by John Shirley
“No one makes them. They just step into the job when it’s there, or they create their own. Dessie is not just the waitress, she runs the place. Lot of people have run the Avalon Coffee Shop. She’s the third since I’ve been here. One of them married someone from another settlement and left. The other one got the Summons and wandered off. People do what they enjoy here. She probably likes the job. But it’s all about giving you a feeling of home, of connectedness. I was a military man in the Before but I always wanted to own a bar. Spent a lot of time in them. Makes me feel at home. So I took over the bar, after I got here . . .” He drank his coffee, then squinted out through the opening I’d made in the steam on the window. “Yeah,” he muttered. “Storm. I’d better batten the hatches. See you later . . .”
After I finished my pie and coffee I went out to the square, pausing for a minute to absorb some sunlight. It tasted like excellent buckwheat pancakes with maple syrup and peaches. And then it tasted like fresh orange juice and the melt water from a glacier.
Feeling refreshed, I went to the beach and walked around, gazing at the Concord-grape-colored sea, till it felt like time to head to Doyle’s. I was disappointed when I didn’t run into Fiona out there. I was thinking of asking her for a date.
As I headed for Doyle’s, I peered at the sky, wondering what Major Brummigen had seen that told him a storm was coming. I saw some skirling, restless clouds, but they didn’t seem black or stormy.
I did hear something different, though. It sounded like a warped, off-key choir, singing from the sky . . .
I got to Doyle’s, let myself in through the gate, and paused to look at that big stone monument behind the rosebushes.
It was a large tombstone, neatly etched with
STEEL TRUE
BLADE STRAIGHT
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
~KNIGHT~
PATRIOT, PHYSICIAN & MAN OF LETTERS
“Ha ha, what do you think of my gravestone?” Doyle asked, as he opened the front door. “Saw you through the window. Jolly old thing, ain’t it?”
“Lot of people around here have their own gravestones in their yards?” I asked, walking up to the front door.
“There are a few in Garden Rest—some people enjoy gazing at their own tombstones in a kind of triumph. A ‘You couldn’t keep me down, you lump of granite’ sort of thing, don’t you know. But do you not think this one is splendidly etched? It’s my pride and joy! My old friend Barrie arranged it for me, when he lived here. That’s the exact inscription that was placed on my tombstone after I died in 1930! I do miss Barrie, but the lucky fellow got the Summons and went on walkabout. Haven’t heard much from him since. Pity.”
“Barrie?” I remembered reading in his biography about his friendship with the author of Peter Pan. “James Barrie? The Neverland guy?”
“Yes. Fine fellow, though peculiar. And peculiarly fine! But come in and meet Touie. Oh . . .” He suddenly pointed at something behind me. “Is that a black butterfly?”
I turned, and saw that, in fact, a black butterfly was settling on the top of his tombstone. It was a little bigger than a monarch butterfly, wings and body jet-black.
“Excuse me, old chap,” Doyle said, slipping past me to hurry to the butterfly. He approached it carefully, as if unwilling to frighten the creature away.
Licking his lips in concentration, Doyle bent near the tombstone, and held out his hand. The black butterfly fluttered onto his finger.
“Ah!” Doyle said. “It is for me, then!”
I went over to have a look. “For you?”
He held it up to the light. “You see? Someone’s used a delicate touch, just the tip of a little finger, to write on its wings! The black butterflies get quite annoyed and deliberately disintegrate if you’re not gentle in putting the message on their wings.”
“A message on its wings . . . ?” I could see the light coming through the creature’s wings, illuminating the message, gray against black; hard to see but legible. I made out just four letters and a word on one wing, and two words on the other plus a single letter.
ACDI hear
Your Dreams J
“A, c, d, i?” I said. “Oh—Arthur Conan Doyle, and . . .”
“My initials and I,” Doyle prompted, nodding, lifting his hand to encourage the black butterfly to flitter away.
“Oh sure! ACD I hear your dreams. That the message?”
“Just so.” He seemed troubled.
“That’s a pretty weird message even for the afterworld.”
