Black Pockets

by George Zebrowski

  He heard footsteps in the hall and someone was opening his door with a key. It opened and closed, but no one came into the bedroom to help him.

  Someone was standing in the living room, breathing heavily. Someone was waiting for him to die. Lumet opened his mouth to cry out, but no sound came from his throat. He felt the cold spreading through his body, and knew that he was dying...

  The noise last night, he thought, had been the stranger who now stood in his living room setting the canister and the bow in place. He had wanted to make sure that one or the other would get him.

  The sun came up over the houses across the street and brightened the curtains. It was nine in the morning by the dresser clock. Lumet wondered who at the paper would write his obituary. There would be no one to send his novel around for him.

  The blood was still welling up around the bolt and through his hands, and he felt a great weight on his heart. A pool of blood was forming around him on the linoleum, and he wondered if it would equal the pool of wine he had left in the kitchen. Then his chest burst and the pain stopped his pitying, and the cold took him over...

  At last it was over. Bruno Lumet walked into the bedroom from the living room and looked down at his dead body. The pain and dying of his double was, in a sense, his own, except that by killing him he had saved his own life. The number of overlays had diminished in recent years, but no one was immune from these freak alternates slipping in from the half-worlds of unrealized time. No one can kill them for you, he had been told, and you have to do it without meeting them face to face while they lived. That’s what the theory said; not that anyone had ever met himself to really know whether meeting one’s living double would be lethal. The theory never said how one would die from such a get-together, besides a lot of talk about balancing energy potentials to prevent some bizarre folding up of time and space. Whether it would be widespread or local, no one had been able to say, except to suggest insane tanglings and twistings of historical patterns and individual relationships. Although these slips had occurred throughout human history, long before they were understood, they now required the immediate identification, stalking, and elimination of the intruder double to avoid the piling up of inconsistencies that could only end in a final paroxysm. People who had studied the problem knew what had to be done.

  Lumet looked at his double’s corpse. The poor soul had certainly died from encountering his double, without quite meeting him, of course, except in death. The old stories had never said anything about killing yourself.

  He went over to the bed and examined the failed canister. It had seemed unlikely that the victim would find and disarm it. It would have been more merciful than the bow, but that kindness no longer mattered. He had killed him without meeting him, and he had done it in time—crudely but effectively. He would live despite his double’s watchfulness.

  After he had cleaned up some of the mess, he gave up and went out into the living room, sat down on the sofa, and looked at the book manuscript lying half out of its brown wrapper on the coffee table. He had no memory of writing it, but it properly belonged to both of them, and he would faithfully mail it out again; after all, one rejection meant nothing.

  He looked at his watch, thinking that he would call in sick tonight. He would need time to see his doctor, to help fade the pseudo-memories he shared with his double. He might even need a prescription to break the links this apartment might have developed with his double’s alternate elsewhere. Dreams might reopen the way if he didn’t suppress them. The treatment of slippage accidents was not yet as sophisticated as it needed to be, but new things were being learned with every encounter.

  But he knew that whatever wounds had been inflicted on him and his world would heal, and it was unlikely that this kind of threat to his identity would ever find him again. He had seen to that in the lawful manner, for himself at least.

  In his elsewhere, in his one selfdom among the unseen infinity of his selves, Lumet went down to the police station and filed a fracture report, giving the approximate time he had become aware of his double’s overlay, and all the details that he could recall. The police removed the body, certified its identity, and assured him that they would handle all the remaining formalities.

  Earth Around His Bones

  THE OLD KEEPER LIVED ALONE IN THE NORTH corner of the cemetery, in a small, run-down cottage which faced on one side, the wet bogland, and on the other, the weathered stone slabs standing in the bright green grass.

  His tasks were few and he rarely left the cottage. Nothing important had ever happened to him. He was not interested in the world, and no one ever came to see him. He slept a lot, and his old age seemed to go on peacefully with no end in sight. He had stopped counting the years after eighty-three, and he managed to cut the grass twice a year.

  One cold winter night a voice spoke to him in his sleep. “You hear me, don’t you?” The voice was a hissing whisper in the keeper’s brain. “No, don’t shut me out. Please don’t!” It was a badly frightened voice. “Please listen,” it begged.

  The keeper stirred in his sleep. He had not dreamt in a long time. Outside the snow fell on the frozen earth. The vision of white flakes massing to cover the ground made him feel secure.

  “I am dead,” the voice said, “you must believe me—I’m real... the darkness! I continue to think—I must be real. I was ill and I died. And the cold, I can sense the cold around me. I am buried.”

  After a short silence the voice said, “Whoever you are, I can feel your presence near me. Everyone was standing when I died. I closed my eyes and there was... nothing. Not death, darkness. A million souls could be thrown into all that darkness and it would not be filled. Death had been an impossible thing to me in my youth. Now I wish I could die, truly die... where are you?”

