Vacancy & Ariel

by Lucius Shepard

  “My idea was, these infinite universes…the ones closest to us would be almost indistinguishable from our own. Only minor differences. For instance, when you lose something—keys, glasses—you remember putting them on the dresser, but they’re not there. It’s possible you simply forgot where you put them. What may have happened, because of the endless shuffling of the universes, you may have slipped over into a universe where you left your glasses on the arm of the sofa. You might stay there forever or you might slip back. You’d never know. The universes farther from us, though—they’d start getting strange. One that’s very far away would be completely alien.”

  Capuano was beginning to look bored. “What’s this got to do with Springheel Jack?”

  “Let’s say Springheel Jack came from a universe pretty far from ours. When he arrived, because of the strongly anthropic nature of reality, our perceptions caused his particulate structure to begin decaying, changing toward something approximating our own, and he grew more and more human. More what we expect. The bubble of reality he generated was being eroded by the strongly anthropic process. That would account for the gradual normalization of his appearance and physical abilities. If he was from a universe too far away, the change he’d have to undergo in order to adapt would be so drastic, he’d die. That would explain a lot of unexplained phenomena. Like the chupacabra. Those mutated goat-things down in Puerto Rico? Rahul and I figured they’re from such a far-off universe, they disintegrate. They don’t leave a trace. All through history there are reports suggesting this happens frequently. Like in pre-Christian England, there were these two green-skinned children found wandering on the edge of a village. A boy and a girl. The boy died. He couldn’t eat the food. The girl was able to eat. She survived. Springheel Jack didn’t die…at least not right away. Could be he finally normalized. He seemed to be looking for a woman. At least he kept accosting them.”

  “So,” said Capuano. “How long do we have?”

  “Before she changes beyond recognition? Years, maybe. But you want to find her quickly. It’s not just her shape that’s changing, it’s her mind. Long before she adapts to our reality—if she does—she’ll forget who she is and why she came here. Particle change in the brain. She’ll probably regress to the level of a child. She may retain some memories, but they’ll seem like dreams.”

  Capuano punched the remote and brought up the image of the woman crouched on the rim of the hollow.

  “Look at her,” I said. “Extremely tall and thin. Capable of leaping forty, fifty feet in the air. You might just have Springheel Jill on your hands.”

  Capuano’s aide shifted behind him—his eyes grazed mine and I had the impression that he viewed me in a poor light.

  “If you’re still hunting for her,” I went on, “tell your guys to take particular notice of intense bad smells and feelings of nausea. Those effects would be produced by electron decay when the bubbles of two different realities overlap.”

  “Okay,” Capuano said, drawing out the word.

  “Rahul and I really geeked out behind the idea. We figured out all kinds of stuff that synched with it. Like with ghosts. We decided hauntings might be resonance waves from nearby universes.”

  Capuano made an amused noise. “That must have been some hellacious hash.”

  “Yeah, it was! Outstanding!”

  He continued to question me, but I could tell by his diffident attitude that he had written off his trip to Ann Arbor as a waste of time. He said he would be checking back with me and to give him a call if I thought of anything else. But I never called and he never checked back.

  After the interview I headed home to the brunette whom I’d followed to UCLA and ultimately married. Her legs were still beautiful, but she had developed an eating disorder, then exchanged this problem for alcoholism, an addiction I was beginning to acquire. We were most of the way down the path to divorce. I decided I should steel myself for a confrontation with her and stopped for a drink at a bar a few blocks from our apartment. The place was decorated for the season with wreaths and merry red and green stickers affixed to the mirror above the liquor bottles. I swilled down a vodka martini, ordered a second, and sat studying the reflections of the other holiday drinkers, their glum expressions similar to my own. My thoughts shifted back and forth between the brunette and the woman in the pit. Seeing her had excited me in a way I had not known since I was a sophomore—her appearance validated the obsessions Rahul and I had shared, our belief that the universe contained miraculous presences unanticipated by mainstream science. I polished off the second martini, signaled the bartender, and was overcome by nostalgia. The good old days at Cal Tech. If I had stayed, what a life I might have had! I was almost to the bottom of a third martini when I realized I was staring at a sticker on the mirror whose outline resembled the image on the monitor screen that Capuano had shown me. The tapering wings partly spread, halo obscuring the shape of the head, making it round. “Some type of vehicle,” he had said.

