“Ah,” he told himself, “I’m but the humblest servant.”
Fortunately the crossing did not coincide with a time for prayer; however he found that his vision was fogging. Ducking down out of sight behind some cargo, he opened the golden box and cradled the holy eyeball naked in his palm once more. The soft ball seemed to burn icily as though still frozen. Inspired, the Half-Face popped his glass prosthetic from its rebuilt orbit and replaced it with the Ayatollah’s own.
His vision swam. He saw two scenes at once: the hellishly gaunt, approaching cliffs licked by sea-spume, and what he could only interpret as a glimpse of paradise, the slope of a verdant valley where fountains of milk gushed, spilling down in streams, where all manner of jewels glittered—a landscape girt with a dance of scintillating pastel auroras like diaphanous rose-and-pink veils of maidens, though minus the maidens. Ahead was a curiously imprecise promise of ecstasies without substance, as if he was seeing this terrain in some warmer Eden of the past, courtesy of an angel.
Some such subconscious, submerged vista must always have lurked in his inner gaze, as a cynosure, a focus. In this mystical moment he appeared to remember the lost object of all his buried desires. The whole island swelled with the light of joyful creation, the conjuring of mischievous beauty. Honey flowed like lava from one hilltop.
He shut the eye that was his own; and through that other, holy eye he saw only the sternness of cliffs again, their stark authenticity. Gulls screamed battle-cries. The sun was an ulcer of yellow pus, its after-image a ball of blood. The impact of waves faintly echoed that torrent of boulders he had heard on a previous occasion at the battlefront.
“Why, Satan-author,” Ali said to himself in surprise, “you are in hell already.”
When he closed his holy right eye to regard the scenery with his left eye, heavenly auras sparkled again, interference patterns between two modes of vision, awakening deeply hidden memories of a time when he had perceived the world freshly with wonder, long ago; of a time when he had been born and had to create a universe around himself.
“In hell indeed,” he added, “unless your eyes see otherwise.”
After he left the ferry to mount the island, he hiked with either his right eye open or his left, the holy eye mapping out barren geometries of rock and sky and grass, the other eye teasing the tastebuds of his soul with that shimmer of scanty pastel veils behind which raw beauty beckoned.
He stepped out, he halted, he stepped out. The holy eye led him along a stony track towards what had once been a crofter’s cottage and was now a sprawling homestead with mirror-glass windows surrounded by a high wire fence, supposedly to deter goats. The only guards these days were gulls.
The Satan-author sat at a desk. Haggard, yes. A nervous twitch in one eye; almost totally bald. Yet as he looked at this intruder who pointed a pistol as though out of habit, the author smiled.
“So it has come at last.”
That damnable smile, of sanity still sustained!
Ali shut his holy eye. Seen through his left eye, a nimbus surrounded the author’s head. Ali reverted to his right eye, tightening his grip on the gun as he scanned the despicable face. A moment later he looked with his left eye too, and his vision swam again dizzyingly, so he closed the left eye.
“You look like a human traffic light,” remarked the author as though choosing wry last words for posterity, fit for some future dictionary of quotations.
Ali’s holy attention was caught by a paper-knife used to open the author’s voluminous, redirected correspondence, all his envelopes full of cheques paying him lavishly for his blasphemy in the currencies of Satan: dollars, pounds, francs, marks.
Now Ali’s left eye also noted the knife with the sharp point. A roseate halo stained the blade with diluted blood. The handle was iridescent mother-of-pearl. Ali remembered the battle against Iraq and suddenly felt cheated. Strange desire surged within him.
“Which,” he asked, as if this was a riddle, “which is my real eye? My true eye?”
Perhaps amazed at the idiosyncrasy of human nature, the author stared at this man who opened one eye then the other turn by turn, squinting at him. Was he really being offered a choice as though in a fairy tale? A choice between life and death—or only a choice between types of death?
He hesitated, then spoke at random. “The left eye.”
