by John Shirley
“Yes,” said Long, coming into the entry hall. “Bolliver is the other one who’s got under Higgs’s skin. But hey, I don’t like Bolliver either.”
“You people have bothered Mr. Merchant enough!” Higgs said, following Long in.
Merchant turned away, started for the stairs. I looked up to the balcony again but the girl had gone. Not much doubt about what we’d interrupted Merchant doing.
And what was sex like, in the afterworld? I was feeling increasingly curious.
“Merchant,” Doyle said softly. His voice, though soft, somehow demanded a response.
Merchant paused, turned frowning to him. “Well?”
“You went on some expeditions with Morgan Harris, I believe?”
“So?”
“You know that he’s . . . that his body has been destroyed?”
He grunted. “By what?”
“We think it was a he or a she, not a what,” I said. “Sir.”
“So ask the old Lamplighter to have a talk with Harris’s soul about it,” Merchant said. “I haven’t seen Morgan Harris for weeks . . . Wait a damned minute! Is this some sort of investigation about Harris? You have that ‘just a few more routine questions’ look. Ridiculous! Come out with it, Doyle, what do you really want?”
“When was the last time you saw Morgan Harris?” Doyle asked, ignoring both of Merchant’s questions.
“Last time I saw Harris? Who keeps track of time, around here? I don’t know, weeks ago. We went on a botanical hike, of sorts. He told me he might have found something like tobacco. I thought about farming the stuff.”
“See anyone around him who showed him any hostility?” Doyle asked, tugging on one of his mustaches.
“No, no. Didn’t see anyone. Except that Bolliver. Saw him once. Don’t remember when it was. We avoided Moore’s territory, or what he supposes is his territory. I like to go out and work off some excess energy in a hike, and besides the tobacco I thought he could help me with . . . well, I was thinking of getting a tree, a really big tree, to grow right here in the house, make a solarium.”
Long sighed, almost inaudibly.
“How do you decide territory around here?” I asked. I thought a guy like Merchant might have issues with property. I was curious to see how he’d react to the question.
“We simply claim property, Fogg,” Merchant snapped. “Long as it’s unclaimed already and no one objects. That’s the last foolish question I’m going to answer.”
He marched back up the stairs, and Doyle watched him go. Doyle seemed to consider calling Merchant back again, but instead he nodded politely to Long, and turned to Higgs, who was just coming in the front door. “You’ll take down those traps, Higgs? All of them?”
Higgs looked sullenly at him and then looked away. “Yes, yes, already deformulated some of them. I’ll . . . work up something harmless. Maybe just an alarm or something.”
“Very good. Please make it soon. Is it safe for us to return the way we came?’
“Safe, sure it’s safe. It’s still standing but it’s deactivated. Might leave it as a warning. But without the springs.”
“Good day to you both, then, gentlemen.” Doyle strode out, and I followed, hurrying to catch up as usual.
Doyle paused at the spike trap outside, hunkering to examine it near the ground. There was afterworld soil clinging to its base. Soil around Garden Rest is somehow different from Earthly earth, less involved with burrowing creatures, and yet subtly alive. Most of the soil I’ve seen is black and some variant of red-gold color. The soil here looked like that—but with silver flecks.
“Roscoe Higgs had this same dirt under his fingernails,” Doyle said. “Same color combination.”
“You could see his nails that closely? You have a microscope with you I don’t see, Doyle?”
I thought he might be annoyed with my smart-ass question but Doyle smiled as he stood up. “Visual acuity comes from use, especially in the afterworld. It appears this trap was put in recently—or he’d have cleaned himself up since. The rest of his appearance shows a reasonable tidiness.”
I remembered how Doyle and Brummigen had inserted their hands into the dirt to formulate from the ground up. “None of that particular soil on Long?”
“No. Nor on his shoes, so far as I could see.”
“Then the trap was all Roscoe Higgs—it was his doing. Unless Merchant ordered him to do it.”
“Merchant says he didn’t. Not as such. I believe him.”
I looked toward the windows of the mansion, maybe hoping to see the girl looking out. No such luck. “I don’t know. Merchant seems capable of violence. Or ordering it. There were rumors, before he died, that Merchant had a guy killed. Story had it that Merchant had financed vote tampering in Florida . . . and someone was going to blow the whistle on it. Guy died in a small-plane crash. One of those.”
“I do not deal in rumors,” Doyle said. He turned away from the house, and we trudged toward the woods.
“Anyway,” I said, when we reached the trail, “Roscoe Higgs looks good for killing Morgan Harris. He complained of Harris getting in the way around here. He seems fanatic about that. And he nearly skewered the two of us. He seems pretty homicidal to me.”
“Yes. Ostensibly he ‘looks good for it’ as you American detectives say. It could be Higgs. But you know, when Long called him, he said ‘get your feuding arse over here.’ That was rather a lot of information to load into a summons, don’t you think? It was as if he was taking the trouble to divert our attention to Higgs.”
“You think Long’s covering something up?”
“I didn’t say that. But it’s possible. He could be protecting Merchant.”
“You think there could be a woman involved in the Harris killing? You know, cherche la femme? Do people even fight over women here?”
