“I’m okay, Penny. Thanks. I will take that first-aid kit from you now though.”
Penny stares at me for only a moment before dashing behind the desk to the office and then reemerging with the first-aid kit. “You’re my angel,” I say as she hands it to me. She still looks concerned, but I give her smile. “Don’t worry. Next time you see me, I’ll be right as rain.” She doesn’t look convinced, but I pat her hand and make my way to the elevator.
Back inside my hotel room, I’m tempted to immediately clean myself up, but I know that’s not how it goes. I slide the first-aid kit onto the nightstand and make my way back into the bathroom. Double-checking the note I left on the cabinet door, I set my chronometer one more time, aiming for 12:45am. I take one more look around the bathroom for any evidence I’m leaving behind, then blink.
Once I’m back to the time I left, I immediately start shedding clothes. I let the shower douse me from all the angles it feels like as I lean my head against the shower wall. Despite witnessing the Eternals in action, this outing to St. Pete has brought me no closer to resolving my issue. It’s only made me more tired. When the automated shower is complete, I make some basic attempts with the first-aid kit, patching whatever scrapes and cuts I see still bleeding, then I gather up my clothes and stumble back into the bedroom. I manage to get my pants on, but as soon as I sit on the edge of the bed to wrangle on my socks, my body refuses to cooperate. It’s as if the mere proximity of the mattress has short-circuited all of my abilities to withstand it. Gravity gets the best of me, and I tip over onto the bed, my legs still dangling off the edge. I don’t care. It feels so good.
Some former objection sputters to the top of my mind for a moment, something about my other self chasing Mym away, but the objection is instantly smothered by the softness of the pillow when I crawl up to the head of the bed.
I bury my face in the pillow and attempt to recall what was so terribly important about staying awake. He was going to take over my life, wasn’t he? I try to make myself care about that prospect. Nothing comes.
It’s okay. He can drive for a while. Not like I’m doing a very good job anyway. Just so long as he lets me sleep.
I let the thought glide through my mind and disappear. It takes the rest of me with it.
19
“It is a marvelous thing the way humans adapt and change. It is our attitudes as much as our biology that have evolved over the centuries. It’s not always for the better, but it’s good to know that we have learned the ability to forge new paths. The future belongs to those with imagination enough to see it.” -Journal of Dr. Harold Quickly, November 18, 2180
The Neverwhere
The tunnel has taken on strange sounds. I don’t know how long I’ve been slumped against the dirt wall in the dark.
Days.
Years.
Centuries.
It could be that I have always been here. Timeless, like the Neverwhere itself. It feels like forever.
But there are the sounds. A dinging noise and then a swooshing and a bump. Another memory trickling through.
I get to my feet.
This tunnel leads under the streets of Seattle—a relic from the period when the city was raised up out of a floodplain. The last time I was inside it was while I was fleeing cyborgs with human heads and a bunch of time-travel-hating zealots. Even so, this tunnel led to safety. It had an exit.
I shuffle along the underground walkway, making my way toward the dinging noise. The sound repeats at regular intervals. Finally, I find a beam of light stretching across the floor from an open doorway. The rusty metal door has been left open. I step inside into a dusty, brick-sided basement.
My memory of this room was different. The bottom few floors of the building above had been gutted and removed, giving a false sense of height. Now the ceiling is intact, making the room much shorter. There were armed guards near the door last time I visited. Now there are only a few steps leading out of the tunnel and then a concrete floor with a few drains and, beyond them, an elevator shaft. Two elevator doors stand side by side. The one on the left is closed. The needle on the brass backsplash above the door points to the number three. The second set of doors to the right stand open, but are trying to close. The doors slide inward, impact a wooden ladder that is positioned between them, and open again. Each opening is accompanied by a ding from the bell. The ladder is positioned so that the person climbing it can reach the floor indicator above the door.
A man is on the ladder, fiddling with the broken dial above the door and muttering to himself. I’m able to see the numbered brass plate beyond his head because the man is almost completely transparent. Looking at him, I can just make out his grease-stained coveralls and a rag hanging from his back pocket. He has a bucket laden with tools on the floor near his ladder. The tools and ladder are just as ghostly as the man.
I take a few steps forward. “Um, hello?”
The man pauses his tinkering and turns around. He appraises me from over his nearly nonexistent spectacles. He’s not especially old. Perhaps fifties, but his clothing is reminiscent of a bygone era. The sturdiness of his leather boots makes me think of the engine mechanics I met aboard the Hindenburg. He has a sturdy chin, too. Square with a deep cleft.
“This elevator is out of service, I’m afraid.” He jabs a thumb toward the door propped open by his ladder. “Not sure where you were headed today. Options are a bit limited.”
“I didn’t know there was anyone else down here,” I say. I take a few steps closer. The man looks friendly. “I’m Ben Travers.”
The man gets off the ladder, wipes his fingers on his rag, then extends a hand. “Henry Drexel. Pleased to meet you.”
His handshake is enthusiastic but vaporous, like shaking hands with a cloud.
“How did you—are you a . . .”
