“Overnight to you,” Reynolds said and his voice skipped. “He was taken almost every night.”
And every day returned to his world, to my world. To live years over the course of a night; to wake each morning in his bed, thinking it all a dream. How I had once laughed at my uncle and his small circle of friends, all of them old, bent men. How young might they have honestly been?
“Miss Franks—” He clasped my hands within his own. “Agnes. I never intended for you to come here. You are dead to your world; time has gone on without you and made what it will of Baltimore.”
Though I wished to believe that all of this was some terrible dream, I knew within my heart that it was not. Edgar’s stories of this place should have prepared me. He had seen this place; its people had loved him and in the end destroyed him.
“Only overnight,” I said. “I can go back.” I had to know, what had become of my world? Was my uncle truly gone? Had the thing I feared most come to pass? It could not be. What if he still lived?
“What are you not telling me?”
Reynolds grabbed my arm. “It isn’t just overnight—not for you.”
It was then that Reynolds’s trespass became clear to me. I had misunderstood what the queen showed me. Every day my uncle woke in my world, it was Reynolds who brought him to that moment. Reynolds unstitched the decades that had passed within this strange world to bring my uncle back into my time, so that I might have a living relation at my side.
How many times should my uncle have died? It was no wonder he’d tried to cut out his own eyes when at last he seemed firmly rooted here.
“It remains her choice,” the queen said to Reynolds. “You asked us to allow that, to never take another of her kind without their permission. This is no different because you love her.”
I looked beyond the queen’s star-wreathed head, to the vast sky where golden birds stretched their wings. No, not birds; angels. When I looked the right direction, I saw their slim bodies. But where was the sea my uncle wrote of, I wondered, and watched the slow ebb and flow of the entire city itself and realized the city is the sea and wanted to weep with the joy of it.
“You would live a full life here,” Reynolds said.
My eyes met Reynolds’s. When I looked at him a certain way, I saw the truth of him, his true body, and if I looked deeper, I saw to the heart of him. Darker, fouler; a seam of brightness. He could take me back as he did my uncle, I thought, but he doesn’t want to.He wanted to keep me.
“I want to go back.” I had to go. To look—to see whatever had become of whatever I loved.
The queen seized my chin in her pear-wet hand and my world went black.
When light returned, it fell in hazy curtains around me. The air was ashen, bits of burnt paper falling as snow would. Walls like skeletal fingers rose around me. Scattered bricks, the stench of burnt wood. I saw hunched figures in the street and ran for them, but as I neared they became only heaps of more debris. I saw no people.
Though my legs were tired and ached with each step, and my lungs burned, I walked on. I walked up streets once familiar to me; dead, burnt things crunched underfoot. I searched for anything I might recognize and while there were ruined shops aplenty, I knew none of them.
I walked through all the wreckage of this city, until the sun touched and began to fall below the horizon. Exhaustion dragged me to sit on a curb and I couldn’t find the energy to mind the rubbish I settled in.
How many years had passed Baltimore by? How long had the city lain in ruin? Was it God who decided to destroy this place, or man? Did it matter at all?
In the remains at my feet, I found a scrap of poetry, about a woman with hyacinth hair. It could not be my uncle’s handwriting—though perhaps it was, for as I stood to continue my journey, I could not remember his handwriting. I could barely remember his face.
It was his voice I remembered best of all, and the beat of those words in my head. The seam. It rested inside of me, unable to escape. He’d wept for it in the end, shouting for Reynolds to snatch him back to that world.
I folded the page into my hand and walked on. As far as I walked, the whole city through, there was only gray ruin. I yelled, but no one answered. Perhaps there was no one to answer.
“Anyone!” I cried as loud as I could from the middle of the street. I looked to the sky, the veiled sun now set in the gray west.
My world was dead. I had nothing. I looked at my filthy hands and saw them old and wrinkled. I was but twenty and felt the universe retreating from me.
“Reynolds! Fonderous Reynolds!”
The ring of hooves on cobblestones answered me. Sharp and distinct down the ruined street they came, pulling a claret and gold four-in-hand.
