by John Shirley
Doyle opened a drawer, took out a bottle and two small glasses, and poured afterworld whiskey for us, as he went on, “After the storm reaches its peak, most of the souls . . . the forgetters . . . are absorbed into the afterworld background. Some seem to become the nascent core, very thin indeed, of Earthly reincarnations.”
“They end up in someone back on Earth?”
“Generally. Others are absorbed into the background mind of the afterworld itself, to be radiated downward and consumed by matter on lower planes. It’s all quite painless to the forgetters. Of course, some few forgetters struggle to become something more substantial. They may even accumulate enough ‘selfness’ to join us here, on this level. I have met people who were once forgetters. But that will wait for a later conversation. A tot of whiskey? You might find a dram reassuring.”
I accepted, and the reassurance of the whiskey came not a moment too soon—the window directly across from me cracked. The crack was almost horizontal, slanting from one side to the other. “Doyle, I thought you said . . .”
“Oh bother,” Doyle grumbled. “It’s the wind, not the souls, doing that. I’ve been meaning to re-do these windows, I do think Brummigen did his part of the turret formulating sloppily. He was in a foul mood that day because we gave his lot a terrible bluing at cricket, the evening before . . .”
I got to my feet. A face was squeezing through the crack in the window. It came through like a sheet of translucent paper that writhed into the outline of a head—and then it darted at my face.
“Son of a—!” It’s all I managed to say before I fell back into the chair, spilling the rest of my brandy on my wrist, and hearing a sorrowful roaring in my ears. My eyes went blind, at first, just nothing but blackness, then, against the backdrop of aching darkness, pinwheels of fire flared out before me, perhaps some vision of the “galaxy” of forgetters. The pinwheels crashed together with a grand gonging sound and I found myself . . . somewhere else.
I was in a hotel room, somewhere high up, gazing off a balcony through heavy brown smog—smog as thick as dirty dishwater awash with gravy. I was in China, somewhere, around 2009. Someone behind me spoke in Chinese and I understood them.
She spoke in Mandarin, but I understood her in English: “I am going to take the child, we cannot live like this.”
I felt a small hand tug at my shirt. I turned and picked up my small daughter and I tipped us both over the edge of the balcony, whispering to her in Mandarin that we’re going for a ride, a ride, we’re going to fly like swans . . .
She didn’t scream. She laughed. Then we struck the ground . . .
Pinwheels, darkness . . .
“Fogg! Nicholas Fogg!”
I felt a strong grip on my upper right arm and opened my eyes. I was staring at a place where a floor and a wall intersected. I heard Doyle’s voice, “You back with the living, so to speak, dear fellow?”
“I didn’t notice you had a Persian rug in here, before,” I said. My voice sounded hoarse in my own ears. I felt like I might burst into tears.
He helped me to stand. I was wobbly and felt sick to my stomach.
“Not a Persian rug, but a good imitation of one,” Doyle said. “Here, I’ve set up your chair again, sit down . . .”
I let him ease me into the chair. He began to take my pulse—then desisted. “Absurd to take your pulse. Just the habit of an old physician.”
I looked at the windows. I could see the faces receding, rolling up, melting into flares of light. “Storm’s dying down?”
“Yes. Quite spent, I should say.”
“How long was I . . .”
“Ten minutes, perhaps . . .”
“Ten minutes!”
“Didn’t feel that long?”
I shook my head. “It sure didn’t. I was in . . . I think it was China. I had a little girl. We jumped over the balcony and died . . .”
“Oh, do have some more whiskey. I apologize, I must get the windows firmed up . . .”
“Not your fault . . .” I accepted the glass. “Thanks.” I felt dazed. “Sorry I dropped the glass.”
“Not at all. Sorry you were invaded—your mind was swept away into someone else’s. You relived some essential part of their tragedy. When there’s such a storm we can be rained upon by the sheer condensation of someone’s sad past! Most of the forgetters were deeply unhappy when they died.”
