End of the Century

by Chris Roberson

  Stillman looked up at her, a smile creeping across his face.

  “In someplace called…Glastonbury?” Alice nodded. “Yeah, that's right.” She tilted her head to one side and took in Stillman's big grin. “Does that help?”

  “Alice, love,” Stillman said. “How would you feel about taking a little road trip, mmm?”

  There was always one kid, in every grade-school class, who called the teacher “Mom.” It seemed an inescapable fact of life. And that they would then be known as the “kid who called the teacher Mom” for the rest of the school year.

  Alice hadn't been that kid, but she'd sat next to him once, and had joined in with the others in teasing him mercilessly.

  She hadn't thought of that kid in years. But when she opened her mouth and almost, but not quite, called Stillman “Dad,” she couldn't help but remember him.

  “What's that, love?” Stillman was fixing them breakfast. To get a proper start before they hit the road, he said.

  Alice had just been about to ask him something about their plans, but every memory of what's she'd been about to say was driven from her memory as soon as she uttered the “Da-” syllable. She thought about playing it off, calling him “Daddio” like some hipster doofus from fifty years before, like Marty McFly in Back to the Future, but didn't have the heart to try.

  “Nothing,” Alice said, shaking her head.

  This all felt very homey. Waking up to find an older man in the kitchen, making eggs, toast, and bacon. Stillman was about the age her dad would have been, had he lived, had she not fallen down the stairs.

  It was strange, how quickly she'd come to trust this complete stranger. Had he done a bit of hypnosis on her, after all? Or was it just that she'd seen his face in her visions since she was a little girl, making him seem comfortable and safe to be around?

  Stillman set a plate in front of her, the bacon nice and crunchy, just like she liked, so she tried not to worry about it one way or another.

  She was toweling her hair off, just out of the shower, while Stillman was dressed and ready, waiting for her on the sofa, watching the morning news. He already had his shoulder holster on, Alice noted, though the fletchette pistol wasn't yet snugged in place.

  The newscaster—news reader, they called them over here—was talking about an ongoing court case that had started up just weeks before. Two Libyans stood accused of carrying out the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, twelve years before that had killed 270 people. It was a Scottish court, but was confusingly built in an old US Air Force base in the Netherlands.

  “I'll never get used to that,” Alice said, shaking her head. “Planes blowing up over here, stuff like that.”

  Stillman gave her a strange look. “I think you'll find, love, that the rest of the world has unfortunately been used to ‘stuff like that’ for quite some time. It's only in America that you're quite so insulated from knowing about it.” The corners of his mouth tugged down. “‘Over here,’ as you call it, we're more than familiar, I'm sorry to say.”

  “What, like not having trash cans and all that? The IRA, you mean?”

  Stillman gave her a sad smile. “That, and before. Barrage balloons and Anderson shelters and long hot nights in Underground stations. Yes, we've quite a history of things blowing up around us, more's the pity.”

  Alice plopped down on the end of the couch and started pulling on her socks, lacing up her Docs. “Sorry. Didn't mean to be insensitive or anything.” She turned her head to one side, looking over at him. “We're just…safe, in the United States, know what I mean? So we don't think about it as much. I mean, I know that a car blew up at the World Trade Center when I was in the fourth grade, and then that guy blew up that building in Oklahoma when I was in middle school, but it's still pretty rare.”

  Stillman's sad smile lingered. “Well, I hope you're right.”

  The way he said it, Alice was sure he knew she was wrong.

  Alice thought she spotted the man Stillman called the Huntsman as the Corvette pulled out of the garage, but he assured her she was probably mistaken.

  “He's like me, love,” he said with a smile. “Tends only to come out at night.”

  Alice couldn't get over how small all of the cars on the highway were. Of course, if Stillman was to be believed, here it was called a motorway. Whatever. Either way, the cars were all damned tiny. Even the trucks were small compared to those at home.

