Time Travel Omnibus, page 995
“Fetch Azalea’s page,” she told him when he arrived.
Augusta watched the machine until there was a scratch at her door and Azalea’s page stepped inside. He was a half-grown boy, with dark hair in oiled locks and eyes rimmed with kohl; a beautiful specimen that Azalea had insisted on taking into service despite his being too old to train properly. The boy stood in the middle of the room, having the audacity to stare directly at Augusta. She slapped him with the back of her hand. He shrunk back, turning his gaze to the floor. He walked over to the bed and started to remove his clothes.
“No, not now,” Augusta said.
The boy froze halfway out of his surtout. Augusta tossed him the little locket.
“You will tell me what this is,” she said.
“You don’t know?” he said.
Augusta slapped him again.
“You will tell me what this is,” she repeated.
He sniffled.
“It’s a watch.”
“And what does a watch do?”
“It measures time.”
He pointed at the different parts of the watch, explaining their functions. The rods were called hands, and chased around the clockface in step with time. The clockface indicated where in time one was located. It made Augusta shudder violently. Time was an abhorrent thing, a human thing. It didn’t belong here. It was that power which made flesh rot and dreams wither. The gardens were supposed to lie beyond the grasp of time, in constant twilight; the sun just under the horizon, the moon shining full over the trees. Augusta told the boy as much:
“Time doesn’t pass here. Not like that, not for us.”
The boy twisted the little bud on the side of the locket, and the longest hand started to move again.
“But look,” he said. “The hands are moving now. Time is passing now.”
“But does it know how time flows? Does it measure time, or does it just move forward and call that time?”
The changeling stared at her. “Time is time,” he said.
Augusta cut his tongue out before she let him go. Azalea would be furious, but it was necessary.
She laid down on her bed again, but couldn’t seem to fall asleep. How could the hands on the watch keep moving here? The sun didn’t go up or down. Didn’t that mean time stood still here? It was common knowledge. Whenever one woke up, it was the same day as the day before.
She sat down at her writing desk, jotting down a few things on paper. It made her head calm down a little. Then she opened a flask of poppy wine and drank herself back to sleep.
When Augusta woke up, her page was scratching at the door with a set of clothes in his arms and an invitation card between his teeth. It was an invitation to croquet. With a vague feeling that there was something she ought to remember, Augusta let the page dress and powder her.
She returned with a bump in the back of her head and a terrific headache. It had been a fantastic game. There had been gorging, Walpurgis had demonstrated a new dance, and the twins had—sensationally—struck each other senseless. Augusta had been behind everyone else in the game, eventually having her ball sent into the woods again, needing to go fetch it just like that time she’d found something under the dog-rose bush . . . under the dog-rose bush. She looked at her writing desk, where a little silk bundle sat on a piece of paper. She moved the bundle out of the way and read:
A minute is sixty seconds.
An hour is sixty minutes.
A day is twelve hours.
A day and a night is twenty-four hours.
Augusta opened the bundle and looked at the little locket. Some images appeared in her mind: her first croquet game. The corpse in the grey suit. The watch. The page who told her about time. A thirst to know how it worked. What is time? she wrote under the first note. Is it here?
Augusta took the watch and left her room. She wandered down to the orangery, which was lit from inside. Tendrils of steam rose from the roof. Inside, three enormous mounds lay on couches. The Aunts were as always immersed in their holy task to fatten. Three girls hovered around them, tiny in comparison. The girls were servants and successors, keeping the Aunts fed until they eventually perished, and then taking their places to begin the process anew. Augusta opened the watch, peeking at the clockface. The longest hand moved slowly, almost imperceptibly.
She walked from the orangery to the outskirts of the apple orchard, and from there to Porla’s fen; then to the dog-rose shrubs in the woods outside Mnemosyne’s court. Everywhere, the hands on the clockface moved; sometimes forward, sometimes backward. Sometimes they lifted from the clockface, hitting the glass protecting it, as if trying to escape.
