Ascending Read online

  Once, in his mid-teens, that moment had lasted longer, and he had stood openmouthed in awe of it. His Uncle Lucius had been with him.

  "Tell me what you're seeing," Uncle Lucius had coaxed.

  Lenny could only shake his head.

  "Lift your hand up," said Uncle Lucius.

  Lenny lifted his hand slowly, as if it were very heavy. "Now," said Uncle Lucius, when Lenny's hand was poised at the horizontal, "touch."

  Then the moment ended.

  Lenny looked quizzically at Uncle Lucius. Again he shook his head. "I . . . I don't. . ."

  Uncle Lucius said, "You have seen all there is to see. I want you to describe it."

  "I can't . . . I don't know how . . ."

  Uncle Lucius nodded. "I understand," he said.

  Lenny wished now that Uncle Lucius were here so he could explain to him what his own phrase—"All there is to see"—really meant.

  The presence.

  A phrase came to Lenny as he witnessed it. It was a phrase that had been drilled into him by his tenth-grade American history teacher ("Have you got that now, Mr. Baker? Have you got that now?")

  That phrase was E pluribus unum. Out of the many, one.

  Because the presence, this presence had been generated by all the chic, attractive, smiling Torontonians, and by him, and by the dying, the old, the just-born and the about-to-be-born. It bound them together. They made it. They shared it. It was like the air that moved from here to there, got inhaled and exhaled, exchanged, changed, and changed again.

  E pluribus unum.

  It was from all of them, and it bound them together. It was their nakedness. It was themselves. It moved around them and through them like a fog.

  It was all there was to see.

  ~ * ~

  "And that's all you know, Mr. Biergarten?" barked Chief Inspector Marion Erik. He was a tall, rotund, bald man who rarely smiled. He was scowling now. On his round red face it looked like the caricature of a scowl painted on a basketball. He added, "For God's sake, what in the hell did we hire you for?"

  "You didn't hire me," Ryerson said. He was seated on an overstuffed red leather chair in a lounge on the first floor of Rick's building. For most of the conversation, Chief Inspector Erik had been seated in a chair near him, but as the questioning proceeded, it had been clear to Ryerson that the inspector's agitation and frustration was growing more and more acute. Finally the man had thrown himself from the chair and taken up a position in front of Ryerson, feet apart, body bent slightly forward, hands thrust hard into the pockets of his gray suit pants, where he clenched and unclenched his fists. He shook his head. "What kind of psychic are you? Hell, we know more than you do."

  "I've got to find my dog." Ryerson's tone was hard, his pitch slightly off-key.

  "Your dog? What the hell does your dog have to do with these murders, Mr. Biergarten?"

  "Nothing." Ryerson kept his eyes straight ahead, so his gaze was between Inspector Erik's knees. "But he's my dog, and I love him, and he's lost somewhere in the city."

  "And so is the asshole who chopped up two of my best detectives!" bellowed the chief inspector.

  Ryerson looked up at him and cocked his head. "You have the man's name. It's Fredrick Dunn. He works in this building. He's an architect—"

  Erik cut in, turning sideways to Ryerson and pointing stiffly at the door. "You can go! I want you to go! You've been an embarrassment to the city and to this police department for too damned long. My God, I wish I had the authority to order you out of Toronto."

  Ryerson looked at him, head still cocked, for several moments. Then he stood up and moved stiffly past him, toward the door. When he was halfway there, the chief inspector called, "What I can do, Mr. Biergarten, and what I am going to do is get a court order barring you from talking to any of the principals in this case. I should have that accomplished by the evening."

  Ryerson stopped. He glanced back. He said, barely above a whisper, "I don't need to talk to anyone, Inspector." Then he turned and left the building.

  EIGHTEEN

  TWO HOURS LATER-THE SAME BUILDING

  Chief Inspector Erik was standing in the doorway to Rick Dunn's office after the bodies of Max Tyler, Dan Creed, and Roberta Shiffren had been taken to the morgue, and was saying to himself that Canada was going to hell in a hand basket, when a uniformed officer tapped him on the shoulder and said, "Sir? Someone to talk to you."