  Austin was a pretty liberal sort of town, well educated with lots of bookstores, and an alarming number of waiters had doctorates—it seemed a master's degree only got you a job in the kitchen—but even so, it was Texas, and so Alice had grown up surrounded by trucks. Big trucks. Really big trucks, and lots of them. Her mother drove an old Toyota Corolla, and her grandmother had driven an ancient Volkswagen Rabbit. If Alice had a license, she supposed that she'd have inherited the Rabbit, now that Naomi didn't need it anymore. But then she ran away. So much for that idea.

  Texas highways were always choked with pickups and SUVs and eighteen wheelers. Whenever Alice had ridden with her mother in the Corolla or her grandmother in the Rabbit, she'd felt like she would be blown off the road at any time.

  Nancy had driven a Renault Alliance. Nancy had been held back twice, so that by the time she was a freshman in high school she already had a driver's license. That was the start of the trouble, really, the temptation of jumping in the car with Nancy and skipping a few classes, or skipping school entirely. It was no fun to do it on foot, since you couldn't get far. But if you had a car? Well, there was no telling where you might get, or what you might get up to.

  The last time Alice had seen the Renault, it had been wrapped around the concrete and steel base of a highway light post, completely totaled, the front windshield smashed to hell and gone. Alice had worn her seatbelt, and so had suffered only a sprained neck, a few cuts and nicks, and severe bruises across her shoulder and chest where the shoulder belt bit into her flesh. Nancy, on the other hand?

  Anyway. Alice went back to thinking about the smallness of the cars on the motorway. When Stillman looked over and saw the strange expression on her face, the glistening in her eye, he started to ask her what was wrong, but she just turned the stereo up louder and lost herself in the sound.

  They stopped for gas after what seemed an eternity. Alice was surprised to discover they hadn't even left London yet. Greater London, anyway. How big was this city?

  The gas station had a Help Wanted sign posted in the window, and Alice entertained a brief fantasy about applying for the job, and staying, standing all day behind a counter and selling cigarettes and chewing gum to people with strange accents, making change for monopoly money, forgetting all about home and the accidents and her visions and her special destiny. Like anyone would hire a teenaged runaway epileptic with a nose ring and no marketable job skills.

  Back in the car, as they pulled onto the motorway, Alice decided she'd had enough of silence and her own memories. Another Bowie album was playing on the stereo. Alice wasn't sure if Stillman had put it on in honor of the trip, or just because he liked listening to it.

  “So, how'd you get into this line of work, anyway?” she asked. “Spying, I mean?”

  Stillman had his left arm casually draped over the back of the seat, his right wrist resting on the top of the steering wheel. He peeked around the edges of his clunky sunglasses at her, his expression unreadable.

  “That's something of a…complicated question. Or a simple question with a complicated answer, I suppose.” He mulled something over. “What the hell, eh? In for a penny, in for a pound.” He shifted on his seat and put both hands on the wheel. “The simple answer is that I was recruited by the SOE—the Special Operations Executive—during the early days of World War II. I worked for several years as a W/T, or wireless telegraph officer, in the more charming vacation spots of war-torn Europe. By the time SOE was officially dissolved in 1946, I'd been recruited as an agent of Signals Intelligence, MI8, and when it went unde
rground and off the books, I stayed on. I was the first Rook Three, and held damn near every post in the operation by the time I put myself out to pasture.”

  She was supposed to believe this? “Just how old are you, anyway?” He looked fifty, or a spry sixty at best. “When did you sign up, as a toddler?”

  Stillman treated her to a broad smile. “That's the more complicated answer.” He watched the road for a moment, in silence. “I was born in 1920. When I was still a kid, I met a man who told me that I was special, that I had a destiny, that I would go on to do great things.”

  That sounded familiar. But 1920? That would make him eighty years old? As if…

  “When I grew older,” Stillman went on, his tone level, “we became friends. Then…then we became more than friends.”

  “Oh.” Alice couldn't see how it was possible that Stillman was older than her grandmother, but she didn't have any trouble believing him when he talked about his friend. They'd been lovers. “Was that the guy in the portrait? And in the photo with you?”