“An angel guides your words.” Ali snatched up the knife, opened both eyes at once, and pointed the steel tip at the holy one.
The author tensed, imagining that he had chosen wrongly—perhaps could never have chosen correctly!—but Ali skewered the eye of the Ayatollah, drew it forth dripping humours, and stabbed the knife and its jelly burden down upon the desk.
“This,” said Ali, “is the eye that sees hell.”
A weight of years-long possession drained away from Ali’s heart; and for the first time since he could recall, his own left eye leaked tears.
KARL EDWARD WAGNER
At First Just Ghostly
KARL EDWARD WAGNER was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and trained as a psychiatrist before becoming a British and World Fantasy Award-winning writer and editor. His first novel, Darkness Weaves With Many Shades, introduced Kane in the first of an unusually intelligent and brutal heroic fantasy series that continued with Death Angel’s Shadow, Bloodstone, Dark Crusade and the collections Night Winds and The Book of Kane.
He expanded the exploits of two of Robert E. Howard’s characters, Conan and Bran Mak Morn respectively, in the novels The Road of Kings and Legion from the Shadows, while his superior horror stories have been collected in In A Lonely Place, Why Not You and I? and Unthreatened by the Morning Light. He has edited eleven volumes of The Year’s Best Horror Stories (currently being hardcovered as Horrorstory), three Echoes of Valor anthologies and the recent Intensive Scare.
Wagner is a regular visitor to London, and “At First But Ghostly” reflects his enthusiasm for that ancient city, its arcane mysteries, and the popular ’60s television series The Avengers. It is also part of a novel he has been working on for the past few years.
I. Beginning Our Descent
HIS NAME WAS Cody Lennox, and he was coming back to England to die, or maybe just to forget, and after all it’s about the same in the long run.
He had been dozing for the last hour or so, when the British Airways stewardess politely offered him an immigration card to be filled in. He placed it upon the tray table beside the unfinished game of solitaire and the finished glass of Scotch, which he must now remember to call whisky when asking at the bar, and this was one of the few things he was unlikely to forget.
Lennox tapped his glass. “Time for another?”
“Certainly, sir.” The stewardess was blonde and compactly pretty and carefully spoke BBC English with only a trace of a Lancashire accent. Her training had also taught her not to look askance at first class passengers who declined breakfast in favor of another large whisky.
Lennox’s fellow passenger in the aisle seat favored him with a bifocaled frown and returned to his book of crossword puzzles. Lennox had fantasied him to be an accountant for some particularly corrupt television evangelist, doubtlessly on an urgent mission to Switzerland. They had not spoken since the first hour of the flight, when after pre-flight champagne and three subsequent large whiskies Lennox had admitted to being a writer.
Fellow passenger (scathingly): “Oh, well then—name something you’ve written.”
Lennox (in apparent good humor): “You go first. Name something you’ve read.”
In the ensuing frostiness Lennox played countless hands of solitaire with the deck the stewardess had provided and downed almost as many large whiskies, which she also dutifully provided. He considered a visit to the overhead lounge, but a trip to the lavatory convinced him that his legs weren’t to be trusted on the stairs. So he played solitaire, patiently, undeterred by total lack of success, losing despite the nagging temptation to cheat. Lennox had once been told by a friend in a moment of drunk
en insight that a Total Loser was someone who cheated at solitaire and still lost, and Lennox didn’t care to take that chance.
Eventually he fell asleep.
Cody Lennox liked to fly first class. He stood a rangy six-foot-four, and while he still combed his hair to look like James Dean, his joints were the other side of forty and rebelled at being folded into a 747’s tourist-class orange crates. He was wont to say that the edible food and free booze were more than worth the additional expense on a seven-hour flight, and his preventive remedy for tedium and for jet-lag was to drink himself into a blissful stupor and sleep throughout the flight. Once he and Cathy had flown over on the Concorde, and for that cherished memory he would never do so again.
He still hadn’t got used to traveling alone, and he supposed he never would.
