath in the slimy wall where the Checker Cab jumped track and blew a tire and scraped along the side. Niko nods. Written passage.
The moonish creatures press against the gelid wall and let the cab pass unmolested, their blinding encounter with the yellow car a blob of painful recent memory in their meager minds.
Niko shuts his eyes and feels the damp air on his face. It reeks of rot but he no longer notices.
The glowing length of tunnel is behind them now. Bare brown brick conjured from the dark ahead. The iron rails on which they ride are no longer rusted and the crossties are no longer rotten wood. Tie spike rail wheel.
“Your bud back there,” the cabbie says. “What are you gonna do with him when you get back?”
Niko coughs to clear his injured throat. “I haven’t thought that far.”
“I think he might be in for some trouble when we leave the tunnel.”
“We’ll make him keep his head down.”
“Not what I meant.” The cabbie glances in the rearview. At what, at what.
“Then what?” Niko feels thick and stupid and filthy and weary and sore.
“Well. He isn’t mortal is he? Like you are?”
Niko notices she doesn’t say Like us. “No.”
“Well I think he might be once we’re back.”
Niko blinks. “Might be mortal?”
She nods. “I don’t know. I mean it’s just a theory, right? But these guys.” She hooks a thumb at the back seat. “They don’t get out much. I think somehow the game is rigged against them. Otherwise they’d be taking vacations in Disneyland and screaming in the Haunted Mansion. Don’t you think?”
“But.” Niko scrunches up his face. He’s thinking about his good old buddy Phil with his trendy shades and his Rolex Oyster Perpetual Daytona Cosmograph and his hair in perfect disarray and his iPhone cased in human leather that appears from nowhere. Mortal when they’re in our world? How many times has Niko wanted to kill the supercilious son of a bitch? “Well so what if he is?”
The cabbie eyes him. “He’s bad hurt. Injuries like that probably would have killed a mortal man.”
“Yeah but he’s not a—oh.”
She stubs out her cigarillo. “Oh. If we take him to the surface it might kill him when we cross over. If he stays down here he’ll definitely heal.”