I couldn’t decide whether he had cracked in more ways than one.
“You think I pulled a Benedict Arnold on you?” he said. “I assume you’re tickling me in the ribs, though that was never your way, as I recall. Speaking of the past, I have a great big recollection of a female elephant stomping the gonads out of me. I don’t like to think about that, let alone talk of it. It wasn’t that she was female because even though I like to be as chauvinistic as the next guy once in a while, I know there are women who become jocks at age six and grow muscles I’ll never hope to have. It was because she enjoyed herself so much. You might say she dissuaded me from life. She showed me how bad the human race was. With every lump she taught me a severe lesson in ethics, most of which boiled down to the revelation that there aren’t any except maybe in kids like you who don’t know any better. I just walked away from everything and never went back.
I have a family somewhere that I never see so why should I worry about three people I used to do dirty work with?”
“I saw Deron s and Kisko’s dead bodies after the female elephant got done with them,” I said. “By some miracle Kisko was revived. That only leaves you.”
“As a scapegoat, you mean? I don’t care what you accuse me of. I’m so obviously a loser it would be asinine for me to try and deny it, which I wouldn’t anyhow because I’ve given up everything that means anything to me. I didn’t exactly do it on purpose but I found it provides a kind of safety and comfort I never had before. If I haven’t got anything to lose then I can’t suffer a loss.”
He came willingly on the train with me, didn’t seem to notice when other passengers stared at him. He was the worst looking dreg I’d ever seen. He told me he shaved once in a while to keep his face free of vermin; he didn’t like to itch. I thought he must have lost fifty kilos and his rags stank. Not once did he look out the window.
“I don’t care,” he said now and then. “Who cares? What for?” After I got him to the farm I bought him some clothes, handed him a razor and showed him the way to the tub.
I placed a chair in the middle of the pasture and had him sit on it.
“You’re making a mistake,” he said.
“About what?”
“Everything. You see the world through the wrong facet of the glass in front of you.” He looked around, unafraid. “What’s the idea? What am I supposed to be doing out there?”
“You’re a target.”
He kept looking around. “For what? I don’t see anything.”
“Not even all those rings?”
“Where?”
“Straight ahead of you.”
“You know I can’t see rings. I can pick out a couple of faint lines but that’s all.”
“That’s more than I thought you could see. Anyhow, I’d appreciate it if you just sat there.”
“Not that I’m overly curious, but tell me why.”
“Kisko’s in D somewhere. I want him to come out and get you.”
“And you don’t care what he does to me?”
“No.”
It was disappointing in more ways than one. I didn’t savor the thought of him suffering and perhaps being destroyed but the fact remained that he belonged to Kisko. That was the case as I saw it.
For three days he sat in the field. I thought his mind might have gone since he finally took to chuckling and chortling as if at some private joke. Every evening at sundown he came in to dinner, slept in the living room and then went back out to the chair at sunrise. He told me more than once that he aimed to please and hoped I succeeded in killing him because he was tired of living, if that was what one called it.
On the third evening Kisko came out of nowhere like the tail end of a ghost, wispy and languishing in seeming ennui. There was no hurry evinced as trails of fog filled the air around the chair where Wheaty sat bolt upright. His weak blue eyes stared and his teeth showed in a grimace of fear and disbelief but he didn’t cry out or leave his seat.
“Why should I be punished for a guilty conscience?” he said in a loud voice to the blue-gray air enveloping him. “I don’t even know why I feel guilty. It’s just there. Like, my baby teeth came in and I grew a few inches and I grew some more hair and then I grew a guilty conscience. I swear, that’s the worst thing I ever did in my life.”
The clouds gathered more closely and more thickly around him. “I’m sorry you’re sick, boss,” he said. “I’m sorry either of us was ever bom.”
Something unusual happened to him as he sat talking in a rasping voice to the fog. His body lost its rigidity, his expression became puzzled and then he said, “If you say so.” Then he was gone. Like a wink of an eye or the turning of a page of a book, reality was different all at once, had moved on a pace or a parsec and Wheaty no longer sat in the chair in the field that constituted part of my property. The ghost had taken him.
19
I went to Stillwell, Maine, to see if the cousin of Carston, Orfia’s childhood acquaintance, had returned from California. She had and informed me that Carston lived in New York.
I wasn’t expecting much of anything when I arrived at the address which was partly why his first words knocked me for an inward loop.
“How is your mother?”
Just like that I had a family.
It was an ordinary apartment in a highrise overlooking a congested city. The sky beyond the windows was gray with coaldust belching from a smokestack across the river. Carston and I sat in the living room on furniture made of cardboard, styrofoam and cheap fabric. Not that he was poor. He said he was an accountant for a growing business concern, so I knew he made a good salary. It was just that scarcely anything was well made. Someone in another room played a piano, softly and not too proficiently. Carston was broad and balding, friendly and at ease and not overly surprised that I should be there.
“The whole country is turning into a missing person. Everyone seems to be taking a walk. You’re very much like her,” he said as I carefully felt my way into the nearest chair. “I’d know that, you see, because I haven’t seen Orfia since we were both about your age.”
