Mortality Bridge Read Online Free

fuck himself, drove someone else’s manager’s Cadillac into someone else’s swimming pool, frisbeed someone else’s gold record out the window of a VP’s office at a friend’s record label, watched someone OD at a party that got raided not five minutes after he stumbled away.
    He had felt her out there all that awful lost and forlorn time, quietly burning, and knew that she would not come back until he came back to himself. And that didn’t happen till he signed away the most fundamental part of himself and killed his brother Van.
     
    ALL THESE HALLWAY posters. All this past. Niko looked away. Jemma couldn’t have known what kind of awful scrapbook she had put together in this hall. Let it go.
    He left Jemma to her medicated sleep and hurried down the hall and down the sweeping curve of staircase. Through the cavernous living room and into the study. The house was open and airy and Mediterranean but the study was Victorian and dark, brass and polished woods. Tracklights highlighted gold and platinum records in plain wooden frames between pilasters on one wall. On the mantel three gold phonographs on wooden trapezoids, a Lucite pyramid on a black block base, a silver astronaut planting an MTV flag. Him and Jemma hugging Goofy at Disneyland. Jemma with her eyes closed singing background at the mic, blobs of Vari-lite rig behind her. Her portraits of sleeping people, murky acrylics distorting shapes like funhouse mirrors. Newly inaugurated president shaking his hand there on one end of a maple bookcase. Etta James hugging Jemma on the other. On the battlements of maple bookshelves stone gargoyles vigilant before mystery and horror and occult. Her doll collection spaced out among cookbooks, selfhelp books, art monographs. Floppy ragdolls dangling stuffed legs over the wooden precipice like overseeing patchwork angels.
    And Jemma’s pencil sketch of him. Seated on a rude stool in his studio with the Strat high on his thigh, eyes closed and fingers poised and a length of ash on the burning cigarette pinched on the guitar head. Shock of hair obscuring one eye as his head inclines. Historical artifacts, ladies and gentlemen. Note the longlost days of this immortal youth when cigarettes were the least of many vices, when the hair was jet and hanging in the unkempt fashion of the day, not thin and flecked with gray. He’d looked as old back then as he is now. Older.
    The day Jem gave him that portrait. So tentative. They’d been together only a few months. He’d looked from his drawn face to hers so worried and in his heart he’d felt a driven nail of terror because she already loved him more than ever he would her. No one owned a key to that deep place. He would not allow it.
    Niko looked away. This panoply of static things. Totems in some pharaoh’s tomb. Jemma upstairs fading.
    On a marble pedestal in the form of an ionic column stood the weathered remnant of a lyre under glass. Its tortoise shell beneath the dust-shouldered belljar. The mystery of it. He’d bid ruthlessly through intermediaries when it came up at Sotheby’s. He had to have it, he didn’t know why. It brought him close to something old and deep. What hands now dust had plucked forth what notes long carried away?
    Niko pulled a volume from the bookcase by the lyre and pressed a button and the bookcase opened inward.
    Many mansions harbor hidden rooms and tunnels. Panic rooms and getaways, dungeons and shrines. Used with great solemnity and rarely secret at all. But Niko’s little room was truly secret. The woman he had shared his life with never knew about it. Perhaps she had her own such rooms. Perhaps she kept them hidden in her heart.
    Niko stepped through the bookcase like a storybook child.
    The tiny room contained a single chair behind a little walnut desk carved with sleeping faces on the corners and the legs. A laptop incongruous amid fountain pens in display holders, a blotter and a crystal inkwell and a green bankers light. A framed