by John Shirley
I lowered my voice and leaned toward him. “Crispin—did Lenny talk to them?”
“Not that I know of.”
“That’s good.” I managed to make the cops half believe I’d been there just checking on a Marissa. I didn’t want them connecting me with Lenny.
Since Lenny probably had Marissa killed.
Crispin cleared his throat. “She says you can go though. Don’t leave town, and all that. But the kid saw a man breaking in, and she ran in the bathroom. Her mom told her lock the door. And the kid says it wasn’t you who came in . . .”
“They just found this out?”
“Probably hours ago. But they don’t like you. Cal figured out it’s probably Lenny Wong behind it, because they got a record of her working for him and now he claims never to have heard of her.”
“They going to go after him?”
“I doubt it, unless they can find the guy did the thing. Make him talk. Any ideas on that guy?”
“No.”
“Really?”
“I’m really down that far in your estimation now? I said no.”
“Okay. Well. Come on. You want me to drop you anywhere?”
“I . . . yeah. Home. I guess.”
“You better think twice about collecting”—Crispin glanced around to see if anyone was listening—“the fee from whomever . . .”
“I was supposed to find her. I didn’t think he was going to kill her. I was going to talk her into giving his money back . . . she says she didn’t take it . . . and then I was going to give her some cash to leave town. After he paid me.”
“Yeah? She didn’t go for that?”
“Never got to say it. I was getting around to it and Wax and his bouncer thumped me and chucked me out and . . .”
I shut up, then. I didn’t want to tell him the rest of it.
“Okay. Come on. Ridey-ride time.”
We went out the front door of the police station, and into the morning sun. I hadn’t slept. I didn’t like the sun much anytime, especially not now.
It was as noisy out here as indoors. The black lady cop was out there, as Crispin looked around sleepily for his car. “Where’d I park? Oh yeah . . .”
The Asian lady cop was getting into a patrol car at the curb, with her partner.
She saw me, just before she slid into the driver’s seat, and gave me a look of pure contempt.
“Crispin,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“The liquor store open yet? I need a fucking case of beer.”
When I woke up in the afterworld, I was sitting up, leaned against the bole of a small magnolia tree, in Garrett Merchant’s garden. Big white blossoms nodded overhead in the gray predawn.
My head throbbed, but it wasn’t bad. We heal fast here.
I could see the garden in the fading glow from the collapsed house. The garden was mostly lawn, with one dry fountain of stone, in the center of which was a statue of Merchant, pointing at the sky. Beyond the fountain was a row of topiary, and past that a screen of tall willow trees set close together. I glanced toward the wreckage of the house—on the edge of it was the broken-off wreck of the balcony we’d ridden down. Must have been painful for Merchant when the balcony slammed into the lawn.
Doyle was squatting a few paces away from me, working on Garrett Merchant. He had Merchant laid down on what looked like a nicely formulated stretcher. I assume Doyle had made it himself. I could see he had set Merchant’s broken leg and tied on a splint; he was adjusting the ex-magnate slightly on the stretcher. “Easy, Merchant. Relax.”
“It hurts when you do that!”
“Come come, it’s not so bad as all that.”
“Doyle,” I said, “that’s pretty slick, what you did with his leg.”
Doyle turned, looking me over with a slight smile. “I set and splinted many a broken leg, before I was ever a writer.” His face flickered in and out of clarity in the fluctuating red-and-yellow light from the wreckage. He stood, and came to look me over. “Feel all your fingers and toes?”
I wiggled them. “Yeah. They work. Nothing seems broken.”
“You’ll do. I didn’t think you were badly injured—I felt a strong life force in you. Have interesting dreams?”
“Why?” I looked at him. “Was I talking in my sleep?”
“Not that I noticed.”
I changed the subject. “Merchant going to heal up all right?”
“Soon as he gets some sunlight. Be all right in a day or two.”
“That’s fast. Some things are better about the afterworld.” I leaned over, looked behind me at the mansion. “And some things aren’t.” All that remained of it was a scattering of wreckage atop the liquefied formulation material now. “We almost ended up, uh, cemented inside that stuff.”
“We’d have managed something.”
“You know anybody that’s happened to?”
“No,” he admitted, looking at the wreckage. “It seems the house . . . deformulated, after it broke down. Or partly so. I wonder if that was intended to conceal someone’s workroom.”
“Workroom?”
“Where they developed their capacity for taking people’s bodies apart, in a permanent way. So that there’s no healing, and all that is left is a spark. So they can harvest something from that body . . .”
“You think it was someone in the house? Just two or three people besides Merchant. That I know of.”
“Merchant says he had servants. Two people who were used to being servants and liked the Fionas—and perhaps they enjoyed his special frip.”
“Where are they now? In there?”
“Merchant heard them talking in the garden, while the house was reshaping. He thinks the servants and his young lady got out—in fact the lady had departed, that morning, for the village. They parted ways. He’s not sure if Higgs and Long got out.”
“My guess would be—one of them did. Not sure which.”
“Yes. I have my theory based on some research. But I’d better take care of the rest of my business before we talk everything over. Get some rest.”
