Doyle After Death

by John Shirley

  “Oh . . . Fiona. Hi. I was uh . . .”

  She smiled at my nervousness. “Mr. Nicholas Fogg and Mr. Conan Doyle! How you fellas doing?”

  “Very well, Fiona, and yourself?”

  Doyle was putting himself out to be polite, but I could tell he wanted to be on his way.

  “I’m swell, Mr. Doyle.”

  Swell? Then I remembered when she’d died. The 1940s.

  I stood there, trying not to gape at her. She’d attracted me the first time I’d seen her—­now the feeling was even stronger. “You look . . .” Actually she looked just the same. I felt like I wanted to say, “charming, lovely, appealing . . .” But out loud . . . I didn’t want to say that. “You look . . . great. And—­you’re wearing shoes!”

  “Yes, I always put on shoes when coming into town,” she said, showing me her white button-­up boots. “They’re awfully old-­fashioned. I like them that way. I bought them here, at Dierdre’s!”

  “Did you?” Was that the best thing I could think of to say?

  Doyle looked back and forth between me and Fiona. He rolled his eyes. “I see. Och, Fogg—­I must be off.”

  He tipped his hat to Fiona, and hurried off.

  “Bye, Mr. Doyle!” she called after him. She turned to me. “I like that old guy. My dad would have said, ‘Doyle is jake with me.’ Dad was in World War One.”

  “He’s jake with me too, then. Going to buy some more shoes?”

  “No, sewing stuff. Needles, a few bobs and bits. Or is that bits and bobs?”

  I wanted to go in with her and just watch her buy bits and bobs. But I didn’t want to follow her like a lost puppy. “Going to use Fionas—­to buy Fionas?”

  I winced inwardly. She’d probably heard that joke too often.

  “I am! You’d think they’d give me extra Fionas, but no. I got enough, though.”

  “Okay. Well. See you around town. Or . . . out in the fog or . . . something.”

  She looked at me for a long moment. “See you, Nick.” She went inside, jangling the bell on the door.

  And I went to the bar. Some habits seem to follow us everywhere.

  That evening, I took my chances playing poker with Bertram, in Brummigen’s bar, trying to get over feeling like a fool with Fiona. And trying not to think too much about the psychic storm and that awful feeling of looking into Doyle’s darkness . . .

  When Jocelyn came in. (Remember? Tall, shapely woman with a streak in her auburn hair? The streak was probably there when she died.)

  She was wearing a tight red dress, low cut, slit up the side, and red heels, like something from Central Costuming on a Hollywood lot. The Scarlet Lady enters. There was some black slip showing.

  “Whoa,” said Ripp—­you remember Ripp Finch. Turns out that’s the name of the spiky-­haired, wide-­faced kid with the High Stakes Poker sweatshirt. He and I sat across from Bertram in one of Brummigen’s booths.

  Ripp was pouting over his cards. Not much poker face on the kid.

  Jocelyn didn’t look at us as she crossed the room. She went directly to the bar, and sat on stool, exchanging the time of day with the major. He brought her a drink and she paid for it with Fionas.

  I was sitting half turned in my seat, goggling at her. I hadn’t had the nerve to make a move on Fiona. But I’d had some drinks and was feeling bolder. And somehow Jocelyn was more in the field of my experience.

  “You’re going to make the lady pay for a drink, there, hoss?” Bertram muttered.

  I looked at him and whispered, “She’s already got one . . .”

  “Because you’re too damn slow. All right then. If I got to get you rollin’, I got to. And you each owe me forty Fionas for this hand.”

  He smacked down his cards. He had a full house.

  “How do you know I don’t have a better hand?” I demanded. But I didn’t. I had a pair of jacks.

  Ripp threw down his cards in disgust as Bertram left the table. “I know he cheats. I just don’t know how. Does that count?”

  Bertram went to the bar and reached under it, came up with his acoustic guitar. “How about it, Major? Just one or two.”

  I thought he meant drinks, but Brummigen shrugged and took a fiddle out from under the bar. “When did he learn to play fiddle?” I asked.