“If that what makes you a forgetter . . . surprised I’m not one.”
“You’re an old soul. That’s the reason. You have a lot of substance. You’re rather a complex chap, after all . . .”
“An old soul?”
“Yes. You developed over many lifetimes. Of course not everyone reincarnates. But . . . look at your arm. See the hairs standing up?”
I looked at the hairs rising on my forearm. I could see it—and feel it. There was a charge in the air. Doyle’s sharp mustache points seemed almost comically pronounced and his hair, I saw, was gently writhing on his head.
I had to smile. “Is my hair dancing about?”
He grinned, suddenly resembling Teddy Roosevelt in an old photo, and combed his hair back with his hands. “Yes—you see, the storm psychically charges the air, for a time. So some good came of all this, as I’d hoped . . .”
He stood up, brought me one of the volumes from his desk, and laid it open on my lap. “Now . . . observe.”
The text on the book’s pages was calligraphically written out, but was undulating on the page. It reminded me of when I was a teenager and I took the brown mescaline at the hot springs near Mount Shasta.
“That supposed to look psychedelic?” I asked.
“Psychedelic? That is a term I’ve heard, but it was never explained to me.”
“Hallucinogenic.”
“It does look that way, but in fact it’s different—drug hallucinations are illusions. This is actually shifting on the page. The psychic storm shows us a level normally invisible to those of us who are not sufficiently refined. Ah—you see, it becomes legible.”
I could read it now:
The semblance requires many layers of formulation and additional channels of inner circulation before the ways of life consent to take part. It is in the spirit of alchemy, but is more than alchemy.
“Who wrote this?” I asked.
“It was written at least a century ago, and, in fact, the author did not sign his name. Or her name. Read on . . .”
We who have attempted this direct genesis seek to emulate the creation inherent in the energies transmitted by the sun. My colleague suggests that reproductive instincts play a part. It may be so, for no one reproduces here, precisely, though there are creatures who seem to spawn in this world and some variant of biological evolution is indicated. Yet cells seem to function on different principles from the biology of the world before . . . It is a biology so intimately connected with mind that there is little distinction . . .
The words parted like curtains, and seemed to whisper, as a moving picture formed on the page like a slightly murky photograph of a one of the wiry shapes, like the remains of Morgan Harris . . . but this one was weaving itself from up from the ground, a slow animation on the book’s page, the formulating of a man’s shape. But the shape was more fully formed than Harris’s remains. Yet it was not quite human or alive. Two other men, seen from behind, had their hands stuck into the ground; a third, face hidden by rising smoke, seemed to be cutting himself with some elaborate instrument, and directing the blood . . . which was not blood but a silver liquid that moved through the air in a slow flowing, defying gravity, to pour into the wiry man-shape . . .
“You note that the iridescent silver of the life formulation flow,” Doyle said, pointing, “has much in common with the appearance of the ‘snail track’ material we found on Morgan Harris’s remains . . .”
I nodded. “No
w that you mention it, I—”
I broke off when the image of the formulating man vanished in an explosion within its frame.
I just had time to see the words,
. . . the instability may be a message or it may be . . .
And then a new picture flickered into place, exposed by the psychic charge; another shape arising from the ground. But it wasn’t being formulated by anyone. It seemed to organize itself from the stuff of the soil. It was a monstrous shape, something like the lizard forepart of a Gila monster, but big, much bigger than a man, an indistinguishable mix of stone, soil, mulch, and flesh.
A ragged, bearded man stepped into the image, from out of frame, and seemed to be defiantly raving at the creature, shaking his fist and head, telling the beast to be damned and go away. The creature had eyes that seemed made of mushrooms; it had teeth made of broken crystals; it had a black, quivering gullet, exposed wide and wider as it opened its enormous maw—it emerged only halfway from the ground, like a sea serpent rising partway from the water; dirt trickled down its rugged sides, as it rose. It reared over the man, who shouted wildly, defiantly—madly. The creature angled its head down—and lunged, taking the raging man into its maw, so only the fellow’s wriggling bare feet remained. The monster swallowed—and the feet disappeared. A black, muddy tongue smacked along the stony jaws and then withdrew. The creature drew its head back, thrust it forward, as if about to belch—but out of its mouth came a fat blue spark, about the size of a bird . . . which flickered up and out of the frame.
