by Trevor Hoyle
Behold in this mirror –
The thought came from nowhere.
– all your past and future times.
Jeff Cawdor didn’t know how or why he knew this, but his entire history lay scattered before him in these fragments. And also the history that had yet to be made.
For a while back there (Kersh can admit it now) he was spooked. Got himself all worked up and jittery, to the extent that he wasn’t sleeping too good. Real bad dreams – strapped in the electric chair, staring at a fly on the back of his hand. If I fry, little fly, you fry. Fried fly. So damn real, in fact, that he could feel the raw skin prickling where they’d shaved his temples to attach the electrodes.
Sprawled on the white couch, drink in hand, Kersh allows himself the expansive luxury of a mild twinge of regret. After all, he concedes, it sure spiced things up – got the old brain box a-buzzing. The nerve-ends twitching. Boozing and watching TV and shafting Sue Ellen are fine and dandy, but even a steady diet of that gets pretty boring after a while. At least worrying about Cawdor kept him on his toes.
But hey now – he grins – let’s not go overboard. Be thankful for what you’ve got, Frankie boy. Let’s not forget that Cawdor was the one person who could have screwed all this up. Baby Sam was right about that – and right to warn him, too. Give the stinking bag of pus some credit.
In his spare moments Kersh has puzzled over a couple of things. How, for instance, did he get to know about Cawdor in the first place?
OK, through Baby Sam, yeah. But Baby Sam was voicing to Kersh what he knew already. So how did he find out about Cawdor? It was a knotty problem, one that Kersh wrestled with for ages until the answer came to him in a dream. In this dream he was in a hot cramped space that stank to high heaven. He could hear the swirling rush of water through the timber planking. In the light of a flickering candle he saw a circle of figures surrounding a woman. Not that Kersh in his dream was merely an observer; he was active in it, too, a participant in these events. The woman’s name was Saraheda Cawdor. She had a husband named Jefferson, and a son, Daniel. And the whole thing had been as real as his dream of the electric chair. Fact was, Kersh came to realise, his dreaming life was just as real as his waking life here in the penthouse. Sometimes he confused the two – that maybe the penthouse and his presence in it was a dream, and his dreams the true reality.
That’s what gave him the idea, and solved the mystery.
His dreams were the answer – that’s how he knew about Cawdor. When he awoke from them he had a gut feeling, kind of a hunch, about what was happening out there, and that’s where Baby Sam came in. The knowledge was there all along, buried deep in Kersh’s dreams; the scumbag was there to spell out in plain language what the dreams meant.
Then all Kersh has to do then is pass the warning on to the Messengers by tuning into the right channel. Like right now he sees them kneeling in a gloomy chamber somewhere, bowing and chanting and calling his name over and over. This in itself is worth the price of admission: watching these guys hanging on to his every word, looking to him for guidance. Sheeeit.
Kersh is cock-a-hoop that he managed to figure all this out for himself, considering the fact that brainwork was never his strong suit. And this stuff is so damn hard to get a handle on, makes it feel like the top of his head is coming loose. He’s always been that way – acted first, thought second. Maybe that’s been part of the problem. He killed that dumb kid in the gas station without thinking once, never mind twice, about it. So what the hell. The jerk had it coming to him.
Make my day!
Kersh can’t help but laugh aloud at this, head thrown back, glass spilling liquor. He wipes his one good eye with the back of his hand, still chuckling. None of that means jackshit now. Here he is, boy, sitting pretty. This swell penthouse on top of the tower, plus the woman of his dreams (whenever he feels the need) to share it with him. Everything, in fact, he ever wanted. No strings attached. The Messengers had delivered as promised and hadn’t demanded a single favour in return. Kersh has wondered about that too. Tell the truth, it bothers him a little, because in his experience you never get something for nothing. There’s always a payoff. A squaring of accounts somewhere down the line.
But this time he’s clear and running and free as a bird. This time Frank Kersh has come out on top, just where he ought to be. And he means to stay there.