  “Does it all the time,” Ripp said. “Just doesn’t like to play outside the bar. Doesn’t sell drinks, he says, if you play outside the bar.”

  Bertram tuned the guitar for about two seconds and then half sat on a stool, legs stretched to the floor, and started playing. And then he began to sing, sounding just like Ernest Tubb. “I’m walking the floor over you . . . I can’t sleep a wink that is true . . .”

  He was strumming the song in a shuffle, and the major was fiddling the high side, and then Ripp pulled a ­couple of drumsticks from his back pocket . . .

  “You son of a bitch,” I burst out, gaping at Ripp. “You pull those drumsticks out of your ass? This isn’t a goddamn musical!”

  But Ripp didn’t answer, it happens he always was a drummer and now he was playing on the tabletop, clattering right along and I realized Jocelyn was looking calmly at me from the bar, her eyes half closed.

  My mama didn’t raise a fool. Okay, she did, and it was me, but I’m not a fool in that way, and I got up and went to her and said, “Can I have this dance, ma’am?”

  She tilted her head, seeming to consider, then put out a hand. “I suppose we can give it a whirl,” she said lazily, as I drew her onto our impromptu dance floor.

  Fortunately I know how to swing a girl with this style of music, and that’s what I did. We danced and I spun her around and it all fell into place like the eight ball in the corner pocket.

  Just an hour and fifteen minutes later, give or take, I was walking her home.

  The lamps were lit; an owl flashed through the corona of glow overhead, the owl making a screech that sounded like laughter when we reached her front door, and I said, “Early to go home, really.” I had the dopey idea that she was going to say good night to me at the door. A “not on the first date” thing. And who could blame her? But I was hoping to get her to the beach and do some making out—­some old-­fashioned canoodling. “We could walk along that Purple Sea. Maybe you could explain it to me . . . the sea, I mean. And why it’s purple.”

  “You need too much explained to you,” she said huskily. “I’ve been needing company at home ever since that storm today. They always have that effect on me. And you dance pretty good . . .”

  She took me by the wrist and I let her lead me upstairs. I don’t know why I was surprised, considering what she’d done the first time I’d seen her. I was disappointed, in a way. Something about having died and revived made me feel romantic. This wasn’t romantic. It was more Earthly—­and earthy.

  I barely remember getting up the stairs into her rooms. We were kissing before the door was closed.

  The kiss was electric, a flowing back and forth of crackling energy, and it communicated directly with the lower part of me.

  We found our way to the bed, and we were soon undressed and . . . when you screw in a lightbulb, if you get it in right, it lights up the instant it’s in there, if the light is switched on at the wall and the filaments are intact. The light was switched on, and my filaments were intact: the bulb lit up with an almost frightening wattage.

  Sex in the Before, back on Earth, was often awkward. But sometimes you got so gloriously carried away you forgot the awkwardness . . .

  You’re always that carried away if you make love in the afterworld.

  In my mind I heard Bob Wills singing about being on top of the world. Penetration? Yes, with the usual fluids, or something like them, but fragrant as massage oils. Soon, the physical became metaphysical. There was a kaleidoscopic effect—­that’s what sex becomes, here: I saw a mandala of intersecting flesh�
�­and not just in my imagination. Our coitus was a psychic event as much as a physical one. The motive force of this extra-­dimensional connection was a blue-­white electricity—­in my mind it was the exact color of stars on a clear night. It seemed to flow in a circuit between us, through the two of us, and the two sides of each of us: through a biological side and a mental one. When it was at its best, we were absolutely there in the moment, the working together of positive and negative, proton and neutron, pestle in mortar, a shark in a moonlit lagoon. We were endlessly tumbling dice that never did come up to any one set of numbers.

  But something was missing, too. I could feel a resistance—­a stopping short of emotional intimacy. Deep emotional intimacy just wasn’t there. I didn’t usually miss it—­or hadn’t, in the Before.

  But here in the afterworld . . . I did miss it. I felt its absence.

