Doyle After Death

by John Shirley

  The angular roofs of the town showed up in dull red planes in the illumination, pyramidal shapes out of shadow. I could just make out the neon sign Brummigen’s Bar, a signature scrawled on the blackboard of evening. Curiously, they have neon signs—­but no electrical system, as we knew it on Earth.

  “This way!” called out the Lamplighter, as we got to the ridge top. “Come! We go to the brow of the sea!” His voice, keen as a knife, had a faint foreign lilt to it. Grecian, maybe.

  Holding the lantern high, the Lamplighter led the way along the spine of the hilltop. There were tall close-­grown pines here, shimmying slightly in a faint, fragrant breeze from the sea. Their heavy boughs glistened wetly in the light from our guide’s lamp. In this moonless world a forest can become deep, velvety dark away from a lamp. Still, even in the dead of night a man can make his way with only the occasional stumble. Objects here give out their own barely perceptible light after darkness falls; things can gleam in the darkness, even when there is nothing to light them.

  I heard a creaking, looked to see a tree shifting its place, almost imperceptibly, like a man shifting his weight from one foot to the other. An owl, seeming heraldic, an iconic creature like all animals here, sidestepped onto a branch, coming into the wobbly glow cast by the lamp. It stared for a long yellow moment—­and then took to the air with three perfect whirring sweeps of its wings, to flash above the Lamplighter, there and gone. A vine shifted on my left, slithering through the crotch of a tree like a snake; a gust of wind brushed by, skirling fallen leaves, whispering, and I could almost hear what the leaves were saying. Something wailed softly overhead, soughing indiscernibly by.

  I could smell the Purple Sea more strongly now. It didn’t have the same mix of rot and vitality as the sea back home. It was a cleaner sort of brininess. It was the smell of nature at its most objective. I wondered if anything lived in that sea, at all. Anything, or anyone.

  “It’ll rain again soon, sure enough,” Mr. Doyle remarked.

  “You can say that and be right any damn time, there, Doyle, if you’re more than a hundred steps to the north of town.” Major Brummigen snorted. “It’s always going to be the case, up here, just as it’ll tend to be hot if you go more than a hundred steps south of town.” He shrugged. “And it’ll be gusting to the west, and changeable to the east. And that’s a fact.”

  “True enough, Major,” Mr. Doyle said affably. “Just making a bit of companionable natter, don’t you know.”

  “Oh yeah, I know,” Brummigen muttered. The major seemed to like Doyle and dislike him, all at once. It is almost impossible to thoroughly dislike Mr. Doyle, despite his notorious obstinacy and a certain insistent tweediness.

  The path emerged from the pines into an airy openness, the sea a vast presence unfolding below us; we descended a short ways toward the sea, the trail switching back twice, then ending at a shelf of rock that jutted from the face of the escarpment like the lower lip of an angry child. The wind here was a bracing caress. This was Gretchen’s Overlook.

  Though there are no stars or moon here, the Purple Sea is forever limned with a faint phosphorescence; the waves glimmer from within as if an imprisoned energy sleeps there, moodily dreaming. I gazed at the sea, watching as its rows of perfect waves marched toward the fog-­gray beach with eerie regularity. I could just make out the small silhouette of Fiona, far below; she was strolling through the fog blanketing the beach as she awaited newcomers . . .

  The Lamplighter continued ahead of us, his sandaled feet taking him to the edge of the cliff, so that I almost called out a warning to him. But there was no need, and there was simply no fear in him. The wind snapped his white hair and beard like a flag as he stood with the lamp held high over the oddly unfinished figure sprawled on the ledge.

  “Does the Lamplighter have a name?” I asked Major Brummigen in a whisper, as we drew near. “I mean, besides . . .”

  “Diogenes is his name,” the major rumbled.

  We entered the coppery pool of Diogenes’ light. The old patriarch held his lamp over the curiously sketchy figure on the ground.

  “And here indeed, is the corpse of our murder victim,” Mr. Doyle muttered, bending to examine it. Adding, to himself, “So far as a corpse may exist here.”

