Complete Short Fiction, page 14
“Shut up,” Harmon said, savagely. “It’s too late.” He drove a long silver nail into Stanley’s right wrist. Stanley felt it go in, cold, but it didn’t hurt. “You’re dead.” He drove another nail through Stanley’s foot, tinking on the head with a little hammer. “That first one, in the ER. He almost killed us, he was so strong. But we bound him, finally, once we’d figured out what to do. If I went back there now, I would hear him, talking to himself, as if he’d just woken up from a nap and was still sleepy. I hear you everywhere, where I have bound you, on street corners, in hallways, in alleys. In beds.” Harmon found himself crying, tears wetting his cheeks, as if he were the one Stanley Paterson was supposed to be feeling sorry for. Stanley Paterson, who would have only the understanding that he was dead, not alive, to keep him for all eternity. “Don’t worry, Stanley. Life is hateful.”
“No!” Stanley cried. “I want to live!” He reached up with his free hand and grabbed Harmon by the throat.
Harmon felt like he was being buried alive, but not buried in clean earth. He was being buried, instead, in the churned-over, corrupted earth of an ancient cemetery, full of human teeth and writhing worms. It pushed, damp and greasy, against his face. The smell was unbearable. Darkness swelled before him, and he almost let go.
The darkness drained away, and the platform reappeared. Dexter stood over him, his tongue sticking out slightly between his lips. He held the speculum over Stanley’s face, forcing him back. Dexter’s clothes flapped, and he leaned forward, as if into a heavy, foul wind. “Quick, Professor,” he choked. “He’s a strong one, like I said.” Harmon tapped the fourth nail into Stanley’s left wrist.
“I want to live!” Stanley said, quieter now.
Harmon said nothing. Dexter held the fifth nail for him, and he drove it through Stanley’s chest. “There. Now you will remain still.” He rested back on his heels, breathing heavily. How like a doctor, he thought. He could eliminate the symptom, but not cure the disease. Those ghosts, no longer disturbing the living, would lie where he had nailed them until Judgment Day. And there was nothing he could do to help them. He sat there for a long time, until he felt Dexter’s hand on his shoulder. He looked up into that kindly, ugly face, then back at the platform, where five silver dots glittered in the overhead lights.
“That was a bad one, Professor.”
“They’re all bad.”
“It’s worse if they never lived before they died. They want it then, all the more.” Dexter packed the instruments away. Then he rubbed the tension out of Harmon’s back, taking the feel of death up into himself. Dexter, with his credulous beliefs in anything and everything, absurd in his Minnesota Vikings cap with the horns. Without him, Harmon could not have kept moving for even a day.
Harmon thought about going home. Margaret would be there, as she always was, on the side of the bed where the blankets were flat and undisturbed. He hadn’t acted in time, when she had her final, fatal heart attack. He had waited, and doubted his own conclusions, and let them put her on life support for three days, in the cardiac ICU, before he decided it was hopeless, and let them pull the plug on her. By then, of course, it had been much too late. He should simply have let her die there, next to him. But how could he have done that? Whenever he changed the sheets, he could see the rounded heads of the five silver nails driven into the mattress, to keep her fixed where she died.
She had loved life, but she had wanted to stay with him . . . always. So he had laid down on the bed with her and felt her cold embrace. For a doctor with a good knowledge of anatomy his suicide attempt had been shockingly bad. Slitting your own throat is rarely successful. It’s too imprecise. They had found him, and healed him, reconstructing his throat. Modern medicine could do miracles. When he was well enough, though still bandaged, he went and found Dexter. They took care of the man in the ER, and then Margaret. She had cried and pleaded when the nails went in. But she had loved life, so it wasn’t as hard as it could have been, though Harmon could not imagine how it could have been any harder.
When he came back, she would ask him, sleepily, how it had gone. She always sounded like she was about to fall asleep, but she never did. She never would.
“Let’s go,” Dexter said. “It’ll be good to get back to bed. I gotta open the store in three hours. Jeez.”
“Yes, Dexter,” Harmon said. “It will be good to get to bed.”
