Shuteye for the Timebroker

by Paul Di Filippo

  Clayton’s bafflement must have been obvious. Jill boosted herself off the crate, dusting her skirt neatly. “Follow me, you poltroon, and I’ll show you.”

  She headed off down the tunnel, and Clayton cautiously came after her.

  By a tumbled pile of bricks partially filling the way, they stopped.

  “My home for these past three centuries,” Captain Jill said, indicating with a wave of her hand where Clayton should look.

  He swung the flashlight to reveal a brick-lined cubicle set into the earthen side of the tunnel, its fourth wall a knee-high remnant flush with the passage.

  “How—” began Clayton.

  Captain Jill interrupted. “This Blackwood Beach of yours was a wizardly place even in my day, and I steered clear of it as long as I could. But after raiding up and down the coast for years, I ran out of towns to sack. And I was always looking for new challenges. So at last I convinced my men that we could deal with any dastardly tricks this hamlet could offer. One stormy evening, we hazarded a landing on the beach, thinking no one would be expecting us. But they were. A queer one- eyed sorcerer by the name of Goodnight led them. My men he bewitched into hermit crabs, who promptly buried themselves in the sands. Me he bricked up here, filling the loathsome box with a strange blue gas that left my senses intact, saying he might have a use for me in time.”

  Clayton contemplated the coffin-sized space. Three hundred years in a closet? He would have gone mad.

  As if guessing his feelings, Captain Jill continued. “That devilish blue phlogiston, or whate’er it was, left my poor body suspended, but my mind all arace, like a chip in a millstream. At first, I thought I’d be a bedlamite ere long. I couldn’t understand why the warlock had gone to such trouble to preserve me, only to drive me mad. Why hadn’t he just extinguished my thoughts for the nonce, as one caps a flame? But then I noticed the gas gave me certain powers. To wit, I could see and hear what was happening outside my petty cell—all over the world, in fact. I suspect that the scheming Goodnight wished me to keep abreast of history as it happened, so to speak, perhaps in preparation for whate’er obscure use he had for me. At first, I was chary of using my supernatural vision and hearing o’ermuch. But I soon came to enjoy amusing myself, watching the folly of mankind.”

  Clayton had a sudden frightening thought. “Welcome Goodnight, the magician—did he just free you tonight?” Clayton had no wish to intrude on any of the mysterious Goodnight’s projects.

  “Hah! That rascal did no such merciful thing. Yesterday a tremor of the earth opened a crack in my prison. The gas seeped out, and I came to, my old self. With my sword, I gradually chipped away this old mortar and made my escape. If luck be with me, that bastard Goodnight knows nothing of my escape, and I’ll soon have my revenge.”

  Talk of taking revenge on the powerful Goodnight, still living as one of Blackwood Beach’s most eminent citizens, sent gooseflesh crawling up Clayton’s wet back, and he sought to change the topic.

  “Uh, your visonary powers—do you still have them?”

  Captain Jill scowled fiercely. “Blast it, no! They’ve vanished with the gas. A handy talent those would have been, now that I’m free! Luckily, I remembered watching some men hide that crate of whiskey not far from me some sixty years ago—during a time called Prohibition, I wot—and I knew where to head as soon as I was free. All those years built a powerful thirst, my lad.” Captain Jill passed a silky tongue over her lips. “As well as certain other yearnings.”

  Nervously, Clayton replied, “Well, yes, I’m sure that’s true. We’ll see about attending to those when we get you back up to the surface and make you presentable.”

  “Who says I’m following you back up aboveground?” Captain Jill demanded.

  “I naturally assumed—”

  “You’ve assumed wrong, my fine fellow. Your modern world makes me nervous, at least for the nonce. I’ve everything I need down here. Whiskey, song—and now you.”

  While she talked, Captain Jill had managed to inch closer without Clayton’s noticing. Now she was within a foot of him. Realizing this with a start, he began to back away.

  “Uh, that’s very flattering, Miss Innerarity, but I’m afraid I have no intention of staying. I have duties up above, a saintly old grandmother to attend to—”

  “Grandmother be damned!” Captain Jill yelled. “I’ve got blue fog in my veins that I’ve got to work off. It’s left me cold after that long sleep, and I need some mortal warmth!”

