Ascending Read online

  Also an old man in suspenders, a plaid shirt, and baggy gray pants misses his granddaughter whom he hasn't seen in some time. He believes that death will catch up with him before he sees her again.

  It will. What can he do about it? A small hand will reach into him, seek out his heart and squeeze it to a stop. What can he do about it? The only hand he'll see will be his own, clutching desperately at his chest.

  Small creatures at play in a world of human hearts.

  But a woman is batting her eyelashes, too, or thinks she is, that that's what she's doing while she flirts. "Quaint," she thinks. "I am quaint in a world of the new."

  ~ * ~

  Fredrick Dunn is in several different worlds at once, and has been for years.

  ~ * ~

  So, too, is Lenny Baker, who sees the presence writhing about on the CN Tower against a backdrop of a thousand stars pulsing above and below, all around, embracing it.

  The clumsy, the uninitiated, and the gauche are a part of all these worlds. The heroic are, too, and the mundane. How could it be otherwise?

  Like Lenny Baker.

  All of them dance in the air.

  ~ * ~

  "Sir," the man said to Ryerson Biergarten, "your dog's resting his nose on me."

  Ryerson said nothing.

  The man said, "Do you hear me?" He was sitting beside Ryerson, on the window side of the subway car. He was a man of thirty-five, and he was dressed well for an evening of barhopping. He felt that he looked beautiful.

  Ryerson stayed quiet.

  The man lifted the sleeping Creosote's head gently and set it down so that Creosote's muzzle was on Ryerson's leg. Creosote's eyes fluttered open, closed; then he transferred his head back to the man's leg.

  "Lord," the man whispered, and moved closer to the window so Creosote's head dropped into the space between Ryerson's leg and the man's leg. Creosote gurgled in his sleep, then hunkered forward so his snout was once again on the man's leg. "Dammit!" the man breathed. He was sure that Ryerson was sleeping, too, though his eyes were half-open. It was the way the man's wife slept, so it wasn't strange to him.

  ~ * ~

  (Ryerson's soul was absent from the subway car. Fredrick Dunn's soul was absent from the street where he was walking. Their souls moved about high in the air above the CN Tower, each hidden from the other, as if they were in a vast dark maze where stars pulsed and the winds were fierce above them.)

  ~ * ~

  The man in the seat next to Ryerson declared, "Your dog is an annoyance, sir!"

  Ryerson looked uncomprehendingly at him.

  "Oh, damn!" the man hissed. "He's drooled on me."

  The man swiped at his pants. Creosote woke with a start, gurgled, snorted, then curled up on Ryerson's lap.

  Ryerson murmured, "I'm sorry."

  The line had been broken. He was whole again.

  ~ * ~

  "One dollar, sir."

  Lenny Baker fumbled his wallet from the inside pocket of his white sports coat, pulled out a Canadian dollar, and handed it to the young woman behind the ticket counter at the base of the CN Tower. "I'm going all the way up," he mumbled.

  "Sorry, sir?" She hadn't understood him.

  He repeated himself. She understood him. "Yes, sir. To the Space Deck level. You'll be paying an additional dollar at the lower observation deck."

  "Yes, I know."

  "Enjoy yourself, sir."

  He lumbered off to the elevator that would take him to the lower observation level, and pressed the UP button.

  The elevator came moments later, and he got in, along with a young couple and an older man.

  They started their ascent.

  The elevator operator droned on about the statistics of the tower, about the duration of the ride on the exterior elevator, and one minute forty-five seconds later, the elevator stopped. It was at the lower observation level, 1,165 feet up. The doors opened. The young couple got out, then the older man. The elevator operator looked at Lenny and smiled. "Enjoy yourself, sir," he said.

  Lenny said, "I don't want to be here."

  "Would you like to go back down, sir?"

  "No," Lenny said and got out.

  TWENTY

  On an enclosed walkway which spanned two sets of railroad tracks on the west side of the CN Tower, Fredrick Dunn stood arguing with the young man who had for so long possessed him.

  Now that young man was whole. Complete.

  His name was Steve Huckaby. A construction accident in Chicago six years earlier had brought death to him. That death had been the result of Chief Architect Fredrick Dunn's haste. It was a haste borne of greed.

