San Francisco was smaller, dingier, a little old 1950s-style town, no trace of the highrise buildings now. Everything was muted, old-fashioned, the simpler, more innocent textures of his childhood. He half expected it all to be in black and white, as an old newsreel would be, and perhaps to flicker a little. But he took in smells, breezes, sounds, that no newsreel could have captured. This wasn't any newsreel and it wasn't any hallucination, either. This was the world itself, dense, deep, real. All too real, unthinkably real. And there was no place for him in it.
Men wore hats, women's coats had padded shoulders. Shop windows sparkled. There was a Christmas bustle in the streets. A little while later, though, the sky brightened and the dry, cold winds of San Francisco summer came whistling eastward at him again out of the Pacific, and then, presto jingo, the previous winter's rainy season was upon him. He wondered which year's winter it was.
It was 1953, the newspaper told him. The corner newspaper rack was his only friend. It provided him with guidance, information about his present position in time. That was Eisenhower on the front page. The Korean war was still going on, here in 1953. And Stalin: Stalin had just died. Rackman remembered Eisenhower, the president of his childhood, kindly old Ike. Truman's bespectacled face would be next. Rackman had been born during Truman's second term. He had no recollection of the Truman presidency but he could recall the salty old Harry of later years, who went walking every day, gabbing with reporters about anything that came into his head.
What is going to happen to me, Rackman wondered, when I get back past my own birthdate?
Maybe he would come to some glittering gateway, a giant sizzling special effect throwing off fireworks across the whole horizon, with a blue-white sheen of nothingness stretching into infinity beyond it. And when he passed through it he would disappear into oblivion and that would be that. He'd find out soon enough. He couldn't be much more than a year or two away from the day of his birth.
Without knowing or caring where he was going, Rackman began to drive south out of San Francisco, the poky little San Francisco of this far-off day, heading out of town on what once had been Highway 101, the freeway that led to the airport and San Jose and, eventually, Los Angeles. It wasn't a freeway now, just an oddly charming little four-lane road. The billboards that lined it on both sides looked like ads from old National Geographics. The curving rows of small ticky-tacky houses on the hillsides hadn't been built yet. There was almost nothing except open fields everywhere, down here south of the city. The ballpark wasn't there—the Giants still played in New York in this era, he recalled—and when he went past the airport, he almost failed to notice it, it was such a piffling little small-town place. Only when a DC-3 passed overhead like a huge droning mosquito did he realize that that collection of tin sheds over to the left was what would one day be SFO.
Rackman knew that he was still slipping and slipping as he went, that the pace of slippage seemed to be picking up, that if that glittering gateway existed he had already gone beyond it. He was somewhere near 1945 now or maybe even earlier—they were honking at his car on the road in amazement, as though it was a spaceship that had dropped down from Mars—and now a clear, cold understanding of what was in store for him was growing in his mind.
He wouldn't disappear through any gateway. It didn't matter that he hadn't been born yet in the year he was currently traveling through, because he wasn't growing any younger as he drifted backward. And the deep past waited for him. He saw that he would just go endlessly onward, cut loose from the restraints that time imposed, drifting on and on back into antiquity. While he was driving southward, heading for San Jose or Los Angeles or wherever it was that he might be going next, the years would roll along backward, the twentieth century would be gobbled up in the nineteenth, California's great cities would melt away—he had already seen that happening in San Francisco—and the whole state would revert to the days of Mexican rule, a bunch of little villages clustered around the Catholic missions, and then the villages and the missions would disappear too. A day or two later for him, California would be an emptiness, nobody here but simple Indian tribes. Farther to the east, in the center of the continent, great herds of bison would roam. Still farther east would be the territory of the Thirteen Colonies, gradually shriveling back into tiny pioneering settlements and then vanishing also. Well, he thought, if he could get himself across the country quickly enough, he might be able to reach New York City—Nieuw Amsterdam, it would probably be by then—while it still existed. There he might be able to arrange a voyage across to Europe before the continent reverted entirely to its pre-Columbian status. But what then? All that he could envisage was a perpetual journey backward, backward, ever backward: the Renaissance, the Dark Ages, Rome, Greece, Babylon, Egypt, the Ice Age. A couple of summers ago he and Jenny had taken a holiday in France, down in the Dordogne, where they had looked at the painted caves of the Cro-Magnon men, the colorful images of bulls and bison and spotted horses and mammoths. No one knew what those pictures meant, why they had been painted. Now he would go back and find out at first hand the answer to the enigmas of the prehistoric caves. How very cool that sounded, how interesting, a nice fantasy, except that if you gave it half a second's thought it was appalling. To whom would he impart that knowledge? What good would it do him, or anyone?