Many Mansions
In “Many Mansions,” Alexander Jablokov takes an unusual look at the business of time travel . . .
The end of my vacation was announced with typical abruptness. I was in the caldarium, the hot pool, at the Baths of Titus, in Rome. The rotunda was lit by the afternoon sun coming through the hole in the center of the dome, and mist clung to the hot water in the pool. I relaxed, feeling nobly Roman, in one of the bathing boxes that surrounded the central water. I had a foreskin, since it would not do to be mistaken for a Jew. The fashion in male appendages varied so much according to time and place that my foreskin was attached by something approximating physiological Velcro. I had spent the day at the Forum, exchanging scandalous rumors with citizens about the Emperor Hadrian and his beloved, the boy Antinous, and what creative use they might make of the Apis bulls during their visit to Egypt, a visit that I knew, though my gossip mongers didn’t, would end in Antinous’s death by drowning in the Nile. I had also taken a walk over to take a look at the continuing reconstruction of the Pantheon, and finished the day in one of the reading rooms of the new Ulpian Library with a few pages from Suetonius’s Lives of Famous Whores, one of the more charming works of group biography that I’ve ever read. I only wished that I was allowed to have a copy made. The water was searingly hot, and I was at peace, looking forward to a dinner party at the house of the irritating but entertaining poet Juvenal.
“Mathias!” a thin, reedy voice exclaimed. “How at ease you look, like a chicken being poached. I envy you your serene state, so soon, alas, to end.” I looked around, but there was no one close enough to hear. There never was, he planned things that way, but I always check. It makes me feel like I have some charge over things.
“Marienbad,” I said. “Are you all right in there?”
“Perfectly, old friend! One branch of my phylum has disported itself for years in the hot waters of Yellowstone. We are a resilient race, remember, quite unlike your sensitive species.”
Marienbad rested on the bottom of the pool of the caldarium. He looked like a flat fish, a ray or something, I’ve never quite figured out what, covered with red and green Christmas tree lights, with tentacles around his edge. One of his many eyes rose up on a stalk and examined me.
“Your rest has done you well! Now, let us be on our way.”
“Wait, Marienbad! Can’t you give me just a minute to—”
It was worthless. Once he gets something into that aquatic mind of his, there’s nothing I can do about it. The Baths, with their intricate tiling, statues, and spouting dolphins disappeared, like a slow fade in a movie. The hot water, unfortunately, disappeared along with it and I found myself with my bare ass resting in ice water. I jumped up with a shriek, and leaped up out of the water onto the twisted roots of some huge coniferous tree. I now shivered on the edge of a clear cold lake. The bright light of day, after the darkness of the Baths, was blinding. I squinted. In the distance, across the water, were what looked like icy peaks, gleaming in the sun. A fish broke the water and a biting wind did its best to freeze me solid.
“Marienbad!” I yelled. “Where the hell am I? Why do you do this to me?”
There was a stirring in the water beneath the roots, and Marienbad appeared on the sand, about three feet below the surface. “Is it not beautiful? This is what your geologists have called Lake Athabasca, someday to become Lake Michigan. The glaciers have retreated, but the escape of melt waters is blocked to the south by the terminal moraine. Excuse me a moment.” He vanished into the deeper water.
I looked toward what I had thought were mountains: a mile high continental ice sheet. Marienbad had dropped me in the middle of the Wurm glaciation totally naked. So there was a wormhole between Rome in 130 CE and northern Illinois in 10,000 BCE. The memory modifications I had gotten from my employment by Marienbad made sure that I would remember that fact, along with everything else, including the other two thousand or so wormholes already in my memory. The spacetime matrix around Earth was so lousy with them that the more I learned about them the more surprised I was that anyone managed to stay in his own time and place for more than a couple of days. I wrapped my arms around myself and curled into a ball. It didn’t help. The wind sliced through me like a cleaver through calf’s liver.
Marienbad reappeared, a wriggling fish in his tentacles. He proceeded to bite its head off. “Ah, delicious. Are you more alert now, old friend?”
“Alert?” I talked through chattering teeth. “In a very few moments, I will be dead.”