“Of course they do, though mostly with words. People do the usual childish things here. At least, they do for a while. But you weren’t listening closely, with respect to Morgan Harris. I never knew Harris to show an interest in women. If anything, his orientation was, ah—he played for the other cricket team.”
“You mean the Seasiders? Oh!” Slow on the uptake, Fogg. “You mean he’s gay?”
“Well he seemed a cheerful enough chap. But I hardly see . . .”
“You really haven’t heard that term? Gay? I mean, with respect to . . .”
“Just pulling your leg old boy. Yes, that one I have heard. I know you figure an old duffer like me wouldn’t know it. And indeed I don’t like the term. Ruins the old usage. So—Morgan Harris was gay. Many are, here. I’ve learned to accept it.”
“You don’t have any prejudices, Doyle? Not racism, anything? I mean—back in your time, in the Before, most people were biased . . .”
“After a time here, as happens with most people under the influence of this world, I gave prejudices up. Largely.” He cleared his throat. “I suppose class prejudice is a little more persistent.”
I’d been thinking that Doyle and Chauncey didn’t seem without class prejudice. You could take the Englishman out of England, but . . .
He paused to gaze broodingly into a deep pool. A sinuous brightness slithered near the bottom of the pool, like a living belt of diamonds. It vanished into a hole. “But on this plane one is constantly reminded not to cling to the ways of the Before . . .”
“This plane. You mean planet?”
“I do not.”
“Merchant said something about how Moore believed this is a planet. But—isn’t it?”
“Why—no! Did you think this was a planet you were walking about on?”
I turned to him, inwardly jolted. “How can it not be a planet? I didn’t think it was an ‘alien planet’ with extraterrestrials, but . . . I mean . . . it’s not heaven. I thought of it as the Planet of the Afterlife
. And—it’s a world. Everyone calls it a world! It has a sun that rises and sets.”
“But you have seen no stars in the afterworld. Where do you think that might be—a planet without stars?”
“Um . . . I don’t know. I just thought . . . it seemed so much like a planet. It has wind and rain and a sea . . . and creatures.”
“It’s something like one. But it’s not a sphere, like a planet, although it can include a sphere. I’m told it’s more like a Möbius strip but an unthinkably wide one; an ineffably long one. Back on Earth, well, Copernicus and friends were right. The Earth orbits the sun, not vice versa. Here, the sun actually rises and passes over us, as in the old Greek myths. Almost like Apollo passing in his chariot.”
“You’re pulling my leg again, Doyle.”
“Not a bit of it! This is not a planet. Drop a t from the word planet! This is a plane, Fogg. A continuum! I’m told it’s located between the fourth and fifth dimensions. Yet it is a world—a world with its own natural laws.”
“Now wait, the sun . . . if we’re not orbiting it, where does the sun come from?”
“If you were to go far enough toward the west or east, you would see the sun rise, or sink, from a land you could not enter. The sun is emitted by that land. It is, in fact, a land itself! It is a large sphere, not so very far away, and only twice the size of our old moon. And it is an eventual destination for spirits.”
I was still trying to grasp all this. “It comes from underground?”
“The sun is an expression of what, in some places, is called the Ground of Being. It never loses its form, or shape, but it seems to melt into the land—and exude from it . . .”
I shook my head. “Doubt I can ever understand that.”
“Stranger yet, there are beings living there . . .” He looked up at the sun, which was beginning to dip between the trees. “And the beings there, who live upon the sun, are aware of the beings here . . .”
“You get all this from Diogenes?”
“Some of it. There are certain books. You’ll see them tomorrow.”
We walked onward. It was always Doyle who took the lead in going anywhere. I didn’t seem to mind—which would not have been the case on Earth. It was as if he was the one guy I’d be waiting to trail after. The very first one . . . though if I’d been born at the right time, I’d have followed Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys around on tour.
“So—Morgan Harris was gay. But . . . what if someone thought he was after a girl? Maybe Merchant, say . . .”
Doyle snorted. “You merely wish for an excuse to interview that woman up on the mezzanine in the mansion.”
“What? That girl? Me?”
“Do try to put on at least a semblance of gentlemanly behavior, Fogg.”
I changed the subject. “Anyway, there are predators here. Someone preyed on Morgan Harris.”
“Yes. Other kinds of human predation do penetrate to this level. I haven’t yet learned the why—if there’s a why. No doubt you met a couple of our local thugs.”
“Those kids in the town square? Amateurs.”
“Amateur quite describes them, yes.”
“But Higgs seems pretty neurotic. Not as nutty as Moore but pretty wack. Capable of violence. If people bring their mental illnesses here you’d think you’d see serious lunatics hanging around. Schizophrenics and so on. Maybe people prone to violence in their craziness.”
“Mental illness due to neurological damage or poor cerebral wiring doesn’t survive the transition to this world. But . . .” He frowned, the great wordsmith seeming for a moment at a loss for words. “Neurosis can be a result of a mix of factors—and one of them is choice. Some neurotic behavior is itself an addiction. A man like Bull Moore is addicted to his suspicious state of mind. And there is something here like psychological momentum—carried over from the Before. Our psychology rides along with us here. You and I—we all have to free ourselves of this psychological momentum. It can take a very long time and some of us are deeply beset by it. I’m still working on my own personal obsessions—and I have been here three fourths of a century. Not everything is planned out for us here, you see—and the fact that not everything is planned out . . . is planned out!”
