Harbinger

The elevator came to a perfectly timed, and typically automated stop. Transparent doors snapped open perfunctorily no doubt intending to serve and please to some pre-programmed paean of self-satisfaction. Tentatively, I looked out into the lobby. Claustrophobia swaddled me tightly in a hall unusually prodigious for this region. Would I be taken here? Was there anyone even following me?

"Thank you for taking this ride with me. I enjoyed your sojourn. If I may attend in the future, please feel free to utilize my services...I am available at any time."

I swallowed a dry word and answered vacantly.

"Thank you, Sir. May I suggest a dsetination?"

"No."

"Then...good journey, Sir."

"Yes." I hated this electronic servitude. I started out.

"And...a good evening to you."

I stopped. Caught unawares, I reiterated, irritated, "And you."

Attempting to cool down, I started off once again.

My reply had been made without the cool even slant which I typically gave to Human servants who wished to please me, but beyond what I accepted as the degree that one should stoop to when speaking to an electronic servant. Mindlessly, I slipped my new gray mackintosh on as I crossed the lift's threshold.

"Thank you," it said.

Beginning to wonder if there was not an intelligence there after all, that is, one other than the bare integrated circuitry kind, I continued on. This was the way it had been since our escape. Redundancy after situational redundancy.

My hat placed firmly on my head and a brief tucked securely under my arm, for that certain look of respectability, I set out for the God forsaken weather that is Vancouver, British Columbia.

The sodden, Pacific Northwest of North America. I shurgged my shoulders, better positioning my raincoat. How I longed for my American east coast. But for now, I was grateful just to be in Canada, on the American continent.

As I was about to enter out into the dark and watered down city, I passed a woman in the lobby patting down a child’s face with her apparently soaked handkerchief. The child was whimpering, a sound I had not heard since a fatal hunting trip in those emerald Irish hills I had so recently been endeavoring to avoid.

Outside, a taxi horn blared its driver's panic as another vehicle, speeding to enter traffic, nearly sideswiped two limos and a now mortally offended taxi driver. Through the Hotel's large wall of glass which served as the forewall of the building, I could clearly see the guilty driver pull over, hold his aging chest in pain, and shakily wipe his now shiny bald pate with a handkerchief.

Now outside, I turned back to see the woman and child. I covertly observed them as the Hotel's twin pneumatic doors quickly shut the lobby's warmth and dryness away from me.

The woman had a rather striking figure and a carriage unknown to most women in the States. She had quite instantly gotten the child to stop its appalling lamentations. This feat, nearly impossible for any woman no matter how talented or motherly she was, seemed to pose her no concern whatsoever. I found her fascinating. Her hair was blazing red in a most attractive and sensuous fashion. Much like many of the Irish women I had known in the bars and streets of Dublin.

Before the crowds could completely shut the scene out from me, the woman quite suddenly, and much to my amazement and chagrin deftly snapped one of the pre-pubescent's already pink eyeballs; an elegantly painted ring-finger’s nail dented the eye, and swiftly slipped into the woman's palm. For one interminable instant, soft pink eyeball and delicate crimson fingernail had become as one. The doors sighed opened and closed again as a group of formally dressed people pressed by me, desperately seeking entrance to the briefly unsecured edifice.

I looked down at a sodden lump beneath my left foot. The frigid rains continued pouring down in a steady, heavy evacuation of the northwestern skies. I picked the tiny gray, purple-spotted glove up from beneath my shoe.

Immediately, it occurred to me that this must belong to that pathetic and whimpering child. Although I wished to return the glove, no fastidious desire to confront that woman any longer urged me on. Nevertheless, I shunted my cowardice aside and re-entered the lobby, anxiously, albeit, apprehensively.

More people, this time exiting. I stepped aside from the lushly carpeted entrance, scanning the room for the pair. But they were now nowhere to be seen.

Shifting the glove from my right hand to my left, I searched for the stick of gum in my overcoat pocket, continuing to look for the child in that immense lobby. The thumb of my left hand continued to stroke the soft knit glove. I fumbled the gum into my mouth, rubbed my chin and dried my nose. The back of my hand crushed water from my moist eyebrows; residue from the rain steadily dripped off my three day old beard.

An ancient gentleman was enjoying a snack on one of the couches near the center of the lobby. He began to choke. Purple faced, he spit something into a napkin and resumed eating. Again he began to choke, repeated the process and began to eat once more. It was then that I noticed a dull, coppery tang upon my palate. The old codger and I mimicked each others motions. I extracted the gum. At first, it looked quite all right for cinnamon gum. "Ripe Red" cinnamon gum, from Ireland. It was the last of a pack belonging to poor Nikolas.

It was then that I noticed the pink all over the palm of my hand, with dark red streaks. The reflection staring back at me in the chrome latticework encompassing the elegant entrance, bedeviled me. The lack of my usual antiseptic look to my appearance shocked me. My best efforts had been put into maintaining a low profile since long before I had made it to London.

My face was now a marbled red, splotches of dark pink spotting my chin, my nose. There were no cuts; none on my face, nor on my hands. The small gray and purple glove still rested silently in my left hand against my dark trouser leg. Intrigued, I squeezed it and watched. Focusing beyond it onto the cream colored carpet I now noticed the dark spots of the gray glove draining, shrouding perhaps a child's tempered screams. I winced. My heart skipped a few beats; my face paled.

Squeezing harder, a red streak slowly followed previously unnoticed droplets to the carpet; a tiny, macabre Rorschach built from living materials. Lifting the glove to my nose, I sniffed it. It stank of cheap metals, of old cuts on plump, swollen flesh, fallen rabid from septic misuse.

Profane memories came flooding back to me. Blood Oaths of Revenge. Blasphemies. Acts of Sacrilegious Dimensions. My head began to swim, for it had been I who had set the bomb in the R.U.C. Headquarters next to that of the British Army, in that far away, Gaelic land. The three of us had sworn vengeance undiluted by the civilities of cultivated thoughts against men we had never seen. Men who had never hurt us.

They were unavoidable events. Events which had lead a few friends and myself, a New England States, Masters student in Literature, to those beautiful, but wrathful hills of Ireland; a land with incomprehensibly complicated, internal difficulties; events which once seemed rather distant and childishly simple, but were now quite, quite immediate. Time, for me now, may be quite possibly, of limited scope and duration. How...how did I of all people, end up in such an unbelievable situation?