Doyle After Death

by John Shirley

  Moore looked at me with squinting suspicion and backed away. “So you work for them . . .”

  “Haven’t been much help to them yet,” I admitted. “ The more things change, the more they—­”

  “The more things—­the Moore things! Is that what you’re saying? More change . . . ? Change Moore? Into what?” He suddenly spun about and floundered into the swamp, splashing hurriedly off into it, wading up to his knees, then his hips; he dodged behind the bole of a cypress, and I lost sight of him. We stared after him, hearing him splashing onward for a while, ignoring the raised trail leading into the woods.

  “He’s got a place out there,” the major remarked. “A sort of big clunky tree house he’s built for himself. Keeps an eye on us all from up high or something . . .”

  “I knew him from Las Vegas,” I said. “A business connection. He took a fee sometimes for information. He was always cracked, but this . . .”

  Doyle nodded gravely, smoothing his mustaches with the ball of his thumb. “Och, the poor man. ­People bring themselves along, do you see, when they come here. They are their own ‘baggage’! Of course, full-­on lunatics go to quite another place, where they seem to get sorted out. But the half-­sane, the willful paranoids like Moore—­they seem to look for healthier ­people to hide amongst. They come to saner ­people and try to infect them with their own sickness.”

  “He tell you the ‘space aliens’ story, did he, Fogg?” the major asked, seeming only distantly interested.

  “He did. Back when we . . . before we came here, Moore used to go on Art Bell’s radio show and rant about conspiracies and Reptilian aliens. He’s a former wrestler—­just the guy you want to explain the mysteries of the afterworld to you.”

  “A wrestler!”

  “ That’s where he got the ‘Bull’ moniker. No one’s sure what his real first name is. Could be the ATF might know.”

  “There are far worse ­people than Moore here,” Doyle remarked. “In outlying areas. Roundabout . . . and perhaps among us, since it appears someone’s committed murder.”

  “How is it a guy like Bull Moore ends up here, in this little town—­where I happen to be?”

  “Ah!” Doyle grinned. “That particular personal incongruity is one of the imponderables of the afterlife. We’re not sure why it happens, but we assume it has something to do with unfinished business, what the Hindus call karma—­something like that.”

  I shook my head, feeling an existential fatigue. “You’ve been here a long time—­but you guys don’t seem to know that much about how the afterlife works. Unless there’s a lot you’re not telling me.”

  “We know a good deal about practical existence here,” Major Brummigen said. “We’ll tell you something about it in time. But we know a lot less about the, ah, administrative side. We haven’t met anyone in charge of the afterworld. Not sure who’s up the chain of command.”

  Doyle looked contemplatively at the peculiar sun of the afterworld. “Once, I heard Diogenes remark that the sun is the seat of the power here. As if it were a big glowing angel! Oh, it isn’t, exactly—­it’s a sphere of glowing energy. But it’s apparently intelligent. Yet we cannot speak to it. We can only receive its intelligence, somehow—­in a quite subtle process of receptivity. And . . .” He waved sweepingly at the world. “The world itself seems to be its own administration, in a sense.”

  The major nodded. “That’s a fact! You notice that though there are things for sale here, no one puts up signs anywhere but at the business establishment. A sign on your shop seems permitted—­but try putting up a sign on any of the roads coming in. It disintegrates within a minute! Gone! And yet I’ve heard that in other places, road signs are the norm. It seems to have something to do with the locale—­coarse commerciality wouldn’t fit in with Garden Rest, so Garden Rest, the place itself, just doesn’t allow it.”

  “Suits me,” I said, thinking of Las Vegas. “I’ve had enough advertising to last me . . .” I smiled. “A lifetime.”

  “Exactly,” Major Brummigen said, nodding, “Somehow—­­people here chose Garden Rest because they needed it. Or because somehow they can be of some special use here.”

  “Speaking of being of use,” Doyle said, “I believe you had a conversation with the mayor this morning . . .”

  “Yeah.” I filled him and Brummigen in on what I’d learned.

  “Most of that I knew,” Doyle said. “But the part about Merchant . . . didn’t know they’d spent so much time together. Something to add to the fact sheet.”