  There was darkness and light, alternating, in our connection. In the darkness there was a pathos, a wounded otherness that was never fully healed. For just a moment, her guard dropped, and I caught a telepathic image of her, maybe one of her memories; I saw her as a young woman, her shape glowing phosphorescently in a dark little room: she was crying on the floor of a musty closet, with clothes dangling from hangers overhead. She was kneeling in that little booth, holding the door closed against someone trying to force their way in.

  Then a bolt of electricity crashed down my spine toward her—­toward Jocelyn, in the afterworld—­and the frightened young woman vanished as the older, afterworld Joselyn and I writhed together in something as painful as it was satisfying.

  “It’s those psychic storms,” Jocelyn said, almost whispering it, later, when we were drinking her brandy. We were lying back on her bed, nude, the window open, cool air washing over us, clasped brandy glasses poised. There was a casual, relaxed intimacy between us. But I didn’t feel terribly close to her. And once more, that bothered me.

  You should have known, I told myself. But you leapt at it. You haven’t changed much . . . Dying and resurrecting hasn’t changed you much at all . . . Doyle was right about that. . .

  “Those psychic storms don’t affect me that way,” I said. “You affect me that way, though.”

  But I was remembering that frightened young woman on the floor of a closet—­a literal closet, with coats on hangers overhead. Just that glimpse of her right before that flash of light shattered the shape in the darkness.

  Jocelyn’s own protective sheath was up now. Still, she was thinking along the same lines, because she said, “You can only see ­people in layers, any time, even here. You think you know ­people . . .”

  “I’m pretty willing to be open to ­people here,” I said. “I wasn’t open to it in the Before. I’m trying to be different here.” But the truth is I didn’t want to be entirely open. I didn’t want to talk to Jocelyn about Marissa.

  “Me, I come from Minnesota. St Paul. The Twin Cities.” She swirled her brandy. “My dad was a construction boss, real ‘hard-­nose in a hard hat.’ My mom was just trying to stay out of his way, most of the time. I wanted to be a dancer . . . I did dance some, too. Not just stripping either. But I never did get out of St. Paul, not really. I came back to town and talked to my sister and the next day I got hit by a cement truck and I think it might’ve been my old man driving . . . and then I was here.”

  I was startled. “You think your father ran you down? With a cement truck?”

  “He found out I was going to tell on him. See, he would get drunk and paw my little sister. I used to have to hide from him myself when he was smashed. Made me afraid of men, in some ways. I think maybe I overcompensate for that . . . or . . . act out around it or . . . whatever they call that.”

  I was still processing the part about her dad running her over, on purpose, with a cement truck. “You seen him here?”

  “Far as I know the prick is still alive—­I mean, he’s still in the Before. You know, he was in the Army Corps of Engineers when he was a young guy. Real racist, too. Laughed about Katrina . . . ­People get over race fast after they die, but I know one guy here in town who still claims he hates Jews.”

  “Moore?”

  “Yeah. And I’ve run into one other hereabouts. But ­people have to let that racial stuff go, or they don’t get the Summons, they don’t go on to another place.”

  “What place?”

  “The next one up in the ladder. Oh but there’s this guy Arnie, hated Arabs . . .”

  Turned out, Jocelyn’s second biggest joy was gossiping. After the Arnie story, she told me all about Lucio Geranno, who made brass pipes, hinges, picture frames, ornate metal cups, tools, metal things of all kinds, at the north side of town—­he didn’t use much formulation. He had an actual smithy. She told me how he made a metal crossbow and was using it outside, firing at a target, and how Doyle had come up to him when he was doing it and told him to take it off into the woods, and how Geranno had threatened Doyle with said crossbow . . .

  So was this Geranno another possible suspect in the murder? Especially as he worked in fire, he had an artisan way of thinking, and who knew what else he’d learned . . .

  “How’d the whole thing with Doyle and Gerrano turn out?” I asked.

  “Doyle challenged him to target shooting! Doyle won, and now they’re great friends. Gerrano claims he never would’ve shot him. They’re touchy about weapons around here, even though ­people can’t really die exactly . . .” She looked at me. “Or can they? I heard you guys found someone on the cliff by the sea? Or . . . what was left of them?”