He remembered the trouble back in Maine since he had been so personally involved. After it happened, Orfia’s parents packed up and left which had grieved Carston since he had a crush on Orfia.
“At least I did before that day we sneaked off into D,” he said, smiling slightly and rather ruefully. “The world was different then. Ring travel wasn’t something people did recklessly. That is, as far as we knew, Orfia and I and her brother were the only muters in town, and the fact was that we didn’t mute. Not ever. Our parents and teachers used to lecture us against it like they did against drugs and porno. Most of the time they acted as if we were a little bit freaky. So we thought about it and read about it and looked at the rings but did nothing about it. Except Sonny, and I still think to this day he muted all the time and then lied about it even to us. Sonny was always doing something crazy. Anyhow, Orfia and I decided to go ahead and do it one day. We were so excited we couldn’t make up our minds which ring to take. There was a big channel down by a creek we used to play in and on the day we did it we skipped school right after lunch and met at a spot where there were rings all over the place. It was like baptism, you know, except that we knew our parents and everybody else would be against what we were about to do, so that cut into our enthusiasm and made us a little edgy, but it didn’t change our minds.”
Carston paused, frowned and then smiled. “She didn’t mean it, not any of it. She had no more idea of what to expect than I. Oh, we’d read books and knew we were going to transmutate into goths, and we’d seen pictures of them and Gothland but none of it was real. If we’d chosen any other ring our fives might have been entirely different. Orfia and her family probably wouldn’t have moved away, we wouldn’t have lost contact with one another and you might have been my daughter. We picked a ring that exited right on the tip of an escarpment and over the edge we went together, clawing and grabbing at one another in sheer terro
r, reaching out for some support and not thinking of the things we’d read about how it’s almost impossible for a fall or slide to hurt a goth.
Again he paused. “Under normal circumstances we might have come out of that fall untouched but something went wrong when Orfia mutated and she turned out to be monstrously huge, much larger than normal, two hundred kilos and more, and while she grappled with me and I grappled with her, she literally nearly slashed me to pieces with her claws. By the time we got to the bottom of the escarpment I was convinced I was dying. Orfia had to drag me to a yellow ring and shove me through it. The most startling thing to me was that I was in agony and bleeding to death one moment and perfectly okay in the next. I simply got hysterical, blabbed everything and accused Orfia of doing it on purpose. My parents accused hers of having spawned a homicidal freak and the whole thing blew up.”
He shook his head at me and his own thoughts. “That was it. They took her away and I never saw her again. I really think they were afraid she was abnormal and wanted to get her and themselves out of an embarrassing situation that could have become worse.”
Her last name was Kint, he said, and she had blonde curly hair, blue eyes and features like mine.
“I was the cause of her trouble,” he said. “That first transmutation must have been a fluke and I’ll bet after that she muted into a normal sized goth like everybody else.”
“You never went to Waterworld with her?” I said.
“I was terrified of water and couldn’t believe I’d be safe there. To this day I’ve not been to that dimension.” He shrugged and looked self critical. “The talent is wasted on me and always has been. I don’t have the personality for it. I’m content with one world only.”
Like too many other people, I thought, remembering an individual or two who would have traded an arm for the kind of vision it took to travel to other planets.
He didn’t have any more information for me but I kept questioning him and he gave me what answers he could even after he grew tired of the conversation. Before I left he shook my hand and said he hoped I found Orfia. He obviously meant it, just as he obviously still suffered from an occasional pang of guilt about something that happened decades earlier.
Orfia and Miles (Sonny) Kint. There was no data about them at the county court house, not even in the census records. The deed books showed the purchase and sale of their property but nothing else. Since vital statistics, land and property information was recorded in a series of computers and eventually a microfilm copy was made for permanent storage, and since Orfia and Sonny couldn’t be found in any of these, it was plain that someone had gone to a great deal of trouble and money to wipe clean their traces.
I wasn’t quite back where I had started. Now I might have a mother and an uncle. Of course I didn’t really have them, not as long as Appy or someone kept them hidden, or as long as they voluntarily kept out of sight. Which was it?
The puzzles weren’t over. The next morning I went out of the farmhouse to find Googs and take her for a walk and saw her playing with a pup who looked enough like her to be her exact miniature. It had the same pert ears, brown and black coat, stub tail and terrier face. It was about six months old.
“She went into a double blue ring down by the bam and when she came back out she had the other one with her,” said Olger.
There it was again. “What do you mean, a double blue ring? There’s no such thing.”
“It’s interesting to know you have a blind spot,” she said. “The thing was there, all right, and the dog didn’t want or intend to go in it but she ran around the comer after a squirrel and I heard her yelp just before she went through. Gone about a minute, I’d say, before she brought back the young one.”
We walked down to the bam to the appropriate comer where there wasn’t a ring anywhere to be seen. “Just as I thought,” I said. “There aren’t any rings in this spot. There never are.”
“It’s still there,” said Olger. “Practically in front of you, cloudy blue and pink, like dying fire. Could be it’s Hell. It sure looks like it.”
“Take both dogs and push them through it”
“What? Why should I do such a thing?”
