Doyle After Death

by John Shirley

  “Go on,” Doyle said. “I’ll wait here. Go talk to her.”

  Doyle gave me a gentle shove—­and I walked toward them. “Marissa . . . it’s raining . . . that little girl shouldn’t be out in this rain in just . . .”

  Then I saw that the rain was coming down and falling through Marissa and the little girl—­and they were outlined in color, within the rain, the way Long and Touie had been. But it was their own outlines, including their linked hands; it was in their own distinct colors. The little girl was in opalescent colors, and Marissa was marked out in red and green and iris. The raindrops were reproducing the colors, the shapes, right where they fell, as if they were ­people-­shaped bubbles. But I saw their faces, clearly enough, both of them smiling at me.

  The sound of the rain suddenly muted. It was almost silent in the Raining Lands, then. Until Marissa spoke.

  “It’s okay, Nick,” Marissa said. Her voice wasn’t loud but it seemed sharply audible. I could hear it as if she were speaking right into my ear, but she was about forty steps away. “Just stopped in to tell you we’re all right. Sierra is almost ready to start growing up, I think . . .”

  She looked at the little girl, Sierra, who looked fondly up at her. “I am. But not too fast.”

  “Right. Not too fast,” Marissa said.

  “Marissa,” I said.

  They both looked back at me again.

  “Marissa—­I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have taken the job . . .”

  “No. You shouldn’t have. Should never have worked for Lenny.”

  “But I thought I was going to get things right between you and him.”

  “And collect your money,” she said. Her voice wasn’t accusing—­it was more a tone of stark honesty. And maybe some pity.

  “Yeah. But . . .” I sighed. “Yeah. I just . . . shouldn’t have worked for him.”

  “It’s all right,” Marissa went on. “I made a thousand mistakes in my life even before I decided to work for him. And . . . I was stupid to steal his file. Shouldn’t have talked those bubbleheads into going with me. He took the girls back, later, I heard.”

  “Yes,” I said numbly. “He did.”

  “You came to my room to try and help us. You got the police to help my girl. But you know, she got sick again after that. We have cancer in our family. So they put her in a children’s hospital and . . . here she is now.”

  “Really?” I looked at Doyle. “Really, Doyle? Are they there?”

  “I can hear them,” Doyle said, squinting through the rain. “And I see them, though not very well. A woman and child, yes?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s all I can see of your Las Vegas. Oh . . .”

  He said this as they turned . . . and walked into the rain. And vanished.

  And so did Las Vegas.

  I fell to my knees, shaking, in the rain . . .

  FIFTEENTH

  It was the Raining Lands. It felt as if that’s all there was, now, in all the afterworld: the continuous rain and the million little drops splashing, beating at the odd, six-­foot-­high growths off the trail. No true trees, no flowers, no birds.

  Doyle helped me to my feet. “You ready to go on, Fogg?”

  “Yeah. Let’s get this done.” I felt steadier, then. Something about Doyle helping me stand up. And now that lead-­weighted pack was off my back. I felt remarkably lighter.

  I looked around, found the lanterns, and it was time for them—­darkness was filling the rainy canyon up, like a bottleful of ink dumped in an aquarium.

  Doyle was looking through his prism. “This way, Fogg!” He put the prism away, took one of the lanterns and, carrying his bag, started off with a sureness about his stride. I followed him, as best I could.

  The rain fell and fell. I puzzled as to why the ground there wasn’t washed away; I half expected a flood to come and smash us down, sweep us off to some muddy gulch. But it never happened. The canyon was sloped gently downward; the ground was hard, in most places. That was enough. The afterworld knew what it was doing.

  Another mile—­and we came upon the body of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

  It was actually a rough outline of him—­another “golem,” similar to the mocking thing I’d chased in the swampy woods. But this golem was more detailed. It had some false mustaches of black wire, and it had bits of clothes that seemed reminiscent of Doyle.

  “That,” said Doyle, “is what took Touie away. It must have called to her, and she came out and it was ahead of her. At last, when it was out of sight of that wretch Bolliver, why, it took hold of her, clasped her for Long till he could stun her somehow. Long sent it to lure her—­using the very capacities it used to sap the life from Morgan Harris . . . but in reverse. Another of its puppets . . .”