The deep past was waiting for him, yes. But would he get there? Even a Prius wasn't going to make it all the way across North America on a single tank of gas, and soon there weren't going to be any gas stations, and even if there were he would have no valid money to pay for gas, or food, or anything else. Pretty soon there would be no roads, either. He couldn't walk to New York. In that wilderness he wouldn't last three days.
He had kept himself in motion up until this moment, staying just ahead of the vast gray grimness that was threatening to invade his soul, but it was catching up with him now. Rackman went through ten or fifteen minutes that might have been the darkest, bleakest moments of his life. Then—was it something about the sweet simplicity of this little road, no longer the roaring Highway 101 but now just a dusty, narrow two-laner with hardly any traffic?—there came an unexpected change in his mood. He grew indifferent to his fate. In an odd way he found himself actually welcoming whatever might come. The prospect before him looked pretty terrifying, yes. But it might just be exciting, too. He had liked his life, he had liked it very much, but it had been torn away from him, he knew not how or why. This was his life now. He had no choice about that. The best thing to do, Rackman thought, was to take it one century at a time and try to enjoy the ride.
What he needed right now was a little breather: come to a halt if only for a short while, pause and regroup. Stop and pass the time, so to speak, as he got himself ready for the next phase of his new existence. He pulled over by the side of the road and turned off the ignition and sat there quietly, thinking about nothing at all.
After a while a youngish man on a motorcycle pulled up alongside him. The motorcycle was hardly more than a souped-up bike. The man was wearing a khaki blouse and khaki trousers, all pleats and flounces, a very old-fashioned outfit, something like a scoutmaster's uniform. He himself had an old-fashioned look, too, dark hair parted in the middle like an actor in a silent movie.
Then Rackman noticed the California Highway Patrol badge on the man's shoulder. He opened the car window. The patrolman leaned toward him and gave him an earnest smile, a Boy Scout smile. Even the smile was old-fashioned. You couldn't help believing the sincerity of it. “Is there any difficulty, sir? May I be of any assistance?"
So polite, so formal. Sir. Everyone had been calling him sir since this trip had started, the desk clerks, the people in restaurants, Al Mortenson, and now this CHP man. So respectful, everybody was, back here in prehistory.
"No,” Rackman said. “No problem. Everything's fine."
The patrolman didn't seem to hear him. He had turned his complete attention to Rackman's car itself, the glossy silver Prius, the car out of the future. The
look of it was apparently sinking in for the first time. He was staring at the car in disbelief, in befuddlement, in unconcealed jaw-sagging awe, gawking at its fluid streamlined shape, at its gleaming futuristic dashboard. Then he turned back to Rackman himself, taking in the look of his clothing, his haircut, his checked jacket, his patterned shirt. The man's eyes seemed to glaze. Rackman knew that there had to be something about his whole appearance that seemed as wrong to the patrolman as the patrolman's did to him. He could see the man working to get himself under control. The car must have him completely flummoxed, Rackman thought. The patrolman began to say something but it was a moment before he could put his voice in gear. Then he said, hoarsely, like a rusty automaton determined to go through its routine no matter what, “I want you to know, sir, that if you are having any problem with your—ah—your car, we are here to assist you in whatever way we can."