He walked about five paces away from me, knelt in the garden, and thrust one hand, just one, into the soil.
I waited for something to formulate into sight, near his hand—but it didn’t. Not exactly.
Instead the ground seemed to ripple in small, distinct shock waves, which sped away from his hand in the direction of Garden Rest.
THIRTEENTH
Kneeling with his hand in the ground, Doyle looked as if he were concentrating, like a man in the old days, sending a telegraph.
I watched in puzzled fascination as the ground rippled and yet didn’t really deform—after the ripple passed through it the ground fell back into exactly the shape it had been in before. It was as if Doyle were working in the medium of existence itself. The air hummed and I thought I heard a low, distorted echo of Doyle’s voice. Heard him say, “Brummigen . . . injuries . . .” There was a great deal more I couldn’t work out.
The rippling only went on for a about thirty seconds. Then he withdrew his hand, dusted it off as he stood up.
“Doyle—what’d you just do?” I asked. I think I’ve mentioned I’m not always terribly subtle.
“Why, I sent a message. Whew! I’ve got to sit down and rest.” He came and leaned against the tree with me. “That takes it out of me. It’s why we don’t do it much. It’s a difficult skill to learn. Diogenes showed me and . . . I had to work it out myself, after he showed me the rudiments. It took me about eight years.”
“You sent a message? A telepathic message?”
“No, though the psychic element is there. No I call it an afterworld phone message. I imagine speaking the words I wish to convey. I hear them in my mind. I transmit an audio reproduction of them. They then echo in
the area I’m sending them to—unfortunately that last bit is rather approximate. But I think I got it to Garden Rest, all right. Enough people will hear. I don’t wish to try to move Merchant for a couple of hours, till he knits a bit more . . .”
He closed his eyes, and we dozed. I almost went back to the trance state. But I resisted it. I didn’t want to be back in Las Vegas.
It was well after dawn when the confirmation came: Arthur Conan Doyle had been heard in Garden Rest.
Brummigen arrived, coming around the north side of the vast glowing wreckage, with Ruby from the Ossuary and Geranno the blacksmith coming along behind him. Geranno as usual was shirtless. All three carried lanterns and Ruby carried a satchel that looked like a carpetbag.
Doyle sprang up to greet them. I got up with less enthusiasm.
They paused a few paces from us to look at the house.
“That’s a mess—but it’s pretty, too,” Ruby remarked, looking at the glassy ruins of the house.
“What the hell happened here?” Geranno asked, staring at it.
“Hard to explain in brief,” Doyle said. “Someone set the house to deformulate up around us. We scarcely got out in one piece.”
“How’d they do that?” Brummigen asked.
“Och, I’ll let you talk to Mr. Merchant about it on the way back, if you’ll be so kind as to take him for us.”
“It’s about time,” Merchant grumbled, from his stretcher, lifting his head. “I want the hell out of this blighted damn place.”
“This was a place of your making,” Doyle reminded him.
“Wasn’t me that caused all this wreckage.”
“You had a hand in it. As the faceless man knew you would . . .” Doyle stepped up to Brummigen and shook his hand. “I thank you for coming—all of you. Ah—Major—as to Touie. Has she turned up?”
Brummigen shook his head. “Didn’t come back. I have Bertram keeping an eye on your place in case she does.”
“I don’t expect her to come back—unless I bring her back.” Grim faced, Doyle didn’t seem inclined to explain that statement and no one pressed him on it.
“Lord, it’s a long trek out here,” Ruby said. She set the carpetbag on the ground. “Here you go, Sir Arthur.”
“Ah, thank you, my dear,” Doyle said. He picked up the bag, opened it, took out two folded slickers. He tossed one to me. The texture of the thing had too much life and give in it, as if it were almost ready to slip through my fingers like a worm. “Just sling that over your shoulder, Fogg. It’ll cling there till you need it—and we’ll need it in an hour or so, if you’re coming with me to the Raining Lands.” He cocked his head, then, and frowned at me in thought. “But what am I thinking? I shouldn’t bring you along, really. Seems irresponsible.”
“I’ll go with you, Doyle, if he doesn’t,” Brummigen said. But he sounded reluctant. “That place spooks me but . . . I’ll go.”
“You? No no, the village needs you, Major. It might be better if I go alone—the fewer with me, the fewer chances my quarry will be alerted . . .”
I stretched. “Doyle, better, or not better, I don’t care. I’m going with you. That’s all there is to it.”
He looked at me with his eyebrows raised, then he sharpened the points of his mustache with the tips of his fingers, and said, “Very well, sir. Very well.” He bent and looked again into the carpetbag. “Yes. It’s all here. You’ve been quite thorough, Major.”
“Everything that could apply,” Brummigen said, going to Merchant.
“Can we go?” Merchant asked pettishly.
“Yes, yes, we’re going.”
“Major,” Doyle said. “On the way back, it’ll be dawn. Set him down in a ray of sun—if you can find one in that forest. Let him get some sunlight. He should be up and around tomorrow.”
“You, uh, want to tell us when to send a search party after you?”
“If I manage to get a message to you—perhaps then. But not otherwise.”