  “Sounds about right,” I said. “I guess he brought it along here, for a while, and it ran out of battery power, so to speak? Oh—­batteries are a way to—­”

  “Good heavens, man,” Doyle interrupted, bridling, “do you think we did not have batteries in my time? Why, your own homeland’s Ben Franklin described Leyden jars, and there was, later, Volta’s galvanic cell! Batteries were being manufactured before my birth, sir, and while you no doubt have much finer, more developed ones in your time, there’s no need to patronize me—­”

  “Sorry, didn’t mean to—­‘Sir Arthur’! So—­the thing ran out of power and he abandoned it there.”

  “Just so.” Doyle sniffed. “Very well, come along. I shall leave this rather pitiful effigy of me here.”

  Miles more, with our lanterns making two rain-­streaked globes in the darkness. Now and then Doyle paused to look in his prism . . .

  Then, the rain began to diminish a little—­and suddenly we stepped out of it. It wasn’t quite as dark here. We’d passed through a curved wall of rain, and now we were standing in an area where a ground fog swirled around our waists; streams flashed by, and overhead . . .

  I stared upward, stunned by what I was seeing. Overhead was something like the eye of a hurricane: a circle of swirling clouds. The “eye” was hemmed in by the enclosing, perfectly curved and shimmering wall of rain that seemed to stretch like a circular curtain to both sides, cupping an area maybe a quarter mile across. Unlike the eye of a hurricane—­the relatively calm place inside a hurricane—­the streaming clouds in the cyclonic whirlpool above roared around at great speeds, spiraling furiously; lightning flashed above us within the cyclonic field, occasionally crackling down to intersect with the thing that was growing inchingly from the ground fog at the center of the circle of enclosing rainfall . . .

  “Come along, Fogg, we have our orientation now,” Doyle said, his voice especially somber.

  Now and then, in a fitful way, the lightning lit the encircled plain before us; the blue-­white bolts were reflected in shuddering puddles. Though the place was a little better lit here, we still needed the lanterns, at least at first, as we traipsed across, splashing in the puddles.

  We slowed, as we got nearer the center of the circle, and I stared, at first, at the coagulating ectoplasm rising from the roughly star-­shaped crack in the ground. The material was gold and white, with currents of electric blue, and it rose in a twining slow-­motion fountain, like twisted taffy to divide like the threads of cotton being separated out—­the threads seemed to merge seamlessly with the boiling gray-­black lightning-­shot cloud overhead. A soft light pulsed from the ectoplasmic column, close around its base. Sometimes the slow-­motioning ectoplasm took on shapes, like images in a drug hallucination. I’d tried opium twice, and that’s what this made me think of: how I’d stared at smoke rising from the pipe, my mind making the smoke form dragons, which then became rocket ships, which became comets, which became ballroom dancers, who spun apart to become melting, frightened faces—­like the ones that had come to the window in the psychic storm.

  Doyle and I continue
d slowly forward, and I saw the spout of ectoplasm form countless distinct faces: men and women of all races. African and European and Japanese and Native American and aboriginal; faces from India and Southeast Asia and the Philippines. The faces formed and fell apart, and were replaced by others. I glimpsed Marissa there, I thought, and my father and mother . . .

  The faces dissolved into raw ectoplasm; other faces arose, and dissolved. The wind roared, the ectoplasm moaned, in and out of hearable frequency.

  Overhead I saw soul sparks floating down, circling the rising, twining tree of ectoplasm, darting in and away.

  Lightning lit the scene more clearly, as I looked down—­I saw Touie Doyle, then, quite solid and quite naked, lying on the ground, unconscious, her arms flung limply to the sides; over her stood a figure in a one-­piece black outfit sewn with dark scarlet threads. His head was gone—­then I saw that it was merely hidden, inside a sort of unstable helmet made of pure shadow. Two darker places in the shadowy helmet, edged with silver, marked his eyes. I saw no other sign of a face. He seemed rapt in his business. He was gazing down at Touie Doyle. As I watched, the dark figure went down on one knee beside her, reached his hands toward Touie . . . and began to force the tips of his fingers of his left hand down into the skin under her rib cage, piercing her; he thrust his right up, into the rising, twining pillar of ectoplasm.