  The inspector turned, blinked, and said, "Who?"

  The uniformed cop nodded to indicate a tall, thin man with a mop of white hair who was standing in the doorway to the outer office. The officer explained, "It's the janitor."

  "What's he want?"

  "He says someone frightened him, sir. He wanted to report it."

  Inspector Erik went over to the janitor, who smiled and bent his head forward, as if to see better, then stuck his hand out. The inspector shook it and asked, "What can I do for you?"

  "Men in the elevator," the janitor said and stopped smiling. His voice was a surprisingly strong tenor.

  "What about them?" asked the inspector.

  The janitor nodded. "They weren't supposed to be there."

  "I see." The inspector wanted a quick end to this conversation. "Perhaps you could give that information to your superior, whoever he may be."

  "They were evil men!" the janitor declared.

  The inspector wasn't impressed. He said anyway, "And what did they do that caused you to believe they were evil?"

  "They made the elevator burn!" the janitor answered.

  "What do you mean they made the elevator burn?"

  "It's what they did!" the janitor cried.

  "When was this?"

  "An hour ago. It was an hour ago."

  The inspector glanced around at the cop. "What do you know about this?"

  "Nothing, sir. It's the first I've heard of it."

  The inspector looked at the janitor. "Can you take this officer to the elevator you're talking about, please?" he asked. The janitor nodded enthusiastically.

  ~ * ~

  And now, at dusk, the presence was a moving, slithering, dancing luminescence, airy and ghostlike.

  Lenny Baker didn't know where his feet had taken him. The presence was its own pathway.

  He had blundered across streets against traffic lights, had plunged through crowds of Torontonians, and now he was following one particular pathway that the presence had created for him. He didn't know where it would lead, and he followed it in response to his psychic sense, which he had never been able to define or control.

  Now that psychic sense had exploded, and it was why he was seeing what he was seeing—the presence, the luminescence snaking through the city, linking all its living things.

  It was a part of them, it was from them, because of them—like ten million phone calls over ten million telephone lines laid down randomly on the countryside. And Lenny knew which line to follow.

  Though he didn't know why, or to what it might lead.

  ~ * ~

  Ryerson Biergarten was trying to tune in to Creosote. He was aware that there were far more pressing issues at hand, that the ultimately moral thing to do would be to forget his Boston Bull terrier and concentrate on finding Fredrick Dunn.

  But that was something that scared the hell out of him. He knew as graphically and as clearly as Fredrick Dunn himself the power the man possessed, and it was a power that Ryerson was not enthusiastic to challenge—though challenge it he must. In time.

  He was near the corner of Bloor Street West and Queen Street, in the Yorkville district of Toronto. A breeze had come up and the air was growing chilly. He was standing still, trying hard to get some sense of Creosote, but was having no luck.

  As a point of focus, he was using a mannequin dressed in a black evening gown. The mannequin was facing him from a shop window across the street. Next to the mannequin sat a life-size ceramic representation of a long-muzzled white dog with black spots. The dog's head was pointed toward the mann
equin. On the other side of the mannequin, a male mannequin sat in a beige wing chair with his legs crossed and a pipe in his mouth. He was wearing a purple robe, gray slacks, and slippers, and his gaze was on Ryerson.

  The dog turned its head and looked at Ryerson. At first Ryerson didn't notice because his concentration was on the female mannequin. But after a few moments, the visual information—that something just outside his circle of focus had changed—got through to his brain, and he looked at the dog. It had no expression. Its black-and-white ceramic eyes were half-closed, and its long mouth was open partway, so the suggestion of a light pink tongue was visible within.

  The dog stood. For several moments, its large, lean body—like the body of a greyhound but with the coloring of a Dalmatian—stayed still. Then quickly, with sure, fluid grace, it leaped through the plate-glass window without shattering it, turned left, and loped north on Queen Street.

  Ryerson followed, his stride as long and as graceful as the dog's. He knew that eventually he would need to cross Queen Street; perhaps, he decided, when he reached Yonge.

