Dead Lines

by Greg Bear

  He pushed open the bathroom door with a—this time—deliberate bang and stepped into the hall, looking both ways. Dark left, dark right. “Whoever you are, get the hell out,” he called, hands clenched.

  Peter had no tolerance for burglars. He had been robbed often enough—the house four times, his car three times. People who stole deserved no mercy as far as he was concerned.

  He found an antique button switch and pushed it. The hall light came on. Empty. The door at the end of the hall, leading into Phil’s bedroom, was open just a crack. He stood for a moment, listening.

  Someone crying. The sound could have come from outside, from another house. But there were no houses close enough, not here at the end of Hidden Dreams Drive. Peter could feel heat rising again behind his eyes, steamy. Tropical. Such a weird sensation.

  He realized he was making little hiccuping gulps as he finished his walk toward the end of the hall, Phil’s bedroom. The door’s closing had been blocked by wire hangers hooked over the top. He was astonished by how clearly he saw everything in the light of the hall fixture: wallpaper pastel flowers in diamond patterns, dark-stained baseboards, antique oak floor, worn oriental-design runner rucked up and curling on one side, boxes on the left stacked almost to the ceiling, WEIRD TALES 1933–48, the bedroom door and the hangers again, the darkness beyond the crack.

  It sounded like a woman crying, soft, silky sobs, voice like dusty honey. Not Phil, then, of course, and probably not a burglar. A lost little girl, maybe. Some out-of-it doper marching around late at night. Peter forced his breath to slow. Maybe it was someone Phil knew, a lover come back to pick up her toothbrush, her underwear, her jewelry, as unlikely as that might be—Phil had kept so much to himself.

  Peter assumed a fencer’s position in the hall, En garde. “I’m out here, and I won’t hurt you,” he said, hand outstretched. “Don’t be afraid. It’s okay.” He knew, could feel it as a tangible fact, that the bedroom was empty, but he could still hear the sobbing through the door.

  Slender lines of darkness gathered in the periphery of his vision like smeared ink. As he tried to focus, they blended into corner shadows like wisps of spiderweb. Still, outside his direct gaze, the smudged lines flashed toward the bedroom door, wriggling like dark, blurry eels anxious to get in.

  I’m having a stroke, just like Phil.

  But he did not feel ill. Physically he was fine; it was the house, the bedroom, that was not fine.

  It was the bedroom that was crying.

  Peter was not a coward. He knew that about himself. He could feel fear and still act, but what he felt now was not fear; it was an unwillingness to learn, and that was very different. Some things that you discover—infidelity, the death of loved ones—you cannot turn back from. What you suddenly know changes you, chops you up into little pieces.

  He did not want to learn what was in the bedroom.

  Still, he poked the door open with a stiff finger. He leaned slowly into the bedroom and fumbled to push the button switch. The ceiling fixture slowly glowed to sterile yellow brightness. Shadows fled across the bedroom like little cyclones of soot.

  Peter grabbed the doorjamb.

  A woman stood at the foot of Phil’s bed. She had buried her face in gray hands, but Peter could tell who she was by the dark comma of bobbed hair and the honey-silk quality of her weeping. “My God,” he said, and his shoulders slumped. He let out his breath and started to smile. “Lydia. You scared me.”

  The woman’s hands dropped. She turned, head cocked, listening; slowly turned and listened some more, as if to far-off and unpleasant music.

  All of a sudden, through his relief, Peter’s tongue moved involuntarily, and he bit into it. His head exploded in pain. Eyes watering, gasping, he felt vulnerable and very, very foolish. Through his tears, he saw that the woman’s face was like a flat sheet of mother-of-pearl. Her eyes opened to quizzical hollows. Less than solid, she resembled a paper doll frayed by careless snipping. Peter could actually see her edges ripple. Trying to back out, he thumped against the door, closing it, and for an instant, felt something tug at his head, his throbbing tongue, his nerves.

  Her blank and empty eyes vibrated. They seemed to point not quite in his direction, but through and beyond him. The image filled out like a balloon, assuming a counterfeit and temporary solidity.