Augusta woke up in Azalea’s arms, under a canopy in Our Lady’s arbour. The orgy they were visiting was still going on; there were low cries and the sound of breaking glass. Augusta couldn’t remember what they had been doing, but she felt sore and bloated and her sister was snoring very loudly. She was still wearing her shirt. Something rustled in her left breast pocket; she dug it out. It was a note. A little map, seemingly drawn in her own hand. Below the map was written a single sentence: The places float just like time. She had been wandering around, drawing maps and measuring distances. At some point. Mnemosyne’s garden had first been on the right-hand side from Augusta’s rooms. The next time she had found herself walking straight ahead to get there. The places floated. Augusta turned the note over. On the other side were the words: Why is there time here? Why does it flow differently in different places? And if the places float, what is the nature of the woods?
She returned to her rooms in a state of hangover. Papers were strewn everywhere, it seemed: on and under the bed, on the dresser, in droves on the writing-desk. Some of the notes were covered in dust. She couldn’t remember writing some of them. But every word was in her own handwriting.
There was a stranger in Mnemosyne’s court, towering over the other guests. She was dressed in simple robes, hooded and veiled, golden yellow eyes showing through a thin slit. They shone down on Walpurgis, who made a feeble attempt to offer her a croquet club. Everyone else gave the stranger a wide berth.
“It is a djinneya. She is visiting Mnemosyne to trade information,” the twins mumbled to Augusta.
“We wonder what information that is,” Vergilia added.
“Those creatures know everything,” Hermine said.
The djinneya sat by Mnemosyne’s side during the whole game, seemingly deep in conversation with her hostess. Neither the twin’s spectacular knock-out of Walpurgis nor Azalea’s attempt to throttle one of the pages caught her attention. Having been knocked out with a ball over her left knee, Augusta retreated to a couch where she wrote an invitation.
Augusta woke up by her writing-desk by a knock at her door. A cloaked shape entered without asking permission. The djinneya seemed even taller indoors.
“Come in,” said Augusta.
The djinneya nodded, unfastening the veil. Her skin was the colour of fresh bruises. She grinned with a wide mouth, showing deep blue gums and long teeth filed into points.
“I thank you for your invitation, Augusta Prima.” She bent down over Augusta’s bed, fluffing the pillows, and sat down. A scent of sweat and spice spread in the room. “You wanted to converse.”
Augusta straightened, looking at the papers and notes on her desk. She remembered what it was she wanted to ask.
“You and your sort, you travel everywhere. Even beyond the woods. You know things.”
The djinneya flashed her toothy smile. “That we do.”
“I would like to know the nature of time,” Augusta said. “I want to know why time can’t be measured properly here, and why everything moves around.”
The djinneya laughed. “Your kind doesn’t want to know about those things. You can’t bear it.”
“But I do. I want to know.”
The djinneya raised her thin eyebrows. “Normally, you are tedious creatures,” she said. “You only want trivial things. Is that person dead yet? Does this person still love that person? What did they wear at yesterday’s party? I know things that could destroy worlds, and all you wish to know is if Karhu from Jumala is still unmarried.” She scratched her chin. “I believe this is the first time one of your sort has asked me a good question. It’s an expensive one, but I shall give you the answer. If you really are sure.”
“I have to know,” said Augusta. “What is the nature of the world?”
The djinneya smiled with both rows of teeth. “Which one?”
Augusta woke up by the writing desk. The hangover throbbed behind her temples. She had fallen asleep with her head on an enormous stack of papers. She peered at it, leafing through the ones at the top. There are eight worlds, the first one said. They lie side by side, in degrees of perfection. This world is the most perfect one. Below these lines, written in a different ink, was: There is one single world, divided into three levels which are partitioned off from each other by greased membranes. Then in red ink: There are two worlds and they overlap. The first is the land of Day, which belongs to the humans. The second is the land of Twilight, which belongs to the free folk, and of which the woods is a little backwater part. Both lands must obey Time, but the Twilight is ruled by the Heart, whereas the Day is ruled by Thought. At the bottom of the page, large block letters proclaimed: ALL OF THIS IS TRUE.
It dawned on Augusta that she remembered very clearly. The endless parties, in detail. The finding of the corpse, the short periods of clarity, the notes. The djinneya bending down to whisper in her ear.
