by Paul Park
“What are you doing? Get away! Oh, miss,” murmured the man. One eye was open, but the other was bashed shut.
Now there was a man in the road, strolling toward them. Miranda had expected him somehow; she wouldn’t run away, not again. She was the daughter of Prince Frederick Schenck von Schenck, she told herself. And the man was—what? What kind of thing was he? Miranda heard him whistling a complicated tune.
The old man looked with his one eye, and instead of cursing at Miranda and pushing her away, now he grabbed her hands in his strong hands. And his voice had the respectful, pleading tone of earlier: “Miss, you promise now? By Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, who once lived in this place. I’m a drunken cripple and my daughter is a slut, and my sons are simpleminded. It is not for our sake I’m begging you—don’t let us be cut down like dogs. Remember your own people who brought you back to Great Roumania.”
There was something in his words that calmed her, took away her fear. She would indeed remember her own people. And it wouldn’t be for nothing that men like Dinu Fishbelly had faith in her. You could decide things like that and they’d be true. She looked up and she knew what she was going to see. The vampire stood above them on the road, dressed in his black boots and white silk shirt. His black hair curled over his ears. His elegance did not dispel the sense of menace that clung to him. His hands were in his pockets. Miranda saw the moving bulge in the cloth as he searched for something with his right hand. Then he drew it out, a fishing knife with a wooden handle and a stained blade.
He squatted down fastidiously and plucked at the seams of his pants. Miranda tried to pull away, tried to find her gun again, but the old man held her. “Promise me!” he whispered. The vampire smiled.
“Let me help,” he said.
Close as he was, Miranda couldn’t tell whether she was seeing an apparition or a real human being. Though she could see every detail of his delicate face, still there was something ghostlike in the way he moved, quietly and without effort. Certainly Miranda was aware of the difference between him and the man who grasped her hands with such desperation. The man’s breath was hoarse and choking, and a stink came from his body. His arms were shuddering and trembling as the vampire put the knife under his black shirt. “Watch me gut this fish,” he said to Miranda, smiling, his dark lips close.
Blood dripped from the saturated shirt. The stink was overpowering. Fishbelly opened his mashed eye, and both his eyes were staring at her, only at her. He seemed scarcely aware of his attacker, who was moving the knife up his stomach through his clothes. But under the vampire’s hands, he also seemed tinged now with unreality. His grip on her hands was failing, and she was able to sprawl backwards and pull away and pull the gun out of her shirt—her father’s gun which felt so heavy and so light—and pull the hammer back with her greasy hands. Surely her aunt, who had left her this gun, and who kept duck-hunting photographs on her bureau, would not have neglected to teach her how to shoot.
With her elbows locked in front of her she pressed the trigger and fired once into the vampire’s smiling face. The noise of the gun was terrific, and her hands jerked back. Then she jumped up with the hammer cocked again; there was no vampire, no person there. But she stood shaking in the moonlight, terrified now, suddenly terrified to be alone, aware suddenly of the noise of the surf on her left. In front of her there was the empty road and a fire burning on the hill. Her ears were ringing and her hands ached. Below her lay a dead horse. But the dead man, also, had disappeared.
In this world, as now, there were unreal moments mixed in with the real, moments when all natural laws were suspended; it had been that way since the book of her past life had caught fire on Christmas Hill. Conjuring, people called it here, magic, she supposed. But how did it work, and how could she make it work for her, for Dinu Fishbelly? She stepped back a few yards and lifted the gun’s warm muzzle to the sky. Above her was a veil of clouds. She listened to the sound of the surf on the shingle beach, and in time she heard the clink of a horse’s bridle and the clump of its hoofs on the dry sand. Or rather two horses, because when she turned she saw the girl Ludu astride her pony, leading the big gray. She slipped out of the saddle and pulled down her skirt. “It was the man from the dock,” Miranda stammered. “And your father—now they’re gone.”