He slides off the couch and pads up to the bar, the black silk robe flapping loosely. The sensual feel of it against his skin makes him think of Sue Ellen. But he’s not in the mood right this minute. And not being in the mood, naturally she doesn’t appear. Kersh has come to realise this – that he has to really want something for it to happen. If he genuinely desires it, then – bingo! – it’s his. It appears. Merely thinking about it won’t do the trick. Which is just as well, because he wouldn’t like to encounter some of the stuff he dreams about. There’s a lot of funny – that is, weirdo – garbage buried down there that rises to the surface when he’s asleep, and Kersh isn’t keen to come face to face with it – if it has a face. He suspects it hasn’t. A nameless, formless shape, like the smell of fear, that just hangs there shivering on the edge of his awareness.
Even thinking about it now makes him feel uneasy. Spoils his relaxed and benevolent frame of mind. Snap out of it, Frankie, he chides himself. Don’t spoil the party. Everything’s under control.
He freshens his drink, takes a belt, strolls out on to the balcony. There’s no breeze, but the air feels cool and fresh. The pale slice of moon is still in the same spot. He’d start to worry if it wasn’t. No change. That’s what Kersh wants. Everything to stay exactly as it is this minute – the moon, the stars, the carpet of glittering lights. This is fine. This is just dandy.
Those poor saps down there don’t know what they’re missing. Like rats in an endless maze. Following each other nose to tail, round and round and never getting nowhere. And to think he used to be one of them. Most people are so stupid, you can hardly give it credit. Example. Kersh has never understood why everyone gets upset when there’s an earthquake or an airplane crash or some so-called ‘disaster’. There it is, splashed all over the front pages and on the TV bulletins, everybody going around with long faces saying how awful it is, and isn’t it terrible, blah-blah, those poor people, 50 killed, 200, 2,000, whatever.
What the fuck was so terrible about it? The planet was crawling with people, swarming over it like lice. What was 50 less, or 50,000, or even 50,000,000? Look on the bright side. It meant more space, more opportunities, more of everything for those who were left. You could spread out a little, breathe in some air that hadn’t been breathed in and out by a zillion other anonymous lice. How could you feel sorry or sad for people you’d never known and never even heard about until they were involved in a ‘disaster’?
Kersh can’t recall ever once feeling sorry. His only reaction was Tough crud. Glad it was you and not me.’
That’s how most people really and truly felt, deep down, though of course they’d never admit it. Instead they wept crocodile tears and went around shaking their long faces at one another, saying, ‘Isn’t it awful; isn’t it terrible?’ Terrible my ass. Now what would be terrible was if it was me instead of them.
Same bullshit about the 6,000,000 Jews. So what? Kersh had never noticed any lack of Jews around, even after they got rid of 6,000,000 of them. They were all over the damn place. Heads of multimillion-dollar corporations. Politicians. Journalists. Authors. And about 90 per cent of show business, it seems to Kersh. Christ, you could wipe out another 6,000,000 and not even make a dent. Not that he has anything against Jews in particular; it was all this crap about the so-called Holocaust that pissed him off. He’s lost count of the number of TV documentaries he’s seen about it. More like not seen, because the minute they come on he switches channels. Sooner watch a re-re-rerun of I Love Lucy than another fucking Holocaust special.
He remembers how sick he’d been when he found out that the Marx Brothers were Jewish. He
thought the Marx Brothers were great. They broke him up. After that he couldn’t stomach them.
Kersh leans on the rail, sipping his drink. He leans right over and looks straight down. This is some mean motherfucker of a tower block, he thinks. Must be two fucking thousand storeys high. A long way down. And a long way up. Nobody coming up here in a hurry, brother, no sir. It’s a comforting thought, and its warmth spreads through him like the liquor warming his gut.
Plus he’s got Baby Sam and the gang down there. His private little army of guardian angels. Tell the truth, Baby Sam scares the living shit out of him. Not because of who or what he is – a disgusting sack of seeping brown sewage on feelers – but because Baby Sam reminds Kersh of those dream phantoms of his. That murky stuff shivering on the edge of his consciousness. Like as if Baby Sam came to him in a nightmare and then appeared before him in the flesh.