  Captain Jill extended one slim finger to touch the back of Clayton’s hand. A preternatural bolt of ice shot up his arm, and he hastily jerked back.

  “I’m sure a doctor can cure that condition better than me,” Clayton argued. “Perhaps a day in the sun would work wonders—”

  “I’ll pick the nostrum for what ails me, you snivelling whelp, and it’ll be a cure that’s never failed me yet!”

  With this, Captain Jill leaped upon Clayton with alarming speed. Her embrace transmitted a fearsome chill through his nightshirt and throughout his entire body. He felt her breasts as two soft mounds of snow tipped with nubby little stalagmites. (Or was that stalactites? he wondered absurdly. He could never keep the two straight. He supposed it depended on whether she was lying on her back or on her stomach.)

  Clayton’s mind began to fail under the onslaught of the cold radiated by Captain Jill, who now wrapped one leg around one of his and toppled him to the ground. Much to his alarm, he detected certain umistakable stirrings below his waist, as her actions combined with the supernatural chill began to rouse him to an icy erectness.

  Before blanking out, Clayton had time to wonder if “Roger me silly, you varlet!” meant what he suspected it did.

  * * *

  Why was he thinking of John Keats? Surely there were more pressing matters to fill his mind as he lay there on the damp, packed earth of the tunnel floor. Such as finding the power to get to his feet.

  Ah, that was why thoughts of Keats had occurred to him. Those lines in “La Belle Dame sans Merci”: “And I awoke, and found me here / On the cold hill’s side.” Certain parallels were undeniable. Was there any record of how the knight in that poem had dealt with the morning after?

  Summoning energy from previously unplumbed depths, Clayton woozily got to his feet. His flashlight was sending out a yellow beam indicative of drained batteries. Captain Jill was nowhere to be seen.

  Somehow Clayton made it back to the ladder leading up to his cellar. His energy was dribbling back in small increments, and he used some to ascend the rungs.

  In the basement, he dropped the trapdoor and weakly shoved boxes atop it. He jumped as a noise sounded behind him. Jill? No, only a whiskery rat scrambling across some cardboard.

  The cellar stairs were another obstacle, but he conquered them like Hillary taking the last hundred yards of Everest. In the kitchen, he slammed the door shut and locked it, wondering if he had the strength to move the refrigerator in front of it.

  “Clayton?”

  He nearly shot out of his skin. Turning around slowly, he found Granny Little seated at the breakfast table. His loud sigh of relief obviously puzzled her.

  Granny Little was about four feet five inches tall. Her silvery white hair was caught up in a large bun partway back on her head. Thick bifocals in gold frames rested on her hawklike nose. Her knobby, arthritic hands were clasped clumsily atop the table. She wore her unvarying outfit: a gingham dress covered with a homemade cardigan.

  “Where have you been, Clay? I checked your bedroom and found it empty at six. It’s nine now. I was so worried.”

  Clayton began to explain. The singing, his descent to the cellar, and then to the tunnel, his conversation with Captain Jill. When it came time to detail how he had been rendered unconscious and taken advantage of, Clayton paused, unsure of how to phrase it delicately. At last, he bulled ahead, knowing Granny had led no sheltered life.

  Granny nodded knowingly. “I was afraid something like that had happened when I saw th
e cellar door open.” Granny’s cherubic face assumed a look of worry and sadness. “Oh, I’m afraid it’s all my fault for not warning you, Clay. And once I suspected where you’d gone, I still couldn’t help. My joints, you know.”

  Clayton felt awful that Granny was blaming herself. All his self-pity quickly vanished. What did he have to worry about? At least he was young and healthy. The woman lurking under the house could surely be evicted by someone of his ingenuity and abilities. When he smelled the coffee Granny had perked, he felt even more hopeful.

  “I had completely forgotten about this Jill person,” Granny continued, her look of concern partially overlaid by one of calculation. “There was an old legend about her, but after so many years, no one gave it much thought. It seems now we’ll have to do something about it. Tell me, Clay, what exactly did that chill of hers feel like?”