  Not Lydia. But it looks like her.

  The image moved its lips. As if pushing through gelatin, the sound arrived late at his ears. “Phil, how could you do this, how could you just die?” came the high-pitched silken wail, only a little louder than the buzzing of a fly.

  The eel shadows swooped through the door and into the bedroom like descending hawks. He could feel them brush his shoulders like the tips of cold, damp fingers. The figure jerked in a horrible simulation of fear, trying to escape, dodging faster than flesh, like a bad film edit. But escape was impossible.

  Peter’s mouth went stone dry. He wanted to look away, block his vision with a hand. Instincts old and deep instructed him that he was about to bear witness to something private, a sight no living human should ever have to see; but he could not stop himself.

  He stared. Pity held him. And curiosity.

  The eel shadows swarmed and lanced and worried the image, snatching away scalloped bites and crumbling pieces. It lifted its hands in weak defense, shuddering with an astonishing, dry simulacrum of pain. Whatever it was, its time had come. As the likeness of Phil’s ex-wife diminished and deflated, its wailing turned tinny and desperate. It unraveled drastically, peeling and dissolving in shreds like a tissue-paper cutout dipped in a bowl of water. In a few seconds, the last of its murky outline disintegrated and fell away. Sated, the shadows fled, draining like water around his feet. The room seemed to shiver off the last of them, leaving just the bed, neatly made and undisturbed, and the threadbare carpet and empty shelves.

  The image, the delusion, the reflection or copy of Lydia—whatever it might have been—was gone. Peter leaned his shoulder against the doorjamb. He could not move. For the moment, he could not even turn his head. Blood pounded in his ears. His calf cramped and he gritted his teeth. Even in his worse days of besotted grief, he had never seen anything remotely like this.

  Pitiful, something left behind, dropped like an old Kleenex.

  His heart slowed. The heat behind his eyes cooled. Finally, he had to blink. That instant with his eyes closed terrified him and he felt his neck tense and intestines curl.

  Nothing came. Nothing touched him. Quiet and still. The room was innocent.

  Nothing had actually happened.

  Nothing real.

  Peter was finally able to turn. He put out one foot as if rediscovering how to walk, then another, and slowly left the bedroom, reaching back with numb and inept fingers to close the door. The hangers caught. He could not close the door all the way, so he angrily slammed it. The hangers jangled. One fell and bounced off the wood floor with a tinny resonance. The whine of the hanger wire made him grit his teeth; it sounded too much like the voice.

  He gave up and walked on what felt like tingling stumps to the couch in the living room. Sat on the couch with hands folded on his lap. Did not even try to relax. Watched the carnival of the city across the water, darker now in the wee hours. His neck knotted and stayed that way.

  He was still alive and wasn’t sure he wanted to be, not if he had to think about what he had just seen.

  PETER WATCHED THE dawn light gather slowly over San Francisco, then burst forth along the eastern hills, reflecting gold against skyscrapers and banks of fog, the most beautiful sight of all: day.

  He was making a big, grown-man decision. There was only one way to react—it must have been a bad dream—and two things to do. He walked into the kitchen and poured himself a bowl of Cheerios, chewing reflexively each milky mouthful. The milk had been in the fridge since Phil’s death and was on the edge of spoiling, but served well enough.

  He forced himself to take a shower in the big bathroom, removing his
clothes with catlike caution, climbing into the claw-foot tub, and drawing the curtain around on its pipe, tucked inside just enough to keep water from spraying on the floor, but with a clear view of the open bathroom door. This took tremendous will but it had to be done, and just this way. The water was set hot and stung his back. Phil did not believe in wimpy showers; no water inhibitor valves for him.

  No Bergson valves.

  As Peter scrubbed using Phil’s rounded block of Ivory soap, he tried to recall what a Bergson valve was. Something he had picked up reading The Doors of Perception in the sixties.

  This is the end . . . beautiful friend.

  Aldous Huxley. Something about drugs opening doors, or was it spigots? Letting the taps of reality flow free. He’d look it up when he got home. Or maybe Phil had a copy.

