Elemental

by Steven Savile

  “I found it in the hall, in the ashcan.” Lang shrugged. “I should turn it over to the police, I suppose. They could swab it for DNA—”

  Van Diem grabbed Lang’s wrist and drew him close. “No!” He looked at his hand, talon-like, grasping Lang. He frowned and released the doctor.

  Lang rubbed his wrist, astonished at the old man’s strength.

  “My apologies, Dr. Lang, but you must not give that to the police. It is mine.”

  Lang had never imagined someone so old could have moved so fast. Psychotic mania triggered by what? The pipe? He dared not question him further.

  “I’d better leave. I’m upsetting you.”

  “No. Please.” Van Diem exhaled and his body seemed to collapse beneath the rumpled sheet. “I’ll tell you where Dr. Ambrose is.”

  He closed his eyes and fell silent.

  Dr. Lang waited, eager to hear more, but after a full minute of silence, he feared that he had triggered a stroke in Van Diem. He reached for the man’s wrist.

  Trancelike, Van Diem spoke: “I will show you where he is, doctor. Yes, that is the only way. But you must bring my expedition bag from storage. The pipe, too. And bring matches … plenty of matches.”

  At midnight, Dr. Lang descended into the basement of Oceanview. He’d never come here before; he didn’t like the dark. His overactive imagination, he supposed.

  But he had been motivated by the old man’s queer insistence … that, and a tip from his lawyer that the DA intended to file charges against him in the morning.

  So he’d come down here; he had to find Ambrose. Even a long shot was worth following. Whatever he found, it had to use it carefully—jog Van Diem’s memory and discover Ambrose’s whereabouts—but he didn’t want to risk getting the old man too excited. It might kill someone his age.

  Lang flicked on the lights; dim forty-watt bulbs hung like necrotic fruit throughout the half-acre chamber. Rows of shelving stretched to the ceiling and cast a matrix of shadows. It smelled of concrete and rat piss.

  He quieted his irrational fears and entered.

  Boxes on the shelves bore dated tags and Lang strode back in time, thirty years, until he found one marked: Diem, V. / Personal Effects No.: 98456.

  Dust coated everything in this basement … and there were scuffs around this box as if it had been recently moved.

  He considered calling the police and have them dust for fingerprints. But what if they didn’t care? What if they did and there was nothing to this? They could take him into custody and he’d never get another chance to see what Van Diem wanted so badly.

  Lang snapped on a pair of latex gloves and eased the box to the floor.

  Inside was a leather bag, blackened with age, and if Lang wasn’t mistaken, made from rhinoceros hide. It bore several scars and a bullet hole.

  He gingerly opened the bag; the leather creaked. Inside there were two side layers that hinged open to reveal dozens of individual compartments. Within the center space was a rotten butterfly net. There were moldering maps with notes handwritten in Arabic. Inside the smaller compartments were beetles, butterflies, worms, in jars filled with alcohol, others pinned, and some held by tiny mechanical pincers to immobilize their legs.

  What did an entomologist’s collection kit have to do with Ambrose’s disappearance? Despite what it said on Van Diem’s chart, Lang now doubted the old man’s mental faculties.

  He closed the bag and picked it up. It felt heavier than it had before.

  Lang crept back upstairs, and carefully looked up and down the halls to make sure no one was there. Every fourth fluorescent light was on, flickering, leaving dollops of shuddering illumination on the blue and gray tiles. He slinked past a cart full of uneaten creamed chicken, rice, and lime Jell-O.

  He slipped into Van Diem’s room without knocking. To his surprise the old man was awake, reading a magazine.

  Van Diem spied the bag in Lang’s hand and sat up.

  “I brought what you wanted.” Lang set the bag on the bed, which groaned under its weight.

  Lang noticed a new nightstand that hadn’t been there this afternoon. On it were scientific journals: Physical Review D, Topics in Topology, and Biochemical Clinical Psychology.

  Van Diem dragged the bag into his lap.

  From under his covers more magazines spilled open onto the floor. Lang bent to pick them up, finding dog-eared articles such as: “Unstable N-Manifolds Key to Stability,” “Signal Structure of Chemically Imbalanced Neurons,” “Wavefunction Probability Distribution and the Many-Worlds Theorem.”