He looked through the window and into darkness fading to grey. As they chased the dawn, clouds began to appear and break apart; below them monotonous expanses of grey sea gave way to glimpses of distant green land. Coming in over Ireland, he supposed, and finished his drink.
He felt steadier now, and he filled out the immigration card, wincing, as he knew he would, over the inquiry as to marital status, etc. He placed the card inside his passport, avoiding looking at his photograph there. There was time for another hand, so he collected and reshuffled his cards.
“We are beginning our descent into London Heathrow,” someone was announcing. Lennox had nodded off. “Please make certain your seatbelts are fastened, your seat backs are in the upright position, your tray tables are . . .”
“The passengers will please refrain,” prompted Lennox, scooping up the cards and locking back his tray. “Batten the hatches, you swabs. Prepare to abandon ship.”
“Do you want to know why you never won?”
“Eh?” said Lennox, startled by his seatmate’s first attempt at conversation since the Jersey shore.
The mysterious accountant pointed an incisive finger toward the cabin floor. “You haven’t been playing with a full deck.”
The Queen of Spades peeked out from beneath the accountant’s tight black shoes.
“The opportunity to deliver a line such as that comes only once in a life-time,” Lennox said with admiration. He reached down to recover the truant card, but the impact of landing skidded it away.
Probably the really and truly best thing about flying first class across the Atlantic was that you were first off the plane and first to get through immigration and customs. Lennox had a morbid dread of being engulfed by gabbling hordes of blue-haired widows from New Jersey or milling throngs of students hunchbacked by garish knapsacks and sleeping bags. “Americans never queue up,” he once observed to an icily patient gentleman, similarly overrun while waiting for a teller at a London bank. “They just mill about and make confused sounds.”
“The purpose of your stay here, sir?” asked the immigrations officer, flipping through Lennox’s passport.
“Primarily I’m on holiday,” said Lennox. “Although for tax purposes I’ll be mixing in a little business, as I’m also here to attend the World Science Fiction Convention in Brighton some days from now.”
The officer was automatically stamping his passport. “So then, you’re a writer, are you, sir?” His eyes abruptly focused through the boredom of routine, and he flipped back to the passport photo.
“Cody Lennox!” He compared photo and face in disbelief. “Lord, and I’ve just finished reading They Do Not Die!”
“Small world,” said Cody imaginatively. “Will you still let me in?”
“First celebrity I’ve had here.” The immigrations officer returned his passport. “Your books have given me and the wife some fair shivers. Working on a new one, are you?”
“Might write one while I’m here.”
“I’ll want to read it, then.”
Lennox passed through to baggage claim and found his two scruffy suitcases. They were half-empty, as he preferred to buy whatever he needed when he needed it, and he hated to pack. He also hated carry-on luggage, people who carried on carry-on luggage, and cameras of all sorts. Such eccentricities frequently excited some speculation as to his nationality.
Cody Lennox was, however, American: born in Los Angeles of a Scandinavian bit-player and a father who worked in pictures before skipping to Mexico; educated across the States with two never-to-be-completed doctorates scattered along the way, and now living in New York City. He had had eight best-selling horror novels over the last five years, in addition to some other books that had paid the bills early on. His novels weren’t all that long on the best-seller lists, but they were there, nonetheless, and film rights and script work all added up to an enviable bundle. He had been on Johnny Carson twice, but he had never hosted Saturday Night Live. His books could be found at supermarket check-out counters between the tabloids and the TV Guides, but only for a month or so. It was a living. Once he had been happy with his life.
Cody Lennox hauled his pair of cases through the green lane at Heathrow customs. He had made this trip a dozen times or more, and he had never been stopped. Sometimes he considered becoming a smuggler. Probably he looked too non-innocent for the customs officers to bother examining his luggage.
