by Tim Pratt
He sat a while, thinking, chasing vague pictures around in his mind. He heard, or was conscious of, the rapid but slowing beat of her frightened heart.
"Miss Patchell," he said, turning to her, his voice gentle. "I have not at any time looked into your records. Until--ah--yesterday, you were simply another face in the class, another source of quiz papers to be graded. I have not consulted the registrar's files for information about you. And, to my almost certain knowledge, this is the first time I have spoken with you."
"That's right, sir," she said quietly.
"Very good, then." He wet his lips. "You are twenty-three years old. The house in which you were born was a two-story affair, quiet old, with a leaded bay window at the turn of the stairs. The small bedroom, or nursery, was directly over the kitchen. You could hear the clatter of dishes below you when the house was quiet. The address was 191 Bucyrus Road."
"How--oh yes! How did you know?"
He shook his head, and then put it between his hands. "I don't know. I don't know. I lived in that house, too, as a child. I don't know how I knew that you did. There are things in here--" He rapped his head, shook it again. "I thought perhaps you could help."
She looked at him. He was a small man, brilliant, tired, getting old swiftly. She put a hand on his arm. "I wish I could," she said warmly. "I do wish I could."
"Thank you, child."
"Maybe if you told me more--"
"Perhaps. Some of it is--ugly. All of it is cloudy, long ago, barely remembered. And yet--"
"Please go on."
"I remember," he half-whispered, "things that happened long ago that way, and recent things I remember--twice. One memory is sharp and clear, and one is old and misty. And I remember, in the same misty way, what is happening now--and what will happen!"
"I don't understand."
"That girl. That Miss Symes. She--died here yesterday."
"She was sitting right behind me," said Miss Patchell.
"I know it! I knew what was going to happen to her. I knew it mistily, like an old memory. That's what I mean. I don't know what I could have done to stop it. I don't think I could have done anything. And yet, down deep I have the feeling that it's my fault--that she slipped and fell because of something I did."
"Oh, no!"
He touched her arm in mute gratitude for the sympathy in her tone, and grimaced miserably. "It's happened before," he said. "Time and time and time again. As a boy, as a youth, I was plagued with accidents. I led a quiet life. I was not very strong and books were always more my line than baseball. And yet I witnessed a dozen or more violent, useless deaths--automobile accidents, drownings, falls, and one or two--" his voice shook--"which I won't mention. And there were countless minor ones--broken bones, maimings, stabbings... and every time, in some way, it was my fault, like the one yesterday... and I--I--"
"Don't," she whispered. "Please don't. You were nowhere near Elaine Symes when she fell."
"I was nowhere near any of them! That never mattered. It never took away the burden of guilt. Miss Patchell--"
"Catherine."
"Catherine. Thank you so much! There are people called by insurance actuaries, 'accident prone.' Most of these are involved in accidents through their own negligence, or through some psychological quirk which causes them to defy the world, or to demand attention, by getting hurt. But some are simply present at accidents, without being involved at all--catalysts of death, if you'll pardon a flamboyant phrase. I am, apparently, one of these."
"Then--how could you feel guilty?"
"It was--" He broke off suddenly, and looked at her. She had a gentle face, and her eyes were filled with compassion. He shrugged. "I've said so much," he said. "More would sound no more fantastic and do me no more damage."
"There'll be no damage from anything you tell me," she said, with a sparkle of decisiveness.
He smiled his thanks this time, sobered, and said, "These horrors--the maimings, the deaths--they were funny, once, long ago. I must have been a child, a baby. Something taught me, then, that the agony and death of others was to be promoted and enjoyed. I remember, I--almost remember when that stopped. There was a--a toy, a--a--"
Jeremy blinked. He had been staring at the fine crack in the ceiling for so long that his eyes hurt.
"What are you doing?" asked the monster.
"Dreaming real," said Jeremy. "I am grown up and sitting in the big empty lecture place, talking to the girl with the brown hair that shines. Her name's Catherine."
"What are you talking about?"