“Mathias, you are forever difficult, and have no faith in me. Did I not hire you from your tedious archivist’s post and give you the run of the centuries? Do I not defend your interests at all times, keeping various of my colleagues from eating you, or stuffing you for their collections? Do I not—”
“Get to the point, dammit!” I screamed.
“All right, all right. Behind the tree, with the rucksack. No faith. He has no faith.”
I crawled around to the other side of the tree, my limbs already numb. Piled over the rucksack was a huge fur robe, large enough for the Jolly Green Giant, with the fur on the inside. I crawled in, wrapped it tightly around me, and just lay there for about ten minutes, shaking desperately, until I felt warm again. I poked my head out. One of Marienbad’s eyes was looking at me. “Are you now prepared for converse?” he said, in a coldly annoyed voice.
“Yes. Now that I have at least some chance of surviving to the end of the conversation, we can talk.” I looked at the fur I had wrapped around me and wondered what manner of beast it had come from. It was very rough. A giant ground sloth? A saber-toothed cat? Maybe a young woolly mammoth. I didn’t even want to think about what manner of being that huge robe had been made for. The different millennia of Earth’s history, as I had gradually found out during the course of my employment with Marienbad, played host to some four dozen species of aliens from all the planets of the Galaxy, and most of them were quite unpleasant.
“I have a job for you, Mathias Pomeranz.” I hate it when he uses my full name. That means that he is acting in his official capacity as my superior officer in the Transtemporal Constabulary. “I must use your remarkable skills to track down a desperate criminal. His name is Kinbarn, and his place of origin is a planet that circles the star you know as Deneb.”
“What has he done?”
“He is a dangerous addict, with a most reprehensible stimulation habit.”
“And what might that be?”
“Religious revelation. Extreme caution is advised.”
I slogged up the mud hill with the rest of the pilgrims. It was raining. It always rains in the lie de France during April, even in 1227 CE. That’s what makes it so green in May. But it wasn’t May. It was April. My felt hat was soaked through, and my cloak was about to be. My feet sloshed in my shoes, which in turn sucked in and out of the mud with every step. I occasionally lost a shoe in the mud and had to go back for it. The wet wood of my staff was rubbing my hands raw. My vacation was over, and I was back at work.
By evening, the rain had stopped, and we had reached the town of Chartres. The towers of the cathedral caught the last rays of the sunset. It was the hour of Vespers, and from within came the sound of plainsong, and the bells rang out over the countryside. We made it in for the chanting of the Magnificat. The cathedral was dramatic in the dying light of the late afternoon, as the torches were being lit, but we were herded out rather briskly once the altar had been censed and the service was over. In the Middle Ages, pilgrims like us were treated basically as tourists with no money, the lowest of the low. We would have to wait until tomorrow to see anything.
With the disappearance of the sun it had become cold. I led the way to the pilgrim’s hostel on the edge of town. There, we were all given a watery barley stew and some not overly clean straw to sleep in. I had done better, in my time, but I had also done considerably worse. The one night I had spent at Versailles, in 1672, for example, had been in a disgusting room near the only privy in that wing of the palace, and even the privilege of seeing Louis the Sun King eat his lunch had not really made up for it. Several of my fellow pilgrims and I shared the sour wine in our leather flasks, swapped dirty stories, and went to sleep, near enough to each other for our fleas to compare notes on accommodations.
When I came awake, at about three in the morning, according to my internal clock, it was silent, except for the snores. With the torches out, the inside of the hostel was so dark that for a moment I wasn’t sure if I’d actually succeeded in opening my eyes. I tripped over sleeping bodies all the way to the door.
Marienbad hadn’t been able to give me much. He never does. It’s always a hint, a clue, a rumor. It’s no way to run a law enforcement agency, as I’d told him any number of times, but then the laws we were enforcing tended to be vague and obscure themselves. Half a million years of an entire planet’s history is a hell of a jurisdiction. My lead, for what it was worth, was that Kinbarn the Denebian was known to have been in the vicinity of Chartres in the spring of 1227. Marienbad had even managed to rustle up a photograph of my quarry, along with some vital statistics. Kinbarn was about four feet high, had shiny black skin, like lacquer, and was covered head to foot with flecks of what looked like diamonds. His eyes, three of them, flickered with their own light and resembled fire opals. He smelled like the oil of bitter almonds, or perhaps like cyanide, depending on which way your fancy runs. He seemed to have no distinguishing marks or scars.