  The old keeper woke up in a cold sweat. Around him the room was quiet. In the wall space where once there had been a fireplace the gas heater glowed. The December stars shone coldly through the small window over the front door. He got up and went to the curtained window near the bed. In the cemetery, the stones cast solid black shadows, and the wind whistled through the bare trees. Foolish dream, he thought, and went back to bed. He pulled the woolen blanket more tightly around himself. It was an old friend, with him now for more than fifty years. His eyes grew heavy and he fell asleep.

  The Voice returned.

  “You disappeared,” it said.

  Then, “I think I understand, but I can’t seem to think clearly... Oh God!”

  And the voice in the night was still.

  The ground unfroze.

  Small rivulets of water ran down from the high ground into the cracked earth of the cemetery.

  The spring air was humid.

  The trees were thickening with leaves. The rains moistened the earth and the grass had to be cut.

  There was a smell of soft bog and growing, living things everywhere.

  The old man had almost forgotten his winter dreams. He cut the grass slowly, feeling useful again.

  One warm night the voice spoke to him again, as if no time had passed. Its whisper was filled with a sense of fear and resignation. “It’s warm,” it said. “I am in the ground and it’s warm. I wish I could see in this darkness...” The old man tried to wake up, break the dream, and could not.

  “My body is dead, but my... brain has not rotted. I am conscious, bound to the ruin of myself, mourning my own death. My sight is gone but I can see the window of my home—the only real thing left— beyond my reach. My body failed long before my mind could reach maturity... we have no time! I hate this darkness... and when I rot, when the meager tissues of my organic brain begin to rot, I will slowly lose what little sanity is left to me. I stood on a hill once when I was young, hoping to see the stars, covered by a monstrous overcast which would not break. I shook from the cold and continued looking upward, as if I could find some meaning in that low sky...

  “Aaaaaaahhhhhh!” the voice wailed.

  The wail turned into
a laugh.

  “It’s warmer...”

  The keeper woke up with a cry.

  The voice was still in his head, close to him—closer than anything he had ever felt in his life. It was laughing and talking to itself.

  And the keeper knew that in one of the graves outside, in the moist earth, the worms had broken through the coffin and were feeding on the newly thawed mass of a man’s decaying brain.

  The body had died a while ago—the first death; but the man’s awareness still clung to the rotting passageways where once had flickered billions of neuron connections.

  The second death was near. The true death, the real end.

  The voice whimpered, then was quiet for a moment.

  Finally the keeper heard snatches of prayer, as the voice begged for the cold which had preserved it to return.

  The whimperings became incoherent and insane. There was one last shriek before the final silence.

  The keeper got out of bed and stood by the window. In the east the light of dawn was growing brighter, throwing a hint of redness into his frail curtains. He wondered how many of those buried in the cemetery had died this way. He wondered how many had been given the chance to communicate the truth of dying...

  He went back to bed and lay there for a long time, wondering if he were going senile. But if what he had heard had been real, then the same fate awaited him when he died. Slowly his flesh would rot, while his mind endured, burning like the last of a candle; and he would have peace only when the thick earth closed around his bones with its moist embrace.

  From that day his sleep was never peaceful. He retired the next month, and very rarely left the cottage.

  In his ninety-first year he went blind. In winter the shrieks and whispers would come back into his mind and he would whimper in his bed at night, praying that somehow he could be cremated, burned into clean oblivion when he died, his bones charred into dryness by the flames.

  On the first day of spring the cottage burned. The gas heater exploded, giving unlimited fuel to the fire. The frame of the cottage became an incandescent skeleton in the pyre, finally crumbling into ash. When at last the gas was shut off, nothing was left except the ash, which the wind came and blew slowly into the bogland.

  Fire of Spring

  ELINA’S SCREAM ECHOED IN CYRIL BELDON’S ears as he ran down the carpeted stone hallway of the castle. He carried a flint rifle in his right hand. Each step brought him nearer to the sight he had hoped he would never see, the death tableau which had marked the end of life for so many of his family. Every ten years one life had been taken, since the first massing of stones had created Dawnstone seven centuries ago. There had been omens. As soon as the walls of Dawnstone had been raised the sun had captured a blue star passing nearby, pulling it in close to itself. A year later the sun had consumed its small companion in a fiery storm which had dominated the sky for months, as if signaling the start of the terror.

  He found Elina on the red carpet just beyond the turn in the passage. Beldon stopped, desperately hoping that she would scream again, but there was only a muted gurgle coming from her torn throat. It was the only sound he would ever hear from his beloved again.

  There were six of them around her: dwarflike gargoyles two feet tall with wings folded across their backs. One held Elina’s long hair with taloned fingers; two held her feet. Another was crouched near her neck, where he had been gorging on the flow of blood. The remaining two were kneeling over her belly which was smeared with blood.

  Beldon fired his gun. The creature holding Elina’s hair let go with a shriek and flew at him, eyes burning with bloodshot hatred. It was bleeding where the ball from the gun had penetrated its right wing. Beldon swung at the flying beast with the butt of his rifle. He knocked it to the floor where it lay still, its leathery wings spread open.