“Yet I’m afraid I do understand it . . .”
“Arthur!” a woman called.
I looked up to see Touie standing in the doorway.
“Did you get a butterfly message?” she asked. “I saw the little creature fly away. Anything of interest?”
“Yes my dear. At least, it had my initials. Might be from . . . my father. Rather cryptic. Didn’t get a close look before the beggar absconded. Come along, Fogg. Morning tea.”
I followed him into the house, puzzling over what he’d said to Touie. Arthur Conan Doyle’s father’s name was Charles Doyle. No J in that. I knew from Doyle’s biography that Charles Doyle was a talented artist, but psychologically off-kilter, increasingly loopy as he aged, the whole thing complicated by uncontrollable alcoholism. He drank furniture polish if he couldn’t get anything else.
J had seemed like an abbreviated signature . . .
Then it came to me. Jean.
Doyle’s second wife . . .
Jean was elsewhere, in the afterworld, so I inferred from Doyle.
Doyle had resettled in Garden Rest with his first wife. Naturally he didn’t want Touie to know he was getting black-butterfly messages from Jean Leckie Doyle—the woman who had replaced Touie after she’d died.
I was surprised at catching him in a lie, though. Didn’t seem his style. And it sure didn’t seem “steel true and blade straight.”
“Right this way, Fogg,” Doyle said, leading me into a sunny dining room. It was a hexagonal room projecting from the back of the house, with a window on every wall except the one with the door, and a light fixture that could have been designed by Tiffany.
There was a silver tea service on the oaken table, and dishes of what that looked like Cream of Wheat and butter, and a plate of cookies. Or were they crumpets? A deliciously grainy, buttery smell greeted me.
Yet another breakfast. But I knew it wouldn’t make me feel overfull.
“Oh I am glad if you’ve heard from your papa,” Touie said, pouring tea as she stood beside her red-cushioned Victorian–style chair.
“Ah yes,” Doyle said, gesturing for me to sit. He sat across from me and said, “One of the great joys of the afterworld, Fogg, was finding my father awaiting me, well and happy! He was no longer suffering from dipsomania. Nor epilepsy! The rascal even looked a little younger than me! He was sketching and painting, quite content. I lived down the street from him for a year before he heard the Summons . . .”
Touie dished up a china bowl of the buttery hot cereal and placed it before me, her fingers working with flawless elegance. Beside it, she set a china cup of tea on a fragile-looking blue dish, and a silver creamer, alongside a plate of British–style biscuits.
Touie sat on my right, daintily unfolding a lace-edged napkin onto her lap. I laid my napkin on my own lap, less daintily, and returned her smile. My smile wasn’t as prim as hers, either. But she seemed genuinely happy to have company. In the morning light from the tall, lacily curtained windows, with her hair swirled atop her head, Louisa Doyle looked like a gravely gracious lady from an ivory cameo.
“That is Touie’s special porridge, which she makes from a seed we call manna,” Doyle said. “We don’t know what else to call it—it is quite soft and workable, you can make it into so much. The butter comes from something we call
a cream plant. Tastes just like milk, of course. Now sir, here you go, some sugar, from our own sugarcane . . . If you will be guided by me, I advise a little cream and sugar on the porridge. It’s jolly good . . .”
I tasted the finished concoction. It tasted a lot like grits to me, with butter and sugar and cream. “Really good. Makes a guy feel at home, eating something like that! Thank you, Mrs. Doyle!”
She actually blushed and squirmed a bit on her chair, quite pleased. “Oh I am glad you like it! Of course we don’t need to eat solid food, here, but it does seem to add something extra to life. The taste and texture of food, from time to time.”
“And of course it absorbs perfectly, without waste, so the elimination aspect of eating,” Doyle began, “need not—”
“Arthur? Please!” Touie said, raising her eyebrows.
“Sorry my dear. How’s your tea, old boy?”
“I never was a tea drinker but I think you’re converting me. This stuff is good . . .”