  Clayton thought a moment, then strove to capture the preternatural sensation in at least a simile.

  “Like being squeezed by a polar bear during an Antarctic midnight while simultaneously having a spinal tap.”

  Granny shook her head in sympathy. “It sounds, son, like you could have used a nice warm sweater between you and that witch.”

  At that instant, having placidly uttered the non sequitur, Granny began to knit.

  Clayton put a hand to his forehead and eyed her uneasily—for the woman had neither needles nor yarn in her hands.

  For almost seventy years, Granny had been a compulsive knitter. Even her arthritis had not slowed her down. The output of her flickering needles had clothed, covered, and comforted dozens of Littles and their neighbors with sweaters, blankets, slippers, mittens, socks, and gloves of every description and size. Nor was Granny a purist. She would knit with wool, rayon, acrylic, even string. She knew every pattern in the books, and dozens that were unique to her. Clayton had worn garments made by her all his life.

  But just recently, Granny had developed a disconcerting habit. Although as capable as ever, she had forsaken the conventional implements and materials of her craft, apparently having exhausted their potential after seven decades of activity. Instead, she seemed content to make busy knitting motions with her empty hands, knitting sheer air, apparently working in a medium invisible to the eye.

  Clayton suspected and dreaded that Granny was gradually succumbing to something awful like Alzheimer’s. Yet she seemed so competent in every other area. Her only eccentricity was that ghastly miming of knitting. It gave Clayton the heebie-jeebies.

  “Have something to eat, Clay,” Granny said, “before you drive out to the farm.” Then she repeated, as her hands ceaselessly shifted, “Yes, we’ll definitely have to do something about this.”

  * * *

  When was the state ever going to pave this stretch of highway? They neglected Blackwood Beach shamefully, and sometimes it didn’t help that the town repaid them in kind.

  Of course, the ride was not enhanced by the fact that Clayton’s red ’59 Ford pickup had no shocks. Clayton always meant to get around to installing some, but both time and money conspired against him. By now, he was coming to feel that any vehicle that had served as faithfully as the Little Mistletoe Farm delivery truck for so long deserved respect for its innards, and should be allowed to keep all its original, Detroit-given organs right up until death.

  Still, it made for a bone-shaking ride.

  Driving along Middenheap Mile (so called because the town dump had existed there since the seventeenth century), Clayton alternately steered and chafed his gloved hands together. Another deficiency of the truck exhibited itself in the heater department. But was it worth the effort to fix something that was needed only two or three months out of the year?

  Heading out of town, tire chains rattling and crunching over the snowy gravel road, Clayton considered the problem of the excitable and lickerish Captain Jill. Although his concerns were many, his solutions were few. Eventually he gave up.

  Middenheap Mile forked onto Holsapple Meadow Road. A ways down the latter, a sign appeared on the left, supported by two tall wooden poles above a driveway:

  THE LITTLE MISTLETOE FARM OF BLACKWOOD BEACH, JEROTHMUL LITTLE, PROP.

  Jerothmul was Gran’pa Little. Despite Gran’pa’s demise, Clayton saw no reason to impose his own name on the sign. He was not the true proprietor, any more than Gran’pa had been.

  That office belonged to Ethel.

  Pulling into the plowed driveway, Clayton checked the picnic basket beside him, which Granny had prepared as usual. He hoped Ethel appreciated the fact that he trekked out here every day despite all his own problems. Perhaps he would get a civil response today.

  Engine killed, Clayton climbed out, his size thirteen Timberland boots biting into the snow. He turned to enter the grove.

  Clayton experienced another slippage of time. He was a child again, visiting the farm for the first time. It had been summer.

  “Where’s the mistletoe, Gran’pa?” he had asked. “I don’t see anything but a bunch of oaks.”

  “Look closely, boy. Use your eyes.”

  Clayton had stared and stared, until at last he spotted the mistletoe. “It’s woven all among the branches, Gran’pa. How come?”

  Gran’pa Little had explained then that mistletoe was a parasitical plant, growing on many different kinds of trees, not able to take root on its own. Without pruning, it would eventually kill its host. As it was, the life processes of the mistletoe infected the host, causing bizarre growths—so many, in fact, that the branches of mistletoe-bearing trees came to be called “witches’ brooms.”