  Steve Huckaby had spent the last few moments of his life in an air dance, in the exhilaration of free-fall. Then his body had impacted with the earth.

  And, at that moment, his soul had merged with the soul of Fredrick Dunn.

  "Of course you're my servant," Fredrick Dunn insisted now, on the covered walkway over the railroad tracks on the west side of the tower.

  "I ain't no one's servant!" Steve Huckaby insisted. He was blond, blue eyed, fair skinned, attractive. He wore faded blue jeans, a red plaid shirt and a pair of heavy steel-toed brown shoes. He was the perfect replica of his living self, and the few passersby moving briskly past on their way to Sparkles, the Sky-High Nightclub at the 1,165-foot level of the tower, were polite enough to ignore him and Fredrick Dunn and the argument going on.

  "I'm a part of God!" shouted Fredrick Dunn.

  "You ain't shit!" Huckaby sneered.

  "I'm much more than shit!" countered Fredrick Dunn. "Much more than shit!"

  Steve Huckaby grinned at him. "You got a shitty soul!"

  "What the hell would you know about my soul?"

  "I lived in it."

  "You weren't invited."

  "I didn't need to be."

  They were close to the window that overlooked the moat which circled the tower. The heat radiating from them was beginning to turn the beige vinyl wall covering below the window a dull brown.

  A passerby noticed the heat. She was a woman of sixty-eight, with keen senses, and she told herself that the heating system must be working overtime.

  Heat existed around Steve Huckaby and Fredrick Dunn because a kind of forced and unnatural birth had occurred. Where only one entity had taken up space in the psychic atmosphere, now there were two. Friction was the result. The result of that friction was heat.

  Fredrick Dunn shouted at Steve Huckaby, "I didn't want to wrap those people up in plastic and stick them in the ceilings!"

  The old woman stopped when she heard that and looked back. Fredrick Dunn and Steve Huckaby were a dozen feet behind her. They were very involved in their argument and didn't notice her.

  "What you do with meat," cried Steve Huckaby, "don't make no difference to the meat!"

  "Well, by God," sputtered Fredrick Dunn, "that's damned . . . sick!"

  "And you loved it!"

  "It made me cringe! It made me squirm! I didn't love it!"

  The old woman standing a dozen feet away kept up with the news, and the news about the "Toronto High Places Killer" was very familiar to her. She thought, listening to Steve Hucicaby and Fredrick Dunn, It's them! and continued to listen, though with growing trepidation.

  Steve Huckaby said, as a kind of loud, sly aside, "Listen, man, I was in you, I know what you're all about."

  Fredrick Dunn was offended. "I'm a Christian!" he insisted.

  "So the hell am I!" Steve Huckaby countered.

  By now, the old woman was beginning to believe that she was overhearing two crazy people in some kind of spontaneous, free-associative argument. She was beginning to feel less and less that either of them was the actual "Toronto High Places Killer" when they both noticed her at the same time.

  She smiled. She was a slight woman with a thin face and broad lips that were covered with dark red lipstick, so the smile, though small and nervous, looked very large and clownlike.

  Steve Huckaby ti
lted his head at her. He sensed age in her, and wisdom, and he respected it because she reminded him very much of his grandmother. He stared silently at her. She continued to smile back at him. She wanted desperately to reassure him, and Fredrick Dunn—who had also turned his head to stare at her—that she was very harmless, as harmless as a bunny, which was the phrase that came to her. But she couldn't speak. She knew, looking into Steve Huckaby's still blue eyes that he was something she had never dealt with before, not even in her nightmares, and she knew without actually thinking it that speaking to him would be like speaking to a steel wall. She also knew without thinking it that he had the moral sense of a wall.

  "I am a Christian!" he insisted at her. He was becoming quite taken with the fact that she looked like his grandmother. He hadn't seen his grandmother in years.

  "It makes no difference, though, about Christians," Fredrick Dunn said.

  The woman's mouth dropped open, revealing sparkling white teeth and a pale pink tongue.

  Two punk rockers strolled onto the walkway. One was a girl of fifteen who was wearing a tight black leather skirt and had bright orange hair; the other was a boy of seventeen who looked very much like her, except that he was wearing black leather pants and his orange hair had been cut into a Mohawk.