  He was running very fast (in college, he'd been a champion long-distance runner) and skillfully dodging people while keeping his eye on the ceramic dog moving swiftly down the well-lighted street.

  Suddenly the dog veered west down an alley. Ryerson glanced left quickly, then right. The street was clear. He vaulted across it after the dog and into the alley.

  He stopped.

  The dog was nowhere in sight.

  He peered behind at the street, then back into the alley. Nothing. "Hell!" he breathed. These runners, as he thought of them, were so damned unreliable—lose sight of them for just a moment, and . . .

  A flash of white appeared at the end of the alleyway. He riveted his gaze on it. It was the dog. It turned right, so it was once again heading north—on York Street, now—and was gone. Ryerson ran after it. He knew that if it stayed out of his sight for very long, his psychic connection with it would end, and he'd be back to square one.

  ~ * ~

  "Inspector Erik?" said the uniformed cop.

  The inspector turned from the window in Fredrick Dunn's office. "Yes?" He saw that the janitor was standing with the uniformed cop, who looked confused, gestured toward the door, and said, "It's a very strange thing, sir. Perhaps you should come and see it for your-self."

  "What's a very strange thing?" asked Erik.

  "The elevator, sir."

  The janitor was smiling a flat polite smile, as if he thought he represented a necessary intrusion.

  "What elevator?" asked Inspector Erik, agitated.

  "The service elevator," answered the cop, and he gestured again and grinned quickly, as if embarrassed. "There are strange sorts of shadows in it, sir." A brief pause. "Shadows!" he reiterated, paused again, and finished, "Burned into the elevator, sir." He nodded. "Into the wall of the elevator. Sort of like that wall at the Science Center. Where your shadow freezes."

  NINETEEN

  The white ceramic dog led Ryerson to Grenville Street, at the north edge of Yorkville, and then to a narrow alleyway between two sets of red-brick row houses. The dog paused and looked back. Ryerson had run a good distance and was out of breath, so he had to stop at the front of the alleyway.

  When Ryerson had caught his breath, the ceramic dog loped to the middle of the long alleyway, stopped, and looked back again. Ryerson was closing quickly. The dog vanished in a microsecond's puff of flame, like flash paper.

  ~ * ~

  Inspector Erik reached out and fingered the scorched area on the wall of the service elevator. He scowled, glanced at the uniformed cop standing just outside the elevator, then at the janitor, then once more at the scorched area, which he again touched. "I'll be damned," he said.

  "It's what those two evil men did," proclaimed the janitor, nodding gravely.

  "Then what?" asked Inspector Erik.

  "Huh?" said the janitor.

  "Then what did they do?"

  "I don't know. I don't know what they did. I didn't see them do anything."

  The scorched areas on the elevator wall were roughly man shaped. One was taller than the other, and they were connected at the arms, as if the two men had been standing very close to one another.

  "Isn't it just like I said?" asked the uniformed cop. "Like the shadow wall at the Science Center?"

  Inspector Erik looked at him oddly. "No. These are scorch marks, Officer. The wall at the Science Center doesn't actually burn."

  "Oh," the cop said, cowed. "You're right, of course. It isn't."

  "I could smell 'em," offered the janitor, and cocked his head. "I still can."

  Inspector Erik sniffed conspicuously. "Yes," he whispered.

  The uniformed cop nodded. "Me, too." A brief pause. "It's the burned wall."

  ~ * ~

  Early evening in downtown Toronto is a deluge of light and movement. It is not a terrifically loud time. Sounds are muffled, and even normally shrill voices seem quieter. This may very well be by comparison to the deluge of light and movement, magnified by so much glass and height and air. The three commingle to produce a sort of steady high-tech aura of power, the kind of power that whispers broadly and convincingly, We are all very civilized here, and this is what we have built.

  Lenny Baker, very near the CN Tower in his nearly blind and awestruck search through the presence, was only dimly aware of this power and civility. He was also just dimly aware that he was hungry. He would do nothing about it, of course. He would follow wherever the presence led him.

  ~ * ~

  Ryerson Biergarten, seated at a small table in a café in Old York, said to the waitress, "How long have I been here?"