  Fishing through the bag, Van Diem said, “Now we find Ambrose. You will help me.”

  “He wanted what was in your bag?”

  “Yes and no. The bag, my mind. Ambrose asked for answers … no, that’s not accurate. He tricked the answers from me.” Van Diem smoothed a hand over his head, through wispy white hair that Lang was certain had not been there this morning. “My pipe? Did you bring it as well?”

  Lang wasn’t sure letting him have the pipe was a good idea. Then again, the old man was talking; he wasn’t making much sense, but perhaps he could sort the fiction from the fantasy of Van Diem’s sudden mania. And besides, Lang had already tampered with potential evidence; there was no going back now.

  He produced the meerschaum pipe and handed it to Van Diem.

  The old man turned it over in his trembling hands, inspecting the white carved stone as if it were a precision instrument, caressing the wrinkles of the elephant’s trunk.

  “You can’t smoke in the building. I’ll get a wheelchair—”

  “Be good enough to strike me a light,” Van Diem said, “would you?”

  Lang considered. What harm could it do? There was no pure oxygen in the room, and he’d be here to watch. And did he really want the orderlies and the outside security cameras to see him wheeling around the centenarian for a midnight smoke?

  He opened the window and then fumbled through his pocket and handed Van Diem a pack of wooden matches.

  “Ah, good, matches. Infinitely better than a lighter. A moment please.”

  Van Diem opened his expedition bag and removed maps dotted with islands and Greek symbols, a dried toad, and a case of impaled butterflies with wings of opal, then halted when he found an ivory vial. He uncorked it and dumped its contents into his hand: three thumb-sized satin green moths. He then packed the creatures into the bowl of the meerschaum pipe.

  “Perception is the key.” Van Diem struck a match and watched the fire blossom; flames mirrored in his eyes. He touched the match to the dead insects and sucked the heat through the pipe. The creatures glowed, and their legs moved in the heat. They crackled and popped. They looked disturbingly alive, wriggling in the flames.

  One puff, a second, and he inhaled deeply. Blue smoke curled from his lips and nose and the bowl. It smelled of vinegar and vanilla.

  He exhaled, saying, “Most see only the faintest film of reality that surrounds them.”

  The air thickened and the smoke, rather than dissipating, remained curled and baroque tendrils of faintly luminescent fumes that caressed the air.

  “There is so much more.”

  The smoky veils parted … and the room changed.

  Lang blinked once, twice, three times, unsure if he saw correctly.

  Van Diem’s bed grew four posts and a canopy of red velvet. The blue and gray tiled floor rippled into hard stripes of stained oak. Shadowy Rembrandts in gilt frames pushed their way through the mint green paint of the walls. Gas lamps with Tiffany glass flickered on.

  Van Diem’s eyes were dark green, and they looked like two small beetles.

  Lang stood immobile, choking on half-formed words, trying to assemble a coherent thought. And then one bubbled to the forefront of his conscious mind: panic.

  He ran for the room’s door, ripped it open, and sprinted down the hall, knocking over the cart piled with leftover dinners. Recovering, he made a mad dash to his office.

  Behind him, Van Diem chuck
led.

  Lang paced in his office, behind its locked door, trying to work the terror from his body. He marched to his rosewood desk, back to the wall of reference books, and then to his desk where he sat and logged onto his computer.

  Hallucination. It had to have been a psychotropic chemical carried by the smoke. It had happened too rapidly, though, like no hallucinogenic agent he knew. And those beetles in Van Diem’s bag were thirty years old. What drug remained potent for so long?

  Lang punched up the hospital’s database and opened Van Diem’s file. The old man was the key to this. It was the same nondata posted on his chart.

  There had to be data on the man somewhere. No one existed in an information vacuum in this day and age.

  Lang went online, typed “Edward Van Diem” into a search engine, and pressed ENTER.

  He inhaled deeply, waiting for his query to bounce across the Internet. He could still smell vinegar and vanilla. In his peripheral vision he saw ripples, looked and saw only the dark wood grain of his walnut desk.