  "Uh, something strange here, Brenda," he said.

  Brenda nodded. "Sure," she said noncomittally.

  "Awful hot, I'd say."

  They hurried past and were over the hump of the walkway, on their way down the other side, approaching the area where the tickets to the tower were sold, when Fredrick Dunn and Steve Huckaby stopped their argument. It was a sense of urgency that stopped them. A sense of being crowded, of needing air. An awareness that the psychic atmosphere had become stifling. Fredrick Dunn equated it with the feeling a harried parent of many small children might get finding them flocking around his feet. Steve Huckaby merely felt breathless, though he hadn't taken a breath in years.

  They walked quickly, men with a purpose, toward the area where tickets to the tower were sold. On their way, Steve Huckaby put his arm around the waist of the open-mouthed woman. "Hello, Grandmother," he said.

  The heat around him was unbearable, and she could only gasp for air. He carried her along as if she were a rag doll. After a dozen yards, he let her go and she plopped to the beige indoor/ outdoor carpet like a sack of laundry. The memory of his grandmother had sunk once again into the murky pool that held the memories of his life on earth. And he saw only the surface of that pool, dark and impenetrable. Now and again, memories floated like dead fish to the surface of the pool, and he peered wonderingly at them.

  ~ * ~

  A woman with shoulder-length straight blond hair, a long, purposeful stride, and dressed in a voluminous, earth-colored skirt and a man's gray herringbone tweed jacket came onto the walkway and saw the old woman lying motionless, saw Fredrick Dunn and Steve Huckaby moving over the hump of the walkway, and she called to them, "Hey, there's a woman on the floor there!" They continued walking. "Dammit!" she called. "I said there's a woman lying there!" Still, they continued walking. The blond woman ran over to the old woman lying on the carpet, rolled her over, and looked at her face. She gasped and shrank back from what she saw. A scream built quickly in her throat. And tore loose.

  ~ * ~

  "Woman screaming," said Derek Swade, the manager at a concession stand near the base of the tower, close to where tickets were sold and where Lenny Baker had bought his ticket ten minutes earlier. Swade was talking to a young woman named Marnie Heller, his assistant manager.

  Marnie said, "I heard it."

  Derek shushed her. He heard another scream. "There's another one," he said.

  "Yes," Marnie said. "What do you think it is, Derek?"

  "I think it's a woman screaming."

  "Do you think she's in trouble?"

  "That's possible, yes."

  "Do you think we should call security?"

  ~ * ~

  The old woman had no face, nor any skull beneath the missing oval of her face. Nor any brain in the missing skull cavity. She had only darkness. No blood, no bone, no flesh. Only a simple, deep, and articulate oval of darkness where her face had been.

  Words came out of that oval of darkness.

  "Help me. Please help me!"

  TWENTY-ONE

  When he was on Front Street West, outside the entrance to the CN Tower, Ryerson Biergarten saw the presence. He remembered encountering it decades before and watching it in awe and wonder. He did not wonder now. He had a sense of it—of what it was—in the same way that he had a sense for the way electricity worked, and why comets sprouted tails.

  He also sensed that there was great trouble within the CN Tower.

  There were two sets of cement steps ahead. One, to his left, led to Waldo's Restaurant, the other led directly to the tower. Above the glass doors which led to the tower, white letters on the gray concrete read, CN TOWER, and below it, LA TOUR CN, and below that, ENTRANCE.

  He went up the steps and through those doors. There was a short open area and another set of glass doors beyond.

  He was carrying Creosote. He set the dog down, looked earnestly at him, and said, "Stay!" Creosote's flat, toothy face was alive with confusion. "Stay!" Ryerson repeated, settled on his haunches, and took Creosote's face in his hands. He read not only confusion in the dog, but a sense of abandonment, too. Ryerson shook his head. "I'm sorry, pal. I'm going somewhere." He stopped. Where was he going? Into the tower, yes, but then where? He scratched Creosote's neck lovingly. The dog inclined his head toward his master's hand—I like that. More! Ryerson said again, "Stay!" then straightened and went quickly through the second set of glass doors which would lead him to the tower. He looked back.

  Creosote hadn't budged.