  I looked up at the coruscating star that gently warmed and watched over us. “Diogenes says the sun is the ‘seat of power’? Anyone try . . . ?”

  “Praying to it?” Doyle chuckled. “Asking it for a response? Certainly! One gets no reply, not in any obvious way.”

  “Diogenes seems to have the answers,” I said. “You must have sat down with the guy and asked—­”

  Brummigen raised a warning hand, like a traffic cop signaling a stop. “Can’t go there with him, Fogg. The Lamplighter simply will not submit to any real interrogation. He is often gone from here, and we don’t know where he goes to—­and he won’t say! He doesn’t directly involve himself in most local affairs.”

  Doyle chuckled. “I recollect when a feeble-­minded young woman followed Diogenes around, insisting the old boy was an angel! He told her she needed to get her wits in order—­that’s just how he put it—­and he informed her in no uncertain terms that he was no angel, and he wouldn’t allow anybody trailing after him. He left that night and we didn’t see him again till long after she’d moved on.”

  “Moved on—­to where?”

  Brummigen shrugged. ­“People stay here indefinitely—­or they move on. Sometimes they feel another stage calling them. Summoning them . . .”

  Doyle was frowning worriedly at me. “Hello! You look pale, Nicholas!”

  “Yeah, I feel . . . worn.”

  “Did you sleep—­perchance to dream?”

  “I did.” I didn’t want to think about the dreams. Dreams, for me, here, were memories, so far. Badly tangled memories that chewed at the back of my mind. “Maybe I need to eat. Had some coffee and some kinda pastry. Seemed to be doughy air, to me, I don’t know how nutritious it could be . . .”

  “Right. It’s a pity there’s not much in the way of solid food here. Of course there are creatures one could eat. But trying it—­even thinking of it—­leaves a strange, unpleasant taste in the mind. Eggs now—­there are eggs. But they’re not like back home. I’m thinking of trying to formulate some real eggs from memory. Perhaps some kippers to go with them.”

  The major glanced at him, a grin flickering and gone. He was far too straight-­faced as he said, “But Doyle, I heard you and your Spiritualist chums were sure there’d be constant feasting in a glorious wonderland here . . .”

  Doyle sniffed at the needling. “We said nothing of the sort! Not . . . exactly. Garden Rest is more or less . . . is rather what I envisioned.” He sighed. “Some of the Spiritualist message seems to’ve been confirmed—­some of it contradicted.” He shrugged. “That’s to be expected. And there’s much more to be discovered when the time comes!” He looked at the sky, repeating to himself, almost ruefully, “When the time comes . . .”

  I’d forgotten about the Arthur Conan Doyle dichotomy. I’d read somewhere, before I’d died, that the creator of Sherlock Holmes—­the fictional personification of reason, logic, empiricism—­had become a “Spiritualist”: a crony of spirit mediums, an attendee of séances. Not very damned rational or logical. But who was I to mock the afterlife now? “So, about Spiritualism—­I mean, you know, the process. Does anyone here contact the, uh, mortal world, through mediums or whatever?”

  “No,” said the major.

  “Yes!” declared Doyle.

  Brummigen waved a dismissive hand. “Come on, Doyle, you’ve n
ever confirmed a single instance of it here. We haven’t got any mediums calling us up, no one going back from Garden Rest to shoot ectoplasm at a séance . . .”

  “But I confirmed it before I passed to this world!” Doyle insisted. “And coming here is proof of the afterlife, of the persistence of spirits. Put the two together—­”

  “Yes, yes, this is an afterlife—­but it doesn’t prove all that Spiritualist stuff is true—­just a little corner of it.”

  Doyle gave out a grunt of annoyance. “We’ve worn this argument out, many a night. But in time we’ll contact the mortal world, Major! Mark my word! Just now let’s improve our contact with this one.” Doyle turned to clap me on the shoulder—­a ringing thump that almost knocked me over. “Fogg, you’re looking a bit blanched but we’ll soon get you right. Here is where you’ll have your breakfast. Turn and face the sun.”

  Puzzled, I played along. The three of us turned to face the sun shining over the village.