  After toweling dry, he dressed in the living room, putting on his good wool slacks and a black long-sleeve shirt and the thrift-store suit coat to get ready for when they delivered Phil, or when—and he did not know how he would react to this—the real Lydia turned up again on the porch.

  Peter washed the bowl in the sink and suddenly started snorting with laughter. It didn’t last long; it wasn’t funny, really. It was sad. “I see live people,” he said, and started snorting again until he had to take off his glasses to wipe his nose and his eyes.

  His best friend’s wake was today and he couldn’t keep his act together long enough to get a good night’s sleep. He had to start seeing things. Peter the screwup, two nights running. Maybe he was hoping to draw attention to himself; poor Peter, maddened by loss once again.

  Really sad.

  The self-hatred built like bad clouds before a storm. Then it burst and went away. Peter’s ground state was a mellow kind of cheer, high energy at times, but usually slow to blame or anger. Sometimes he just reverted to the ground state when things got really bad, without explanation, but no solution, either; the bad clouds inevitably returned. He would have to deal with them. Just not now.

  “It did not feel like a dream,” he told himself. He was clean and well dressed, wearing his beige silk coat. He had become a figure of calm masculine dignity, gray-bearded, with wide-spaced and gentle eyes and glasses, lacking only a pipe.

  Bring it on.

  He sat on the porch swing, relishing the sun, the cool fresh air.

  “What a great house, Phil,” he said. “Really.”

  A dark blue unmarked panel truck came up the road trailing a thin cloud of exhaust and dust. It parked on the gravel beside the Porsche and a man in a dark brown suit got out, carrying a square cardboard box.

  “Is that Phil?” Peter called from the porch.

  “Delivery for Ms. Lydia Richards,” the man said, holding out the box in both hands. He had thick, theatrically wavy gray hair and walked and spoke with a jaded but professional dignity. Peter had once known a stripper who had married an undertaker. It was all about flesh after all.

  “I’ll take him,” Peter said.

  “Are you authorized by the family to receive the mortal remains of Mr. Philip Daley Richards?” the dignified man asked.

  “I’m family,” Peter said, and signed for Phil’s ashes.

  CHAPTER 8

  PETER GINGERLY PLACED the box on the mantel of the fireplace. It barely fit.

  The morning’s explanations weren’t making much sense now.

  “Lydia, where did Phil die?” he rehearsed out loud, standing before the fireplace. “Lydia, I don’t think he died in the house. Did you die in the house, Lydia? Because it wasn’t Phil who showed up this morning, in the dark.”

  He rubbed his lips as if to wipe away that potential conversation. Best to just let the wake roll on. Unlike Peter, Phil had not become a teetotaler. He would have appreciated a few drinks hoisted on his behalf. But solemn speeches and rows of furtive people dressed in black would have bummed him.

  Peter looked down at his hands. They were trembling. He was not cut out to lose people. He was not cut out to face the death of loved ones, and he had loved Phil. Maybe he was not meant to be a friend or a husband or a daddy or any kind of serious human being. He had been at his happiest, he thought with a real twinge, facing the softer truths of young flesh, bawdiness and bodies live, parties on sets that sometimes turned into happy orgies. So much joy and laughter, walking around with a large pad of newsprint and a marker, wearing a wide floppy Shakespearean hat and nothing else, sketching his actors while orating like Richard Burton; loose easy conversations and kisses and oral sex and gentle, easy fucking and food, just between friends.

  In the sixties and early seventies, he had stayed well away from the serious and somber.

  He would have loved to go on that Old Farts Hot Dog Tour, had there been time; that would have been something he could have done well with Phil. This, he did not think he was going to do well.

  “Lydia, do you burn incense, practice astral projection?”

  Peter gave it up.

  At noon, still alone in the house, pacing, glancing at the mantel, Peter realized that the cardboard box was not decorous. He walked up to the fireplace and lowered the box to the brick hearth. Inside, a bronze-colored plastic urn looked both cheap and better. He lifted the urn from the box and centered it, creating two urns, one on the mantel, one in the mirror above the mantel. Phil and anti-Phil. Through the looking glass.

