Doyle After Death

by John Shirley

  The major pretended to look doubtful—­then he cracked a grudging smile. “We’ll give it a try. But I’ll be standing back from your first attempt. Not a pleasant thing to have a house fall over on you. I’ve had that experience. I don’t recommend it.”

  “Do you know,” Doyle said, dusting his hands, “formulating here is rather like what we used to call apportment. The most curious items would materialize in séances—­would apport right there and then. Of course, Houdini caught some of the more misguided mediums using sleight of hand to make things seem to appear . . . but there were some remarkable instances where interesting objects genuinely apported. I remember a bird’s nest, from a foreign land, appearing in the very midst of the table . . .”

  Brummigen snorted skeptically but said nothing.

  I ran my hand along the outer wall of the new house. It felt solid, looked like it had been there forever. “You just . . . made it happen!”

  “Oh, we’re mere amateurs, really,” Doyle said, with a modesty I didn’t really buy into.

  “How do you do it without . . . stepping on each other’s toes? I mean . . . did you plan the house out in advance?”

  “We did,” Brummigen said. “And you get a feel for another man’s formulation style, over time. That’s a fact! Might be psychic. But it’s not like telepathy. Hard to describe.”

  “It’s wonderful!” Mrs. Singh told them. “You’re both so gifted!”

  “There’s a ­couple of chaps who could do it better,” Doyle allowed. “But they charge money. No reason you should have to spend your Fi’s needlessly.”

  The major grunted. “That Charlie Long does a helluva job of it, for sure. However you want it!”

  Long. I remembered the name. “Long works for Garrett Merchant?”

  Doyle looked at me with his eyebrows raised. “You’re certainly getting your bearings quickly. I was myself thinking that since Morgan Harris had spent some time out there, we should ask Merchant if he observed anything of interest.”

  “Can we go out to see Merchant’s place? Appreciate the architecture . . . maybe ask a few questions?”

  “Merchant doesn’t like questions,” the major said. “Unless it’s in the form of praise. Like, ‘How’d you ever do anything so great, Mr. Merchant?’ ”

  Doyle laughed heartily at that. “You see, if by some miracle you get Brummigen in a good mood, the man becomes a humorist. Doesn’t happen often. Certainly I’ll take you out to see Merchant, Fogg. Maybe Brummigen’ll even condescend to come along.”

  Brummigen was smiling, pleased to have amused Doyle. “Today—­sorry, can’t come along this time. Got to get back to the bar.”

  Doyle sniffed. “I do have to report to a lady for luncheon, and a spot of gardening. I dare not defy her.” He winked at me. “But after lunch, which is more ceremonious than nutritious, we shall talk with Mr. Merchant. And along the way, perhaps with your dear old chum Mr. ‘Bull’ Moore.”

  Brummigen cleared his throat. “Doyle—­how is . . . Touie?”

  “My wife is very well,” Doyle said, looking abstractedly into the forest. After a moment he added, “Well enough.”

  The major glanced at Doyle, seemed to be about to say something more. The subject of “Lady Doyle” seemed to make the air between them tighten with tension.

  But after a moment Major Brummigen shrugged and turned back to the house. “What do you say, let’s see if we need to make any more corrections in the structure. Maybe . . .” He broke off, staring at a man who was striding toward us. “Shit. Here comes Bolliver.”

  Doyle grunted and hooded his eyes as he turned to watch Bolliver. Clearly, neither Conan Doyle nor the major liked the man, which wasn’t surprising, given what Winn Chauncey had said.

  Bolliver was a pale goopy man of medium height, shoulders always hunched, his posture almost S-­shaped. He had scraggly sandy brown hair, surprisingly red lips, small blue-­gray eyes. His clothing made me think of an old school geek, complete with pocket protector and high-­water pants. “Fellows,” he said. “How do you hang?”

  “They haven’t hung me yet,” I said. “That I remember.”

  Bolliver looked at me. “I didn’t mean you.” He looked me up and down—­literally starting at my head. “You one of the new ones?”

  “Nick Fogg,” I said, sticking out my hand.

  Bolliver shook hands. His grip was limp and tentative, as if he were afraid I’d steal his fingers. He dropped his hand, turned his head to watch Mrs. Singh as she went in the house with her husband.

