"I will find you! I will be waiting on a distant boat, and I will kill you. And you will never get to the end of The River nor storm the gates of Valhalla!"
Even when the hand had slackened, Sam had been too cold with horror to move away. Death rattled in the throat of the sinister shadow, and still Sam was frozen on the outside, though vibrating inside.
"I wait!"
Those were Erik Bloodaxe's last words, echoing yet in his dreams down the years.
Sam had scoffed at the prophecy – later on. No one could see into the future. That was superstitious rot. Bloodaxe might be up-River, but, if he was, it was due to chance alone. There was a fifty-fifty probability that he was down-River. Moreover, even if the Norseman was waiting for revenge, he wasn't likely to have an opportunity to wreak it. The boat only made three stops a day, except for some occasional shore leaves of a week or so. Very probably Bloodaxe would be standing on the bank when the riverboat traveled by. Run or paddle or sail though he might, Erik could not catch up with the swift vessel.
Believing this did not, however, keep Bloodaxe out of Sam's nightmares. Perhaps this was because, deep within him, Sam knew that he was guilty of murder, therefore, he should be punished.
In one of those sudden shifts of scene the Supervisor of Dreams so slickly contrives, Sam found himself in a hut. It was night, and rain and lightning and thunder were like a cat- o'- nine- tails against the back of darkness. The flashes in the sky faintly illumined the interior of the hut. A shadowy figure squatted near him. The figure was cloaked; a huge dome on its shoulders covered its head.
"What is the occasion for this unexpected visit?" Sam said, repeating the question he'd asked during the Mysterious Stranger's second visit.
"The Sphinx and I are playing draw poker," the Stranger said. "Would you like to sit in?"
Sam awoke. The luminous digits of the chronometer on the wall across the cabin read 03:33. What I tell you three times is true. Gwenafra, beside him, groaned. She muttered something about "Richard." Was she dreaming about Richard Burton? Though she had only been about seven when she had known him, and had been with him for only a year, she still talked of him. Her child's love for him had survived.
There was no sound now except for Gwenafra's breathing and the far-off chuff-chuff of the great paddlewheels. Their cycling sent slight vibrations throughout the ship. When he had his hand on the duraluminum frame of the bed, he could feel the faint waves. The four wheels turned by the colossal electrical motors were driving the vessel toward his goal.
Out there, on both banks, people were sleeping. Night lay over this hemisphere, and an estimated 8.75 billion were abed, dreaming. What were their shadowy visions? Some would be of Earth; some, of this world.
Was the ex-caveman turning restlessly in his sleep, moaning, dreaming of a sabertooth prowling outside the fire in the entrance? Joe Miller often dreamed of mammoths, those hairy curving-tusked leviathans of his time, food to stuff his capacious belly and skin to make tents and ivory to make props for the tents and teeth to make enormous necklaces. He also dreamed of his totem, his ancestor, the giant cave bear; the massive shaggy figure came to him at night and advised him on matters that troubled him. And he dreamed sometimes of being beat with clubs on the soles of his feet by enemies. Joe's eight hundred pounds plus his bipedal posture caused flat feet. He could not walk all day like the Homo sapiens pygmies; he had to sit down and ease his aching feet.
Joe also had nocturnal emissions when dreaming of a female of his kind. Joe was sleeping with his present mate, a six-foot seven-inch beauty, a Kassubian, a Slavic speaker of the third century A.D. She loved Joe's massiveness and hairiness and the grotesque nose and the gargantuan penis and most of all his essentially gentle soul. And she may have gotten a perverse pleasure from making love to a not-quite-human being. Joe loved her, too, but that didn't keep him from dreaming amorously of his Terrestrial wife and any number of other females of his tribe. Or, like humans everywhere, of a mate constructed by the Master of Dreams, an ideal living only in the unconscious.
"Every man is a moon and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody."
So Sam Clemens had written. How true. But the Master of Dreams, that master of ceremonies of bizarre circuses, trotted out his caged beasts and trapeze artists and tight-rope walkers and side-show freaks every night.