  It was a Christmas angel.

  IT SEEMS I may be both the villain and the hero of this piece, though I am scarcely the stuff from which such figures are traditionally made. My current wife, a smallish woman, has been known to describe me as imposing, but I recognize this for an example of bias on her part. I am an ordinary man of early middle age with a professorial mien who could stand to lose a few pounds. Yet I suppose if my story can be said to have a hero, there is no better candidate for the part, and my actions must be considered villainous to a degree, if for no other reason than that I provided the materials from which everything else derived. When I set foot upon the path that has led to these conclusions, however, I had no stake in the matter whatsoever.

  The female figure I saw in Professor Karlan’s office never left my mind, though over time it receded, cropping up in my thoughts only intermittently. Then four years after my meeting with Capuano, two years after my divorce became final, I took the fall semester off to research a book. My chief interest as an academic was the cultural usage of myths, their reflection of opposing forces in society. I wanted to particularize Levi-Strauss’s work in the area, concentrating on Louisiana, a locale resplendent with myth; but one afternoon in late September a colleague at Tulane told me a story he’d heard from a student, a folktale of recent vintage concerning a dweller in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia known as the Willowy Woman. A beautiful woman said to be seven feet tall, a nocturnal creature who lived in the wild and was possessed of immense physical strength and magical powers. I thought of the even taller woman I had seen leap from the hollow and asked my colleague in which part of the Alleghenies the Willowy Woman was purported to live. He consulted his notes—she had been seen initially near the town of Valley Head, but thereafter had been sighted by hunters in various other areas. I copied the notes and accessed a map of the state. Valley Head was about twenty miles from Tuttle’s Hollow. I referenced a topological map and found that one could follow a system of creeks and streams to Valley Head from a point adjoining the hollow. An excellent escape route for someone fleeing pursuit. The last recorded sighting was south of the town of Durbin, and Durbin was only fifteen miles north of the SETI array at Green Bank.

  ET, phone home?

  If that had been her original intent, I assumed that she had forgotten it and kept heading for the array on automatic pilot.

  I thought about getting in touch with Capuano, but gave it no serious consideration. He had not taken me seriously, and further, if the Willowy Woman proved to be the same woman who had materialized from the project’s smoke, I had no desire to turn her over to the bald eagles at the NSC. The notion of meeting the central element of a real-life folktale evoked visions of awards banquets in my head. A book. Books, perhaps. Appearances on national television. Then, too, the notion that this female nightmare who had climbed from the fuming pit might in four years have morphed into a beautiful larger-than-life child-woman living in the deep green mystery of the legend-haunted West Virginia hills, it appeal
ed to my romantic side. I envisioned years spent in study of the woman. Visiting her regularly, gentling her, winning her trust. We would speak to one another in a hybrid language of grunts and whistles and eventually I would emerge from the wood with her on my arm and an incredible story. Even after the toll taken by divorce, I had enough money to chuck my job and live comfortably. To hell with academia! It had been a stopgap, something to do until something better happened along.

  And now something had.

  The following Saturday afternoon I found myself on a stool in one of Durbin’s armpit bars, Mickey’s Clubhouse, a place that sported placards in the window advertising HBO, a turkey raffle, and the availability of punchcards, and was full of brownish air and a brimstone smell compounded of industrial-strength cleaner and staleness. Gray light streamed through the dirty front window, but did not penetrate far; the darkness of the clouded mirror was picked out by digital beer ads. I was trying to negotiate with a scrawny, middle-aged man improbably named Whirlie Henley who had been recommended as a guide. Henley was only half-listening. The insignia on his baseball cap and blue windbreaker attested to his allegiance to the West Virginia Mountaineers, and his eyes were pinned to the television set mounted behind the bar which was showing his beloved Mountaineers getting their asses handed them by the University of Miami. It was only after the score reached 38-7 that he turned to me and asked why I wanted to explore the hills south of Durbin.

  “Nothin’ there ’cept critters and nettles,” he said. “A whole big buncha nothin’.”