  An aftereffect of the drug?

  His computer screen blinked and Lang saw hundreds of search matches—but not for the “Edward Van Diem” he had typed, rather for one “Sir Eustace Carter Van Diem.”

  There were links to the history of African exploration, lists of controversial knighthoods granted in nineteenth-century England, the home page of the Royal Geographical Society, famous archeological digs in the Valley of the Kings, and accounts of lost expeditions to find the headwaters of the Nile.

  Lang opened a page at random.

  A tin daguerreotype appeared on screen. In it a spry elderly man in khakis and pith helmet stood between Zulu warriors who towered over him, their hands on his shoulders. The warriors brandished spears and were bedecked with feathers, smiles, and little else. The old man smiled, too. He held a Westly-Richards elephant rifle in one hand … and cradled a pipe in the other.

  Lang magnified the image.

  The pipe was white meerschaum, its bowl carved into the shape of an elephant.

  Could Edward Van Diem be this man’s grandson? He scrolled his magnified screen to the face. The resemblance was uncanny.

  Lang wasn’t sure what was going on, but hallucinations or not, Van Diem was talking now, and Lang had to hear what he had to say.

  He licked his lips, his mouth suddenly dry. He’d listen to Van Diem, but he’d take a few precautions.

  Lang unlocked the drawer in his cedar desk, grabbed the snubnosed .38 there, and shoved it into his coat pocket. Just in case. He wasn’t going to let whatever happened to Ambrose happen to him … if he could help it.

  “Come in, come in, Doctor. You are late for tea.”

  Lang’s eyes registered what used to be Van Diem’s room, but he failed to comprehend what he saw. He stood half in and half out of the doorway. He stood half in and half out of another world.

  A chandelier of a thousand cut crystals hung from the ceiling thirty feet above the polished cream-and-pink checkerboard floor. The three facing walls were green glass, with round portals cut into them that led to gardens filled with Olympian statues and flashing fountains. And upon the horizon stood towers of aquamarine luminous in the afternoon sun. Zeppelins glided smoothly by with metallic skins, and Big Ben, ornate with silver, struck four in the afternoon.

  Van Diem sat in a chair of bleached wicker and a table was within arm’s reach. The smoldering meerschaum pipe rested upon it, next to his expedition bag. Butterflies swarmed from the open bag: red ones with ghostly blue spots, green ones so small they appeared as tiny emeralds gleaming in the afternoon light, others of plain white with holes in their wings like pieces of flying lace, and ones with foot-long feathery antenna and tails of fog.

  Lang watched, unable to move.

  Van Diem took his pipe and puffed upon it. A Queen Anne loveseat appeared.

  No, it didn’t appear; Lang just saw it—as if it had always been there, and he’d never noticed it before.

  “Please sit, Doctor. I would like to share a few things before we find Dr. Ambrose.”

  Lang wanted to move, but his body was numb. He reached into his pocket and touched the pistol, a scrap of reality to anchor himself. He tasted metal in his mouth, and smelled the gun oil.

  “None of this is real,” he whispered.

  Van Diem appeared a man of fifty. Coppery hair crowned his head, and he wore satin black pants and a long coat trimmed with gold brocade.

  “Reality is,” Van Diem said, “malleable. That is what I learned in Africa, when I met the Sinjuro people, the butterfly people, the people who live in their dreams.”

  Lang recognized this younger incarnation of the old man. “Sir Eustace Carter Van Diem … ,” he said.

  Van Diem smiled the same smile he wore in the tin daguerreotype taken over a century ago. “I knew you were smart.”

  He picked up the pipe and lit it. The cloud of butterflies about him thickened, shimmered with colors and motion, confetti thrown into the air that never landed.

  “I apologize for the suddenness of all this, young man, seeing reality unveiled is unsettling. And, I’m afraid, it is entirely my fault.”