In last night's dream, he, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, had been locked in a room with an enormous machine on the back of which rode his alter ego, Mark Twain. The machine was a monstrous and weird creature, squat, round-backed, a cockroach with a thousand legs and a thousand teeth. The teeth in the oblong mouth were bottles of patent medicine, "snake oil." The legs were metal rods with round feet on the bottoms of which were letters from the alphabet. It advanced toward him, teeth clinking together while the legs squeaked and squealed from lack of oil. Mark Twain, seated in a gold-plated diamond-encrusted howdah on its back, pulled levers to direct it. Mark Twain was an old man with bushy white hair and a white bushy mustache. He wore an all-white suit. He grinned and then glared at Sam and jerked at the levers and steered his machine this way and that, trying to cut off Sam's attempts to escape.
Sam was only eighteen, his famous mustache not yet grown. He clutched the handle of a carpetbag in one hand.
Round and round the room Sam fled, while the machine clinked and squeaked as it spun around and ran toward him and then backed up. Mark Twain kept yelling things at Sam, such as: "Here's a page from your own book, Sam," and "Your publisher sends you his regards, Sam, and asks for more money!"
Sam, squealing like the machine, was a mouse trapped by a mechanical cat. No matter how fast he ran, how he spun, whirled, and leaped, he was inevitably going to be caught.
Suddenly, ripples passed over the metal shell of the monster. It stopped, and it groaned. A clicking issued from its mouth; it squatted, the legs bending. From an orifice in its rear spurted a stream of green paper. They were thousand-dollar bills, and they piled against the wall and then began to flow over the machine. The pile grew and grew and then fell into the howdah, where Mark Twain was screaming at the machine that it was sick, sick, sick.
Fascinated, Sam crept forward, keeping a wary eye on the machine. He picked up one of the bills. "At last," he thought, "at long last."
The paper in his hand became human feces.
Now he saw that all the bills had suddenly turned to feces.
But a door had opened in the hitherto unbroken wall of the room.
H. H. Rogers stuck his head through. He was the rich man who'd aided Sam during his troubles, even though Sam had excoriated the big oil trusts. Sam ran toward him, yelling, "Help! Help!"
Rogers stepped into the room. He wore nothing except red longjohns, the rear flap of which hung unbuttoned. On his chest in gold letters was the legend: IN STANDARD OIL WE TRUST; ALL OTHERS, GOD.
"You've saved me, Henry!" Sam gasped.
Rogers turned his back for a minute, exposing the sign on his buttocks: PUT IN A DOLLAR AND PULL THE LEVER.
Rogers, frowning, said, "Just a minute." He reached behind him and pulled out a document.
"Sign here, and I'll let you out."
"I haven't got a pen!" Sam said. Behind him, the machine was beginning to move again. He couldn't see it, but he knew that it was creeping up on him. Beyond Rogers, through the door, Sam could see a beautiful garden. A lion and a lamb sat side by side, and Livy was standing just behind them. She smiled at him. She wore nothing, and she was holding a huge parasol over her head. Faces peeked from behind flowers and bushes. One of them was Susy, his favorite daughter. But what was she doing? Something he knew he wouldn't like. Was that a man's bare foot sticking out from the bush behind which Susy was hiding?
"I don't have a pen," Sam said again. "I'll take your shadow for collateral," Rogers said. "I already sold it," Sam said. He groaned as the door swung shut behind Rogers.
And that had been the end of that nightmare. Where now were his wife Livy, Clara, Jean, an
d Susy, his daughters? What dreams were they dreaming? Did he figure in them? If so, as what? Where was Orion, his brother? Inept bumbling ne'er-do-well optimistic Orion. Sam had loved him. And where was his brother Henry, poor Henry, burned so badly when the paddlewheeler Pennsylvania blew up, lingering for six excruciatingly painful days in the makeshift hospital in Memphis. Sam had been with him, had suffered with him, and then had seen him carried off to the room where the undoubtedly dying were taken.
Resurrection had restored Orion's charred skin, but it would never heal his interior wounds. Just as it had failed to heal Sam's.