  “Gaze right at the sun,” Doyle said. “You must have noticed it does you no harm in this world to look right at it. Look deep into its light. Just keep looking at it . . .”

  I did as he suggested and as I gazed I was increasingly fascinated by a subtle emanation of intelligence in this sun’s soft, scintillating glow. The sunlight, looked at directly, had overlapping layers of emanation, constantly unfolding, like paintings I’d seen of mandalas.

  “Now as you gaze at it, feel yourself open, like a blossom in the morning,” Doyle went on.

  Major Brummigen growled at that simile. “Oh Christ, that’s something you say to a damn little girl, Doyle. It’s more like turning a radio antenna to the signal.”

  “I don’t have a blossom or an antenna,” I complained.

  “You do!” Brummigen said. “Do you feel a peculiar emptiness, something like hunger, but not quite like the hunger for food?”

  “I guess so. I thought it was just being bummed out. I mean, you know, depressed. Ending my life the way I did—­that’s not conducive to a good mood.”

  “Your life hasn’t ended,” Doyle reminded me. “You’ve simply shed your old body and gotten a rather different sort. Now, keep gazing into the sun and sense that inner emptiness—­and just open up to the sunlight . . .”

  “You guys are yanking my chain, here,” I said, giving Doyle a suspicious glance.

  “We’re what?”

  “It’s an expression, Doyle,” the major said. “No one’s yanking your chain, Fogg, just do what ‘Sherlock’ Doyle there tells you. This is for real.”

  I shrugged. I looked once more at the sun. I felt that inner emptiness. I tried to feel . . . receptive.

  Suddenly my mouth filled with the taste of ripe, sun-­warmed concord grapes. No, it wasn’t grapes—­it was honey, the most flavorful honey I’d ever tasted. But then again, it was the taste of something savory, like meat, but not meat—­something textured like meat that melted in my mouth, becoming pure nutrient. Then there was another taste that is not quite describable—­it was the taste of dark-­green grass, of exquisitely pure water; of sunlight and salty minerals and evening breezes in jungle places.

  “Ah,” Doyle said, watching my expression appreciatively. “There it is.”

  My feasting went on for a full minute—­and I was aware, somehow, that while it was coming through the glow of the sun, it was sourced in the whole afterworld around me . . .

  And then it simply reached its culmination. I suddenly felt entirely full—­recharged, strengthened, refreshed, sated. After a mild wave of disappointment that it was over for now, I looked at Doyle—­my eyes not even watering after staring into the sun, no blurring of my vision—­and I saw him fairly beaming at me. In fact, in an understated way, he was literally beaming: a shine was coming off him.

  “Marvelous, isn’t it?” he said. “It beats the vulgar process of eating—­and, Lord knows, the elimination that follows on eating.”

  “I miss a real steak, right there on the plate in front of me.” The major sighed. “I miss the feeling of chewing it up.” But he was not very convincing.

  “This seems good right here,” the major muttered. And then Brummigen dropped to his knees and plunged his hands into the soil.

  Doyle did the same, falling to his knees on the grassy field across from Major Brummigen—­the width of a Garden Rest cottage away.

  I stood behind them, in the cool shadow of a house nearby; beyond them the field stretched down to the edge of the swamp marked by a fringe of lilies. Waiting to my right was Mr. Gerald Peller, and Mrs. Singh, a ­couple who had, in the afterlife, taken up living together. They had lived in Mrs. Singh’s small cottage, and now they wanted one big enough for the both of them. (She went by Mrs. Singh in public but soon she would become Mrs. Peller. ­People in the afterlife can be strangely old-­fashioned.) She was a small, beautiful woman from the Indian subcontinent, with large black eyes and raven-­wing hair; she wore a red sari, figured with golden lotuses; smiling beside her, holding her hand, Peller was a man of early middle age; he had a neatly clipped brown-­blond goatee, and he wore a tweedy gray suit, and loafers. He had a professorial look to me and I found out later, in life he was a professor of Asian history. He had died . . . aftered . . . two years earlier.