  Stillman nodded, his mouth drawn tight. He drew a heavy breath and held it before replying. “My friend came from something of an oppressive background. He was never quite comfortable, even when we were alone. Of course, it wasn't as if he was wrong to be worried. In those days, homosexuality was still illegal in Britain, after all. It was a mental illness, they said. Alan Turing, one of the cryptographers at Bletchley Park, was prosecuted for homosexuality and ended up taking his own life after an unfortunate series of events.” He paused, a sad expression lining his face. “There but for the grace of God go I, if you believe that sort of thing.”

  Bowie was still blaring from the stereo, talking about time, who waited in the wings, speaking of senseless things. Stillman was still silent, lost in memory.

  “You know, I saw a documentary once,” Alice said, filling the silence. “About Bowie. It was on cable or PBS or something. There was all this footage of kids going to one of his concerts in America back in the early seventies, or hanging out in their bedrooms talking to the camera about how Bowie was God. And when I saw it, I couldn't help but notice how many of those kids were clearly gay. And just loving it, you know? That Bowie was up on stage, being all of these different people, blurring the lines between genders and stuff like that. You know? You could see it in those kids’ eyes, that they thought the long hard battle was over, and that from that point on, they could be anything they wanted to be. Homo superior or whatever, right? But then, what happened? Just a few years later, Bowie moved on to be some other character altogether, and punk came along, and metal. Don't get me wrong, I love punk, but maybe it wasn't as…accepting of gay kids as the whole glam thing had been. And metal? Forget about it.”

  Alice was silent for a moment, thinking back to those eager, hopeful faces. They'd be the age her mother was now, she figured. She wondered what had become of them.

  “Anyway. I just think about those kids, sometimes. Thinking that the future was here, and that they didn't have to be afraid anymore. What must it have been like, when they realized that they were wrong, and it was just like it had always been?”

  Stillman glanced at her but didn't say a word. They continued on up the motorway, finally leaving London behind.

  Alice had decided to take it as a given that Stillman was as old as he said he was. Because, really, was that any stranger than anything else he'd said?

  “So what happened to your friend? Your mentor, or whatever?”

  It was early afternoon, and the signs said they'd reach their destination in another hour at most, barring traffic.

  Stillman looked her way and sighed.

  “Just making conversation,” Alice said, a little defensively.

  Stillman nodded, and gave her a weak, weary smile. “All right. Fair enough. It's all been years ago, anyway.” He glanced at the backpack shoved beneath Alice's legs on the floorboards. “How about another of those cigarettes, though, eh?”

  Lighting the butt from the orange-glowing coils of the cigarette lighter, Stillman took in a lungful, and then with the smoke streaming from his nostrils, began to speak.

  “You see, we were hunting an escaped Nazi sorcerer named Otto Rahn.” Stillman slid his eyes left, and caught Alice's disbelieving look. “Yes, I said ‘sorcerer.’ If you like, you can think of it as someone who dabbles in the dark corners, as it were, a scientific researcher into unknown science. But our lot, we always just called them sorcerers. Anyway, Rahn was one of the Ahnenerbe, the Nazis who the SID had been eavesdropping on back in the war, but he'd faked his death before the war had even really started and gone into hiding. It was ironic, perhaps, that my friend and I were the ones to end up hunting him down, since Rahn had been forced to fake his death in the first place when it was revealed to his superiors that he was a homosexual. But there you have it.”

  Stillman drew on the cigarette, the burning ember at its end glowing brightly.