"Oh, all the funny dreams. Only--"
"Well?"
"They're not so funny."
The monster scurried over to him and pounced on his chest. "Time to sleep now. And I want to--"
"No," said Jeremy. He put his hands over his throat. "I have enough now. Wait until I see some more of this real-dream."
"What do you want to see?"
"Oh, I don't know. There's something..."
"Let's have some fun," said the monster. "This is the girl you can change, isn't it?"
"Yes."
"Go ahead. Give her an elephant's trunk. Make her grow a beard. Stop her nostrils up. Go on. You can do anything." Jeremy grinned briefly, then said, "I don't want to."
"Oh, go on. Just see how funny..."
"A toy," said the professor. "But more than a toy. It could talk, I think. If I could only remember more clearly!"
"Don't try so hard. Maybe it will come," she said. She took his hand impulsively. "Go ahead."
"It was--something--" the professor said haltingly, "--something soft and not too large, I don't recall..."
"Was it smooth?"
"No. Hairy--fuzzy. Fuzzy! I'm beginning to get it. Wait, now... A thing like a teddy bear. It talked. It--why, of course! It was alive!"
"A pet, then. Not a toy."
"Oh, no," said the professor, and shuddered. "It was a toy, all right. My mother thought it was, anyway. It made me dream real."
"You mean, like Peter Ibbetson?"
"No, no. Not like that." He leaned back, rolled his eyes up. "I used to see myself as I would be later, when I was grown. And before. Oh. Oh--I think it was then--Yes! It must have been then that I began to see all those terrible accidents. It was! It was!"
"Steady," said Catherine. "Tell me quietly."
He relaxed. "Fuzzy. The demon--the monster. I know what it did, the devil. Somehow it made me see myself as I grew. It made me repeat what I had learned. It--it ate knowledge! It did; it ate knowledge. It had some strange affinity for me, for something about me. It could absorb knowledge that I gave out. And it--it changed the knowledge into blood, the way a plant changes sunlight and water into cellulose!"
"I don't understand," she said again.
"You don't? How could you? How can I? I know that that's what it did, though. It made me--why, I was spouting my lectures here to the beast when I was four years old! The words of them, the sense of them, came from now to me then. And I gave it to the monster, and it ate the knowledge and spiced it with the things it made me do in my real dreams. It made me trip a man up on a hat, of all absurd things, and fall into a subway excavation. And when I was in my teens, I was right by the excavation to see it happen. And that's the way with all of them! All the horrible accidents I have witnessed, I have half-remembered before they happened. There's no stopping, any of them. What am I going to do?"
There were tears in her eyes. "What about me?" she whispered--more, probably, to get his mind away from his despair than for any other reason.
"You. There's something about you, if only I could remember. Something about what happened to that--that toy, that beast. You were in the same environment as I, as that devil. Somehow, you are vulnerable to it and--Catherine, Catherine, I think that something was done to you that--"
He broke off. His eyes widened in horror. The girl sat beside him, helping him, pitying him, and her expression did not change. But--everything else about her did.
Her face shrank, shrivelled. Her eyes lengthened. Her ears grew long, grew until they were like donkey's ears, like rabbit's ears, like horrible, long hairy spider's legs. Her teeth lengthened into tusks. Her arms shrivelled into jointed straws, and her body thickened.
It smelled like rotten meat.
There were filthy claws scattering out of her polished open-toed shoes. There were bright sores. There were--other things. And all the while she--it--held his hand and looked at him with pity and friendliness.
The professor--
Jeremy sat up and flung the monster away. "It isn't funny!" he screamed. "It isn't funny, it isn't, it isn't, it isn't!"