  Doyle had told me that Peller and Mrs. Singh had known each other in life, that she’d been Peller’s “I.T. person.” He’d found a great many excuses to have her unnecessarily upgrade his computer. But she’d been married and he’d never made a move. She’d died first; he’d died four years later. She’d been surprised when her husband, killed in the same car accident, refused to acknowledge their marriage in the afterlife. But then, the vows do say till death. When Peller appeared, he declared his undying love within minutes of discovering her here.

  Undying love, Doyle had said. That phrase made me think of someone. Nothing’s undying, Nick, Bettie told me. Not love, not anything.

  As I watched Brummigen and Doyle, both men looking quite odd kneeling with their hands stuck in the soil across from one another in a vacant lot, I wondered how Bettie was, back on Earth—­in the Before. One of these days she’d die, and I hoped her afterlife plans didn’t include Garden Rest. I didn’t particularly want to see her again. No, let’s be more definite: I really don’t want to see her.

  But judging by what I’ve seen of the afterlife—­I probably will see her.

  The soil trembled around Conan Doyle’s fingers; it shuddered around Brummigen’s hands. Then it erupted upward like a dark fountain, at first—­a slow-­motion fountain of light-­brown soil near Doyle, and juts of gray stone close to Major Brummigen. The two flows combined and whirled, seemed to pour into an invisible mold shaped like the foundation of a house, the foundation rumbling gently as it formed.

  It was as if stone softened and became a cool, thick gray liquid as it flowed upward and to the side—­the stone was as liquid as lava but put out no heat. I expected the ground under the rising material to sink down as resources were drawn from the fundament, but it didn’t. The ground beneath was constantly renewed from deeper places, farther down.

  I wondered, as I watched the house “formulate,” what was farther down, under our feet, in a world like this? Were there burning caverns somewhere beneath the surface? Was there some hellish underworld?

  I shook my head. Hell didn’t seem like this afterlife’s style. Still—­if some of us unconsciously chose places like Garden Rest, perhaps others, darkly obsessed, chose an underworld where they might act out the suffering they felt they deserved. ­People created their own hells on Earth, after all—­or rather, before all.

  The stone base of the house had finished formulating, the soft flowing stone hardening with crick-­crick sounds as it settled in place. I remembered being a kid building up a house with little plump strands of Play-­Doh, one atop the next, log-­cabin fashion, till I’d gotten the walls done. Then I’d smooth a
ll the logs together. This house built up almost that way for a while, but accreting to house sized, and each layer was perfectly formed. Once the basic walls were done, they smoothed out a bit—­from within, with the same mind-­over-­matter methodology. Then supportive structures erupted up from the ground at the corners, rising to harden into vertical framing that appeared to be wood. It flowed upward, looking like a liquid wood, then hardened into something indistinguishable from wood cut from a tree, wood grain and all. Frames formed for windows, minerals flowed from beneath, hardened into glass with a crackling and sputtering; the glass rose into its place in the window frames like car windows electrically closing . . .

  Peller and the former Mrs. Singh strolled around the house, holding hands, smiling as it rose up before them, their eyes shining. They stopped by me and we exchanged grins. I’m not a guy to grin much, but this had touched me.

  “Like the old barn raisings,” I said, “but easier and faster and . . . just damn amazing.”

  “It is, at that.” Peller chuckled. “I’ll make the door myself, out of the local wood and metal. And I’ll touch it up with paint. That’s traditional. I was a pretty good amateur carpenter . . .”

  We watched the house seem to organize itself, in increasing detail, the idea of a house materializing a house—­and I was amazed at how well the major and Doyle worked together, each with his own specialty. They must’ve done this together before.

  When it was finally roofed, complete with chimney, the rumbling stopped; Brummigen pointed out a certain crookedness on the south side. Doyle agreed, and they once more plunged their hands into the soil. The house seemed to shudder, then, and shrug, before suddenly straightening up, dropping a few errant bits away to the side.

  And then the house formulation was complete but for the door and furnishings.

  Peller and Mrs. Singh thanked the major and Doyle, the lady adding hugs; I added my congratulations. I was genuinely impressed. Both the house raisers looked quite pleased with themselves.

  “Could you teach me to do that?” I asked Brummigen. “To formulate? Build something that way?”