  It was the outline of a corpse, an unclothed man lying awkwardly spread out, faceup. It reminded me of sculptures I’d seen made out of thick wire bent to follow the outer human form, with artful gaps so you could see hollow insides. The wind whistled softly through the gaps in the man-­shaped shell.

  The remains seemed a rough draft of a fairly large, full-­grown man, the body only partly defined. His head was angled toward us. In the wavering lamplight, shadow played inside his eye sockets—­and other shadows nestled deeper, on the curved inside of the wiry skull. The unfinished, unclothed shape seemed caught in mid convulsion, frozen in agony.

  Then I saw the traces of the victim’s soul. I hadn’t seen it at first because of the lamplight: a diffuse electric-­blue glow like a fat, blurred spark, but big as a songbird, that shifted restlessly back and forth within the caging shape of the body. It was as if the big, living ember was looking for a way out of its cage. There were gaps in the body through which I thought the spark might escape—­but something seemed to prevent it.

  “The soul is still here, I see,” said Mr. Doyle, straightening up with a frown. “Though it seems rather faint.”

  “Yes,” Diogenes said. “Faint and forgetting.” He wasn’t looking at the “corpse”—­he was gazing out to sea, his eyes seeking, seeking . . . and seeking.

  “If the soul is there,” I suggested, “Can’t you ask it questions, somehow? Find out what happened?”

  Diogenes compressed his lips thoughtfully. “Someone might. But none of us have the art of it. Not to speak to so slight a soul as this. It would be like conversing with a mote. And it’ll soon be gone.”

  I looked down at the remains of the murdered man. It was hard to understand how someone could be killed here, in this world, since we were all dead already, relative to the Before.

  But the murdered man—­was he dead? If not, how could he be murdered?

  I hunkered in the falling mists, and stared. The spark’s reflected light crawled over the wet coating on the black wiry shape. There was something emotional in its movements; something pathetic—­the very essence of longing. I felt a tug as I looked at it as if some nearly identical spark in my own breast were responding, awakening, itself trying to escape.

  Suddenly vertiginous, I straightened up, and looked away. I focused my eyes instead on the upraised lamp held by the lean, robed old man. There was an affinity between the light in the lamp and the one in the remains of the murdered man. But while the light in the lamp burned placidly, the light in the man-­shaped cage flickered hungrily, almost frantic.

  “You do well not to stare at it,” said Diogenes, nodding at me. “It calls too strongly to the one inside you.”

  I looked out at the sea below us. “They could have dropped the . . . the remains . . . into the sea. Why leave it up here to be found, if it was a murder? Doesn’t seem like something that would wash up.”

  “But it is murder,” Doyle said. “Take hold of the remains—­lift it up.”

  I licked my lips and knelt, slid my hands under what was left of the body, and tried lifting it.

  I picked it up easily. I stood up, and hefted it gently. It weighed about the same as the same shape made of coat-­hanger wire.

  “You see?” Doyle said. “It’s fragile. Hollow. The light in it is weak.”

  “You may as well be the one to let it go,” Brummigen said. “Bend the spine—­make it an upside-­down U shape.”

  I glanced at Diogenes, and he nodded.

  I bent the skeletal, wiry spine with little effort, as if trying to break the body’s back —­this spread the ribs out, opening a wide enough exit for the sp
ark.

  It hurled itself against the gap, wriggled, and slipped through. The fat, bird-­sized spark shot up above us, freed, its motion an animation of elation.

  I felt elated, too, as if it were me flying up to freedom.

  The spark circled us like a curious bird, then sped upward, to become the only star in the sky . . . which, after a moment, winked out.

  I shuddered, and gently laid the “remains” on the stony shelf. “What’ll happen to it? “ I asked, putting the wirelike remains on the ground. “To the spark, I mean . . .”

  Diogenes was studying at the sky. “Oh, it’s still up there. It may become a forgetter. Or it may find its way to the great sea of light it came from.” He sighed. “Or—­it may enter another body, and light another daydream.”

  “Do we know who it was?” I asked Doyle.