The monster sat up and looked at him with its soft, bland, teddy-bear expression. "Be quiet," it said. "Let's make her all squashy now, like soft-soap. And hornets in her stomach. And we can put her--"
Jeremy clapped his hands over his ears and screwed his eyes shut. The monster talked on. Jeremy burst into tears, leapt from the crib and, hurling the monster to the floor, kicked it. It grunted. "That's funny!" screamed the child. "Ha, ha!" he cried, as he planted both feet in its yielding stomach. He picked up the twitching mass and hurled it across the room. It struck the nursery clock. Clock and monster struck the floor together in a flurry of glass, metal, and blood. Jeremy stamped it all into a jagged, pulpy mass, blood from his feet mixing with blood from the monster, the same strange blood which the monster had pumped into his neck...
Mummy all but fainted when she ran in and saw him. She screamed, but he laughed, screaming. The doctor gave him sedatives until he slept, and cured his feet. He was never very strong after that. They saved him, to live his life and to see his real-dreams; funny dreams, and to die finally in a lecture room, with his eyes distended in horror while horror froze his heart, and a terrified young woman ran crying, crying for help.
The Heidelberg
Cylinder
by Jonathan Carroll
It began the day our new refrigerator was delivered. A big silver thing that looked like a miniature Airstream trailer turned on its side. But Rae loved it. We had bought it a few days before. In January I told her as soon as my raise comes in, you get your fridge. And I kept my promise, all six hundred and thirty-nine dollars of it.
Two puffing deliverymen came in the pouring rain to curse and shove it into place in our kitchen. Both guys were in big bad moods, that was plain. But no wonder--who wants to deliver appliances in a ripping thunderstorm? When they were finished and I'd signed the delivery papers, Rae offered coffee. That perked them up. After they'd done stirring and sipping and settling into the chairs one guy, "Dennis" it said on his shirt, told a strange story that got us thinking.
For the past few days while driving around making deliveries, they'd seen piles of furniture all over town stacked in the middle of sidewalks. That didn't seem so strange to me. But Dennis said they saw it at least ten times overall: big piles of furniture heaped up, just sitting there unguarded usually.
"No that's not true," his partner Vito piped in. "Remember when we saw the man and woman standing next to a pile up on Lail Avenue, arguing? They were really fighting! Arms flying, pointing fingers at each other. It was like one had thrown the other outta the house with all their stuff, but you couldn't tell who'd thrown who."
"Just furniture? Nothing else? No moving vans there or anything? No people guarding the stuff?"
"Nope, that's the weird part. These piles of furniture and boxes, like whole households, stacked up and no one around. Go figure."
The four of us sat there drinking coffee, thinking it over. Then Dennis said, "We saw another pile coming over here today. Remember that nice blue leather couch and TV I pointed to? Jeez, stuff looked brand-new. Big screen TV... Just sitting out in the rain getting drenched.
"Times are tough. Maybe it's coincidence, but I hear a lotta people are being thrown out of their houses by the banks."
"All at the same time? I don't think so, partner," Vito said sarcastically to him and winked at me.
Dennis straightened up and threw him a black look. "You got a better explanation, genius?"
"Nope. Just that it's weird. Never in my life have I seen stuff that nice left out alone on the street unguarded. And so many times. In the rain? Makes the whole town look like a big yard sale."
Right then Chapter Two began but none of us knew it yet. Before anyone had a chance to say more, the doorbell rang. I looked at Rae to see if she was expecting someone. She shook her head. Who now?
I got up to answer it. A second after opening that door I wished I hadn't. Standing on my porch were two guys looking like wet seals. One glimpse and you wanted to say, "No thanks to whatever you've got," slam the door in their faces and run for cover.
Naturally they were smiling. But you know the kind--totally fake. No one smiles like that without putting too much face into it. Or they got a gun stuck in their back. These guys were wearing identical brown suits freckled dark all over with rain. Bright yellow plastic nametags were pinned on their breast pockets. White shirts with the top button buttoned but no ties. Both had bowl haircuts that made them look like monks or The Beatles gone bad. And they smelled. I'm sorry to have to say that, but they did. They smelled like they'd lived in their buttoned-up rayon shirts way too long.
"Good morning, sir! I'm Brother Brooks and this is Brother Zin Zan."