  She arched her back in pain and cried out, her face grimacing. But still she didn’t awaken.

  The sky roared and howled; Touie’s hair whipped about in the blustering wind . . .

  And dark energies seemed to gather about the two figures.

  Doyle seemed a little angrier with each step forward. His eyes flashed; his mustaches seemed to twitch. “Charles Long! That woman is in my care, and under my protection! You will step away from her!”

  Long turned to stare at us; we couldn’t see his face but his body stiffened in shock. “Doyle! You two! You can’t be here!” It was Charles Long’s voice.

  “We got ourselves and Merchant out of the house, Long,” I said. I was trying to distract him so that Doyle could do whatever it was he had in mind. “Tricky, what you did with the place. Sure to be front cover of Architectural Digest. Anyhow it was more creative a trap than any Higgs worked up.”

  Those silvery eyes flicked toward me and then back at Doyle.

  Doyle and I were about thirty feet away now, just within the circle of pulsing light around the ectoplasmic plume. Doyle stopped, set the bag and his lantern down, and reached into the bag as he spoke. “Charles Long, I arrest you, and sentence you . . .”

  “Shut up, Doyle!” Long roared. The words made the shadow helmet snap and shiver around his head. “You’re diminutive, inconsequential, Conan Doyle! You are no world shaker! You are too small to interfere with me!”

  Doyle straightened up, in his hand the instrument he’d kept wrapped up in black cloth. “Fogg,” he said, in an aside to me, “do what you must, till I finish here.”

  I wasn’t sure what he meant by do what you must. But Doyle was too busy for me to ask. He was frowning with concentration as he extended the brass-­colored instrument out, the way a person telescopes out a car aerial, and seemed to be infusing it with something from his hands as he did it. The brass antenna shape vibrated at his touch—­and there was something exacting in that touch.

  So I stepped toward Long. One long, slow step.

  “Get away from her, Long!” I shouted.

  “Not a chance, you washed up failure of a man!” Long bellowed gleefully. “She’s the last I’m going to need—­for decades, at least! I’ve got enough stored in myself to make this plume light up! And with hers, too, I’ll create whatever I like, Fogg! I’ll cover a million square miles with anything I dream of! I will not let timid, inconsequential ­people stop me!”

  “We were both failures, Long!” I said. “You were a failed businessman, you were a failed husband, you were a failure as a human being! I know the feeling. And my failure was really all mine, Long! I had to look at myself and see that! Now it’s your turn!” Another two steps toward him. “You can still turn yourself around!”

  I was almost in reach—­and he had to draw his hands from Touie and the ectoplasmic spout, and face toward me.

  Long started toward me—­he reached for me . . .

  I didn’t like the way hands looked. They were giving off smoke and glowing red-­hot.

  I sidestepped, ducked under his hands, and slammed him one in the stomach.

  Long staggered back, just one pace. But then he recovered and stepped forward—­I was still bent over, and he laughed, slapping a hand on my back above my right shoulder blade.

  And his touch burned. It hurt the way I always imagined hellfire would hurt.

  I howled and he backslapped me, knocking me onto my back. I ground my teeth in pain and rolled onto my side.

  Long loomed over me . . .

  “That will do, Fogg,” Doyle said calmly, stepping up. “Very good! Just enough.”

  I throbbed with pain—­but turned my head and saw the brass antenna vibrating, humming, in the ground. A ringing began, a funeral tolling—­it came from the device. The antenna sent its ringing through the ground so that the sound shook the very stone, tolling outward . . . calling out . . .

  “No you will not!” Long bellowed, turning on his heel to face Doyle.

  “I already have!”

  Long hesitated, his hands clenching. “Doyle . . . just tell me . . . was it the thread?”