To assist you. That was a good one.
Rackman managed a faint smile. “Thanks, but the car's okay,” he said. “And I'm okay too. I just stopped off here to rest a bit, that's all. I've got a long trip ahead of me.” He reached for the ignition key. Silently, smoothly, the Prius floated forward into the morning light and the night that would quickly follow it and into the random succession of springs and winters and autumns and summers beyond, forward into the mysteries, dark and dreadful and splendid, that lay before him.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Books To Look For by Charles de Lint
The Midnight Road, by Tom Piccirilli, Bantam Books, 2007, $6.99.
You'd think that dying was the worst thing that could happen to you. For Child Protection Services investigator Flynn, that's only the start of his misery.
It begins with an investigation out in the boonies during a big winter storm. As he rescues a young girl and her mentally challenged brother from a large and wealthy estate, he's almost killed by the children's mother. They make their escape, but the mother follows in her car and runs him off the road into a lake. The children get out before the car plunges into the frigid water, but Flynn's not so lucky.
He's twenty-eight minutes in the water, flash frozen, before he's resuscitated. According to the press, he's the Miracle Man, but everything's the same as it was before except that now his life starts to spiral completely out of his control. Someone wants to kill him. The authorities are trying to pin a number of murders on him. Oh, and he's being haunted by the ghost of a dead bulldog named Zero who talks to him in his own voice.
Piccirilli obviously shares my own love for noir. This is a hardboiled mystery, and while it bucks the tradition in any number of good ways, the meat is here: the darkness at the heart of the story, the main character's weary worldview, and the tragic circumstances of his personal history that make him the man he is.
To spice it up, Piccirilli throws in a handful of ghosts, though I will admit that the reality of their presence relies on how the reader comes to the book. If you lean toward fantasy, you'll take them at face value. If your reading runs more to the mainstream, it's possible that these ghosts are only figments of Flynn's imagination.
Piccirilli never comes down with a definite take on what they are, but I didn't mind. I like the uneasy ambiguity—the fact that, though we're rooting for Flynn, he could well be more damaged than he cares to admit. He certainly makes more wrong choices than would someone in full control of his senses.
On the other hand, how many people have died and come back? Who knows what that would do to you?
But no matter what you decide as you read, what can't be denied is that over the years Piccirilli has developed into a powerful voice. He writes with strong, lean prose. He understands the impact that our pasts have upon our present selves. And he cares deeply for his characters, which in turn makes us care for them, too.
This is as good as—no, better than—any number of the big name hardcovers that make the bestseller lists. Do yourself a favor and find out why.
* * * *
The Servants, by Michael Marshall Smith, Earthling Publications, 2007, $30.
I think of Michael Marshall Smith as the quintessential sf writer (yes, I know he writes thrillers as Michael Marshall, but I'm slow and haven't caught up with those books yet), so I was surprised to find him penning this quiet, tender, and deeply personal story of an eleven-year-old boy's coming of age in a decidedly mainstream setting.
Let me quickly note that when I say “deeply personal,” I'm referring to how the story relates to the characters. I have no idea how, or even if, this fits into Smith's own history.
And I also feel I need to add that this is an adult book about an eleven-year-old, not a book aimed at that general age group.
It's winter in Brighton, England, a place where Mark and his parents used to holiday. His mother would shop in the little stores, they'd wander along the boardwalk, they'd have Chinese take-out ... all in all, a pleasant break from their lives in London.
Now Mark and his mother have moved to Brighton, along with her new husband, David. Mark resents his stepfather. His mother seems to be sick a lot and David doesn't appear to be doing anything to help except—so far as Mark is concerned—do everything wrong.