  Their feast ended, the five others launched themselves toward the open window at the end of the hall. The great glass panels were fixed in place and a chill wind blew in from the foggy, spring night, filling the heavy, white curtains as if they were sails. The flying things were out and lost in the fog in a moment, leaving him alone with the body of Elina.

  Beldon went up to the body and examined its state. Her stomach was a raw mass of drying blood. Even in death she clutched the flimsy night shirt that was bunched up around her waist. Her eyes were wide open as if still seeing the horror which had descended upon her.

  He knelt down and closed them gently, pitying her young form. He took off his coat and covered her. Tears formed in his eyes.

  He heard something stir on the rug behind him. He turned around suddenly and saw the creature he had struck with his rifle. Removing his belt he rushed over to it and bound its taloned hands together. Then, one by one, he broke the light bones in its wings by crushing them under his boots. When he was sure the beast would never fly again he stopped and looked back to Elina’s body. Rage filled him quickly and he kicked the wounded gargoyle in the side. Tears rolled down his face, but the devil made no sound.

  He picked the gargoyle up and carried it down the hall, and down the great stairs into the main room where he placed it on the warm, slate flooring in front of the large hearth fire. Then he went to the kitchen where he found a meat cleaver and carving knife.

  When he got back to the fireplace the winged devil was thrashing around violently, straining at its bonds. Its eyes were fearful of the flames. Every few moments it stopped its struggles to look at the sparks which were landing near it on the slate.

  Beldon kneeled down next to the creature’s face and tried to catch its attention. He knew what he had to find out, even if he had to torture it for the information.

  The fiery eyes found his suddenly and the beast spoke. “A thousand years more, you’ll pay,” it said. “The others will tell how you opposed us.” Its voice was a hissing whisper broken with shrill, whistling sounds.

  The creature’s eyes were now betraying something of its pain. “What’s a thousand years,” Beldon said, “when you have the right of harvest at Dawnstone forever?” He paused. “Now,” he continued, “where is your spawning ground? Tell me and I’ll kill you quickly.” He stared directly into its eyes and prodded it with the point of the carving knife.

  “You will never know.”

  “I will know—you fly here in reasonable time so it must be near.”

  “What else do you know, fool?”

  “It must be a small area, a place I know but do not recognize.” He paused again. “I am the last and I will end it,” he said, raising his voice, “I have to!” He drove the knife partially into the creature’s side. “Now tell me, for my Elina, for my dying mother, tell me now!”

  But the gargoyle’s eyes were no longer looking at him. He knew that it had resigned itself to death. Beldon withdrew the knife point and considered what he could do to its body that would be cruel enough to make it speak.

  Suddenly he picked up the meat cleaver and began hacking at the broken wings lying limp on both sides of the gnarly body. In a few moments he had severed the wings from the ratlike form. He picked up the pieces and hurled them into the fire.

  “Your hands are next,” he said.

  There was no reply. Beldon looked around the huge room that was illuminated only by the fire. For a moment his own hatred astonished him. He thought of his mother asleep in the south wing of the castle—too deaf in her old age to have heard what was going on. But then, she had died inside when they had taken his father ten years ago. Even his marriage to Elina had failed to revive her. For years he had thought they would take her when the time came. Secretly he had hoped they would take the old woman and spare Elina. The thought shamed him now.

  The shame kindled itself into a new rage. He brought the knife up to the beast’s eye and pushed it in far enough to blind it. The gargoyle howled. The eye closed in shock as he withdrew the knife. The other one was watching him, jealous of its sight.

  The creature asked, “If I tell you what you want to know, will you k
ill me quickly?”

  Beldon was suspicious that the beast was trying to trick him into killing it. It would tell him some lie and he would kill it too quickly.

  But maybe he had broken its sense of community with the others and death meant more to it now than any loyalty.

  Swiftly Beldon put out its other eye, shouting. “No lies now. I won’t kill you until I’m sure.”

  The creature was licking its thin lips and biting them in pain, and the only tears its eyes could shed now were made of blood. “This much is true,” it said. “The first Dawnstone conjured our spirits from the black abyss and imprisoned them in the bodies of the creature you see me in. They were harmless little things which lived in the forest. After he had bound us into these forms, he bargained to release us if we gave him all our knowledge of the forces which rule the world. If we refused he would destroy us by turning loose his birds of prey. In those days it would have been easy because we were so small and unused to our new shapes. So we gave him all our knowledge of conjuring all the powers in the blackness between the worlds. But we also tricked him into performing a ritual which turned those same powers against him. When he tested his powers for the first time, his body was turned inside out and torn into a thousand pieces; and the force of his death hurled a blue star into the sun. That much you know. But what you have never understood is that his spirit itself was destroyed, and all the heirs of Dawnstone were delivered into our power. After the lives of one hundred generations have been destroyed, we will be free of our fleshy prisons. Until then we cannot leave our bodies, but we can renew them from Spring to Spring, making them grow larger and more strong on the blood of our enemies. My death is nothing. I will have a new body at next birthing. Kill me now.”