He looked a little like an on-the-skids rock star with his designer jeans and t-shirt and wrinkled linen jacket. He still had the face of a young James Dean, but his ash-blond hair was so pale as to seem dead-white. His left ear was pierced, but he seldom bothered to wear anything there, and his week-old smear of a beard was fashionable but too light to be noticed. He wore blue-lensed glasses over his pale blue eyes, but this was more of necessity than style: Lennox was virtually blinded by bright sunlight.
Lennox adjusted his scarred watch to London time while he waited to cash a traveler’s check at the bank outside the customs exit. He saw no sign of his seatmate, and for this he was grateful. Bastard might have told him about the missing card.
The Piccadilly Line ran from Heathrow to where Lennox meant to go, but he was in no mood for the early morning crush on the tube. Still feeling the buzz of a long flight and too many drinks, he joined the queue for a taxi—nudging his cases along with his foot, as he endured confused American tourists and aggressive Germans who simply shoved to the front of it all.
Lennox was very tired and somewhere on the verge of a hangover, when the next black Austin stopped for him. He tossed his cases into the missing left-side front seat and pulled himself into the back. After the 747 the back seat was spacious, and he stretched out his long legs.
He said: “The Bloomsbury Park Hotel. Small place on Southampton Row. Just off Russell Square.”
“I know it, guv,” said the driver. “Changed the name again, have they?”
“Right. Used to be the Grand. God only knows what it was before that.”
II. Lost Without a Crowd
IT WAS NOT much after nine when the cab made a neat U-turn across Southampton Row and landed Lennox and his cases at the door of his hotel. In addition to changing its name, the Bloomsbury Park Hotel had changed management half a dozen times in the dozen or so years that Lennox had been stopping there, but the head porter had been there probably since before the Blitz, and he greeted Lennox with a warm smile.
“Good to see you again, sir.”
“Good to be back, Mr. Edwards.”
It had been about a year since his last stay here, and Edwards remembered not to inquire about his wife.
The newest management had redone the foyer again; this time in trendy Art Deco, which fitted as well with the original Art Nouveau décor as did the kilt on the golden-ager tourist who was complaining his way across the lobby in tow of his wife.
Jack Martin was at the reception desk, scribbling away at a piece of hotel stationery.
“Hello, Jack.”
“Cody! I don’t believe it! I was just writing you a note telling you where I was staying.”
“Synchronicity, good buddy. When’d you get here?”
“Flew in Sunday from L
.A. Still coping with jet-lag, but I walked over here to see whether you’d checked in yet. Had breakfast? Guess they fed you on the flight. How was it?”
“OK. Anything you can walk away from is OK. Here, better let me register.”
Lennox filled in forms while Martin worked on a cigarette. No, his room wasn’t ready yet, but Lennox had expected that, and the porters would see to his cases in the meantime.
The girl at the desk was auburnhaired, Irish, and half Lennox’s age, and he wondered if she’d been here last time. Probably so, or else she was instinctively cheeky.
“You’re very popular, sir. Two calls for you already.”
“More likely ten, judging by my usual luck with hotel switchboards.” Lennox studied the messages. “Mike Carson says to give him a ring and I owe him a pint. And the other one—from a Mr. Kane?”
“He said he’d be getting in touch.”
“Never heard of him. Social secretary from Buckingham Palace, isn’t he? Come on, Jack. Let’s go get something to drink.”
“Pubs won’t open until eleven,” Martin pointed out.
“Let me show you my private club.”
There was a minimart just down Southampton Row from the hotel, and Lennox bought Martin a carton of orange juice and two cans of lager for himself. Cosmo Place was the alleyway that connected onto Queen Square, where there were vacant benches beneath the trees. Lennox was just able to keep his hands from shaking as he popped his first lager.
Martin was trying to solve the juice carton. “So, Cody. How are things going?”
It was more than a casual question and Lennox hated the glance of watchful concern that accompanied it, but he had grown accustomed to it all and it no longer hurt so bitterly.
“Can’t complain, Jack. They Do Not Die! is still hanging high on the lists, and Mack says the sharks are in a feeding frenzy to bid on my next one.”
“How’s that been coming along?”
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