There was one thing left to me. Hope in the brightness in the seam above the floor. Hope that there existed in that place a life worth living, with beings I might one day love. My uncle was dead in both worlds, but I was only dead in one. I stepped in the path of the carriage and my world went black—But only for a moment.
While mindlessly browsing the internet, I came across stories about the strange days leading up to Poe’s death, how he was found wandering, in clothes that were not his own. I moved on to something else, but over the next week, my mind kept returning to that idea of him in a stranger’s clothes. How would this come to be? Did he go mad at the end of his life? What could have caused it? I poked around a little more, and the idea of him having rabies came up. Ear too tame... that couldn’t possibly be it! I turned to Foe’s own writing for an answer (the poems “Dreamland,” “Spirits of the Dead,” and “Fairyland”), and coupled with a few prompts from my writing group, this story is the result.
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* * * *
Gregory Frostis a writer of fantasy, horror and science fiction who has been publishing steadily for more than two decades.
His latest work is the fantasy duology,Shadowbridge,published by Del Rey Books. His earlier novels include Fitcher’s Brides, a World Fantasy Award and International Horror Guild Award finalist for Best Novel; Tain, Lyrec, and Nebula-nominated SF work The Pure Cold Light. His short story collection, Attack of the Jazz Giants & Other Stories,was called byPublishers Weekly“one of the best fantasy collections of the year.”
He is the one of two Fiction Writing Workshop Directors at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, PA, and has thrice taught the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Workshop.
His web site is www.gregoryfrost.com ; his blog, “Frostbites,” lurks at http://frostokovich.livejournal.com
* * * *
The Final Act
By Gregory Frost
McGowren caught up with him in the lobby amid the end-of-the-day exodus. One moment Leonard was heading through the gray granite lobby by himself, the next the person he least wanted to see was striding along beside him as if no bad blood lay between them.
Leonard pulled away as if from a foul odor, then set his jaw and kept walking at the same pace, refusing to be rattled or to acknowledge the intrusion beyond a sidewise glance.
McGowren’s chinos were stained, his shirttail hung out on one side, he seemed to have lost his tie, and he had a heavy enough five o’clock shadow that he must have shaved the night before. Leonard, unconsciously smoothing down his own tie, wondered if the schmuck had met any clients like that. Had any of the partners on the fifth floor seen him in this shape? Maybe he’d been sacked already, he sure looked the part. But no, Len would have heard. Too many people knew he’d have liked nothing more than to hear that about McGowren, and someone would have called or even ridden up to tell him. Almost to himself he said, “You look like you slept under a bar.”
“Nice to see you, too, Len.”
“And unless you’re here to beg forgiveness, you can fuck off.” Then Leonard was in the revolving door, pushing his way to the sidewalk, ditching McGowren and merging into the departing throng. However, before he’d reached the corner, McGowren reappeared beside him. “Leonard, bro, I need to t
alk to you.”
“Don’t call me ‘bro.’ Or buddy or pal or anything else.”
“Len—”
“I don’t have time tonight. I have to pick up my car.” At least he didn’t have to fabricate an excuse.
“Geez, man, I was hoping you’d give me a ride.”
“You take the train, asshole,” he replied. He maneuvered around a light pole and then walked on the narrow strip outside the parking meters, passing most of the crowd and temporarily outstripping McGowren again. He heard behind him the words, “I don’t have my pass on me. I lost it. I need aride, man.”
Leonard nodded his head. It might have meant he’d heard or it might have signaled that he would agree to help. He wasn’t sure which, either.
It had been five months since he’d spoken to Gary McGowren—not since the Christmas party where he’d caught McGowren and Laurel in the coat closet, about two items of clothing away from a full-on fuck. The closet was the size of a meat locker and could have contained an orgy, but there were just the two of them, his wife and Gary. Idiots. At least Laurel looked horrified as she snatched up her clothes and ran past him. Leonard stood his ground. McGowren raised a hand in pathetic imitation of an apology, shambled forward and slurred, “Don’ be mad, Len, ‘m sorry, just too much punch at the watering hole is all, ‘m sorry.” He pawed, clutched Len’s arm. “Listen, Laurel’s just—” was all he got to say before Leonard shoved him sprawling into the coats, that clutching hand grabbing for purchase, catching hold of the rod as his forehead hit it and he fell, his weight snapping it out of the wall and dragging coats and furs down on top of him. With a displaced calm, Leonard collected his own and Laurel’s coats from the other side of the closet. Why hadn’t he done something? Why hadn’t he stomped the bastard to death? But even there in that moment of fury he was afraid of violence, scared of acting out. He could stand in a courtroom and gloatingly reduce people to self-contradicting imbeciles, but he couldn’t deck McGowren. Just couldn’t touch him. He hated himself for it, and McGowren as the proof.