  “Yes,” Doyle said, with one slight nod. “I knew that torch-­red shade of scarlet, scarlet runes sewn onto black cloth, was favored by men who supposed themselves, in their vanity, to be black magicians. I found it on Harris’s notebook! Then I saw the entry on you, mentioning your fumblings with what you imagined to be magic . . .”

  “A thread?” Long snarled. “Just a thread!”

  “Not entirely! It was also the Journals—­describing the pattern of your earthly life. It fit with the murderers. Your jealousy of others—­your desire to rip into their very beings to satisfy your compulsion . . .”

  “But you can’t . . .”

  “I tell you again I already have! I read about the spiny bell stored in the mayor’s attic.”

  “It isn’t fair!”

  Doyle pointed at the “spiny bell,” the coppery antenna quivering in the dirt, and he called out with a voice ringing, itself, with authority:

  “Charles Long, I sentence you to the sudden transfiguration! I call upon the Scargel!”

  That’s when the ground about forty feet from Long erupted upward . . . and the Scargel erupted up with it, like an asp snapping up from a basket. Then it flopped down on its long sinuous, scaly belly and stretched toward Charles Long.

  It was the creature we’d seen in the Journal, the giant beast, half serpent and half slug, that had devoured the defiant madman in the book’s animation. The Scargel was physical, and yet it was pure furious spirit; it was grotesque, yet as effectively designed as Thor’s hammer.

  Long backed away from the looming monster. His shadow helmet fluttered . . . and vaporized. Suddenly the hood of shadow was gone—­and there was mere Charles Long, looking quite pale and frightened. He kept staring at the Scargel but called out, “Doyle . . . is it too late to stop it?”

  “Too late, Long!” Doyle replied, with a touch of sympathy.

  “But I’m sorry, Doyle! Call it off!”

  “I cannot!”

  The Scargel poised over Long, opening its enormous maw, emanating something that made me scramble backward on the ground in terror. It swayed like a cobra, anticipating prey.

  Long stared at the Scargel, and seemed afraid to turn, to run—­afraid that’s when it would choose to strike.

  “Doyle! For God’s sake! Tell it . . .”

  But once it had been called to feed, it would not turn away.
And Doyle knew the Scargel preys only on certain kinds of souls. It is a special predator—­that feeds only on other predators.

  “Doyle!”

  Long turned to run, but the Scargel struck, and took him in its jaws in two gulps.

  It sank back, digesting, seeming to wriggle with enjoyment.

  Then the Scargel spat out the thin blue-­white spark of Long’s soul . . .

  Which fluttered upward, to be sucked away in the spiraling clouds. It vanished completely from sight.

  The Scargel returned to its burrow in the ground, dived in, flicked a tail, and was gone from sight.

  The twining plume of ectoplasm died quickly back, folding in on itself, seeming to run backward in time like a film image in reverse . . . and shrank into the star-­shaped cracks.

  The crack closed and sealed. The sky cleared, the clouds evaporating, but only over the circle enclosed by the walls of rain.

  I tried to get up . . . but the pain was too much. Struggling at it, I managed to sit, hissing to myself with the lancing agony in my back, and watched as Doyle went to Touie. There was a hand-­width wound under her ribs, but it was not bleeding much.

  Dole took off his coat and wrapped her in it, then sat beside her and picked her up in his arms, to cradle her.

  She opened her eyes, seeming still half unconscious and dreamy. She smiled. “Why Arthur! Are you suddenly feeling romantic?”

  I lay back down, and closed my eyes. I listened to the rain pouring down not far away—­and I sank into a trancelike doze . . .

  Hot day. But not too hot. Sun glancing off the windshield of my Gran Torino as I washed it. Was just finishing washing the car when Chino came strolling up. His feet, in red Converse sneakers, were sort of splayed, and he was chunky, but he was a bright, happy guy. He lived right around the corner. He had a crazily wide smile and long black hair held by a headband; his gut strained at a T-­shirt for the 13th Floor Elevators.

  “Hey Nick, you coming? We’re gonna go see the Flamin’ Groovies!”

  Chino liked sixties and seventies psychedelic bands.