  “Humor me,” I said.

  “I don’t know, Professor.” He glanced sourly at the TV. “Gets cold out there this time a’year.”

  I increased my offer, but Miami was threatening to score again and Henley became even more truculent. His bony face tightened, his watery blue eyes narrowed. “Shit!” he said as a Miami wide receiver danced into the end zone holding the football aloft. He whipped off his Mountaineer cap and eyed it as if it were a thing offensive to God. His drab brown hair was home-cut, trimmed high on the neck, and he had a tonsure-like bald spot.

  “Two hundred a day,” I said. “Two weeks minimum.”

  He cocked an eye toward me. “Why you want to pay that much to take a nature walk?”

  “The Willowy Woman,” I said.

  His face emptied. After a moment he called for another beer. The bartender, a huge apple-cheeked man with a bushy beard and black hair falling to his mid-back, wearing a plaid wool shirt and jeans, heaved up from his stool and shambled forward like a hillbilly wrestler cautiously coming out of his corner to confront some masked menace.

  “You’ve seen her,” I said after the bartender had mosied back to his perch.

  “I seen somethin’ mighta been her,” Henley took a pull from his beer. “I seen her peepin’ at me from a purpleheart tree. Scared the shit outta me.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Wicked pretty. Long hair. Couldn’t see much but her face.”

  “What happened?”

  He had another drink. “I like to fell over. Next I know she shinnied up higher in the tree and I heard her goin’ off through the tops of the other trees like she’s a monkey.” He sucked on his teeth till they squeaked, set the bottle down precisely in the wet circle from which he had lifted it. “Three hunnerd per day and I’ll find her for ya.”

  This surprised me. Going by his expression when I mentioned her, I figured he was still afraid. I said as much and he said, “Oh, yeah. I admit it.”

  “But three hundred a day will settle your nerves.”

  “That ain’t it.” He tipped the bottle to his lips and drank until it was empty, then waved the empty at the bartender, who appeared to have fallen asleep. “Hey, Mickey! Wake your ass up and get me ’nother beer.”

  The giant lumbered up and lurched toward the cooler. “Goddamn, Whirlie. You be pissin’ for a week.” He plunked a beer down on the counter. “How ’bout you, friend?” he asked me, his bewhiskered baby face set in earnest lines.

  “Well whiskey,” I told him. “A double.”

  “Damn straight!” Mickey said. “I’ll join ya.”

  He poured, we clinked glasses and drank. The whiskey was raw, but Mickey sighed as if in rapture and poured me another on the house before returning to his seat. I fondled the glass but did not drink. I had a presentiment of danger, a sunbreak of rationality in my romantic fog. Immense strength. Magical powers. The capacity to elude an army of searchers. Even four years down the road from the peak of her powers, I had no doubt that the Willowy Woman would be formidable.

  “If you’re afraid,” I said to Henley, “and if it isn’t the money that motivates you, how come you want to make the trip?”

  “It’s personal,” he said. “Once’t you seen that face, it’s kinda like you gotta see it agin.”

  THE HILLS SOUTH of Durbin were thickly forested with medleys of butternut, black walnut, tupelos, oaks, tulip trees, and here and there a chestnut stump. The skies were overcast and even at noon it was dark under the trees. Whenever the sun peeked through, the twisted trunks cast devious shadows. The forest floor was carpeted with rotting leaves and ground apple, ginseng and goldenseal. Mica-flecked boulders poked out from the slopes. We backpacked for three days before Henley detected signs that the Willowy Woman might be in the area: rabbit bones that bore the marks of human teeth and human waste less than a day old. Another two days of reconnoitering and he claimed to have established the perimeters of her hunting ground.

  “She’ll been comin’ through the treetops,” he said. “She prob’ly lives in ’em. I ain’t seen one footprint…though I know she’s bound to come down once’t in a while. We gonna sight ’er, we gotta get in the trees ourselves.” He spat and adjusted his Mountaineer cap. “We gon’ hafta be damn lucky any way you cut it. I figger she’s got night eyes.”