  Lang found he could again move; he turned, but the door that had been behind him was gone. In its place was a wall of green glass and beyond a metropolis with spires and domes of gold, a river of glittering silver, and farther still, a palace that gleamed like a million brilliant-cut diamonds. He closed his eyes, knowing this was only hallucination, the door was still there … along with the rest of the hospital. It had to be. Eyes shut, he tried to step back into the corridor, but felt only smooth glass.

  Butterflies landed upon his arms, coiling and uncoiling their spiral tongues. He shook them off.

  Van Diem motioned him to the loveseat, and Lang, not knowing what else to do, stumbled to it and sat.

  “Ambrose discovered my previous explorations as well,” Van Diem said. “At first he asked me simple questions about my name and where I was born. I remembered, at least, enough to keep him probing until he found my bag, field journals, and pipe.” He held the smoldering pipe tighter. “It was only then that I saw the darkness in the man’s heart, but, alas, by then it was too late.”

  He sucked on the pipe until the bowl glowed red. One of the fluttering insects, attracted to the light, flew into the bowl, sizzled, and made a great cloud of blue smoke. The air rippled.

  Van Diem stared at Lang and frowned. “I see from your sour expression that you are having a difficult time.” He sighed. “Perhaps a scientific explanation would better suit an educated mind? How quantum mechanics postulates that for every potential microscopic outcome there are alternate realities born? And infinite possibilities to pick amongst? A slight push with the mind—wavefunctions perturbate, tunnel, shift, and well, here we are.”

  Fossilized trilobites scuttled through the stone checkerboard floor.

  Lang grasped part of Van Diem’s explanation. The room took on a solidity it didn’t have before, feeling more real now.

  “But,” Lang said, twisting his hands together, “quantum mechanics only works on a microscopic scale. This is different.”

  Van Diem consulted his pocket watch. “Time grows short. We shall save the philosophical implications of existence for another day. I must explain about Dr. Ambrose.” He stood, and looked thirty now, a mop of red hair falling over his brown eyes. “But it is an explanation I will impart as we move.”

  Lang stood and backed away. “I can’t … .”

  “Come, come, man,” Van Diem said, his brows bunching together. “You have taken the first step. You have the proper mental facilities. A lesser man could never have entered this room and survived with a shred of his sanity intact.” He pointed at him. “Observe.”

  Lang’s lab coat was gone. Instead, he wore a doublet and hose, and the .38 snubnose had become a silver flintlock tucked into a wide black leather belt. A cape of dark gray cascaded off his shoulders and down his back.

  Lang smoothed
his hands over the velvety material. If this was hallucination, it was like nothing he had ever read of. It reminded him of how he felt when he had painted; he’d imagine, and with a brushstroke it would be created. How different was this? It was something he desired to explore more.

  “All right,” Lang whispered. “I think I can keep an open mind.”

  Van Diem found his smile again. “Good.” He walked over and clapped Lang on the shoulder. “Some think that having an open mind is a form of madness. But you shall learn it is so much more.”

  He led Lang through a portal in the glass wall, through a garden of fountains, past water that shot up in wavering columns and glistening buxom nymphs that splashed one another in the wading pools.

  Lang and Van Diem descended a set of winding steps, back and forth, switchbacking down into the city.

  A blanket of fog settled around them as the sun set.

  The buildings were slender structures with Victorian ironwork and painted lavender, crimson, with roofs covered in slate. The people on the streets wore togas, Civil War Cavalry uniforms, business suits, body paint, and one who passed them had on a white space suit with the helmet tucked under her arm.

  Lang pulled his cloak tighter about himself to ward off their too-curious stares.

  A tabby wearing a fedora and one lime-green boot on its hind leg brushed against Van Diem.

  “Fish?” the cat asked.

  Van Diem patted its haunch, and then took a puff of his pipe. A school of carp swam out of the mist, spied the cat, and darted away.

  The tabby scrambled after them.

  “Ambrose is here?” Lang asked, shooing a butterfly from his lips.

  Van Diem pointed to a footbridge that arched over a black river. “There.”

  The structures in that part of the city leaned against one another, tilting at odd angles. They had broken windows and weeds grew between cobblestones. The streets were deserted. The house Van Diem indicated had been charred by fire—save the door, which was lacquered red and embossed with a Chinese dragon.