We chatted. Touie asked me about my life as a detective—she discreetly did not ask about my death—and I gave her a sanitized version.
“Most detective work, in the humdrum world,” Doyle said, putting his teacup down with a careful finality, “is quite unsurprisingly humdrum work, so I understand.”
“We can’t all be Sherlock Holmes,” I said.
“Even Sherlock Holmes could not be Sherlock Holmes,” said Touie, with a slight smile.
We can’t all be Sherlock Holmes. But could I be . . . Watson?
“I half expected Mr. Holmes to greet me when I found myself here,” Touie said. “There were a good many people who believed he was real. Women wrote letters to Arthur suggesting that they would simply adore being housekeeper for Sherlock Holmes . . .”
We laughed, chatted a little more, then Doyle said, “Now then, Fogg. Let us repair to my office upstairs, I have something to show you . . .”
I did my best to follow all the mannerly cues, dabbing my lips with the napkin, standing up as the lady stood, feeling awkward but managing not to seem as oafish as I am. At least I hope so.
The windows rattled, then, vibrating with the dissonant choir voices I’d heard before.
“Oh dear, you were right about the storm, Arthur,” Touie said. “Perhaps the shelter?”
“You go there if it comforts you, my dear, and I shall join you, in time. I believe it’s quite a minor blow . . .”
I followed Doyle to a narrow, spiral wooden stairs off the main hall. The house creaked in a rising wind; the dissonant choir grew louder.
The office proved to be the one room occupying the top floor of the turret. A rolltop oaken desk, with a wooden chair, stood beside one of three windows in the circular walls; an old-fashioned ink pen and a sheaf of paper lay on the open desk. Facing the window was an easy chair with a small table beside it. On the table, leaning in a brass ashtray, was a briar pipe.
“That a briar pipe?” I asked. “So you smoke what, here, Doyle—frip?”
He gave me a narrow-eyed glance of irritation. “Do I look like a hophead to you, Mr. Fogg?”
“No, Sir Arthur.” He didn’t particularly liked to be called that—which was why I was calling him that. His testiness had brought out the smartass in me. “I just heard there was no tobacco here . . .”
“Och, occasionally some tobacco makes its way here, in the pockets of new arrivals. It goes at a premium. None remains in this household, sadly. Do sit down, old chap, don’t mean to snap at you.”
He sat at the desk chair, I took the easy chair. “Merchant said he was interested in Morgan Harris because Harris had found something close to tobacco, out there in the woods . . .”
“Yes, believe me, my ears perked up at that. I shall pursue that lead as well as those pertaining to his untimely demise.” He chuckled. “Of course, tobacco is harmless to us here—and we thought it harmless in my time! Indeed, it was sometimes prescribed by doctors! I did learn the truth about it, long after my own passing to this world. I might have lived a bit longer in the Before had I never indulged in tobacco. Ah well . . .”
Doyle turned to the desk, pushed the papers aside, and opened a drawer. He took out several volumes looking like journals in old leather bindings.
“I borrowed these from Chauncey,” he said, arranging the three volumes on the desktop. “Not usually the thing to take them out of the city hall, but I knew we were to have a storm, and it may illuminate something extra . . .” He opened one volume—it seemed a dense text of unreadable calligraphy in rusty-colored ink on yellow paper. He straightened up and seemed to listen to some alteration in the discordant choir. “ . . . Ah, here is the storm right on schedule.”
He nodded toward the window—which began rattling in its frame.
Something outside was rattling the window. Not the wind, though the wind was in fact rising. It was the thing’s grip on the frame that rattled it.
Something with a hollow-eyed face was shaking the window . . .
EIGHTH
The elongated visage, eyeless and suffering, disintegrated under pressure from another, quite distinct face, the way a form in flowing paint is pushed out of shape when another color is poured into the mix. The rounder face with owlish eyes, replacing the first, was quickly pressed aside by several others: human shapes with streaming hair, men and women and mixed gender, some faces well defined and others only sketches. Some looked directly at us; others didn’t seem to see us, and shattered themselves against the windowpane.