  So, here was another essential paradox of Blackwood Beach: one of the town’s prime exports was barely visible on its own, a mere straggler hiding among the commercially unimportant, but more impressive, oaks.

  However, when he was just thirteen, young (but, at nearly six feet, not little) Clayton had not been particularly aware of paradoxes as such. He had simply been enthralled with the fact that his grandparents ran such an intriguing, Christmassy business.

  “Gran’pa,” Clayton had asked, “how did you ever decide to grow mistletoe, of all things?”

  Gran’pa Little stopped to load and tamp a charred briar pipe before answering. “Did you ever hear of Druids, Clay?”

  Clayton nodded.

  “Well, we Littles trace our family tree back to Druidic times. Although we were never Druids ourselves, we were of their religion, serving as acolytes. In Germany, one branch of the family was called Klein. In pre-Christian France, we were Petite. In old England, Lytle. Apparently, part of our duties was attending to the sacred groves of oaks and mistletoe so important for Druidic ceremonies. Eventually, as our religion was superseded and replaced by Christianity, the keeping of the groves was transmuted into a strictly commercial enterprise. In a nutshell, that’s how I inherited this business.”

  Clayton had studied his grandfather, standing there stalwart, with the summer sun burnishing his silver hair, and had been suddenly swept by a chilly awe and respect for their lineage.

  Returning to the present with a start, Clayton realized the chill was real. It was not summer now, and the mistletoe was plainly visible, the oak’s own leaves having dropped. Among the widely spaced trees, Clayton sought to gauge the progress of the crop. The berries seemed to be flourishing, promising a bountiful crop in the summer. (Paradox two: although a symbol of winter and Christmas, mistletoe was harvested in midsummer. Clayton had learned to accept such ironies with a shrug.)

  After a walk of some minutes’ duration, Clayton came at last to the largest oak in the grove. A massive, gnarly-rooted giant, it thrust its branches up toward the deep winter sky and rattled its few dead leaves as if in supplication for the sun’s return.

  Between two thick roots that formed a rough circle, at an angle of forty-five degrees, was set a door of planks bound with iron straps.

  Clayton knocked politely on the door and called, “Ethelred, sir. It’s me, Clayton.”

  After an interval, a rude gr
umbling came from behind the door, which swung reluctantly open, revealing Ethel, standing on a flight of steps leading down below the tree.

  Naked save for immense quantities of hair that hung down to his feet, Ethelred the Druid was a spindle-shanked, wizened being even smaller than Granny Little. His mad eyes and pointy nose were the salient features of an otherwise hirsute face.

  “Oh, it’s you, is it?” said Ethel, squinting belligerently at Clayton. “What do you want now? Can’t a fellow even read his runes in peace, without these constant interruptions?”

  Clayton stooped from his height to politely regard the mannikin on his own level. “Sorry, sir. I meant to show up earlier. But there was some trouble back at the house. I’ve just brought your food for another day.”

  “Here, give me that then, and begone.” Ethel seized the basket by the handles. “Unless you’ve brought those magazines I asked for.”

  Damn, thought Clayton. He had forgotten again. The Druid was essential to the success of the farm, and was worth the cosseting he demanded.

  “Sorry, Ethelred. I haven’t had a chance. Next time, for sure. Penthouse, Playboy, Gallery—and what else?”

  Ethel shook his head ruefully, as if nothing human could amaze him. “Can’t you remember anything? A volume of stories by that fellow named Duke or Knave or Queen or whatever, stories to chill the blood. Just the reading for a cold winter’s night. And don’t forget again, Mister High-Pockets. Such neglect makes me mad! In fact, I don’t know why I stay with your family. All these generations since the Romans drove us out of Gaul. Why, if it weren’t for my grove—” Clucking his tongue, Ethel left the implications of his remarks unvoiced. He turned his back abruptly on Clayton, slammed his door, and then could be heard retreating to his burrow.

  Straightening his spine with a groan, Clayton turned to go. He heard the door open again behind him, and immediately felt the not negligible impact of an empty picnic basket striking his back.