The monster began to ripple away in the ground, like a swimming snake, the ground seeming to part for it like muddy water. The text undulated to cover the image and . . .
And then I felt a jolt of psychic intrusion, darkness and pinwheels, and I heard Arthur Conan Doyle’s voice, ruminating, muttering, miserable, as if echoing from some dark pit in the world . . .
“She would not die, she would not go, her unfailing kindness a wall between me and my love, my only love, and I must atone, atone forever for love, so long as she . . .”
I looked up at Doyle, but he wasn’t speaking. Yet I could hear his voice.
“ . . . so long as she lives . . .”
Doyle gave me a startled look. “I seem to be picking up a wandering bit of something from your memories, Fogg. About—a woman in Las Vegas?”
I blinked. “Me? My thoughts?”
“You are hearing something from me?”
“Um—yeah. It was like your voice, something about atoning? But . . . you weren’t talking. Not out loud.”
“I see. Yes. It’s not reading one’s mind, per se, not usually.” His eyes seemed suddenly flat, dead; his voice toneless. “It’s a sort of recording, an echo from the deep unconscious. The psychic charge from the storm transmits it quite inadvertently. Normally we have a protective sheath against unintended telepathy. It can be rather . . .”
He didn’t finish what he was saying, his voice breaking as he picked up the book from my lap and walked to the desk, his back turned to me. He cleared his throat. “The charge is seeping away. The books will . . . will show us only their text now . . .”
“I couldn’t read the text until the charge happened. Then the writing changed . . .”
He sniffed. “It can be read, with application, you simply have to get used to the calligraphy style.”
“What was that thing, in the second picture? The monster?”
“It’s called the Scargel. We don’t know who named it that or why. We are not entirely sure what its place here is. Sometimes it . . . seems to sort people out.” He let out a long, slow, windy breath. “But that is enough for now, Fogg. I will meditate on all this.”
He was still standing with his back to me.
I looked out the window. I could see the psychic storm in the distance, fulminating like heat lightning in dark clouds, seeming to shrink within itself, diminishing. The discordant choir was barely audible.
“I’ll . . . see what else I can find out about Morgan Harris,” I said, not at all sure how I would do that.
“Ah, yes.” He sat at the desk, his shoulders slumped. “Yes, do. I expect Touie is in the storm shelter so . . . you will have to see yourself out.”
There was an uncomfortable, indefinable embarrassment between us, palpable in the air itself. Doyle wasn’t pleased that I’d heard that echo from his dark places.
I turned away, and went downstairs, and let myself out the front door. I didn’t see Touie.
I walked past the ironic tombstone of Arthur Conan Doyle, and out the gate, into the kindly refreshment of the cleansed air soughing softly over the street.
The birds sang. Most of it was instrumental stuff; bird soloing. But I thought I heard one of them singing, “She would not die, she would not go, her unfailing kindness a wall . . . so long as she . . .”
NINTH
I was walking from the Avalon Coffee Shop over to Brummigen’s Bar when I saw Doyle, striding along the walk, with another Old Journal under his arm. He looked grim and focused as he went into a shop—a little place that looked like something from a 1930s British movie about middle-class people in a British village. Deidre’s Dry Goods.
Feeling an undefined concern for Doyle, I risked annoying him and went into the shop.
A little bell tinkled on the door when I came in. The place was packed with dry goods, cloth especially; and there were shelves of paper, in many colors; there were bagged goods and racks of tools.
Doyle was pondering a display table of fountain pens where a sign said Sale on Pens, Two Fionas Each.
“Garden Rest could use coinage,” I said. “I volunteer my face for the fifty-cent piece.”