“Elevator maintenance,” Henry replies. “Best in the business if I do say so myself. Not too many folks know their way around a Mobilus elevator like me. You can count on it.”
“You’re a time travel elevator mechanic?”
“Have you been aboard? Haven’t seen you down here before.”
“Actually, I did ride it once. Around the 2400s. Looked a bit different though. Not as nice as this.”
“2400s? Now that’s way up there isn’t it? Past its prime to be sure. I helped build this elevator in 1882. Do you believe it?” He turns around to admire the shining doors. “Lots of good times we’ve had together. Good, good times.” He polishes his glasses on his sleeve and readjusts them on his face again.
“Do you mind if I ask what got you here?” I ask. “In the Neverwhere? Did someone . . . do something to you?”
Henry glances at me and then moves to his tool bucket. “Well, you can’t go expecting a time machine to work right every single time now can you? They are just machines after all. Not the fault of Tempus Mobilus Elevator Company.” He pulls a wrench from the pocket of his coveralls and drops it into the bucket. “We never lost a customer. I was an employee, so the record is still clean as far as I’m concerned.”
He fumbles in his pockets a little more and comes up with the needle for the second indicator. “I’m sure they had this back up and running in no time after I left. No time at all.” He fiddles with the pointer, staring wistfully at the back plate. He’s so faded that I have a hard time making out the detail of his expressions. “She sure was a beauty, wasn’t she?”
I let him continue his admiration of the elevator a little longer, but finally my concern gets the best of me.
“Are you okay?” I ask. “You seem a bit—hazy.”
Henry turns around. “Oh, sure. Been getting that way for a while now. Looks like you’re losing a bit of shine yourself.”
I study my arms. They are a bit less vivid than I remember. A drab hue to my skin and fingernails. I’m still much better defined than Henry, but I can’t deny that I share a bit of his pallor.
“What’s happening to us?”
“Just a litt
le fading. Happens to the best of us.”
“But why am I—”
“You’re a memory aren’t ya? Memories don’t last forever.”
His statement sits like a lump in my chest. “Wait, what do you mean by that? I’m going to disappear?”
“Can’t expect to just linger about in the middle of things forever, can you? There comes a time to let go. I’m about done here anyway. I did want to get her other car back in order, but it seems I didn’t bring all the right parts. Would have been nice to see her in all her glory one more time.”
“When you say, ‘let go,’ what are you talking about? I didn’t think there was a way out of this place.”
“Of course there is,” Henry replies. “What kind of screwball told you that?”
“Um. Just a—friend.”
“Well, you tell him to stop filling your head with nonsense.”
“He’s actually not—he’s . . . gone now.”
“See? What did I tell you? Moved on, right?”
“No. Not exactly.”
Henry looks me in the eye, and his face grows serious. “Oh. I see.” He fidgets with his rag and stuffs it back in his pocket again. “Ran into one of the other kind, did he? Look, son, why don’t I take you up top and let you have a look around. Have you been up top yet?” He jabs a finger toward the ceiling.
“I went to the seventh floor once. Is that what you mean?”
“Seven? No. There’s a good view from seven, but that ain’t the top. Come on.” He steps around his ladder and presses the up button on the elevator. The doors on the right spring back enthusiastically from their attempts to crush the ladder, but Henry waits till the left-hand elevator doors open and shoos me in ahead of him. Once inside, he produces a key from his coveralls that is just as hazy as the rest of him, but upon inserting it in the keyhole below the buttons, the doors close. He presses the button for seven and waits.
I admire the shiny wood paneling and brass handrails, not sure if it’s Henry’s memory or mine, or a combination of both that has brought them to life.
When the elevator reaches the seventh floor, it bumps to a stop, but Henry gives the key on the control panel an extra three turns and the doors stay closed. A thump from somewhere above us is followed by a jolt, and the elevator continues upward. We finally come to a stop once more, and the doors slide open. The bell dings.
We’re outside.
Stepping out of the elevator, the gritty tar paper of the roof crunches underfoot. The rest of the roof goes unnoticed, however, because the sky demands all of my attention. Out here there is no fog, just a cosmic starscape of brilliant lights and thin, twisting, iridescent rivers. The view is clearer than any I’ve had before. It’s almost as if I’m out among the stars myself—closer to the streams of light and color. I feel as if I could stretch out and dip my hand into them.
“This is the top,” Henry says. “Last stop before forever. Not a bad view, eh? ”
“What is it?” I ask. “What are we really looking at?”
“Space and time. The whole kit and caboodle. Look up there, and you might see anywhere. Any time.”
I watch the colors shimmer through the sky. “I don’t think I really understand it.”
“Why would you? Out here, we’re just specks ourselves. Somewhere out there in some other time, someone might be looking up and seeing us. We look just the same.” He kicks a few loose pebbles on the roof shingles below us. “All this other stuff is just leftovers. The memory of what we were before. All in our heads.”
“We’re that?” I point to the shimmering river arcing up past us into the cosmos.
“Sure. Just a teeny bit of that, mind you. That’s probably everybody we ever knew in there, stretched out across their lifetimes. The only reason we see it and they don’t is that we’ve got perspective. Your mind got a chance to step outside of time and see the bigger picture.”
