I gripped his throat and slammed his head against the bricks. He tugged at my wrist, and I clamped my free hand over his face and twice more drove his head against the wall. The eyes of the former acolyte floated upward, and a stench of dead fish came from his mouth. When I let go, he crumpled between the garbage cans. I smashed my boot onto his head, heard his skull crack, and kept stamping until the side of his head turned soft.
These idiots should know enough to keep their mouths shut.
Great Beings, You who in aeons to come shall linger over these words penned by Your Devoted Servant, You alone comprehend my certainty that a great change is in the air. The culmination of that Sacred Mission entrusted to me and so teasingly adumbrated by the Providence Master has begun to declare its appearance upon the earthly stage. As I walk unseen through the city, the flow of information sharpens and intensifies, bringing with it the promise of that destiny for which I have waited since I was a boy taking lessons from the foxes and owls in Johnson’s Woods.
Here, in a room stacked with microwave ovens and laptop computers, a professional thief and occasional arsonist named Anton “Frenchy” La Chapelle lies unconscious in sleeping embrace with one Cassandra “Cassie” Little, a hard-bitten little scrubber. Hello, Frenchy, you delightfully nasty piece of work! You don’t know it, but I imagine that your pointless life is going to serve some purpose after all.
Here, on the second floor of a rooming house, Otto Bremen, a grade-school crossing guard, slumbers before his television screen with a not quite empty bottle of bourbon nestled in his crotch. The last half inch of a cigarette burns inexorably toward the first two fingers of his right hand. The conjunction of the cigarette and Frenchy’s secondary occupation suggests a possibility, but many things are possible, Otto, and whether or not you are to die in a fire—as I rather think you are—I wish, with the puppet-master’s fondness for his insensate and pliable creatures, that you might know a minute portion of the triumph rushing toward me.
For in my city’s secret corners I already see runners of the blue fire. It hovers over Frenchy and his partner, it travels down the crossing guard’s arm, and it gathers itself for an electrifying moment along the rain gutters on Cherry Street, where the surviving Dunstans eke out their blasted lives. Enormous forces have begun to come into play. Around our tiny illuminated platform suspended in the cosmic darkness, the ancient Gods, my true ancestors, congregate with rustlings of leathery wings and rattlings of filthy claws to witness what their great-grandson shall accomplish.
A most marvelous event has taken place. Star Dunstan has come home to die.
Can you hear me, slug-spittle?
Listen to me, you exhausted bag of skin—
My dearest hope is that your flesh should blister, that you should have to labor for the smallest gulps of air and feel individual organs explode within you, so on and so forth, your eyes to burst, that kind of thing, but though I shall not be able to manage these matters on your behalf, my old sweetheart, I shall do my best to arrange them for our son.
3
Right from the beginning, I had the sense that something crucially significant, something without which I could never be whole, was missing. When I was seven, my mother told me that as soon as I’d learned to sit up by myself, I used to do this funny thing where I turned around and tried to look behind me. Boom, down I’d go, but the second I hit the ground I’d turn my head to check that same spot. According to Star, Aunt Nettie said, “That boy must think the doctor cut off his tail when he was born.” Uncle Clark chimed in with, “He appears to think someone’s sneakin’ up on him.”
“They meant you had something wrong with you,” Star told me, “which was to be expected, me being your mother. I said, ‘My boy Neddie’s smart as a whip, and he’s seeing if his shadow followed him inside the house.’ They shut up, because that was exactly how you looked—like you were trying to find your shadow.”
I can scarcely describe the combination of relief and uncertainty this caused in me. Star had given me proof that my sense of loss was