A sharp yellow light stung Augusta’s eyes. She was sitting at her writing desk in a very small room with wooden walls. A narrow bed with tattered sheets filled the rest of the space. The writing desk stood beneath a window. On the other side of the glass, the woods bathed in light.
There was a door next to the bed. Augusta opened it, finding herself in a narrow hallway with another door at the end. A full-length mirror hung on the opposite wall. It showed a woman dressed in what had once been a blue surtout and knee pants. The fabrics were heavily stained with dirt and greenish mold and in some places worn through. Concentric rings of sweat radiated from the armpits. The shirt front was stiff with red and brown stains. Augusta touched her face. White powder lay in cracked layers along her nose and cheeks. Deep lines ran between her nose and mouth; more lines spread from the corners of her eyes. A golden chain hung from her breast pocket. She pulled on it, swinging the locket into her hand. It was ticking in a steady rythm.
Augusta opened the other door and stepped out onto a landing. An unbearably bright light flooded over her. She backed into the hallway again, slamming the door.
“I told you. Your kind can’t bear that question.”
The djinneya stood behind her in the hallway, shoulders and head hunched under the low ceiling.
“What did you do?” Augusta said.
“What did I do? No. What did you do, Augusta Prima?” She patted Augusta’s shoulder. “It started even before you invited me, Augusta Prima. You tried to measure time in a land that doesn’t want time. You tried to map a floating country.”
The djinneya smiled. “The woods spit you out, Augusta. Now you’re in the land that measures time and draws maps.”
Augusta gripped the hand on her shoulder. “I want to go home. You have to take me home again.”
“So soon? Well. All you have to do is forget what you have learned.” The djinneya squeezed past Augusta and stepped out onto the porch, where she stretched to her full height with a sigh.
“Goodbye, Augusta,” she said over her shoulder. “And do try to hurry if you want to make it back. You’re not getting any younger.”
TWO SHOTS FROM FLY’S PHOTO GALLERY
John Shirley
I tell myself I had no way of knowing Becky would kill herself that night. It was morning, really, when she did it. At about 3:30 in the morning, July 16th, 1975, Rebecca Clanton, the young woman I had married not so long before, threw herself off the roof of her sister’s twelve-story high-rise apartment building. She’d come to see her sister Sandra on a visit—to stay overnight, supposedly just to spend time. But Sandra said that Becky hardly spoke that night—just smoked, and nodded, now and then, as Sandra talked about whatever came into her mind, whatever offered to fill the silence. Then Sandra went to bed. And in the dead hours of the morning, Becky got up from the sofa bed, went to the kitchen, wrote out a brief suicide note, and took the elevator to the roof. Had probably come there to do just that, leave a note where someone who mattered would find it. It was just too lonely to kill herself alone at home, somehow. With me out of town . . .
She threw herself off the roof in a way that carried her right down into the empty swimming pool, which was being repaired, out behind the building. Figured Sandra wouldn’t have the shock of finding her there—maybe she thought the repairmen would find her first, and they did.
I didn’t see her body there, in person, but Sandra told me about it. And somehow I still see it in my mind’s eye, as if looking down from the roof. I picture Becky’s splayed, broken, blood-laced body centered in the blue rectangle of the pool as if in a picture frame.
Me, I was out of town when she died. I was in Albuquerque, for a conference on Billy the Kid. I write westerns—well, I’ve published only one novel, but a good many nonfiction books about the Old West. Henry McCarty AKA William Bonney AKA Billy The Kid was one of mine, from the University of New Mexico Press; The Murder of Morgan Earp was another. My day job was teaching American history at a minor college, but I spent so much time on research trips to ghost towns and pioneer cemeteries covered with weeds, I was always on the verge of losing the job.
I took Becky on a research trip to a particular cemetery in Cobalt Dust, Arizona. She affected to be interested, but when she saw the skeletons, pulled partly out of the yellow dirt by the tree roots muscled into the forgotten old cemetery, she got a faraway look in her eyes, and went back to the motel. And that night she said, “I have to wonder why you want to spend so much of your time with the dead.”
They weren’t dead to me, I told her. It was like I traveled in time, when I did the research. Like I had one foot in the Old West.