Kersh shivers. Sheeeit, don’t even think about it. Kersh takes a gulp of his drink and doesn’t.
SHATTER’D PIECES OF MIRROUR
1
The heavens were in turmoil. Gilbert Gryble brooded on the significance of these planetary disturbances, and wondered if the cause could possibly be the massive and mysterious ‘black bodies’ hypothesised by Michell, exerting their powerful influence on the stars in their courses.
On two successive nights now he had observed several dozen blazing meteors. And the planet Venus, brightest object in the sky, had been obscured, as if wreathed in vapour. Most disturbing of all, towards the western horizon, in the direction they were travelling, lights had flared up brilliantly for just a few seconds, and then been extinguished. Gryble searched his star charts in vain. What did these phenomena portend? Were they signs capable of interpretation, if only he had the means and knowledge?
Gryble was disquieted by it all. It seemed to him that the discord in the sky was a mirror reflection, seen darkly, of what was happening on board ship. The fear was palpable. People shunned one another. Children no longer played games on deck, but stayed close by their parents, sullen-faced. The officers and common seamen went grimly to their tasks. There was no open worship, as before, just huddled murmurings by lamplight, furtively hidden from the general view.
The Salamander was infected by a general plague of the spirit, Gryble ruminated. The ship carried with it the smell of the charnel house. Not everyone believed Cawdor and his frenzied accusations. But even those who didn’t could sense the malignant mind fever that hung over everything, as ever present, as inescapable, as the stench of the privy.
When at first his wife and son couldn’t be found, and he had roamed the ship searching for them, Gryble had feared for Cawdor’s sanity.
Like an automaton, Cawdor had stalked through every deck, peering into every face, shaking people from their beds, tearing aside the flimsy shelters they had erected for privacy and disturbing them in all manner of circumstances and occupations. Indeed, he had the look of a madman. Everyone shrank from his stare, which was that of a man possessed. And his constant repetition – ‘My wife, my son, have you seen them? Have you seen them?’ – was like a dirge, until eventually he was mumbling the words mechanically, without meaning.
Captain Vincent had already instituted a search of steerage and the middle part of the ship which had produced nothing. Cawdor didn’t respond to this. He neither accepted the result, nor rejected it. He went off alone and did it all again, himself. He went through the middle part, with the minimum courtesy of at least rapping on the cubicle doors before he barged inside. The bulk of the passengers tolerated this, watching in silence as he looked in every corner, under the beds, even rummaged through their trunks and chests. Anywhere that might conceal a woman or a boy, and some places that conceivably couldn’t, unless they had been dismembered.
It was when Cawdor turned his attention to the upper decks of the quality end that the trouble started which was to finally snap the captain’s patience, invoke his wrath, and bring about Cawdor’s downfall.
An officer had been posted at the head of the companionway next to the mizzenmast, to keep watch on Cawdor’s movements, and another at the double hatch leading off the quarterdeck. They had been polite with him, reasonable, and quite firm. All the cabins on the upper decks had been investigated by the first lieutenant, Mr Tregorath, personally, and he was satisfied they contained no person they shouldn’t. There was really no need for Mr Cawdor to trouble himself. In any case the captain absolutely forbade any intrusion into the private affairs of the ladies and gentlemen.
‘Surely, Mr Cawdor,’ said one of the officers, a young midshipman, who made the mistake of smiling sympathetically, ‘you can’t seriously accuse anyone up here of the act of concealment. The ladies and gentlemen have given their solemn word that they haven’t laid eyes on your wife, or your son.’
‘I don’t doubt it for a minute,’ Cawdor replied. ‘And I believe them. I want to see for myself, that’s all,’ and a second later stepped over the midshipman, who was staring at the spinning mizzenmast with glazed eyes and wondering why the deck had suddenly tilted to the vertical.
Cawdor didn’t get the chance to see for himself. Four seamen were despatched to block him, and they were none too gentle in their methods. He was put in his cubicle, bruised and bleeding, with two men guarding the door, while Captain Vincent debated what to do with him.