Brummigen took the front of the stretcher, Geranno the back. “You can take our lanterns, Doyle. That okay, Gerrano?”
“Sure. We have enough light. It’s getting on dawn.”
Carrying her own lantern, Ruby came over to Merchant, and patted him on the chest. “I got a nice room fixed up for you, Mr. Merchant.” She turned and waved to us. “Come and see us when you get back.”
Brummigen simply glanced our way, started to speak, then bit his lip. He simply nodded. Doyle nodded back.
“Good luck,” Geranno rumbled. “Wouldn’t catch me out there . . .”
They carried the grumbling Garrett Merchant on his stretcher, off past the still glowing wreckage of the house. I watched them go enviously. I would’ve liked to go with them. Get some comfort in Garden Rest. But there was no way I was leaving Doyle. Not now.
I never stopped to wonder why that might be—why I had to stick with him. It just seemed the most natural thing in the world . . . or in the afterworld.
“Which way do we go?” I asked.
“Why, in the opposite direction,” Doyle said, as if it were obvious.
We draped the rain slickers over our shoulders and tied the arms around our necks, the way people will carry a sweater for later, and Doyle picked up the bag.
“What’s in the bag, Felix?” I asked, as he gazed out over the wreckage of the Mansion.
“Why, it’s—” He turned to look at me. “Felix?”
“After your time. Can I see what’s in it?”
“Certainly, certainly.” He handed it to me. “Don’t touch anything in it please.”
That request annoyed me, maybe more than it should have. I wasn’t feeling my most bushy tailed. I chose not to tell him where he could put his bag of tricks, and opened it up.
There were only two objects in it now, taking up very little room. One was what looked like a prism, but with a tint of blue on it; the other was a roll of black velvet, with a metal handle sticking out of it. Both objects were about the size of a big man’s fist.
“I’ll explain them when the time comes,” Doyle said, taking the bag back. “Just now . . . the sun is coming up.”
We turned to gaze at the coruscating sun, and drew our sustenance from it. I tasted several kinds of citrus, toasted bread, buttered eggs . . . and the usual indefinable essences.
When we were done, I felt mostly restored—and my head stopped throbbing. But there was something still tired and achy inside me—something closer to an emotional ache than a physical one.
Doyle nodded toward the wreck of the mansion. “Fogg, look at this!”
The liquefaction of the mansion had congealed into a mass around the debris, edges sloping and rounded off like an ancient lava flow—I’d expected something like that. But I hadn’t expected the mass to congeal into glassy material the color of diluted amber, surface smooth and unblemished. The solidified flow was perfectly transparent though tawny colored. Fragments of the house remained, distributed intriguingly through the glassy yellow mass. Cornerstones, large scraps of walls, frames of windows, the occasional lonely door, several statuettes of beautiful empty-eyed women lying at various angles, the mythic imps and angels on the balustrade—it was all distributed through the mass almost evenly.
“We’d better have a look over it,” Doyle said. He seemed to regret having to say it, probably because he wanted to be on his way. “We should look for anyone who may be trapped in it. We might have to dig them out.”
I glanced at him, wondering if he thought Touie might be there. I didn’t see that level of anxiety in his face.
How did he know she wasn’t there? For all we knew, she might be anywhere . . . including entombed alive somewhere under our feet.
Doyle tapped the glassy material with the tip of his foot. I tried it with my boot—noticing that my boot tip was gradu
ally coming apart. I’d need new boots pretty soon.
I stepped up on the great glacierlike deposit of glass. The yellow glass felt hard, resistant, stable under me.
“That was rather impetuous,” Doyle said.
But he stepped up on it, too. Slipping now and then, we made our way across it, back and forth, looking through the glass.
There—a woman, her hands lifted, frozen in place on her back . . .
“Doyle . . .” I pointed. “You see her?”
“I see.”
He walked over to it and looked down. “Come here.”
I came, and felt foolish. It was a statue of a woman, a copy of a Grecian figure in a robe.
“One of Merchant’s knickknacks.”
“Come on. Let’s get on our way.”
“Maybe we should call out? What if someone’s stuck in a basement or something?”
“Yes, we should give it a go.”
We grew hoarse with calling. Nothing responded but the birds in the swamp on the other side of the mansion.
“We’ve put in an hour,” Doyle said, as the sun lifted over the treetops. “No Higgs. No sign of Charles Long. No servants. Nor do I feel anyone else there.”
“I haven’t got that ‘feeling people there’ thing down . . .”
“You do. You’re just not consciously aware of it yet.” He looked up at the sun. “Right, we’re off to the east. The nearer border of the Raining Land is just about two miles from here . . .”
When we got to the back garden we stopped to look at the glassy remains of the mansion once more. It shone in the sun, the light undulating through it, breaking up like flowing water around the sharp-edged fragments of wall and window. There was a suggestion of artful pattern, in the distribution of the pattern, as if a modern artist had designed it, but the pattern didn’t quite come together.
“It’s provocative,” Doyle murmured. “And almost lovely.”
“Make a good monument . . . to something anyway. Be a great tourist attraction, back on Earth. We could fence it off right here and charge ten Fionas for it.”