The girl stood where her father had been. With one hand she pushed the hair back from her face. Miranda took a few steps down the road, peering into the reeds on either side. She expected the girl to say something, to ask her questions, but she stood without speaking.
Then finally, matter-of-factly: “He used to beat me,” she said.
“We’ll go back. We’ll look for him. I don’t know—he must be somewhere. It wasn’t real.”
Ludu shook her head. She stood gnawing on her lips and rubbing her mouth, and then she shrugged. She moved to the dead horse, unstrapped a rolled-up cloth that hung across its saddle bow. “You take the pony. She’ll be easy now.”
Miranda looked down. A small fat toad hopped across the sand into the grass.
7
The African
“HOW DO YOU feel?”
The African had a soft, sweet voice. She swallowed her words sometimes, or looked away from Peter when she talked. Though of all the people he had met in this country, she spoke the most fluent English, still sometimes he had to strain to understand because she spoke so softly.
He lay on a rough bed frame, nailed together out of sticks of gray birch. There was no mattress, but he was wrapped in feather comforters and pillows stuffed with straw. A blanket roll supported his back so he could sit up.
She sat beside him on a low stool, also made of raw sticks with the bark left on. She was just a girl, maybe eight or nine. She’d brought him dinner, and now she was holding the tin plate. He had only managed to eat half of it. A mixture of corn bread and beans, it filled his stomach like a pouch of sand.
She had taken his temperature with an ordinary mercury thermometer. She had checked his pulse against the second hand of her wristwatch. Nor did she seem reassured when he told her he had already been sick, already recovered, and the disease had left no trace.
Altogether he was surprised by her competence. But more than that, the sureness of her gestures, a language of grown-up movement, though her voice was hesitant and shy. “All right,” he said, in answer to her question.
Heat came from an iron stove in the middle of the tent. There was no wind, and the canvas walls hung flat, encompassing a square of softened mud twenty feet on a side. Other cots were in the tent. A half dozen people lay unmoving, covered in blankets.
“Where are your parents?” Peter asked.
“They’re dead.” The girl spoke gravely, simply, but without a hint of sadness: “Oh, how queer you are! They’ve been dead a long time.”
She was a beautiful child, with fluffy black hair around her head, dark eyebrows, and pink lips. Her eyes were a dusty green color, accented (Peter saw) with makeup—a drawn line around her eyelids and her mouth. Her cheeks were paler than the backs of her hands, because of some white cosmetic powder. She wore a pale denim dress past her knees. Above it was a heavy brown sweater in a complicated pattern, buttoned down her front with wooden buttons. All of her clothes looked like hand-me-downs from another, older child. Her shoes, especially, were too big for her.
She put the plate aside, then reached out and took hold of Peter’s hand. His right hand was tangled in the blankets, but his left lay open on the counterpane. She put her small palm against his as if measuring the difference. It was a charming gesture, he thought, and he allowed her to stroke his hand—she was an orphan, after all. At the same time he listened to her soft, serious voice as she explained how workers from the archeology dig had stayed here, mostly women. “Now,” she said, “we’ve made the camp into a hospital.”
But she felt a bit like a fraud, she said, because she hadn’t any medical training. It didn’t matter. There was no real treatment. People got better or they didn’t.
Their skin broke into lesions. For several days, since the illness had first spread among a tribe of English savages, she had treated some of the workers here and sent the rest away. Two people had already died. They were buried in the woods.
“Savages” was her word. She had been vaccinated when she was a child, she said. But she didn’t know if vaccinations worked against this strain, whose incubation she had measured in hours instead of days or weeks. It was a long time since she’d been immunized. Smallpox had been eradicated in Africa, along with polio and many other scourges.
When Peter first had stumbled into the camp he had been weak and dazed. Things around him had swum in and out of focus as he sat in bed and tried to eat. He’d accepted a lot of crazy thoughts and crazy feelings, but now he wondered if he’d understood her soft, sweet whisper. Sometimes she talked like a grown-up, sometimes like a child. Now she turned her face away. Other small figures were moving among the sickbeds.