They sang, with some occasional harmony but mostly discord—they were the dissonant choir. Some of them looked fairly happy, or at least pleasantly distracted; a good many others seemed to be grieving, endlessly grieving . . .
I began to make out words in their unrehearsed oratorio, just phrases here and there. “Why aren’t you here, when . . . when . . .” “I thought I’d shoot myself too but I was afraid, I couldn’t do it, I just sat by the bodies till the police came and I waved the gun, then the police did it, they shot me . . .” “I can smell my own dead body, I can’t get away from the smell . . .” “Mama mama mama no . . .” “Quoi de neuf? Pas grand chose . . . grand chose . . .” “Don’t hit me again, again. Don’t hit me again, again . . .” “Feci quod potui, faciant meliora potentes!” “Don’t . . . don’t . . .” “I won’t, I won’t . . .” “Peux-tu m’aider!” “Damn you to hell, sir, damn you to hell!”
I felt sick to my stomach, listening to them. The walls seemed to vibrate with the cries . . .
“Do you speak Latin or French or any other language?”
“Some Spanish, but . . .”
“But you find you know what the spirits you see are saying even when they sing in other languages!”
“Yeah. One of the French ones said, You, help me, in French . . . Some guy spoke in Latin, something about I did what I could, let’s see you do better . . .”
Doyle nodded briskly. “Here the tower of Babel does not stand—though the turret of Doyle does! But here in the afterlife the world itself is our translator.”
I winced as another face deformed itself against the window.
Doyle came over and patted me on the shoulder. “Don’t be afraid of them—this is a mere psychic storm!”
“A mere psychic storm? Come on, Doyle,” I moved my chair back from the window. “What is it?”
Doyle glanced at me. “Good Lord, but you look white as a ghost yourself. Don’t be afraid, dear fellow! There might be a bit of leakage from the storm in here—but we’ll be sheltered enough, on the whole. If at some time you are outdoors, and too close to the heart of it, why, you may find it rather overwhelming. Some people retreat to the basement and wait it out in psychic storm shelters because they’re afraid of psychological contamination—and some get a touch nauseated by the experience. But really it’s all a lot of fearmongering. A littl
e ectoplasm, a slipping in a slick of spilled anxiety, nothing grievous . . .”
The ectoplasm in question was seeping in through tiny cracks along the edges of the window frame, coming through in a sheet of pearly vapor that then twined itself into the shapes of hands, fingers, reaching for us . . .
“Doyle,” I said harshly, pushing my chair back sharply with my feet, “what the hell is a psychic storm?”
Doyle cleared his throat. “No need for a chap to raise his voice—”
“Doyle!”
“Right. Most of the forgetters . . . souls who don’t know who they are . . . the simple way to say it is, they are too insubstantial to incarnate in places like Garden Rest.” He looked ponderingly out the window. “Eventually, after muddling about over land, in places like the swamp, they find their way to larger clouds of such soul sparks, far away, over the sea. Usually the sea cloud is too distant to see from Garden Rest. To mariners they might appear to be lightning storms.”
Mariners? I didn’t want to interrupt him to ask about it. But I imagined sailing on the Purple Sea . . .
Doyle seemed worried about wasting time. He clearly had some sort of plan. He went on, his tone taut with impatience. “When a cloud of sparks reaches a state of maximum concentration, a wind builds up, on one side, a wind that is quite indistinguishable from psychic will. It is wind and will at once. It is as if the afterworld itself has taken a breath and exhaled. This exhalation blows the forgetting sparks into a swirling ball, driving it in over the land, where it becomes a psychic storm. As the storm wears on, something like the whirling inward pull of a galaxy takes place amongst souls instead of stars, and in the spiral’s center the sparks suddenly come into contact, and in reaction are blasted outward, diffused into the ghostly form, as you see here . . .”
The ectoplasmic fingers were reaching into the room from around the window frame . . . but when they reached a certain distance into the room, just short of me, they became wispy, and dissipated—and vanished. But outside, faces still battered against the window like leaves blown by a hurricane.