  ~ * ~

  Two uniformed cops cruising near L'Hotel, a few hundred feet away, got the first call: "Unspecified trouble at the CN Tower. All available units respond at once."

  "Charlie fourteen, Roger, am responding," one of the uniformed cops called back, and within seconds the car came to a halt in front of the same doors that Ryerson had gone through moments before.

  ~ * ~

  It was need that drove Steve Huckaby and Fredrick Dunn now—the same sort of need that drives earthworms from the ground during a rain. The same need that pushes a fetus from the womb.

  The need for space and air.

  But Steve Huckaby and Fredrick Dunn had other needs, as well. The need for altitude. The need to return to the place of their birth.

  They stepped into the exterior elevator that would take them 1,160 feet up to the Skypod observation level. The operator gasped for breath and leaped from the elevator.

  The doors closed.

  The walls became hot.

  The wiring sizzled.

  The elevator stayed put.

  ~ * ~

  At Sparkles, The Sky-High Nightclub, someone had suggested—after overhearing part of a phone conversation between the bartender and the tower's security people—that there was a fire at ground level. It was a suggestion that sent a number of people to the windows in an attempt to get a glimpse of the base of the tower. The attempt was in vain because the tower curved sharply inward below the windows. Still, people looked down, more than a few noting loudly that if there were indeed a fire, then fire trucks would be arriving.

  A man spotted the police cruiser parked on Front Street West, in front of the tower's main entrance, its roof lights flashing. "There's a fire truck!" he called.

  "No," said his date, "it's not a fire truck, it'sa cop car."

  "Where?" said a man at another window.

  "There!" the woman said, nodding.

  "Where?" he asked again.

  "Is it a fire truck?" someone else shouted.

  "There's a fire truck down there!" someone yelled.

  "No, it's a cop car."

  Another cruiser appeared.

  "Two fire trucks!" someone called.

  The
bartender bellowed, "There is no fire!"

  But he'd said the magic word, of course. Fire. Then he repeated it. "There is no fire. Please don't panic!" He had a good low voice, a voice full of confidence and authority, but he'd put great stress on the words "fire" and "panic," and it was that stress which pushed people farther toward the windows in a vain search for flames at the base of the tower.

  "Get away from the goddamned windows!" the bartender bellowed.

  "I can't see a friggin' thing!" someone yelled.

  "What if there really is a fire?" someone else shouted. "Christ, then we'd be trapped."

  "There is no damned fire!" the bartender insisted. He came around quickly from behind the bar and stood behind the line of people—there were several dozen of them at the windows—and said again, "There is no fire!"

  "But there are fire trucks!"

  "Will you for God's sake listen to me!" the bartender bellowed.

  A few people turned to listen. The rest kept their eyes on the two police cars on Front Street West. The bartender shouted, to be heard above the hubbub of grim speculation in the large room, "Even if there was a fire, which there isn't, there's no way it could reach up here. Think about it! There's eleven hundred and sixty feet of cement between any fire—and there isn't a fire—and us. Eleven hundred and sixty feet of cement, for Christ's sake!"

  The room quieted. His argument was rational and convincing.

  The bartender smiled, pleased that he could be so persuasive. Then a man asked him, "But if there is a fire, does that mean we have to walk down?"

  The bartender wasn't sure at first how to answer the question. There were two elevators, exterior and interior. Another elevator led to the Space Deck, 400 feet above, but it didn't go down from where they were. He said, "Sure, in a fire you walk down!"

  "My God!" someone said. "The bartender said there's a fire, and we've got to walk down!"

  "Holy shit!" someone yelled. "We're trapped up here!"

  "There's no damned fire!" yelled the bartender.

  ~ * ~

  Lenny Baker was standing motionless in a corridor outside Sparkles. He was motionless because he was incredibly frightened, and he was frightened because he felt as if he were in two different worlds at the same time and he was familiar with only one of them—the world where people nearby were working themselves into a panic, the world where "communication wands" rested on the windows that overlooked Toronto (and if a person held one of the wands to his ear and stood close to the window, he could get a speech about some aspect of the tower: its construction, history, et cetera), the world where his bladder had been threatening to let go for an hour. But he was not familiar with that other world, the world where the presence existed, the world that was as new and strange and enticing to him as color would be to a blind man.