And where was the poor old whiskey-sodden tramp who had died when the Hannibal jail caught fire? Sam had been ten then, had been awakened out of sleep by the fire bells. He had run down to the jail and seen the man, clinging to the bars, screaming, blackly silhouetted against the bright red flames. The town marshal could not be found, and he had the only keys to the cell door. A group had tried to batter the oaken doors down and had failed.
Some hours before the marshal had picked up the bum, Sam had given the bum some matches to light his pipe. It was one of these that must have set fire to the straw bed in the cell. Sam knew that he was responsible for the tramp's terrible death. If he had not felt sorry for him and gone home to get the matches for him, the man would not have died. An act of charity, a moment of sympathy, had caused him to be burned to death.
And where was Nina, his granddaughter? She was born after he'd died, but he had learned about her from a man who'd read her death notice in the Los Angeles Times of January 18, 1966.
RITES PENDING FOR NINA CLEMENS,
LAST DESCENDANT OF MARK TWAIN
The fellow had a very good memory, but his interest in Mark Twain had helped him to record the heading in his mind.
"She was fifty-five years old and was found dead late Sunday in a motel room at 20- something- or- other
North Highland Avenue
. Her room was strewn with bottles of pills and liquor. There wasn't any note and an autopsy was ordered to find out the exact cause of her death. I never saw the report.
"She'd died across the street from her luxurious three-bedroom penthouse in the HighlandTowers. Her friends said she often checked in there for the weekend when she was tired of being alone. The paper said she'd been alone most of her life. She'd used the name of Clemens after she divorced an artist by the name of Rutgers. She had been married to him briefly in, ah, 1935, I think. The paper said she was the daughter of Clara Grabrilowitsch, your only daughter. It meant that she was your only surviving daughter. Clara married a Jacques Samoussoud after her first husband died. In 1935, I think. She was a devout Christian Scientist, you know."
"No, I didn't know!" Sam said.
His informant, knowing that Sam loathed Christian Science, that he had once written a defamatory book about Mary Baker Eddy, had grinned.
"Do you suppose she was getting back at you?"
"Spare me your psychological analyses," Sam had said. "Clara worshiped me. All my children did."
"Anyway, Clara died in 1962, not long after she'd authorized publication of your unpublished Letters to the Earth."
"That was printed?" Sam said. "What was the reaction?"
"It sold well. But it was pretty mild stuff, you know. No one was outraged or thought it was blasphemous. Oh, yes, your 1601, uncensored, was also printed. When I was young, it could be obtained only through private presses. But by the late 1960's, it was sold to the general public."
Sam had shaken his head. "You mean children could buy it?"
"No, but a lot of them read it."
"How things must've changed!"
"Anything, well, almost anything, went. Let's see. The article said that your granddaughter was an amateur artist, singer and actress. She was also' a shutterbug – a person who liked to take photographs – she took dozens of pictures every week of friends, bartenders, and waiters. Even strangers on the street.
"She was writing an autobiography, A Life Alone, which title tells you a lot about her. Poor thing. Her friends said the book was 'generally confused' but parts of it showed some of your genius."
"I always said that Livy and I were too highstrung to have children."
"Well, she wasn't suffering from lack of money. She inherited some trust funds from her mother, about $800,000, I believe. Money from the sale of your books. When she died, she was worth one and a half million dollars. Yet, she was unhappy and lonely.
"Oh, yes. Her body was taken to Elmira, New York . . . for burial in a family plot near the famed grandfather whose name she bore."
"I can't be blamed for her character," Sam had said. "Clara and Ossip can take credit for that."
The informant shrugged and said, "You and your wife formed the characters of your children, Clara included."
"Yes, but my character was formed by my parents. And theirs by theirs," Sam had said. "Do we go back to Adam and Eve to fix the responsibility? No, because God formed their temperaments when he created them. There is but one being who bears the ultimate responsibility."
"I'm a free-willer myself," the man had said.
"Listen," Sam had said. "When the first living atom found itself afloat on the great Laurentian sea, the first act of that first atom led to the second act of that first atom, and so on down through the succeeding ages of all life until, if the steps could be traced, it would be shown that the first act of that first atom has led inevitably to the act of my standing in my kilt at this instant, talking to you. That's from my What Is Man? slightly paraphrased. What do you think of that?"