  By one o’clock, Peter was irritated and not in the least nervous or worried about what he would say. By two, he was furious. He opened a can of baked beans from the back of the cupboard and ate them cold. He spooned up the sweet smoky beans and the little lump of pork fat and thought of all the potluck food Lydia would no doubt bring.

  As he finished the last bite, the Trans chimed in his pocket. He answered.

  “Yeah?”

  “Have I reached the party to whom I am speaking?”

  “Who is this?” Peter asked.

  “Stanley Weinstein. Mrs. Benoliel told me you were in the Bay Area. I’m calling to say thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “For convincing Mr. Benoliel to invest in our company.”

  “Did I?”

  “You did. And he did. We’re bubbly. I’m inviting you to come to the Big House and meet the crew. We have some of your reward, and if you’re interested, we might have some work for you. I’ve been doing my research. I didn’t know I was meeting a famous man.”

  Peter stared out the window at the city. “Where are you?” he asked.

  “Michelle says you’re somewhere in Marin. We’re not far, if that’s true—and I don’t otherwise know, because a Trans unit cannot be located, it is completely private.”

  “I’m in Tiburon,” Peter said.

  “That’s grand. We’re less than half an hour away. Let me give you directions. You can’t miss it, actually. Do you know where the old San Andreas prison is?”

  “I’ve never been there.”

  “Now’s your chance. California Department of Corrections closed the prison three years ago to sell the land. Very posh, four hundred and fifty acres, great Bay views.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Peter said.

  “We lease space in the condemned wing. It’s right next to the gas chamber. When can you get here?”

  “There’s a wake today. Maybe tomorrow?”

  “I was sorry to hear about your friend.”

  “Thanks,” Peter said.

  “You’ll need some time, obviously. Why don’t we get together at eleven tomorrow morning? If that’s not too soon.”

  Peter realized he could use the money, if any, to get home. “Thanks. I’ll be there.”

  Weinstein gave him his Trans number and the backup landline office number. “We’re still having some glitches,” he explained. “Just temporary.”

  Peter wrote the numbers on a piece of scrap notepaper with a ballpoint pen.

  “Looking forward to it. I think you’ll enjoy the whole experience.” Weinstein ended the call. The cutoff was noiseless. The silence next to Peter�
�s ear just got deeper. He closed the unit, then turned over the paper. Phil had cut an old typed manuscript into smaller pieces. Always thrifty.

  He read the truncated bit of dialog.

  “Do you play any games?” Megan asked him, licking her lips.

  “Not really, not very well,” Carlton replied huskily.

  “Why? Do you have something against rules?”

  Peter folded the scrap and put it in his shirt pocket, then walked down the drive for the fifth time in the last two hours to see if cars were coming. For a moment, he wondered if Lydia had died in an accident and he actually had seen her ghost last night. Perhaps she had committed suicide, taking his five hundred dollars and driving down the road to the beach and drowning herself in the cold waters of the Bay. That was crazy. Crazy thinking. Here he was, seeing things, almost flat broke, hoping for a payout from Stanley Weinstein because he didn’t have enough money to get home.

  His imagination had slipped into a tense, angry riot when he finally saw cars driving up Hidden Dreams Drive. The first one, a green new-style Beetle, carried two people. The driver was Lydia. Behind the Beetle came three more cars.

  Peter straightened his coat and walked back to the house.

  What the hell, he thought as he climbed the porch. Phil, you might have liked this. I sure don’t. But it has your touch, somehow.

  CHAPTER 9

  LYDIA LOOKED TIRED and pale but vital, and she certainly behaved as if nothing untoward had happened. She introduced the guests to Peter. Two he had met long ago, writers from a group Phil had belonged to for almost thirty years, the Mysterians. Peter had attended several meetings and liked them well enough. Mystery writers, reporters, a couple of cops. The two Mysterians that Lydia had invited were both male, portly, and in their sixties. Peter had the impression they were gay and lived together.