At first people hoped that the miracle—for so it seemed—allowed some possibility of rescue, but they soon learned better. Between two of the wavefronts was a narrow corridor which coincided with a side road and led apparently to safety. One family, who had miscalculated their evacuation plans, piled into a car and drove off down the corridor, but halfway their car seemed suddenly to halt, as if frozen. Norton still looked at it occasionally. Through the rear window could be seen two young children, faces caught in smiles, hands arrested in mid-wave. It was clear that the phenomenon was only local, and crossing some invisible threshold they had emerged into the real-time world. At least, he thought, they would never have time to realise that their escape attempt had failed; it was left to those still trapped to experience anguish on their behalf.
Norton wondered what one of the many spy satellites which he supposed crossed overhead would make of the scene, if any of their equipment was sensitive enough to register anything. Perhaps some future historian, analysing the destruction of London, would slow down the film and wonder at an apparent burst of high-speed motion in the area on which the explosions converged. The historian would probably rub his or her eyes in puzzlement and dismiss it as an optical trick, like the after-images which played behind one’s eyelids after staring into a blight light.
“So will you come?” Carver was saying.
Norton dragged his attention back to the conversation, aware that Carver had been talking and that he had not been taking in what he was saying.
“Come? Where?”
“Through the interface. I want somebody else to see this. It’s amazing, Norton. The experience of a lifetime. The last experience of a lifetime. Why miss it?”
Norton’s first instinct was to protest that he wasn’t interested, that there seemed little point in seeking out new experiences when extinction was, at best, days away, but then he realised that in fact some purposeful action—even a pretence at purposeful action would be welcome. Terminal patients given the bad news by their doctors didn’t just lie down and wait to die, if they had any spirit: they got up and got on with their lives for as long as they could. In the last analysis that was all anyone could do, and here everybody—the Greek card players, the partygoers, Carver—seemed to be doing it except him.
“Sure,” he said. “But what about protective clothing? You’ve got all that ...” He gestured at Carver’s bulky and absurd-looking outfit.
“It’s unnecessary. In fact it’s hotter out here than it is there. I don’t know what I was thinking about—if I had run into the heat a thousand of these would have been no protection. All you need is goggles, and I’ve got a spare pair at home.”
Carver got up, tossed a £5 note on the table and walked away, gesturing Norton to follow. He lived just off the High Road, in a large, double-fronted redbrick Victorian house, most of whose neighbours had been turned into bedsits. His house was still intact, though the front garden was a tangle of hollyhocks choking amid brambles, and the wood in the window sashes was visibly rotten. Little attention was evidently paid to its upkeep.
Inside was a dim hallway floored with cracked brown linoleum and cluttered with coatstands and hatracks. There was a heavy odour of dust, old leather and indefinable decay.
Carver went through into one of the rear rooms. Norton followed, then paused in the open doorway. It was a large room, with French windows opening on to the garden. It was impossible to tell what the decorations might have once been like, because the whole room was choked with a profusion of different objects. All the walls were lined from floor to ceiling with books, old and expensive bindings jammed alongside garish paperbacks seemingly at random. More books were heaped on the floor, in chairs and on tables. The rest of the room was a wild assortment of clocks, globes, stuffed animals, model ships and engines, old scientific and medical equipment, porcelain, musical instruments and countless other items. Carver made his way—almost wading through the detritus—to a desk, where some of the clutter had been pushed aside and a second pair of goggles lay amid knives, glues and offcuts of polarized plastic.
“Don’t mind the mess,” he said jovially, seeing Norton still hovering uncertainly by the door. “The whole house is like this, I’m afraid. Never could stop accumulating stuff. Never could throw anything out. My wife used to say I’d been a jackdaw in my previous lives. That’s why I didn’t leave, you know. I couldn’t start off again somewhere else without all this. Sometimes I think there’s more of me here—” his gesture took in the room, and the other rooms beyond it—“than here.” He tapped the side of his skull.
Norton suddenly warmed to the man, seeing him properly for the first time as another human being, not just an irritating presence. Carver seemed to sense this and turned to fiddle with the goggles for long seconds while embarrassment dispersed from the atmosphere. “I made these up myself,” he said. “Ordinary dark glasses are no good. You need extra thicknesses, lots of them. Trouble is, if you put the things on anywhere else you can’t see a damn thing.”
Carver insisted on showing Norton the place where he had gone exploring earlier, though he was equally adamant that this time they would cross over somewhere else. He had stripped off the cumbersome protective suit and now cut an unlikely figure as a pioneer in a Hawaiian-style shirt and corduroy slacks. He had uprooted two stout wooden poles, giving one to Norton and keeping the other himself. They walked away from the High Road, took the second turning on the left, and came face to face with another wall of shimmering, eye-wrenching colourlessness. On its surface, as if holographic images had been pasted to it, were images of Carver’s back as he crossed the interface and his front view as he returned.
“You see,” Carver said, “light can’t escape, so the image is trapped there like a fly in amber until the thing moves forward far enough for it to break up. It’s already starting to happen.”