"It's bullshit."
"You say that because you have been determined to do so. you could not have said anything else."
"You're a sorry case, Mr. Clemens, if you don't mind my saying so."
"I do. But you can't help saying that. Listen, what was your profession?"
The man looked surprised. "What's that got to do with it? I was a realtor. I was also on the school board for many years."
Let me quote myself again," Sam had said. "In the first place, God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards."
Sam chuckled now at the memory of the man's expression.
He sat up. Gwen slept on. He turned on the nightlight and saw that she was smiling slightly. She looked innocent, childlike, yet the full lips and the full curves of the breast, almost entirely exposed, excited him. He reached out to awake her but changed his mind. Instead, he put on his kilt and a cloth for a cape and his visored high-peaked fish-leather cap. He picked up a cigar and left the room closing the door softly. The corridor was warm and bright. At the far end, the door was locked; two armed guards stood by it. Two also stood at the near end by the elevator doors. He lit a cigar and walked toward the elevator. He chatted for a minute with the guards and then entered the cage.
He punched the P button. The doors slid shut, but not before he saw a guard starting to phone to the pilothouse that La Bosso (The Boss) was coming up. The cage rose from the D or hangar deck, where the officers' quarters were, through the two narrow round rooms below the pilothouse, and then to the top chamber. There was a brief wait while the third-watch exec checked out the cage with closed-circuit TV. Then the doors slid open, and Sam entered the pilothouse or control room.
"It's all right boys," he said. "Just me, enjoying insomnia."
There were three others there. The night pilot, smoking a big cigar, eyeing the dials lackadaisically. He was Akande Erin, a massive Dahomeyan who had spent thirty years operating a jungle riverboat. The most outrageous liar Sam had ever known, and he had met the world's best. Third-mate Calvin Cregar, a Scot who had put in forty years on an Australian coastal steamer. Ensign Diego Santiago of the marines, a seventeenth- century Venezuelan.
"Just came to look around," Sam said. "Carry on."
The sky was unclouded, blazing as if that great arsonist, God, had set it afire. The Valley was broad here, and the light fell softly, showing dimly the buildings and b
oats on both banks. Beyond them was a darker darkness. A few sentinel fires made eyes in the night. Otherwise, the world seemed asleep. The hills rose dark with trees, the giant irontrees, a thousand feet high, spiring up from the others. Beyond, the mountains loomed blackly. Faint starlight sparked on the waves.
Sam went through the door to stand on the port walk that ringed the exterior of the pilothouse. The wind was cool but not yet cold. It ran fingers through his bushy hair. Standing on the deck, he felt like a living part, an organ, of the vessel. It was spanking along, paddlewheels churning, its flags flapping, brave as a tiger, huge and sleek as a sperm whale, beautiful" as a woman, heading always against the current, its goal the Axis Mundi, the Navel of the World, the dark tower. He felt roots grow from his feet, tendrils that spread through the hull, extended from the hull, dropped through the black waters, touched by the monsters of the deep, plunged into the muck three miles below, grew laterally up through the earth, spread out, shooting with the speed of thought, growing vines which erupted from the earth, stabbed into the flesh of every living human being on this world, spiraled upward through the roofs of the huts, rocketed toward the skies, veined space with the shoots which wrapped themselves around every planet on which lived animal life and sentients, enveloped and penetrated these, an then shot exploring tentacles toward the blackness where no matter was, where only God existed.
In that moment, Sam Clemens was, if not one with the universe, at least integral with it. And for a moment he believed in God.
And at the moment Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain inhabited the same flesh, merged, became one.
Then the thrilling vision exploded, contracted, dwindled, shot back into him.
He laughed. For several seconds he had known an ecstasy that surpassed even sexual, intercourse, up to that moment the supreme feeling in his, and humanity's lot, disappointing as it often was.
Now he was within himself again, and the universe was outside.
He returned to the control room. Erin, the black pilot, looking up at him, said, "You have been visited by the spirits."
The Magic Labyrinth Page 10