Mark takes refuge in trying to master jumps on his skateboard. It's lonely out on the cold beachfront, and he's bruised from head to toe from his falls off the board, but it still seems better than spending any time in the miserable house to which David has brought them, and where Mark's mother seems to get sicker each day.
Then Mark meets the old lady who lives in the basement apartment of the house and he discovers that the past isn't quite so distant as one might assume.
Smith has done a terrific job with this book, perfectly capturing the confused and sometimes belligerent mindset of his young protagonist while still keeping him likable. It helps that the reader clues in long before Mark about what's happening to his mother—it allows us to feel more sympathy for him—but that doesn't make it any happier a situation.
I've been to Brighton in the off-season and Smith has also done a fine job of bringing the cold and damp setting to life—and he always shows it through the eleven-year-old Mark's eyes, which keeps the character (and therefore, the readers) grounded in the story when the fantastical elements begin to be revealed.
They were one of my favorite parts of the book. I've read a lot of fiction dealing with the supernatural, or with fantastical elements, and while I appreciate the curiosity and inventiveness that writers can bring to them, what I'm most interested in, in a story such as this, is how an encounter with them affect and change ordinary people. When the world shifts underfoot, we can't see it the same way anymore, no matter how much we might want to, and Smith does a perfect job of utilizing this to tell Mark's story.
The Servants is an absolute delight of a book—not because it's so cheerful. With its subject matter, that would be a real trick to pull off. No, the delight is in how beautifully Smith handles every aspect of this poignant and mysterious story.
Highly recommended.
* * * *
God Save the Queen, by Mike Carey and John Bolton, Vertigo/DC, 2007, $19.99.
Usually when practitioners in the comic medium take a stab at the fantasy field, they gravitate to Howardesque barbarians, or very simplified takes on Tolkienesque epic fantasy (with lots of swordplay and magic being cast around). While there's nothing particularly wrong with that, it's still refreshing to find a graphic novel that takes its cue from something a bit more contemporary. But while God Save the Queen certainly owes a tip of the hat to the edgy takes on fairy by prose authors such as Holly Black, in the end, it delivers its own variation, with a fresh voice.
Linda is one of those surly, rebelling-for-the-sake-of-rebelling characters that you just want to shake some sense into (though, of course, we never would in our current PC landscape). She treats everyone around her with a cavalier disregard for their well-being—both emotional and physical. So it's no surprise that she ends up leaving a London dance club with an am
oral group of partiers who just happen to be fairies.
I'm not going to tell you why they befriend her, but when she learns what they are, she also learns that she's half fairy herself and caught smack dab in the middle of a power struggle in the fairy court. The book's title doesn't refer to the Queen of England, but rather to the queen of that court—a rather miserable excuse for a sentient being.
(I've noticed these days that fairy queens seem to have taken the place of wicked stepparents as this sort of story is updated for a contemporary audience. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's a backlash against the young and the beautiful who reign from the covers of the weekly glossy “news” magazines and supermarket tabloids. But I digress....)
The title also wakes—for those old enough to remember—a resonance with the punk movement—though it calls up the hedonistic end of it as championed by the Sex Pistols, rather than the more socially and politically aware side which took its anthems from groups like the Clash.
Mike Carey (you might know him from his run on Hellblazer, or his current work on the terrific series Crossing Midnight) has turned in a powerful story. His fairies are the kind that explain why country folk used to do everything they could to avoid their attention—they're capricious, dark, self-centered, and dangerous beings. His characters aren't what you find in most fantasy books, either. But while not always likable, and often driven by baser designs than one might expect from heroes, they're still fascinating.
Do they come through in the end and do the right thing? I'll let you find out for yourselves.
John Bolton's a wonderful artist. What he lacks in storytelling flow (the almost cinematic movement from panel to panel in which some artists excel), he more than makes up for in the veracity and painterly merit of his individual panels. He's equally at ease depicting beautiful characters and the grotesque—which is lucky, since Carey gives him a good workout with both.
FSF, October 2007 Page 3