Looking closely Norton could see that indeed the images were taking on a slightly unfocused aspect, as though viewed through a wavering heat haze.
They walked back to the High Road, passed the cafe—where a group of men were standing round a table watching five more play out an obviously tense card game; side bets were apparently being exchanged—and approached the interface which blocked the street.
“Right,” Carver said. “Keep close by me. If in doubt wave the stick in front of you. If not in doubt still wave the stick in front of you.” He laughed, and Norton smiled in return. They pulled on their goggles and then, like blind men, tapping their way with their sticks, they walked through the interface, leaving their departing images stuck to its surface so that to anyone casually watching from the cafe it would have looked as if they had both suddenly and improbably halted in mid-stride.
Norton found himself enveloped in a soundless blizzard of brilliant light. Even through the thick laminations of polarized plastic the luminosity was almost painful; it was like looking too near to the sun, except that there was nowhere to turn away. The light seemed to bounce and swirl around him, to cascade on his head and fountain up from the ground. There was a singing in his ears, and he felt as though he was walking into a wind, a zephyr of pure incandescence, its photon pressure sufficient to resist his progress.
He felt exhilarated, almost ecstatic, as if he was coming face to face with God. The light was cleansing, purifying. He found that he was moving with an involuntary swimming motion of his arms, propelling himself into the cool heart of this artificial sun with a clumsy breaststroke.
“Norton! Be careful!” Carver’s voice came as if from under water, far away; it splashed faintly against his ears but was washed away in the radiant tide.
Carver was at his side, tugging at his shirt. He turned and looked at the other man. Carver seemed to glow, to fluoresce. The intense effulgence overpowered ordinary colour, making him a surreal sculpture in degrees of brilliant white. His skin seemed luminous and translucent, and when Norton lifted his own hand he found it was the same; he fancied he could see dim outlines of bone t
hrough the flesh. When Carver moved he cut swathes through the light; a sudden motion of his stick sent splintered refractions in all directions.
“Carver—” Norton said, and his words seemed to be snatched away as if he was talking into a silent hurricane. “This is extraordinary ... incredible ...” The sentence trailed away; he had no words to describe the experience.
Carver laughed. “Who’d have thought that this lay in the heart of a nuclear explosion, eh? I don’t know, though—those slow-motion films always were beautiful if you could forget what they were.”
“How far can we go?” Norton shouted, turning away and moving towards the heart of the radiance, using his cane like a mine-detector.
“Only a few yards. You’ll see.”
Norton moved on a dozen paces, then the tip of his stick abruptly exploded into brilliant fire, like a sparkler on Guy Fawkes’ Night. He withdrew it, stamped on the burning end. Several inches had vanished from its tip in an instant.
“It’s here,” he called in warning. “Just ahead.”
Peering forwards he fancied he could see the further interface, the fireball advancing at its own slow, inexorable pace behind the light flash. Even through the radiance he thought he could detect flickering patterns of orange flame dancing across its surface. Norton was suddenly reminded of what lay beyond there ... but for now it was enough to be drifting, clad in a nimbus of cool white fire.
Carver, a pale haloed ghost of a figure, was at his side. He swished his stick playfully through the fireball’s surface, coming away each time with a couple of inches less on the tip. He was like a lion-tamer, holding inconceivable energy at bay with just the stick and the force of his personality.
“Don’t get too close,” Norton warned, as the other man edged forward. Carver took no notice, so Norton tapped him on the shoulder with his own stick. Carver began to turn, but as he did so his foot caught on the kerbstone. He teetered, began to fall backwards, mouth widening in surprise: fell faster than Norton could lunge forwards, into the fireball.
Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion, as though Carver had fallen into still another time anomaly. He appeared to hang suspended as his hair burst into flame and his skin began to char. Puffs of steam rose from his body. His shirt was consumed so quickly that it simply seemed to vanish. His lips drew back as if he was about to say something, but they were only shrivelling with the heat. Behind them the gums burned away, exposing bone that blackened swiftly, though the teeth remained anomalously white until the enamel cracked and burst. The goggles melted, exposing steaming sockets in a face that was turning into a skull even as he fell. His body cooked, as if Norton was watching an accelerated film of meat being roasted. The skin crisped, then peeled away; the flesh followed, crumbling and flaking away from bones that snapped and popped from their sockets and themselves began to burn. By the time Carver hit the ground all that was left of him was a charred heap of smouldering detritus which blew away in clouds of ash even as it settled. It had taken only seconds; the only sound which reached Norton was a soft, almost plaintive sigh.
Norton watched, transfixed with horror. Then as nausea rose in him he stumbled away, dropping his stick. He burst out of the interface into total darkness—then ripped off the goggles and squatted by the pavement, retching until all he could wring from his stomach was a thin trickle of sour yellow bile.
Now, as Norton looked sidelong at the images recording the beginning and end of yesterday’s tragic adventure, he saw that the interface was undergoing a change. Patterns played more vigorously across its surface; fans of light sprayed outwards briefly; it seemed to vibrate, as if to a deep bass tone. It’s breaking down, he thought. It won’t be long now.