  “Been behaving yourself, Bolliver?” Doyle asked.

  Bolliver grinned wolfishly, then shut the grin suddenly away. “Me? How about you? How about him?” He pointed at me. “And them in the house! How about them! Don’t pick on me. I had enough of that in life. I won’t take it, not from the mayor and not from any of the oh so delicate ­people in town and not even from you, Sherlock.”

  “My name is Conan Doyle,” said the creator of Sherlock Holmes wearily. “It is certainly not Sherlock. What brings you to our house formulating, Bolliver? It was understood to be by invitation.”

  Bolliver covered his mouth with his hand. Then he put his hands in his pockets, suddenly emanating self-­consciousness. “Passing by. Was taking a walk on the trail. Was looking. Was seeing things.”

  “Yeah?” I asked. “What things?”

  “Forgetters. And that crazy bastard Moore.” Bolliver grinned again. “And who knows what else?”

  He shrugged theatrically, and walked off, thrusting his hands in his khaki pockets.

  “The time will come,” Doyle muttered, “when I’ll have to have a regrettably extensive conversation with that deplorable man.”

  FIFTH

  I went with the major back to his bar, had a ­couple of drinks, and thought about all I’d seen. In a way, building things here wasn’t so very different from back in the Before. There, too, you had to imagine what you were going to build, and take substances from the world around you, combine them, and build it all up so it held together. But in the afterworld, if you had formulation skills you didn’t need tools for most of it. You thought and felt it into existence. But it wasn’t instantaneous or easy—­it required top-­notch proficiency. It made me wonder, again, what Merchant’s place was like. Mayor Chauncey seemed to hint it was as tasteless as it was impressive.

  “We go through the swamp to get to Merchant’s place, Major?” I asked, idly spinning my empty highball glass on the bar. “Why’s Merchant live so far from town?”

  Brummigen shrugged, and took the glass from my hand before I could break it. “Merchant needs plenty of room to expand, he says.” He looked toward the door. “Here comes Doyle . . .”

  Significantly less jolly than before whatever “luncheon” had been, Doyle waved at me from the open door. “Ready?”

  “Never more. Hell, I sound like a raven. Let’s go.”

  “I actually heard a bird damnably like a raven say that once, down the street here,” Brummigen said, as I paid for my drinks.

  We headed out, Doyle seeming very quiet, not his usual affable self.

  “Here, mind if we stop by my digs?” he asked, when we got to the corner. “Just for a tick. Need a quick look-­in.”

  “Sure, Mr. Doyle.” We turned the corner, going down a side street luxuriant with blossoming shrubs and fully leafed trees. Birds sang—­it sounded like they were singing old television theme songs, but they probably weren’t.

  I glanced at Doyle. “Uh—­should I call you ‘Sir Arthur’?”

  “No need for the formalities. There are no knights, no barons, nothing of that kind here, and it’s better for it. I never wanted the knighting—­accepted it to make my mother happy. And I never much cared to be called Arthur. Certainly not Ignatius—­a name that comes between Arthur and Conan on my birth certificate. My friends tended to call me Cona
n—­or just Doyle, often as not. We may as well use Doyle and Fogg.”

  We walked up to a two-­story Victorian-­style house—­Doyle himself started out as a real Victorian. (And ended, I suppose, as an Edwardian). The gaunt-­looking house was in white, picked out in battleship gray, and rising to a circular turret in the front, with neatly scaled wooden shingles. The house’s long narrow windows were hung with cream-­colored drapery.

  “Those drapes in there, did you formulate them, like the house? How’s that work?”

  “Formulating something of the sort is not impossible,” Doyle murmured. He seemed to have only distantly heard my question. “But those are crafted from the silk moss in the forest. We have some very good craftsmen here. Fiona sewed these. Excuse me a moment. Right back.”

  He opened the gate in the white picket fence, and walked through a garden of crazily large roses to the front door. He hesitated, then opened it. “Touie!” he called.

  A woman who looked mid-­thirties came to the door. She wore a black day dress with a bustle and puffy sleeves. She was a petite woman, with a wide mouth and widely set eyes, dark hair caught up in a bun atop her head. Even from here, I could see rings under her eyes, a gauntness to her cheeks. I took her to be Louisa—­Touie, Doyle’s wife.

