Chapter 55: The Faces of God
None of the mortal humans in the subway cabin could see the tutelary, at least not for what it was. Nancy Belmont was yammering in my ear as I tried to concentrate on getting the hell out of the cabin and the station without getting a hug from the hedgehog knight.
“Lambton! It’s the Lambton knight who killed the Worm!”
Only the name meant anything to me. I had to get to Lambton Mills, the neighbourhood where my grandmother had lived. If that knight was the primary tutelary keeping the unclean spirits out of Lambton Mills, and it had followed me over here to Kipling station, I had a chance to run back to an unguarded neighbourhood. Crisis and opportunity – sometimes that was better than all the analysis and planning the experts can give.
Knights are slow in all their armor. I was fast. He couldn’t have seen more than the back of my head.
“We’re planting it as soon as we arrive, which will be as soon as possible!” I told everyone, reeling out of the train car and off the platform, leaping up the stairs to the street, crossing the street with barely a thought of traffic, getting lucky this time. “Never mind backtracking and sneaking – if he found me at this distance, others can too. Let me know if you see a spade on the way over!”
From Kipling to Lambton, mostly in a straight line, mostly on Dundas Street, I hammered the pavement with my feet. An electronic billboard in front of a told me it was not yet 9 am as I judged myself to be halfway there from the subway station. I’d have more than two hours to flee by hook or by crook, by taxi or by bus, before Belie rose from his coffin like vampires do in the movies with his superior powers awakening.
The price of this early plant and departure: basically a straight line on the map pointing toward my grandmother’s house once anyone got on my trail. I had planned a very indirect route on foot getting me there later – to throw tutelaries off, to scope out the scene before having to stop anywhere for a prolonged time. But also for another reason that hit me like a thunderbolt as I crossed the Humber River: for my family. I came to a sudden stop, all but slapping myself in the forehead.
Ideally, I wanted the vampires to never know who I had been in life. That would keep my living family members safe. The tutelaries would probably find it out eventually, but they had rules. The vampiric hunters though? I couldn’t be this fucking obvious …
Then I turned around in an indecisive swoon, looking across the bridge to the Humber River, and saw the Lambton knight power-walking down the sidewalk after me, not so slow anymore.
No choice. I’d thought and thought and let the universe – in the form of a man covered in spikes – force my hand again.
I scooped up a blue spade as a I ran through a suburbs of cramped 1950s homes, stealing it from a front yard garden packed with dried brambles.
Nocome said, “Give me control. I can make you faster, and give you day-darkness to empower your escape after the berry is planted.”
“Not now, bitch,” I hissed. I think I startled a little old lady sweeping her driveway as I passed. She was staring suspiciously at my blue spade as if she’d seen it in the hands of someone else many times. Why couldn’t it be an ordinary black spade? Silly me: the sight of a young man sprinting with a spade with any color would be odd.
“I can push back the knight. You should destroy that lady with the broom.” Nocome still couldn’t comprehend the number of witnesses in a city or the speed at which questions would be asked.
As deadly as he was the Lambton knight looked ridiculous in the broad daylight, swinging his arms and legs to get his heavy body up to speed. I think we were about even in speed now, him a block and a half away.
Under the railroad bridge. I knew where I was without all the extra memories backing up my navigation. The bakery. Turned the corner. Past the school. And … there it was. I was finally here and I couldn’t even stop to just look around and reminisce.
The fuckers! They’d cut down the tree in the front yard!
Clenching my hand tight on the blue spade’s handle, I got to work, guided by some sense of justice to put the berry in a hole right on the spot where the tree had been uprooted in the front yard. The panting of my breath – part tired, part angry, part laughing with my own silly anger – obscured any sounds of clanking metal on its way down the sidewalk. There was a car in the driveway, so I expected the current owners to come out and start yelling … a little problem.
When I was mortal I was scared of most strangers on some base level, never really certain that I’d left childhood. I’d be embarrassed, awkward, struggling to avoid confrontation with an indignant homeowner. But now I’d faced the white Pazuzu-face of Belie and the Auschwitz-body of Nocome and the anglerfish-teeth of Lake Simcoe’s denizens and the shapeshifting nonsense of Nanabozho and the hair-raising cries of thunderbirds and the steel threads of the Iron Spider. The knight coming to hug me to death was now close to just annoying; any intruding human would have been welcome just to yell at.
It was done in thirty seconds, the hole a gouge about a foot deep taking the dried-out husk of elderberry. Once it was filled back in with earth I tossed the blue spade into the hedge.
Someone grabbed my shoulders.
No – two someones.
By the time the Lambton knight powerwalked by, I was safe in the attic of my grandmother’s house. And I was a stammering, embarrassed, awkward child all over again.
My grandfather died of throat cancer when I was four years old, so I only knew him through pictures in which I saw a man who rarely smiled frame to frame. Forcing my memory, I couldn’t go back any further than his funeral. His wife had outlived him by many years, and I had many memories of my grandmother and this house, all the little moments in each room, dinners and birthdays and Christmas and the funerals of her siblings and friends and that final funeral at the end.
Nietzsche said that God was dead; Freud said that God is dad. Getting into my own head to the best of my ability, I’d figured out in my youth that when I thought about any kind of ultimate or divine judgement I wasn’t really worried about the judgement of a strange god with a booming voice, but of my older relatives – those who were either gone or seen so infrequently that the occasional visit was an event. If I met an older relative frequently enough they became ‘normal’ people in my mind, ordinary and flawed, more comfortable but unable to fulfill this nebulous and unrealistic role. It couldn’t be purely abstract, or too familiar. So the relatives who lived farther away, or didn’t live at all, clicked into that alleged hole in my developing mind.
There was one face of god: silent, reserved, permanently mysterious.
There was the other face of god: open, chatty, supportive, trying to make up for months in minutes.
So what did it mean when they didn’t speak to me?
As a mere human I had been hurriedly shoved indoors, so fast that I was basically teleported into a closet in the second floor of the old house, squished among jackets and pants with shoes under my feet. I could just make out the sound of the Lambton knight clanking by in his spiked armor. After a pause there was a click of the door handle, and they let me out. I looked down at them, being a tall one in the family.
Not just my grandparents. My grandmother’s sister, her husband, their dog Scooter, their neighbour who had lived just a few doors down from here, now all dead. I don’t know how they all fit in this bedroom – completely repainted and refurnished from what I remembered as a child.
I said, “I know I don’t belong here.”
They were smiling, waving … and nodding, all packed together, their ghostly shoulders almost passing through each other. Why were they so different from the other tutelaries, who had been matter-of-fact and clear and talkative and just more solid? They were treating me like – well like a human. When humans see ghosts its always vague, unclear, unconvincing to others. As a vampire I could see clearer, and even at this time of day I had seen the Lambton knight well enough … but I could just barely see them through a kind of fog.
So they didn’t see me as a vampire because they had known me so well in life? Was that the problem? The longer I looked at them the more certain I was that they were caught in a loop, like a screensaver. How unsatisfying. How depressing. The veil between life and death wouldn’t be so cooperative. They were capable of hauling me off the front yard up here in a flash, but they couldn’t or wouldn’t make a single word, or a single sound.
“Well … I have no idea what to say, so I guess we’re all stuck.”
That made my great-aunt Nancy laugh, still muted.
“Should I move up to hide in the attic, or the basement?” I thought that I might interpret this as my judgement: up or down.
And they all pointed up, at once!
Chapter 56: Becoming a Mule
Image credits: John Dickson Batten, W. Carter, US Army Institute of Heraldry, GTD Aquitaine, Jean-Leon Gerome (Pollice verso, 1872)