  So it was that we spent the next three nights high in the crown of a water oak, keeping watch in nearly total darkness, staring down through the wends of branches and masses of leaves, alert for any glimmer of movement. On the fourth day I told Henley I thought we should change our position. I was giddy with lack of sleep, sore from bracing in the fork of a limb, and I was looking to gain an advantage over weariness and boredom—I hoped a new vantage might help to keep me awake and give us a better shot at encountering the Willowy Woman. Henley was lukewarm to the idea.

  “Well, we could,” he said, scratching his neck. “But way I figger, she’s a mover. She hunts an area one night, then moves on. We might be due for a visit, we stick it out here.”

  “How do you know she’s a mover?” I asked, irritated—Henley’s woods lore had gotten us nowhere and I thought my voice deserved to be heeded.

  “I don’t know nothin’. I jus’ figger that’s how it is. I got a good feelin’ we hang around here, she’ll come to us. But it’s your dollar.”

  I was, I discovered, not up to shouldering the burden of decision. Or maybe I just wanted Henley to be the one who was wrong—I was losing hope that we would find her. The sky cleared that evening; the stars shone bright and there was a three-quarter moon. Aloft in the water oak, wired on caffeine pills, I felt afloat, grounded in silvery light. The points of the leaves were tipped with illusory glitters—they seemed to hiss when they touched my skin. I wished I had a joint to smooth things out, though I doubted Henley would approve. I made him out below to the right, half-hidden among the shadowy foliage. Still as an Indian. Likely replaying old Mountaineer games in his head, or boning up on his botanical knowledge. Every time we passed a plant he’d say its name, as if I cared. “That there’s black kohosh,” he’d say. “And that’s cardinal flower…that little ’un next to the crust of fungus.” I told myself to lighten up on Whirlie.

  He’d proved to be a good traveling companion. He put up with my bullshit, after all, and he told amusing stories about his life in the redneck paradise. Turned out he had a sister by the name of Girlie. Whirlie and Girlie Henley.

  “She com
e out a few months premature,” he’d said. “Daddy was gonna call her Early, but mama wouldn’t have it.”

  I zoned out for a while, lost in the stars. Tiny sparkles against the black. A cold breeze made me shiver, bringing a bitter scent. I began to feel queasy and wondered if the game I’d eaten was backing up on me. I was too self-absorbed to recognize these for signs of the Willowy Woman’s presence and the first I knew she was nearby was when I heard Henley squawk, this followed by a thud from below. I peered down, trying to see him.

  “Hey…What’s going on?” I asked shakily.

  Then I spotted her peeking from among the leaves to my left. Henley had been right about her face. Milk-pale, long and narrow, it had an exotic angularity and simplicity such as might be depicted in a comic book artist’s vision of beauty, too streamlined to be real, and it was more compelling than the face of any human woman I had known. Her eyes were dark, almost no whites showing around enormous pupils, and the eyebrows were black upswept streaks. Sharp cheekbones mimicked the angle of her eyebrows; her mouth was wide and full, predatory yet sensual. The face of an avenging angel such as might have been drawn by Neal Adams or Jim Steranko. But real, vibrant, almost hallucinatorily intense. She emerged further from the leaves, snarled black hair waterfalling to her waist, and stared at me as if I were the one thing in the world that mattered.

  Nausea roiled the contents of my stomach and a fierce rotting stench clotted my nostrils, but I remained transfixed by her. The descriptions given in my colleague’s notes all spoke of her as naked, but she wore a faded oversized dress and a down jacket patched with strips of duct tape—castaways she must have scavenged from a dump. She seized hold of my shirt and lifted me…but not easily. Her arm trembled with the effort. Nonetheless, she lifted me and I was certain she was going to drop me from the tree, just as I assumed she had done with Henley. But then her intense expression was washed away by one of confusion. Her eyes widened, her lips parted, and she let out a gasp. She wrapped an arm about my waist and began to descend through the tree, carrying me like a sack of flour. Disoriented, the leaves slapping me in the face, shots of moonlight splashing into my eyes, I struggled against her grip, but she held me fast. Once we reached the ground she deposited me at the base of the trunk and stalked off several paces, moving with a gliding step. I realized that she was nowhere near seven feet tall. Closer to six, I’d say. Then I recalled that it had been some time since the last sighting. She had dwindled and grown weaker since that night.