  “I thought you had gone on your ramble,” she said. She coughed delicately, covering her mouth.

  “Right enough but, ah—­are you sure you’re quite well? You seemed . . . when I left, you seemed rather to dwindle in spirits. Should I not go?”

  “I would not think of interfering with your investigation; I am quite well, Arthur, thank you. Will you not pick me some flowers, if you come upon them?”

  “I will, my dear. With all my heart.”

  He kissed her on the cheek, and she turned away, coughing genteelly again and softly closing the door. She didn’t glance toward me at all. Touie Doyle seemed a very inward person.

  A yellow-­and-­black bird, something like an oriole, landed on a rosebush near me. It cocked its head and looked at me and chirped. Something more came out besides the chirp. I thought it said, “Isn’t sure, but is. Isn’t but is.” Then it fluttered away.

  I saw something else in the garden, a monument, perhaps a tombstone, only half visible on the other side of the gaudy roses. I repressed an urge to intrude into the garden and look the stone over.

  Doyle rejoined me at the gate, frowning. “I don’t know . . . I simply do not know . . .”

  I waited for him to say what it was he didn’t know. He didn’t, and we walked on, toward the cypress swamp. He had his hands thrust in his coat pockets; there was something moody about the gesture.

  Across the street was a rather plain young woman with a stubbly, recently shaved head; she wore only a light blue hospital gown and paper slippers. She walked tentatively along, looking this way and that. Likely she was new in Garden Rest. Perhaps Fiona had missed a chance to welcome her, and she was still working things out. She must have worn the gown a long time before dying, I figured, to be still thinking of herself that way in the afterlife. She’d get over it. But she looked pretty dazed right now. I waved to her. She twitched a hand and then looked quickly away, hurrying on.

  We walked the opposite way, turning a corner and following another pleasant, shady street to the edge of the village and the house formulated for Mrs. Singh and her husband that morning. We kept on past, toward the swampy woods.

  Doyle was silent as we took the raised trail, a sort of winding, low dike through the swamp. Sometimes the raised trail sank down a little, ramping close to the surface of the water, only to rise up again. In places the edges of the trail seemed eroded, marked, broken down with footprints and paw prints. Somehow I felt reassured seeing erosion, something worn down here. The world didn’t seem comfortable without it, without some decay, some disorganization, even this gentle, moderated entropy. Garden Rest was too much like a giant landscaped garden: a place where an imperfect human being—­any human being—­could never feel quite welcome.

  Still, the flooded forest was lovely. The shadows were like caresses and an understated scent of living possibility arose from the crystalline water. Softly radiant clusters of lilies sprouted in the shallows. Soft sunlight lay slanting in easygoing shafts, winking as a breeze nudged the moss weeping from the cypresses. The “knees” of the cypresses rose higher than such roots on Earth.

  Something splashed in the distance; something else cawed and laughed.

  Doyle was trudging along, frowning, staring at the mossy trail, brows knit. “Don’t mean to be unsociable,” he said suddenly. “I . . . should have introduced you to my wife. But she hasn’t been feeling social.”

  “That’s okay. I know the feeling.”

  “You were, perhaps, twelve yards from the door of our house,” he said. “Ah—­did she look well to you?”

  How honest should I be? “I didn’t get a good look, Doyle. I guess she looked . . . sickly. A little. But then I don’t know how she normally looks.”

  He sighed. “Och. She doesn’t ever quite glow with health. But this sickliness is a new thing, at least here in the afterworld. She’s gotten worse lately. Complaining of impossible illnesses. ­People can be hurt, for a time, here, if they fall off a cliff, if they climb a tree and leap off and . . . I’ve seen it all. But the injuries don’t last, as you saw this morning. Unless something extraordinary happens, as with Morgan Harris. Touie has had no injury I know of. She’s . . . coughing, and complains of malaise, weakness, a burning in her side—­presenting classic symptoms of consumption.”

  “Tuberculosis.”

  “ Which she had indeed suffered from in the Before! And it eventually took her life. But . . .” He glanced ruefully at me. “I should apologize. I don’t usually confide in ­people quite so readily. Something about you, old boy. Sorry to burden you with it.”