  “Perhaps,” he said, distractedly. He was scanning the ground in the Lamplighter’s glow. “Someone has gone missing. But ­people go missing all the time here, and it’s not murder when they vanish—­not normally. They are simply off about afterlife errands. Still, the disappearance was suspicious. I say, Diogenes, if you’d be so good as to lower the lamp a little?”

  The old man complied, his beard streaming in the breeze.

  “Well, Doyle,” Brummigen murmured, leaning over to see what Doyle was peering at. “What would your Holmes look for here? This is not London . . .”

  “It is indeed not London,” Mr. Doyle allowed, running the tips of his fingers over the rock. “But as in the Before, things leave traces, here. Where there is movement, and material, marks are made. Rather a pleasing alliteration, that . . .”

  The creator of Sherlock Holmes straightened up, holding his hand, palm up, closer to the light. “You see it?” Doyle asked. “On the tips of my fingers? When I turn my hand just so?”

  “Rainwater?” I suggested, squinting at the silvery smear.

  “No,” Doyle said. “It’s faintly gritty . . .”

  “Something mineral then. You have sand here, at the edge of the Purple Sea. Why not mica?”

  “We do have minerals. But this feels like the residue of an organism . . .” He held it to his nose, gently sniffed. “I had a notion it might smell fishy. We do have fish here, too, Nicholas, as pungent as fish anywhere. This material rather resembles crushed fish scales. I detect no smell, however.”

  “It looks like the stuff in snail tracks,” I observed, peering at the ground where he’d found it. Was that the shape of a man’s bare heel, dimly marked in organic glitter? “That might be a footprint—­a man’s, not a snail’s.”

  “I’ve seen something like this material, somewhere,” Diogenes said, craning to look closer at Doyle’s fingers. “Perhaps a century ago. Perhaps more. “Certain men in this very settlement were experimenting with . . . life creation.”

  Diogenes frowned. “There is an account in the Old Journals, in the mayor’s office. The method could be used to formulate any manner of . . . semblance. And any semblance might leave the same traces.”

  “Ah,” I said. Not sounding wise. I was already out of my depth as a detective here. And I was showing my ignorance in front of the creator of history’s most famous fictional detective.

  “Are there other famous dead—­ah, aftered authors in town?” I asked impulsively.

  The three men looked at me the way adults look at a child digressing into irrelevance. “Not at the moment,” Brummigen said grudgingly. “Just as well. Most literary types give me a pain. I like a military history, a good technical manual, that’s about it . . . Julius Caesar’s Commentaries . . . but there was a science-­fiction writer, American . . . used to read him myself. He came through. Philip Jose Farmer.” Brummigen smiled wryly, just for a moment. “He kept asking if we were sure this place wasn’t created artificially by a race of super-­beings! Took me a long time to convince him this was truly life after death. Be he eventually realized it was so. He moved on, trying to find Heinlein, and some other fellows. I’ve heard they’re all far to the west, in the City of Phantasmic Devices.”

  “I didn’t have the pleasure of meeting Mr. Farmer,” Doyle said. “I did encounter my friend Kipling here, briefly. And Bernard Shaw was around for a long time—­beard and all! Finally moved on somewhere.”

  “Shaw? Really? What’d he say about finding out there was an afterlife?”

  Doyle chuckled. “I asked him what he thought of it. ‘Why it’s a sharp kick in the trousers,’ says he. ‘I was reckoning on a few billion years of peace and quiet. I’ve never been more disappointed.’ ” Doyle grinned. “I quite liked Shaw, when I got to know him here, despite some philosophical disagreements.” Doyle shook his head, suddenly frowning. “I wish I could find the self-­righ­teous Mr. Harry Houdini. I’ve some things to say to him.” He looked back at his fingers, holding them once more to the lamplight. The snail-­track substance glistened. “This material could be remnants of a formulated semblance . . .”

  I was feeling tired, all of a sudden, and shivery. “Someone want to tell me what a ‘formulated semblance’ is?”

  “Hmph,” said Brummigen. “We should show you what formulation itself is, around here, first. Let’s go back to town. You and Doyle can confer on this later . . .”