We came to the edge of the swamp, and I could see Garden Rest less than a quarter mile away. Here the outer pools were tinged with sunset. The sun was sinking beyond the hills . . . literally sinking, according to Conan Doyle.
I felt a sudden desire to get a drink to go back to the Ossuary and think things through. I glanced at Doyle. “We come to any definite conclusions about Morgan Harris?”
“I have not. Have you?”
“Nope. I suspect Roscoe Higgs. This murderer seemed to want Harris’s remains found. That may be a clue in itself . . . I mean, suppose he did it for Merchant? Maybe he wanted Merchant to know he got rid of someone.”
“I suppose it might be he wanted the remains found. I thought so at first. But a simpler answer, Occam’s choice as it were, is that the murderer could’ve been interrupted just as he completed the process of . . . deformulating the victim’s body.”
We walked on a ways, with my mind wandering ahead of us. What else was in the afterworld? How far did it extend? Was there a map somewhere?
Doyle suddenly stopped and said, “Look here . . .”
He bent and plucked something from the dirt at the side of the path. My gaze had passed right over it—and missed it. Doyle could only have seen a tiny corner of it: a notebook, crusted on the outside with the soil of the afterworld. He shook it till it was a little cleaner, then pried its stuck pages open. I looked over his shoulder, and we saw a pressed flower, between two pages, with inked, slightly runny notes beside it, and a freehand drawing of the flower’s petals. “It would appear to be a botanical monograph. Taxonomy, don’t you know.” Doyle read some of the notes aloud. Pappus is bristly, lengths asymmetrical . . . phyllaries distinctive to afterworld patterns, midvein raised and pulsing with a life not as subtle as Earthly chlorophyllic processes . . . Photosynthesis takes on a new dimension here . . .”
“Botany,” I said. “Did it belong to Morgan Harris?”
“Quite probably,” Doyle said, nodding, prying open the beginning of the notebook. “And in fact . . . yes, here we are.”
The first page of the notebook was largely illegible with dampness, but on the inside of the front cover was scribbled:
M. Harris, afterworld plant taxonomy, Vol III.
He looked the notebook over. “I will take it home and examine it under a magnifying glass. Perhaps . . .” He cleaned it off a bit more, and thrust it in a coat pocket. “This jacket will certainly need laundering.” After a moment, squinting at the ground, he added, “Curious that the notebook should be dropped here. A man like Morgan, with a passion for his science, would not have been so careless with his notes. I suspect it was dropped in haste—possibly he was running. Come—let us backtrack a trifle.”
Half a dozen paces back, Doyle squatted down, pointing at the stones lining the pathway’s edges. “You see? The stones are pushed apart . . . just here, and here. As if two persons were struggling, opposed, each pushing back against the other. And here—the imprint of a heel, pressed into the ground. Indications of a scuffle!”
We found nothing else, and the light was continuing to weaken. We turned and started once more toward the village. “Doyle—when he dropped the notebook, you think he was running from whoever he’d struggled with?”
“It could be, Fogg. It could well be. He may have seen something our murderer did not want him to see. Which led to the scuffle and Morgan running away. Losing his notebook in the process.”
“Running away—but not getting away.”
A few minutes of silence passed as we continued toward Garden Rest, then he said, “Perhaps, if Touie is feeling well enough, you might come
to have some breakfast at our little cottage tomorrow, Fogg. There’s something she’s learned to cook that’s rather good. Of course, you don’t need to eat anything here, conventionally, but—it’s rather satisfying, come the morning, to have a bit of a tuck. And we have a rather good tea.” He stopped to gaze off over the shallow pools between the village and the swamp woods.
A rather good tea? I remembered Brummigen mentioning I would be paid somehow for assisting Doyle. But I’d never discussed it with Doyle and couldn’t imagine asking him for even the local equivalent of money.
But perhaps, indirectly . . .
“I do need to find a way to make a living, if that’s the word I want, around here, Doyle. I’ll do anything I can to help you, but maybe you could suggest a—”
“Look!” he interrupted. “What is that, over there?”
He pointed off across the pools of water, near the village. Something was outlined by the slant of light, in the water. Maybe something we hadn’t been able to see on the way here, because of the light.
Was it a black wiry shape—like an exoskeleton of wire?
SEVENTH
The wire-formed shape . . . wasn’t a man. It wasn’t a woman. It wasn’t a human shape at all.
I was up to my waist in tepid water, my pants rasping on my skin, my boots sucking at the mud, as I approached the wiry remains.
Under a foot and a half of clear water, resting on its side half buried in a mound of wet clay, the shape seemed a wire sculpture of one of the slothlike creatures I’d seen in the woods. I bent over and tugged it free, my fingers twining through the openings between its wiry outlines. I lifted it from the water. Somehow I was gratified to see the slime dripping from it—the afterworld seemed too antiseptic, at times.