Doyle glanced up. He didn’t seem surprised to see me. Nor pleased. “Ah. Fogg.”
“How the hell do they make fountain pens here?” I asked, picking one up.
“You’ll meet the chap who makes them, later. You’ll meet everyone. Including Deirdre—here she is.”
Deidre came in, smoothing her white ruffled apron. She wore it over a blue-and-black flowered dress with puffy sleeves. She had a wry, cheerful expression, dark red lipstick, and her hair was done up so much like one of the Andrews Sisters I expected her to break into “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B.” But she said, “Gents, how can I help?” Sounding too British to be an Andrews sister.
“Just fifty sheets of the onion skin, Deirdre,” Doyle said. “And perhaps some wrapping for this book. It’s a Journal loaner from the mayor.”
“Right.” Fingers working efficiently, she packaged up the paper and the book “And the other gent?”
“Um—just sort of following poor Doyle here,” I said. “Getting on his nerves.”
Deirde laughed gently. “Not difficult to do, but if he’s gruff with you, just let it go by. Sir Arthur doesn’t mean it.”
“No need for honorifics, Deirdre,” Doyle said. “Call me anything but Ignatius. This fellow you can call Nicholas Fogg. New chap. Doing some work with me.”
I shook her small hand. “Mr. Fogg,” she said, her smile widening.
The door jangled chirpily and I turned to see Roscoe Higgs come in. He was scowling, looking hurried, impatient. He carried a piece of paper in his hand. “I need some . . . damned thread. Why, I don’t know. But I do. Here.”
He slapped the scrap of paper down on her wooden counter.
She sighed, but bustled over to him. “Which ‘damned thread’ would that be, Mr. Higgs?”
“It’s there on the paper. He asked me for it. I don’t know . . . red.”
“Scarlet, in fact,” she said, picking up the paper. She went into the back room.
I felt a sort of tingling, and glanced at the door—saw Charles Long outside, looking in the window, past a display of shoes. He seemed startled to find me looking back at him. He hesitated, then cam
e into the shop.
“Well. Mr. Doyle and Mr. Fogg. Here we are again.”
“Long,” I said, nodding. “If you’re looking for Higgs, guess what, I’ve found him.” I hooked a thumb at Higgs.
“You are an impressive detective,” Long said, playing at sarcasm. He seemed to be working hard to be chummy.
“She’s getting the thread, Long,” Higgs said. “Why couldn’t you get it?”
“I thought I could trust you with it,” Long said. “Then I rethought it. After all I trusted you not to try to impale the neighbors.”
“Did you say impale?” Deirdre said, coming in with a small bag in her hand.
“Just a misunderstanding about fencing, at the mansion,” Doyle said.
“They overdo it, out there,” I said.
“That’s all over with,” Long observed, taking the bag from Deidre. “You guys should come out to dinner in my wing of the mansion, in fact, next week,” Long added, nodding to us. “I need someone to talk to besides Merchant and Higgs here.”
“Oh sure, you’re such a joy to talk to,” Higgs muttered.
Long gave her a Fiona and turned to go. “Come on, Higgs. Let’s hit the road. Trust you with one thing . . .”
He seemed to hustle Higgs out of the shop.
“Scarlet thread,” Doyle said, looking after them. “I didn’t reckon either man to take an interest in needlepoint.” Doyle turned to me. “I’m for home. I’ve decided to check another Journal . . .”
“Looking for anything specific?”
He glanced at Deirdre, who was straightening up reams of paper. She seemed to be primly hanging about. Felt to me more about picking up gossip than spying.
“Just . . . biographical material on newcomers. Perhaps even you, Fogg!”
“Cool. Great. I won’t ask who wrote it or why. I’m going to get a drink. The psychic storm took it out of me . . .”
“Wasn’t that an awful one, though?” Deirdre said, gazing out the window.
She waved cheerfully good-bye to us as we left.
Just outside, I almost stumbled into Fiona.