Blind Shrike

THIRTY ONE The Future

In a street of nightmares, Spyder saw the Black Clerks.

The street had been roofed over, like the souks of Morocco. The sound attracted Spyder to the spot, a strange and deliberate animal wail—screams extracted with mechanical precision.

Inside the dark, cramped street was a gallery of horrors. Men turned over bonfires on huge metal spits. Women were crushed under rolling boulders studded with surgical blades. Children screamed as spiders and over-sized ants tore at their young flesh. Terrified people were tormented up and down the length of the street, shrieking and tearing at the arms of passersby as they were chased by snarling animals or angry mobs. Spyder took a breath and reminded himself that none of this was real. It was just the collective memories of bad dreams, the night terrors these poor saps could never forget. It reminded him of paintings by Bruegel and Goya, and, while he tried to work his way around the thought and not let it invade his consciousness, the memories of the paintings made him think of the underworld. If this is what Hell was going to be like, Spyder wasn’t sure he could take it. Of course, he was going to be blindfolded so, unlike here, he wouldn’t have to actually look at Hell. It was a small comfort, but Spyder was ready for any comfort he could get.

At the far end of the street, Spyder spotted the Black Clerks. At first, he took them to be part of another nightmare and stopped to watch them pulling the guts out of a cop who had been crucified across a writhing pile of drug-starved junkies, their withered limbs (oozing pus and blood from running sores) strained against the barbed wire that held them together. The head Clerk, the one who always held the reptile-skin ledger, looked at Spyder and beckoned him over.

“You are quite a long way from home?” said the Clerk, in his peculiar singsong cadence.

“You see me. I thought you were someone’s bad dream.”

“We’re as real as you?”

“How about him? Is he real, too?” asked Spyder, inclining his head toward the tormented cop.

“He thought he could escape us,” said the Clerk. “Sometimes it is not enough to take what is ours from the body, but to insinuate ourselves in the mind and memory. A warning and object lesson for others? This is our burden.”

Spyder started to walk away.

“I hope you aren’t running away, trying to cheat providence?”

“No way, José. I’m true blue,” said Spyder.

“You don’t wish to stay and watch us work?”

One of the Clerks had placed an elaborate metal brace into the policeman’s open mouth and was studiously sawing off his lower jaw.

“Why would I want to see that?”

“Because you’re lying. And most people want to know their future.”

Spyder backed away and quickly left the street of nightmares.