“Do it. Googs is mine and I care what happens to her.”
Giving me an outraged look, Olger picked up both animals and seemed to scoot them through thin air. They suddenly disappeared. We waited and by and by Googs came walking back into existence, wagging her tail.
“Now you’ve caused her to lose the little one,” said Olger. “Tell me what you just proved.”
“Nothing, obviously, except that the pup didn’t belong here and isn’t here.”
“But it was her own. Flesh and blood never looked more alike.”
“You know she didn’t give birth to that pup.”
“Then where did it come from?”
“I don’t suppose you’d care to go in the ring and report back to me?”
That afternoon I went loping through some familiar territory in Gothland when I came across a message carved into a rock. It was large enough so that I couldn’t miss it: GREEN DOUBLE RINGS. Frustrated, I sat on my haunches and stared at the words for five minutes. I had no doubt Kisko wrote them for me but I thought the least he could have done was to talk about something that made sense to me. I was tired of hearing about double rings. Olger kept chiding me about Googs and the pup, I had a strong recollection of Lamana mentioning the things and the more I heard of them the more I felt left out.
Why should Kisko write me about them? Why, for that matter, should he write coherently about anything? He hadn’t come out of D after Wheaty but instead had drawn the other into wherever he himself was.
For the fiftieth time Olger remarked about it at dinner. “How can you sit there stuffing yourself while I talk of the demise of a human being?”
“That means dead, doesn’t it? Well, I don’t think Wheaty’s dead. He was supposed to be something like it. I figured Kisko would feel his lure and come out of D to get him, and that way he might be well again.”
“And now?”
“Now I don’t know where either of them is or what’s going on ”
“Go ahead. Continue playing with people’s lives.”
“Somebody played with my life. In fact, they’re still doing it.”
I had a phone conversation with Solvo during which he politely inquired as to the whereabouts of his daughter. How did I know? Gorwyn was malicious but I didn’t consider him dangerous. Yes, he might confuse Lamana or even lose her, but only temporarily. Yes, it was possible she was following a lead or clue. After all, he should know his offspring better than I. Yes, it was surprising to be told that Gorwyn’s mansion wasn’t to be found anywhere in the state of Nevada. Yes, Gorwyn lied now and then about a lot of things.
There were still no records concerning any of them. Tedwar, Gorwyn, Ectri, Orfia, Croff and the three or four others the latter had mentioned might never have been born for all the information there was to be found on them. Solvo didn’t like it either.
“This happens all the time,” he said, an obvious untruth. “The first thing a criminal does is clean up his tracks. Appy has erased everything that might lead to him.”
“What about Erma?”
“The name and description ought to be enough to trace her but so far they haven’t been, which means she’s a background player. Forget her. Forget all of it. Go play games and leave murderers and crazy people to me. Or better still, come to the clinic and let my associates try once again to break your mind block.”
That was on a Tuesday. By Thursday I was bored and restless and decided to take him up on his offer. I muted through an ordinary ring, expecting to land on the front walk of the building. Instead I found myself in Gorwyn’s back yard for approximately three seconds, just long enough for me to recognize the place and start getting bewildered. There was the iron gate and the house beyond it and I thought I saw someone coming down the walk toward me. But then I went elsewhere, not of my ow
n volition but at the whim of some unknown force. Pfft One moment I was on Gorwyn’s property, the next I sailed through blind space and stepped onto the concrete walk next to Solvo’s building.
“Why don’t you worry about Lamana and forget about me?” I said to him when I met him inside.
“My daughter is no cause for worry. She’s on an errand for me.”
That made me pause. “You found her? That’s funny. She hasn’t come to my place.”
“Why should she do that?”
“I thought her job was to keep watch on me.”
“Besides which, she’s a good friend, eh?”
“What about the incident I related to you? Could somebody make a machine that picked me up when I was muting and set me down somewhere that I didn’t want to go?”
He didn’t answer that question or any of the others and neither did anyone else. Chameleon seemed satisfied that I was once more her prisoner and made all sorts of preparations that indicated she might be getting ready to offer me up as a sacrificial goat or something. She patted me, hugged and kissed me, threatened and cajoled, used her silver eyes to bedazzle me, but the wall in my mind slid around and then settled firmly back in place.
“Concentrate on double rings,” said Doctor Oregon. “Try to see them in your mind. Talk about them to the old woman.”
“It doesn’t do me any good to think or talk about them. I can’t see them no matter how I try.”
“You only think you can’t.”
“Can you see them?” I said.
“I can’t see any rings at all but Lamana and her family can and that includes the double kind.”
“Have you seen her? Where is she?”
“On an assignment. Concentrate on the matter at hand. Let Chameleon help you.”
First the wrinkled little old human tried knocking me out with a narcotic and asked me questions, and when that didn’t work she used a series of televised images to try and put me into a hypnotic trance. The wall in my head shifted a bit but didn’t seem to weaken at all so she stood in front of me and used her weird eyes to knock me out. I’ll give her credit and say she was good enough to do almost anything to a human psyche that hadn’t already been tampered with by whoever had tampered with mine.
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