  “Somebody’s been talking too much.”

  “But did you find someone there?”

  “Some kinda remains. Morgan Harris. But we saw his soul flying upwards, on its way somewhere. So something of him is around.”

  “Sure, but—­destroying a person’s body here . . . that’s like . . . some kind of murder anyway. I mean, even more than on Earth, your body is real intimate with your soul. That must’ve hurt.”

  “Did you know Morgan Harris?”

  “A little. Hey, you want me to read your fortune?”

  “What? Oh yeah, Bertram mentioned you do that . . .” Why was she changing the subject to fortune-­telling? Was she mixed up in Morgan’s death?

  She put her glass on the floor, then rolled on her side and looked at me. “Move that glass.”

  I moved it. Then she slapped my belly, hard, with the flat of her hand and all five splayed fingers.

  “Ow!”

  “Sorry. Arch your back a little. Good. Now hold still.”

  She stared at the red imprint of her hand on my belly.

  As I watched, the imprint’s exterior outline faded, leaving a tracery inside, like the veins in a fallen red maple leaf.

  “Huh. Says you have a long road of choices ahead of you. Says you will have a profound relationship, one you’ve been looking for most of your life. It’s not a sexual one. Says your faith in others will be tested. Says your loyalty will falter. Says that I can trust you. Says a second death is a possibility but it depends on a critical choice.”

  “Wait, second death? For me? Like Morgan Harris had?”

  “I’d guess that’s what it means. It’s a maybe. Never seen that before.”

  “How are you reading that?”

  “It’s written here in English, in tiny little cursive . . .”

  I looked closer and saw the traceries were cursive words . . . which were fading now, and gone.

  “You want me to try another reading?”

  “No! How come there was a message for you, too, in it?”

  “It just happens that way sometimes. Probably because I had a question in my mind about trusting you.”

  “You feel like you can trust me now?”

  “Yeah. I guess so.”

  “So you’re ready to tell me about Morgan Harris now?”

 
“Not that much to tell. I tried to seduce him, realized he was gay. We had a nice time hanging out anyway, though he got boring about his afterworld theories of, what is it, botany.”

  “None of that sounds like anything you had to worry about trusting ­people with.”

  “I do some work . . . it’s not exactly work . . . for Merchant, sometimes. There’s something else. And I got the impression Morgan was afraid of something to do with Merchant. And I didn’t know if I could tell you that, really . . . I don’t want Merchant to know that I told you . . .”

  “Oh. I won’t tell Merchant. Anything else—­what specifically was Morgan afraid of?”

  “I don’t know. He just said he didn’t want to go back to Merchant’s place. You want something to eat? I gather food from the forests, and there’s something I know how to make . . .”

  “If you want.”

  “You know what I really want?”

  “I have a suspicion . . .” I reached for her. A man has a duty not to disappoint a lady.

  Sometime later, spooning pleasantly in the breeze from the window, we fell into the trancelike state that replaces sleep here . . .

  I got out of the cab, wincing, still feeling the thumping in the belly I’d gotten from Wax’s professional thumper.

  Lucinda got out on the other side; the cab driver drove off. We were standing on a highway, at the edge of town, a sudden wind whipping through. Lucinda waved vaguely at the Desert Wind Motel, across the street. “Last I knew she was in twelve over there.”

  “Okay.” Down the highway to the right was a strip club, with a ­couple of limos and several trailerless semitrucks parked in front of it. Glowing against the sky on the strip club’s sign was the outline of a dancing girl, in pink neon—­like a cartoon caricature of the one I’d seen on the ceiling at Fremont Street. She was kicking a bare leg at the glare-­dimmed stars. To the left were two more motels and, farther down, a liquor store and a card room and, eventually, the cavern-­phosphorescent glow of downtown Las Vegas.

  Lucinda walked back to her own motel, yawning. “I been up for two days. I got to get some real crash time.” She wasn’t particularly talking to me.