“Where are you from?” Peter asked, to distract himself from his bad stomach.
She squeezed his fingers and turned toward him. “Abyssinia. Eritrea. Have you heard of it?”
“I—I think so.”
“What’s your name?”
He told her. “I’m Waile,” she said. “Waile Bizunesh. Eritrea is south of the Aegyptian Sudan. I thought I would escape, lead a healthy life. And not die young.” She shook her head.
Peter wondered if he’d understood her. “You’re here by yourself?”
“Of course.” She smiled. “You must think I am mysterious. But you are the mysterious one. What has brought you to my excavation here? You are not like these savages or the Roumanian. You said some strange things while you were sleeping.”
She didn’t tell him what it was he’d said. She was talking about herself. “I confess it’s true I’ve made a strange discovery. And I’ll share it with you. My work here is a kind of dissertation. I was working in the valley of the kings near Heliopolis.”
She’d turned away from him. On the other side of the tent someone moved and shifted on his cot. It was the little boy Raevsky had brought in. The girl—Waile—paid no attention. “I don’t understand,” said Peter.
“Of course you don’t,” she said. “For someone with my training it is also difficult to understand. We were excavating a chamber in the tomb. Nothing special at the bottom, just some interesting hieroglyphs from the twenty-sixth dynasty. But in Eritrea we’d heard about a place with similar inscriptions here at the world’s edge. I received an academic grant—I came the normal way, I can assure you. I took the boat from Alexandria and then the packet steamer from New York.”
She giggled. “I confess I spoke to the Roumanian. So I know you have a secret, too.” Then suddenly she was staring at him, eyes wide, face serious. “I’ve had to shift the focus of my research. I am curious to see which parts of childhood are learned, which are innate. I mean the behavior of children, and I’ve made some interesting discoveries. For example, I would never have told you any of this before—it is a secret, really. But I want to confide in you—isn’t that so silly?” She gave his hand a squeeze. “You’re not like these primitives who are attacking us.”
Peter didn’t know what to make of this. The boy rolled over to face them on his cot. Peter could see his big, listless eyes, his face covered with sores. One of the women sat beside him, then brought him a tin cup of water from a bucket by the stove.
“How is he?” whispered the girl—Waile. But the woman heard her. She came hurrying, her arms outstretched, and then knelt down in the mud. Because of her mask, Peter couldn’t see her face.
“How is he, Fiona?”
“Ma’am, he’ll live.”
The girl shrugged her shoulders. “If we all live through till morning…”
Peter knew what she was talking about. He’d heard about it from Raevsky when he’d brought in the boy and laid him down. The night before, men had come out of the forest and attacked the camp. No one had been hurt.
“You see, I’m different each time I come up from the well,” said the girl, squeezing his hand. Now she looked at him again, her face wide with surprise at her own story. “I climb up the ladder, and each time the rungs are bigger in my hands. Each time the spaces are wider, the well deeper—all these people see me leave on the boat to New York City. West to east over the ocean—oh, they waved and laughed the first time I went. Then in a few months here I am again! It’s happened several times! And I don’t come in a boat or through the woods. No, I climb out from underneath the earth—they won’t go down into the well now. I could tell them a treasure was down there. I’d be right, but don’t you see? Now they think I am a great magician, just like a Roumanian! Like a Roumanian conjurer on the Lido in Alexandria, making people disappear! A shilling a pop! But unfortunately they blame me also for this fever—that’s enough!”
She paid no attention to Fiona, who hadn’t moved, who was struggling to say more. A woman older than Peter, she had colorless light hair that poked out under her cap. Her eyes were blue and bloodshot.