"Brother who? You want to say all that again?" I stood back and gave them a lot of room, just in case they exploded and their crazy went all over my porch.
"Brooks and Zin Zan. Would you have a few moments to spare? It may just change your life!"
I knew where this was leading and was just about to adios them, but a thunderclap shook the house and rain came down like a tidal wave. What could I do, shove them back out in that flood? Really unhappily I asked, "You want to come in a minute?
Their faces lit up like Yankee Stadium for a night game. "We certainly would. Thank you very much."
In for a penny, in for a pound. "Want some coffee? Looks like you could use it."
"No thank you, sir. But it's certainly kind of you to offer."
"Well, come on in." They stepped into the hall and I closed the door. They both wore black basketball sneakers with a brand name written in white on the side that I couldn't make out. I thought it was kind of strange that Bible guys would be wearing sneakers. Much less underneath a suit.
"Bill, who was it?" Rae called out.
"Brooks Brothers and Sen Sen." I couldn't resist saying. And you know what? Brooks started laughing.
"That's very funny, sir. People always make that mistake. But actually, it's Brother Brooks. And Brother Zin Zan. He's from New Zealand."
"New Zealand. Is that right? You're pretty far from home. Sorry for the mistake. Come on in."
I went first to see what would happen. When Rae and the delivery guys caught a view of who was following me, they got exactly the same look on their faces--Whaaat?
"Everybody, this is Brother Brooks and Brother Zin Zan. They say they can change our lives." I said it like I was introducing an act in Las Vegas.
Picking right up on it Dennis said, "Sounds good to me. Anything to stop delivering refrigerators!"
Rae stared at me like I'd gone nuts. Both of us hate door-to-door preachers with their ridiculous speeches and too many teeth. Her face asked, why had I let these guys in? Suddenly our house was like the dog pound--every stray in town under one roof, dripping on her carpets. I sat down but the Brothers kept standing. To my surprise, Zin Zan started talking. He had a strong accent. Then I remembered he was from New Zealand. The whole time he spoke, Brooks gave him an all-attention smile that looked as phony as a tinfoil Christmas tree.
"We represent a brotherhood called The Heidelberg Cylinder. Our avatar is a man named Beeflow."
"Beef-low?" Dennis looked at his partner and me, then wiggled his eyebrows and O'd his mouth.
"No, sir, Bee-flow. We believe we are entering the Second Diaspora. It will formally begin with the Millennium
and continue for another 16,312 years."
"Sixteen thousand, you say? With or without intermission?"
My sweet wife tried to smooth that one over. "Would you two like some juice?"
"Thank you, Ma'am, but we don't drink anything but water. Beeflow says--"
"Who's this Beeflow?"
"Our spiritual master. Chosen avatar by--"
"What's an avatar? Sounds like that new model Honda."
Brother Brooks liked that one too. He smiled and for the first time it looked real. "No sir, an avatar is an incarnation of a deity. A kind of God in human form, you could say."
"What did your Mr. Beeflow do before he became God?"
Maybe it was the way Rae said it, so respectful and serious. Or maybe because Dennis and I were watching each other when she spoke. Whatever, as soon as my wife asked her question so gently, the three of us guys cracked up. I mean big time. We laughed so hard we choked.
"He was a travel agent."
"Good career move!" I said, which brought down the house again. Except for Rae. She FedExed me her stone face and I knew what that meant. I shut up fast.
"So what do you guys believe in? I mean, like a quick wrap-up of your religion?"
"We believe in rent control, a river view when possible, and forced air heating."
The living room got silent fast. Real silent.
"Say that again?"
"Room, sir. We believe in the just and proper distribution of room. Human space. Apartments, houses, it makes no difference. A civilized place to live."
"Geodesic domes," Zin Zan added, nodding.
"What the Hell are you talking about? I'm not following you here, Brother Brooks."
"Well sir, have you noticed all the furniture out on the streets of the city recently? Piles of it, looking like it's waiting to be picked up?"
"We were just talking about that!"
"It's the first sign of the beginning of the Diaspora."