The night was cold enough for frost, and the grass crunched beneath my feet. My still damp clothes began to freeze. I was starting to give up on the idea of ever being warm again. There was a half moon in the sky, which provided enough light through the clouds for me to see my way to the cathedral. It was so silent that the sudden hoot of a owl in pursuit of a mouse somewhere out in the fields made me jump a foot in the air. The towers of the cathedral loomed above me.
The main difference between this thirteenth century Notre Dame de Chartres and the one I’d visited as a tourist in the twentieth century was the north tower. From what I could see in the moonlight, it was a permanent looking structure of wood. It would have to wait another three hundred years before it was replaced by the stone Gothic Flamboyant tower I remembered.
I made my way around to the south side of the cathedral. Much of Chartres had burned down in a disastrous fire some forty years before. Even with the enthusiastic assistance of workers from all over France, which included great lords and ladies pulling wagons of stone from the quarries, it still took a long time to build a Gothic cathedral, and the southern part was still under construction. I checked, reflexively, for guards, but there didn’t seem to be anyone around. Chartres was miles from a city of any size, and daring midnight thefts of half ton chunks of dressed stone were apparently not considered a serious risk. Somewhere, in the village of the hundreds of workers who still labored on the cathedral, master masons slept, dreaming of making heavy rock fly. I hoped none of them were dedicated enough to sleep on the construction site.
I looked up at the south transept. Lashed-together poles made up the scaffolding, and several ladders consisting of a single pole with pegs stuck through it leaned against the wall. A couple of windlasses stood at the top of the wall, their dangling ropes making them look like gibbets in the moonlight. I grabbed a ladder and started climbing.
The south porch, with its triple doorway, was well along to being carved, and the lower stained glass windows were in place. Where the upper ones would be, eventually, on either side of the rose window, were blind, staring holes. Climbing the ladder was, because of the central pole, like riding a barrel in a fast flowing river. When I made it up to the window opening, I was shaking. I looked in. The feel of the hard marble floor far below pressed cold on my forehead, even though I couldn’t see it. I poked my foot in experimentally, but couldn’t find any support. I sat down, half in and half out, and thought about going back to bed. If it had been silk sheets and a fire in a palace in Provence, I might have done it. Unfortunately, the thought of rough straw reinforced my sense of duty. I didn’t want to walk into that cathedral unprepared the next morning.
I climbed up farther, to the windlass, and pulled out its rope. It was heavy, and friendly as a python. It tried to pull me off my precarious ledge down to the ground, and, before I finally managed to wrestle it down to the window, it almost succeeded. I tied it down and threw the other end down into the darkness. There was no sound of its hitting the floor. I didn’t stop to consider things any further, because I knew that if I did, I would just give up, straw or no straw, so I just started climbing down. When I reached the end of the rope I held on and lowered myself, feeling with my feet. I was just about to confront the possibility of having to let myself drop toward a floor an unknown distance below when my searching toes finally touched, and I let out a breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding.
I began to pussyfoot around the nave. Above me were the famous stained glass windows of Chartres, newly installed and undimmed by the corruptions of time, but I couldn’t see a damn thing. It was just as dark as it had been in the hostel. It is testimony to the perseverance and energy of humanity that anyone ever managed to commit crimes at night before Edison. It was too dark to do anything but sleep. A noise, somewhere, made me turn quickly. A pillar that had crept up behind me, waiting for that very moment, smashed me on the side of the head and knocked me to the floor with a nice, furtive crash. I lay there, cursing myself for an idiot, when I saw two torches bobbing along the west end of the nave. I took a second to pull my shoes off, then came to my feet and zeroed in on them like a moth. The stone floor was cold. Of course.