  “The Ahnenerbe, you'll recall, believed all sorts of strange nonsense, and Rahn was no exception. His contention was that the Eddas, the old Norse poems, contained hints about the burial place of the guardian of the Holy Grail. In 1936, while he was still ‘alive,’ he led a whole team of SS archeologists to Iceland to look for it. In 1947, after the war and under a new identity, he went back again, but this time my friend and I were on his heels. MI8 wanted to bring Rahn in, to pick his brains and see what sort of secrets he carried around between his ears. In any event, we were just a few steps behind Rahn when we lost the trail in Reykjavík and scoured the countryside looking for him. We split up but found no sign of Rahn. My friend did turn up an antique silver chalice, though, which he brought to our hotel and insisted that I accept as a token of his affection. Our own personal grail, he called it. He was always sentimental that way. He also brought with him an old friend of his who he'd run into along the way, a man named John Delamere, who was in Iceland on business of his own. As Delamere's purpose and our own were complementary, he joined us, and it was a few days later the three of us caught up with Rahn and his team, at the mouth of an erupting volcano.” A dark cloud passed over his face. “I…I was the only survivor, on either side, everyone else lost to the flames. I returned home, taking the silver chalice with me. That, and the portrait, and the photograph, were all I had left of him.”

  Alice's brows were knit. “Wait, did you say volcano?”

  Stillman looked at her, his eyes narrowed behind the clunky frames. “What of it?”

  “I think my grandmother was in Iceland at the same time. She talked about a volcano in, yeah, in 1947!”

  “Really?” Stillman was genuinely surprised. “How strange.”

  ON THE MORNING OF THEIR THIRD DAY in Llongborth, reasonably well rested and recuperated, Artor and his captains prepared to continue on their journey, only this time by land and not sea. Geraint had agreed to escort them himself to the hedge of mist of which he'd spoken and to outfit them with horses from his personal stables. The animals had been too long cooped up in their stalls, the Dumnonian king had insisted, and could do with the fresh air and exercise.

  Artor's captains had brought their own saddles and tack along with them on board White Aspect, as a matter of course, and so while Geraint's people prepared the animals, Galaad and the others were sent to see to the gear.

  The thought of mounting a horse made Galaad feel nauseated, even lightheaded. He'd not been on horseback since the accident, not since the spring morning when he and Flora had ridden out together and not ridden back. He knew, however, that if he refused to ride, he'd be left behind while the others rode out without him. For the others this journey might have begun with a whim on the part of Artor, the High King looking for some ready excuse to escape the tedium into which his life had sunk, but now it was clear that Artor burned with the same curiosity that had driven Galaad to his court in the first place. Having come face to face with the inhuman Huntsman and the unearthly hounds, Artor was determined to see this hedge of mist for himself and to see
what lay within. And though they'd come this distance on the strength of Galaad's visions, at least initially, Galaad was sure that Artor would not hesitate to continue on the journey without him if the need arose.

  So it was that Galaad resolved to overcome his fears, just as Pryder had said, to be the master of his emotions and not their slave.

  Handling the saddle and tack was only the first step, Galaad knew. Even so, he questioned his ability to keep his morning meal down, already feeling his gorge rise at the mere touch of the saddle leather.

  Having carried their gear to the stables, the captains began the business of dressing their horses for travel. Galaad hung back, the sting of bile at the back of his throat, and handed over saddles, bridles, and reins when requested.

  “Here, Galaad,” Artor called from the stable's door, Geraint at his side. The High King carried some sort of staff and bundle in his arms.

  Galaad handed Bedwyr his saddle, and then gratefully stepped away towards the door, grateful for the opportunity to move away from horses, if only briefly.

  “Yes, majesty?” Galaad couldn't help but fear that Artor had seen his disease with the animals and intended to ask after its cause. He tried to soften his queasy expression of distaste, to mask the quaver in his voice.

  “It is because of you that we have come this far,” Artor answered, leaning on a wooden staff almost as tall as he was, topped with some sort of bundle. “Whatever lies before us, whether danger or glory or death, it is down to you.”

  “Um, thank you?” Galaad was unsure whether to apologize or express gratitude, given Artor's manner. It sounded to him as though the High King welcomed danger.

  “Yes,” Artor said, nodding. “Well, it seems to me only fitting, given your pivotal role in our enterprise, that you should bear our standard when we ride out this morning.”