  “Hey, I’m flattered you feel like confiding, Doyle.” I meant it. “What does she say when you point out to her she can’t really get tuberculosis here?”

  “I haven’t put it to her quite so baldly. We do have ­people here who died of heart disease, or cancer, say, in the previous world who imagine they are still suffering from it after they get here. We tend to let them get over it on their own. Generally, within a fortnight, they usually let their imaginary symptoms go. But this—­this has been about two months now! She’s . . .” He shook his head. “She didn’t start out with these symptoms, here! When she first got here she remarked on how well she felt! She’s been here quite a while. Years. Then, recently, she developed this . . . this relapse. One’s body here does respond to the mind, even more than in the Before.”

  He was quiet for a while, then slowed his walking pace, at last pausing to gaze out over the swamp. I paused beside him, looking around. We’d reached a boulder-­strewn locale, where the trees were farther apart. A few yards away a transparent green-­and-­gold snake coiled on a mossy boulder. The snake tilted its triangular head, and hissed . . . I thought I almost heard the whisper of a word in its hiss . . . then it turned and drooped itself headfirst into the pool, went sidewinding without haste along the surface to weave into the draping gray Spanish moss tasseling a water-­rooted shrub.

  The air was mildly muggy here, but had none of the itchy humidity or buggy torments of an earthly swamp. In some areas half-­formed wraiths of mist moved between trees, and under the raised arches of the cypress knees, flowing with almost ceremonious slowness, at the pace a pallbearer takes.

  At last Doyle strode onward. After a dozen steps, he said, “Touie’s illness . . . if that’s what it is . . . began when she encountered our daughter Mary. Soon after Mary died, and appeared here . . . we had rather a row with the girl—­I did, I should say. Mary accused me of hardening my heart to her, after I married Jean . . . Jean was the woman I married after Touie passed on.” He grimaced. “And there’s some truth in the accusation. Jean insisted that
she would always be in Touie’s shadow unless I showed her that I did not favor my children with my first wife over those I had with her, and . . . and I’m afraid I was indeed guilty of pushing my earlier children away, back on old Earth. I’ve carried that stain on my soul and—­it took me years to admit it to myself. Perhaps . . .” His voice became nearly inaudible. “ . . . Perhaps it’s why I didn’t seek Jean out, when I came to the afterworld . . . why I simply moved in with Touie. Dear old Louisa greeted me, soon after I arrived, and though she knew about Jean . . . the woman who’d become my second wife . . . she didn’t mention her. She didn’t ask if I’d be joining my most recent wife and . . .” He sighed heavily. “Och, I had carried some considerable guilt. Jean didn’t put in an appearance, at any rate . . .” Marching stolidly along, he looked up between the trees at the sun, which showed itself for a step or two before our progress hid it behind the foliage again. “It seemed somehow natural, despite all, that Touie was here, waiting for me. It seemed fated . . . a penance.” He winced. “One does waffle on, rather, to ­people, here, more than in the other world, but really, I’m being terribly indiscreet.” He gave me a sidelong glance. “Somehow . . . it feels natural, though, unburdening to you—­and one learns to go with such feelings, here. With what feels natural and normal.”

  I’d been a bit surprised by this crack in his British reserve with a relatively new acquaintance. But touched by it, too. “Does your daughter Mary live in Garden Rest?”

  “Why no—­she wandered off after a young fellow, and moved on. My children . . . well, I have seen my boy Kingsley. He passed, in the Before, during the influenza epidemic—­after serving in the Great War and coming through all that gunfire intact. What a blessing it was to see him when I arrived here!” He swallowed hard, a man swallowing a painful emotion. Then he showed a sad, self-­mocking smile. “My son revealed that none of the spirit messages I got from him after his passing were, in fact, from him!” Doyle shrugged. “Even honest mediums are sometimes dishonest. ­People expect so much from them.” He cleared his throat. “Our Kingsley has gone off to explore this world. So he said. Perhaps he heard the Summoning. He left some years back. In fact, none of my children . . .” He broke off with a single quick shake of his head, clearly not inclined to talk about his children any further. The confidentiality between us dropped away, and he put on a brisk, businesslike air. “We’ve got a good long walk, to Merchant’s overstuffed palace—­we should pick up the pace.”