It was at this point that Gilbert Gryble had requested to see the captain, to plead on Cawdor’s behalf, and been turned down. The captain knew the facts of the matter, thank you most kindly, and he was in no mood for instruction or persuasion; Cawdor had been warned already about his conduct, and now must suffer the consequences of his disruptive, unacceptable behaviour.
Gryble puzzled over this ‘warned already’, when one of the officers reported it to him. When, and for what reason, had Cawdor been warned before? In Gryble’s experience Cawdor was a man of decent character and genial disposition, rather stolid by nature, who spent a good deal of his time cramming architecture and building practice. Except for the sole occasion when Cawdor had intervened to save the young man from injury, and possibly death, in that bizarre ritual, his conduct had been unremarkable.
But it seemed that the captain had his own sense of justice, and it was a harsh one, Gryble thought bitterly. Too harsh. Almost vindictive. For what man in Cawdor’s position, driven to the point of extremity, wouldn’t have reacted in so violent a fashion?
Good God, his wife and child gone! Wiped from the face of the Earth as though they never existed! Enough – more than enough, surely to God – to send any man to the edge of sanity and beyond?
Saraheda and Daniel were not on the ship, that much seemed certain, Gryble acknowledged.
They were by now many miles behind, and many miles deep.
Misadventure or foul play? They had vanished three nights ago, and no alarm had been raised. Captain Vincent had interrogated the officer of the watch, Gryble had heard, who had reported no incident and no disturbance during that night. It was a mystery, and would remain so, unless a witness was found, and none had come forward.
Of course, if it was foul play, then it was unlikely that anyone would volunteer information, because they would be implicated in the deed. Either they were directly responsible, or if not should have at least alerted the watch to this nefarious, suspicious activity. That avenue of speculation was a dead end, Gryble concluded. Such a person, or persons, would clamp their mouths tight as man-traps.
Misadventure then? Yet, the more he examined the possibility, the less tenable it seemed. Two people falling overboard, and not a cry to be heard? Why were they on deck at all, in the middle of the night? And odder still, Gryble pondered – where the devil was Cawdor while these events, accidental or intentional, were taking place? Fast asleep in his bed? Otherwise engaged? Gryble couldn’t conceive of any activity that would distract Cawdor to the extent of wantonly neglecting his wife and son. He was such a loving husband and dutiful father that Gryble found this aspect of the affair the mo
st worrisome and baffling of all.
That, and the brooding atmosphere on the ship, and now the discord in the heavens, all conspired to fill him with dread and foreboding.
The voyage had started out with such hope and high expectation – an adventure in the New World! Pioneer settlers with their eyes firmly fixed on a glorious golden future! Opportunity! Freedom! Achievement! Those had been the resounding watchwords.
Words that now rang in Gilbert Gryble’s head like so many cracked bells.
2
Gryble had to grasp the iron hoop with both hands and use every ounce of his strength to budge the heavy wooden trap door. He heaved it open, taking care not to let it crash back on its hinges. Even from down here, in the murky depths of the vessel, below the waterline, the noise might be heard on the upper decks. Gryble didn’t care to be hauled before the captain and charged with gross disobedience.
He peered over the edge. The lantern’s weak light made no impression on the black void below. He heard the swirl and slap of water, smelt the noxious odour of putrefaction. Something had died down here, and was in the process of decay.
‘Cawdor! Are you there? Where –’
A face seemed to swim up to him, floating in the gloom. Red-rimmed eyes blinking in the lamplight. The voice was a hoarse whisper. ‘Who is it? I can’t see.’
‘Gilbert Gryble. I’ve fetched something for you to eat. I couldn’t manage soup, but there’s salted pork, hard biscuit –’ His round face contorted, now that his eyes had adjusted to the darkness. ‘Holy Mother of God, Jefferson, this is a hell-hole. I imagined it to be foul, but this is beyond belief…’ He gulped back his nausea. ‘Reach up and take it. Here. Quick. I mustn’t tarry!’
There was a rattling noise.
Gryble stared. ‘Suffering Saints, man, are you chained too? Why didn’t the captain have you flogged and keelhauled and have done with it?’