To his surprise his major feeling was not fear but relief. He understood now why condemned prisoners sometimes sacked their lawyers and actively sought their execution rather than trying to delay it.
He felt he would prefer to be at home when it happened, so he turned back into Marlborough Street. As he passed number 6 a voice called out his name. It was Mr McDonald, a friendly and gregarious pensioner who lived there with his equally good-natured wife: Norton had always got on well with them on a pleasant superficial level. Lacking transport, the McDonalds had been unable to evacuate even if they had wanted to.
Mr McDonald was busily giving the sitting room windows a second coat of whitewash. “Just putting the final touches,” he said cheerily. The McDonalds had spent the last eight days as they had spent the week before, turning part of their house into a fallout shelter, following an official instruction leaflet. To them the last week seemed to be a God-given opportunity to finish the job properly. Their house did not have a cellar, so they had fitted out the large cupboard under the stairs, protecting it with countless black dustbin bags filled with earth. Inside were carefully arranged supplies of food, water and medicine; bedding and primitive cooking equipment; and even a portable chemical toilet. Before retirement made such recreations impossible to afford the McDonalds had been keen campers, and regarded their expertise and lovingly-stored equipment as particular good fortune. A few days ago Mr McDonald had insisted on showing off their impressively well-organised shelter to Norton; had even offered to squeeze up and make room for three if he hadn’t the materials to build his own defences. What was more, although the offer was made only out of politeness, Norton was sure the McDonalds would have gone through with it if he had pressed them. But he had declined politely, assuring them of the adequacy of his own preparations.
Now, with the image of Carver vivid in his mind, he felt like shouting at Mr McDonald, shocking him into a realisation of how futile his efforts were in the face of the kind of forces held delicately in check all around him. But it would only hurt and confuse the old man, who was simply following the instructions which he had been told would keep him safe.
Norton waved goodbye to Mr McDonald and started to walk away. But even as his foot lifted, the air seemed to shudder and split around him, and before his senses were able properly to register the phenomenon the world was filled with an instantaneous, consuming brilliance, a white fire that was neither cool nor pure.
THE VENTRILOQUIST’S DAUGHTER by Juleen Brantingham
Juleen Brantingham was somewhat reticent when asked for some background information: “I was born in Ohio in ’42 and did nothing very interesting until ’77 when I made my first sf sale to Terry Carr for Universe 9. I’ve had stories published in TZ, Asimov’s, and Shadows. I love horror/fantasy, especially short stories—I think the longer forms don’t pack the same kind of punch—but in spite of my preferences I find I am working now on what may be a mystery/suspense novel.”
Brantingham might have added that she has published extensively outside the science fiction/fantasy field and that she is a regular contributor to Charles L. Grant’s Shadows anthology series. She also confesses to doing most of her work in longhand—a secret practice of many of the best writers in this genre. Brantingham currently lives in Louisiana.
The ventriloquist’s daughter got out of the cab stiffly, the ache in her bones protesting every movement. It will be over soon, she told herself. All this psychosomatic nonsense should stop now that the old bastard is dying. This is the happiest day of my—she winced as she raised her head to look at the dust-clouded windows of the upper floor. For a moment tears blinded her.
The cab driver hadn’t spoken since he picked her up at the bus station. If he’d guessed who she was, if the people in town still remembered who used to live here, he gave no sign of it. But when she had paid him he looked at the house and frowned.
“Miss, would you like me to wait?” He didn’t bother to say that there was probably no telephone here. It wasn’t necessary. The sagging lines of the house described poverty and neglect.
She shook her head and turned away, hoping he would take the hint and leave. This was a moment for privacy, and she wanted to savor every bit of it. It didn’t matter that when she had finished what she came here to do s
he would have a very long walk ahead of her. For some reason she couldn’t picture herself taking that walk, couldn’t image an “after.” She had been plotting her revenge for years. At times it had been the only thing that kept her alive and she had come to think of “after” the same way she thought of heaven—a pleasant hypothesis but only a hypothesis, having nothing at all to do with life as it had to be lived.
She waited, facing the house, until the sound of the cab had faded and blended with the summer afternoon insect buzz. Then, leaving the case she had brought in the dust of the road, she walked up the path, climbed the steps to the front door. Her hand fumbled for the knob, finally found it a foot lower than memory placed it. It was hard to see the house as it was now when what it had been was so much more real and important.
The inside looked a little better than the outside. He must have paid someone to come in and clean from time to time. Perhaps he’d been planning to come back for a visit, before this last illness had made it impossible for him to think of travelling more than a few city blocks.
She stood in the front hall, looking through the arch to the living room. She hadn’t realized that this part of it would be so hard. When they left, twenty-five years ago, they had taken nothing that couldn’t be packed in suitcases. If she could discount the pain and the fact that she was a little taller, everything was the same as when she used to run home from the school bus stop to find him waiting for her, there in that lumpy armchair in the shadows.
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