Waile’s ears especially were beautiful, dark rims and pink whorls. She wore a pair of gold studs. After Fiona had touched her forehead and shuffled away, Waile studied Peter’s face with a grave, childlike intensity until, embarrassed, he looked down. He too had been staring. Now he looked into his lap—often he had found a way, lately, to hide his right hand from other people and himself, to allow the sleeve of his overcoat to cover it, or to twist it in the waist of his sweater, or in a blanket, as now.
But she had hold of his left hand and was squeezing and caressing it. Conscious of her green eyes on him, conscious of her smile, he studied her plump, tapered fingers and then, lying back against the bedroll, the bleached canvas ceiling of the tent.
“I’ve been talking about my troubles,” she whispered. “But what I want to know is you. I come back over and over, younger each time, you see. Three times so far. And the tribes just get wilder and wilder, these people who live here.” She laughed.
Peter had learned some of this history in dribs and drabs. The British Isles had been destroyed by an earthquake. Many had survived, had migrated into Europe and America—Peter had seen some of these Englishmen in the cave where he’d been sick. Now he wondered if he’d passed on his disease to them. A flick of a thought. Then it was gone.
“I asked the Roumanian about you,” continued Waile. “But I can’t understand. Like all his people he’s a superstitious man.”
“It’s hard to understand.”
Waile giggled. “So you see. It’s just like me. I knew it!”
Peter didn’t want to explain. He was trying to avoid thinking about Miranda, picturing Miranda, wondering where Miranda was.
But now the girl looked cross. “Tell me,” she said. “It’s not fair—I told you something. Now it’s your turn.”
At this moment she seemed artless and as innocent as her apparent age. So he found himself talking as a means of sidling away from the memory of the cave, the old English man with the white beard who quoted William Blake and poked at the bare skin of his stomach, which was just beginning to break out in hard white lumps. And Miranda with her arms around him—he told the girl how he’d been born and brought up in a different place, a modern town along the Hoosick River, a place with streets and houses and computers and electricity, where he had gone to high school, and where his father lived. But here on that stretch of the river there was not even a clearing or a break in the trees, or a rock or a stone or a brick left over from any of that.
“Where did it all go?” she asked, holding his hand.
So then Peter told her about Kevin Markasev, and how he’d come to school from the Ukraine or Romania or someplace, and how Miranda had a history book her aunt had given her, a book that summarized the history of every country in that vanished world. And how a woman named Ceausescu had sent Kevin Markasev to steal the book, destroy it, and how he’d caught up with them on Christmas Hill, and how he’d dropped the book int
o the fire, and when they’d woken up the town was gone, and Markasev was gone, and Miranda’s friend Andromeda had turned into a dog.…
“Where is your friend now—Miranda Popescu? Why is that name familiar to me?”
“I don’t know,” said Peter miserably. “Captain Raevsky says she’s in Roumania. But how can that be true? Yesterday morning is when I saw her.”
The girl gave his hand a sympathetic squeeze. Now he was conscious of a smell from her, a sweet perfume that reminded him …
They sat companionably for some minutes before she spoke. “A world inside a book. Now the book is gone. You must not think I am laughing at you.”
Peter had thought no such thing. “I know it sounds ridiculous,” he admitted humbly.
Her soft small voice: “It is ridiculous. Why are you telling me these lies? After all you are a superstitious person just like the Roumanian. Dogs turn into people, like the fairy stories from central Europe. Do you want to impress me by telling me these silly things?”
She hesitated, then went on in an irritated tone. “The Roumanian told me something about this. But like you it was magic this, magic that, strange phenomena that cannot be believed. From him I expect this kind of thing. Roumania is famous for this silliness and everyone makes fun of Europeans of this type. They tell fortunes in the marketplace or work as clairvoyants in the theater. But I think there is some reason why we cannot travel to Bucharest and see things for ourselves, some danger. The restrictions are on our side—you understand? You talk in this silly way, but somewhere here there is a scientific fact, something that can be tested and studied. I know this from experience. I know what my former colleagues would say about what I’ve found at the bottom of my well, and how my government would ban all access even if I could find an explanation. Please tell me that you understand me!”