  She answered a little peevishly, "Two hours, close to three. More coffee?"

  "Yes," he answered. "More."

  She frowned and poured more coffee.

  Ryerson nodded to himself. "You're right. My dog is hungry."

  The waitress paused in her pouring of the coffee. She shrugged—perhaps she had said something without realizing. She nodded at Creosote, seated next to Ryerson's right foot and looking hungrily at her. "Get him a burger?" she suggested, finished pouring the coffee, and looked questioningly at Ryerson.

  "Yes." Ryerson glanced at her. "He'd like a burger." He reached down and scratched Creosote's chin.

  "And you?" asked the waitress.

  Ryerson glanced at her again, shook his head, and looked blankly at his coffee.

  "Are you all right?" asked the waitress.

  "No burger for me," Ryerson said, his head still turned. "Just one for my dog. Uncooked, of course."

  "Yes, uncooked. Right away," said the waitress. "Are you sure you're all right?"

  Ryerson shook his head but didn't look at her. "No. I'm not. There's something I've got to do, and I don't want to do it."

  "A common complaint, eh?" said the waitress. "Uncooked hamburger for the pooch."

  Ryerson looked at her. "Yes. For the pooch." He scooped Creosote up, stood, said, "In a minute or two," and moved off toward Yonge Street and the subway entrance there.

  ~ * ~

  Down deep within himself, Fredrick Dunn wanted very badly to climb into his Jaguar and take it for a good fast spin on the back roads twenty miles north of Toronto. He needed that. He also wanted to swagger into some bar on Bloor Street and pick up a woman and take her home. And he wanted to write a letter to his sweet mother in Chicago, even if she wouldn't understand it; or, understanding it, wouldn't remember that he—Fredrick Dunn—was her son. Those were things that human beings did. Things that he had done when he was a human being.

  It was sad to glance at his dark reflection in the shop windows. Sad to see the shape and movements that were human and know that it was a disguise that had been thrown over him, a disguise he had thrown over himself.

  He would never again send anyone Christmas cards. That was something very human. People were always talking about what separated humans from animals. That did. Sending Christmas ca
rds.

  It was odd, but he felt spiritual. Cosmic. At one with the universe. The universe, after all, was as murderous as he—it swallowed stars, it ate galaxies, and he had absorbed some of that. It wasn't a need, it was reality—the only reality, too, because it lasted forever. And he had absorbed a piece of it. All humans could. Some others had, and they were well known to history.

  So, too, would he absorb the creature walking with him, just as the creature had absorbed him, had moved his arms and legs about and made him do things in a way that he didn't want to do them. Like hide bodies in ceilings. For example, wrap bodies in plastic and hide them in ceilings and wait for them to fall on someone, plop!

  That was a joke, wasn't it?

  If so, then it was a cosmic joke because that creature was also spiritual, had absorbed some small digit of the universe, was cosmic, had once perhaps had bones and blood, as he—Fredrick Dunn—still did, or supposed he did. It was the costume of the universe itself—blood and bones, that small fragment of the universe wrapped up behind a face that grinned. Everyone grinned. And that was the key. He—Fredrick Dunn—had discovered what no one else anywhere had discovered, that he was a living, breathing fragment of the universe that swallowed galaxies whole.

  He was a part of God.

  So that creature walking with him was his servant.

  ~ * ~

  Ryerson did not want to do this alone. It was a real struggle now even to keep his bearings—he had to say to himself, though not in so many words, I am on a subway beneath Yonge Street in Toronto, and I am a part of the world that wakes up in the morning, and breathes and eats candy and elects people to public office. Because he was beginning to feel strongly that he was a part of the other world that overlaid and encompassed and embraced all that, and embraced so much else.

  I am beneath Yonge Street in Toronto, he told himself.

  Above me now people are going to dinner. Some of those people are concerned with the color of their clothes, concerned that gray doesn't match with brown or blue with red. Some of them are wondering if the restaurant they're going to will accept credit cards, and some are worried that their cars are illegally parked and they'll get towed.