  “What do we do with the remains?” I asked, looking at the bent, blackened man-­shape on the ground. “Burial?”

  The Lamplighter shook his head. “Now that the spark is gone, it will erode in the rain and crumble into the underlying substance, from which all things arise and fall back. Look, even now . . .”

  I saw what he meant—­the man-­shaped framework was looking pitted, rusty, its gaps widening.

  I looked at Doyle. “When you came into Brummigen’s place you said there’d been another murder—­this is the second one?”

  “So it now seems. I wasn’t sure, with the one we found on the beach. A vagabond chap. Half mad, homeless back in the Before . . . back on Earth. Here he wandered in some confusion, but if he’d had time, his mind would have knit back together. Lunatics find their way here, if they wish to, and they heal. Fiona had gotten to know him a little, but I met him only briefly. He simply wouldn’t leave the strand . . .” He gestured in the direction of the sea. “Then we found some of his clothing and nearby . . . remains much like this one. Do you know, we never learned his name, except for ‘Ron.’ Almost no life history. Three days on the sand, down there, wandering through the fog, and then . . .”

  Brummigen looked toward the ocean. “At first we thought he’d simply immolated himself somehow. Occasionally someone will abandon their old body, and . . . well, it doesn’t leave a residue like this. It seemed strange. The soul was not there. It had already escaped—­or been released by someone. Doyle suspected foul play. I thought it was just another freakish mystery of the Before.”

  “And now, Major?” Doyle asked.

  Brummigen looked at the wire-­formed remains. “I think it was murder.” He turned to Diogenes. “Thoughts, Lamplighter?”

  Diogenes took a long ten seconds before responding. “They are both unnatural renderings of the soul. They are predation. Apart from that, shadow lies across it. I cannot see more; nor could I say more if I could see more.”

  I’ve learned you can’t make Diogenes explain, when he is not inclined to. Somehow, I don’t know how, Diogenes is doing the right thing by keeping quiet.

  “Come on, then, Fogg,” said Doyle. “We’ll have a cup of tea, and you will rest. Tomorrow morning you’ll see what formulation is. Much will be revealed . . .”

  We started back down the hillside, the Lamplighter leading the way, Brummigen beside me, Doyle following, looking at the trail curiously as he went—­perhaps, like Holmes, alert for more clues. “Major, who is it who’s gone missing, lately?”

  “Most recently—­Morgan Harris. And to me, those remains resemble him, in a general way. Hard to tell, o
f course, for sure. Not much there. But I’d guess it was Morgan. He was a botanist wandering the swamps, the forests, trying to understand the plant life . . . or plant afterlife. Could be he wandered too close to something.”

  “Like what?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. He did make a few cryptic remarks at the bar. Something about ‘the wrong seeds are sometimes sown.’ Said it twice, staring in the mirror behind the bar. Funny duck, that guy, anyway. I feel like . . . that was probably what was left of him, back there . . .”

  Morgan Harris. First thing you learn in Homicide Investigation 101: The identity of the murder victim is a good place to start . . .

  “Where can I find out about this Harris?” I asked.

  Doyle paused, glancing back at me. “You’re quite the . . . what’s the American term? Quite the go-­getter. Well, then. Go see the mayor tomorrow, if you’re so inclined. I’m already fairly aware of Morgan Harris. You’d best get up to speed. I shall need you to provide a more quotidian perspective, ha ha . . .”

  I blinked. Quotidian?

  Doyle turned away, whistling tunelessly to himself, and continued down the hill. After a moment I followed, underneath the Great Darkness, but hurrying toward the contemplative lights of Garden Rest.

  FOURTH

  The old wooden door of the two-­story brick building was studded with rusty bolts and the ivory door handle was worn with use. On the door a small brass plaque read

  HIS HONOR, WINN CHAUNCEY

  MAYOR OF GARDEN REST

  The mayor himself, wearing an old-­fashioned mayor’s sash over a blazer, answered my knock, looking hazily surprised but not unfriendly.