“So the Neverwhere—all these other spaces and memories I’ve been seeing—it’s just an illusion in my head?”
“Not an illusion. It’s your past. It’s your memories. Memories aren’t illusions, they just are what they are. And it’s easier for your mind to keep you in there than to accept all of this. Takes a little adjusting to process it all. So you live in your memories for a while. But you’re getting there. You’re seeing it now. It’s taken a long time to let go myself. Still saying my goodbyes.”
“What about the others? The people I’ve met here didn’t move on to anywhere else. There’s this one, Zurvan, and he’s been taking people from the real world. Snatching them up.”
“This Zurvan and your other friend. Did they seem inclined to let go of their past?”
“Um. No. Actually, the past was kind of all they talked about. Zurvan just keeps replaying his memories, re-watching them, like an obsession. Benny was pretty intent on revisiting the past too.”
“Then they never would have seen the Neverwhere like this.” Henry gestures to the sky. “This would be terrifying to them. A place they’d hide from at all cost.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s their inevitable future. A mind stuck in the past can’t abide the idea of leaving it behind. But that’s what you’d have to do to ever leave this place. You’d have to let go. That’s the catch. When your friend said there’s no way out, he wasn’t all wrong. There’s no getting out the way you are now. You’d have to give up all that. Be willing to accept what you will be. Time always works that way.”
“Zurvan keeps sucking up people’s minds. He’s the one who got my friend Benny. Why hasn’t he faded away yet?”
“Keeps getting himself new memories, right? The more he keeps doing that, the more he ties himself to the regular world. He won’t ever feel hungry for eternity unless he stops feeding himself with the past. Even if it belongs to someone else.”
Even as I look at Henry, his already-wispy exterior has been changing colors. His transparency now makes him a conductor for the view beyond. Henry is beautiful.
“Is that what you are? Hungry for eternity?”
Henry takes a seat on the edge of the roof and lets his feet dangle over the edge. I sink down next to him and do the same.
“It’s getting so I can’t think about anything else. I’m going to let you in on a secret, son. If you sit out here long enough, you start to forget what it was that was ever so important about yourself. It’s a tough lesson to learn because all we ever seem to want in life is to be important—to matter. And I don’t mean to say you didn’t. I’m just saying that when you get yourself a little perspective and see the universe and all of time laid out for you like this, you tend to realize there’s so much more to being you than you thought. It creeps up on you that this whole time you were part of something a whole lot bigger. Something older and more spectacular.”
“And that’s the way out? Stop being such an individual?” I frown.
“You don’t have to say it like it’s a bad thing,” Henry replies. “Do you like puzzles?”
“I guess.”
“You ever get yourself a puzzle piece in your hand, pick out one you like from among all the thousand others and say, ‘I think I’ll just set this one piece down and not worry about the rest. I’m done with this puzzle.’ You ever do that?”
“No. I don’t really think that counts as solving a puzzle.”
“I agree. I don’t think it counts either. I think people are the same way. We might be the greatest person we could ever be and might have had the most outstanding life, but without the rest of our pieces . . . Well, we still don’t amount to much, do we?”
I contemplate the view in silence for a little, turning over Henry’s analogy. This view of the universe is a level of beauty I’ve never known. It makes me wish that Mym could be with me to see it. She’s the only puzzle piece I feel like I’m missing.
“What if I’m not ready for my place out there yet? What if by being here, I’m leaving a hole somewhere else? Somewhere where someone still needs
me.”
“They still need you, or you still need them?”
“I’m hoping both.”
“If you think they really need you, you’d better get to it. If you can see all this, eternity is calling your name. From what it looks like, you’re headed that way soon whether you like it or not. Haven’t known many folks who could see this place for what it really is and then stay around long after.”
I study the palm of my hand. It could be my imagination, but it seems like my skin has taken on a few of Henry’s iridescent qualities. Even so, I’m not ready to go twinkling away into the great beyond.
“How do you fight it off? Eternity.”
“Not sure you should, frankly. But if you got yourself set on it, I’d see about getting some help. You’re a memory, son. If you want to stay that way, you belong in your own head, not floating around out here.”
“What if my head doesn’t want me back?”
“Then you’d better make a more convincing argument. You have a version of yourself back in the real world who knows you’re here, right? He’s someone who remembers you pretty recently from the look of you.”
“Yeah. I’ve been trying to contact him.”
“That’s good. That’ll keep you around for a bit. That’s why I’m still here.”
“You’re in touch with someone in the real world too?”
“Sure. Hard to be a memory otherwise. He’s been forgetting a lot though lately. Getting old, you know? He’s about ready to let go. When he does, well, that’ll be my cue to go.”
“If your other self in the real world dies, you’ll get erased too?”
“Erased is a silly way to put it. Can’t take away what we were. But yes, without a consciousness in the real world to stay connected to, we’ll both have to move on. You shouldn’t worry too much yet. Looks like your other self might be more connected than you know.” He points to my face. “Your lip is bleeding.”
In Times Like These Boxed Set Page 152