She shook her head then, and muttered something about arrested adolescence and macho fixations and wouldn’t say anymore.
The night she died I was in an Albuquerque bar arguing about whether or not Billy the Kid would really have gotten that amnesty from governor Lew Wallace if he’d been more cooperative. I remember realizing it was almost midnight, and I had promised to call Becky at her sister’s that night. So I called, piling a double handful of quarters in the pay phone, and her sister answered, her every syllable iced with passive aggressive reproach:
“She’s gone to bed. Naturally.”
“I see. Are you sure she’s asleep, Sandra? I got caught up in an academic discussion . . .”
Just then the noise level in the bar peaked. Someone giggled and someone else dropped a glass and everyone applauded as it broke.
“Yes, I can hear the academic discussion going on,” Sandra said. “Becky’s gone to bed. I’m not going to get her up. She’s been feeling down and she needs her rest. Goodbye.” And she hung up.
She’s been feeling down . . .
She’d talked about suicide more than once. Becky was a pale woman with curly black hair, full lips, a face that showed the angularity, a hint of the Native American planes of many from the Southwest—she’d grown up in Arizona. She had a wistful smile, an air of nonchalant resignation. She wore long dark old-fashioned dresses, and black-spangled old lady’s feathered hats she found in second-hand stores.
I first found Becky in Bisbee, where her mother owned a souvenir shop for tourists hunting remnants of the Old West. She sat behind the counter, using the same resigned expression for attending to a customer as just staring out the dusty, fly-blown window. A small record player set up behind the cash register was playing “Oh! Sweet Nothin’ ” by the Velvet Underground, not very loud. It was only later that I learned the name of the song.
“Afternoon,” I said. “You’re Miss Rebecca Clanton?”
She nodded. “You’re that guy from the university?”
“College. North San Diego College of the Humanities.”
“I got your postcard. Researching a book on the Clanton gang, you said?” She shook her head apologetically. “I don’t know anything about my ancestors. I meant to write you back about that. Sorry you made the trip to glorious Bisbee, if you came to talk to me.”
She gave out with that wistful smile. Immediately, I wanted to take her in my arms and comfort her. And kiss those large soft lips.
“Lots of times, people know more about their family than they realize. Or they remember that an aunt has some old letters or . . . Could I take you to dinner and just see if anything comes to mind?”
She looked at me doubtfully. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“It’s Bill Washoe.”
“ ‘Lonesome Cowboy Bill.’ ” She smiled. Sort of smiled. It was only later, too, that I found out that “Lonesome Cowboy Bill” was a song from the same Velvet Underground album. “Okay, Lonesome. Let’s go, as soon as I ring this lady up . . .”
I was right, there was Clanton history to be gleaned from Becky. Turned out that her great-grandmother had been shacked up with Billy Clanton—the same Billy Clanton, cowboy and sometime rustler, who’d been shot to death, along with Frank and Tom McClaury, by the Earps and Doc Holliday in a small vacant lot near the OK Corral on October 26, 1881. Ike Clanton’s younger brother, Old Man Clanton’s youngest kid, Billy had fallen for a mixed-race dance hall girl named Isabella Chavez, a girl whom some called “Issy” or “Easy”; she was said to be a quarter French, a quarter black, a quarter Indian, a quarter Chinese—but no one knew for sure. Billy had gotten Issy knocked up, and had promised he’d marry her, but hadn’t made good on it, and it was said that just before the gunfight Ike had been trying to talk him out of the marriage. Then they’d gotten on the wrong side of the Earp brothers, in Tombstone, and Billy’d been shot down. Isabella had her child, and had given the boy, William Jose, Billy Clanton’s surname; the local registrar, some said in exchange for a sexual favor, had stretched a point and made the name official, though she’d never been married to Billy Clanton. That much I’d known. Consulting County records, I also learned that William Jose Clanton, the semiofficial Billy Clanton Jr., had married one Dolores Plainville, who’d borne a boy, James Isaac Clanton, who’d married Rebecca’s mother Louella. Rebecca revealed that William Clanton the Second had deserted Dolores early on, and “Jimmy Ike,” as Becky’s dad had been called, had deserted Becky and her Mom when she was three.