Laurel had cried all the way home except for the few moments she spent vomiting out the window. She hadn’t meant—hadn’t known—what she was doing. All the excuses failing to explain why, of all the people she could have drunkenly pursued, she’d picked McGowren. He was good looking, okay, but come on, the guy had the verbal skills of an ape. It was why he’d been passed over for promotions, never offered even a junior partnership, just maintained his position, handling work injury cases that he had next to no business pursuing, billing enough hours to get by but not much else. If they’d worked in the same department, crossed paths at all, Len would have had him fired. Instead, roiling in his own sense of inadequacy and failure, he’d just let him be, hoping McGowren would go away and die on his own. Laurel had seen a counselor and then she had insisted they see a counselor together, as if her indiscretion was somehow his fault as well, and he’d gone, he’d borne it. In five months they’d attained a kind of stability, forbearance moving toward acceptance, maybe some kind of forgiveness. Over and over she had told him how good he was, how kind, but he wasn’t sure kindness wasn’t just weakness. He doubted he would trust anything or anyone ever again.
At the corner of 12th and Locust, Leonard waited for the light and McGowren slid up beside him. The bastard did look pretty banged up. Maybe hehad been sacked. Maybe he was sleeping under a bar. Good.
Leonard had told no one about the coat closet, but someone must have come upon McGowren, and it was only a few days before Debbie, his secretary, had stepped into his office and just said, “I’m really sorry.” He’d looked in her eyes and known what she was saying, known that his coworkers all knew. McGowren had stayed away, the one smart thing he’d done. So what was this appeal all about? What did he want, sympathy? Forgiveness? Those ships had sailed.
They had known each other since high school, and McGowren been an ape then, too, a running back on the football team who was always playing pranks: convincing someone to climb out on the cafeteria roof and then locking the windows to keep them out there till some outraged faculty or staff member let them back in; turning a firehose on the cheerleaders just before they ran outside, where it was 45 degrees; filling a water bottle in chemistry class with mustard and spraying his chem partner with it. Mostly he started fights. The trouble was, for some perverse reason he wanted to hang around with Leonard’s group. They weren’t nerds exactly, but they weren’t the popular kids, either, and they foolishly thought a football player in their midst could open a door into the world of girls. Instead, McGowren had only managed to get them in trouble by association so that they were drawn into every fracas, often in defense of the schmuck. Leonard had steered clear of him as much as possible. Even then he was petrified of confrontations, of violence, of being hit. So when McGowren had applied for a position at the law firm and given Leonard as a reference, it was an act of pure stupidity to have hoped he’d grown up.
Without looking at him, as if it was hard to express, McGowren said, “Listen, Len, we have history, okay? I just need a ride. I don’t want your forgiveness. I don’t expect it.” The light changed. He finally glanced cautiously at Leonard. “So, can you?”
“Fine, I’ll give you a ride, all right,” he replied, amazed to hear the words, as if his mouth had answered without consulting him. He knew he didn’t mean it, knew that he had reached the end with this jerk who’d followed him like a slug’s smear from high school to the law firm. He didn’t know what he was going to do yet, but it was time to get rid of Gary McGowren once and for all.
* * * *
He paid the bill for the lube job and oil change, and got in. Then he remembered his passenger and unlocked the doors. Where had McGowren got to while he’d looked over the bill and paid up? Restroom probably. For an instant he considered driving off without him. Then the door opened and McGowren folded into the seat. He sat in a forward hunch as if intrigued by the Infiniti’s dashboard. “Put your seatbelt on, Gary.”
“I hate ‘em.”
“Yeah? Well do it anyway. I’m not going to be liable when you go through the windshield.”
As if with obvious reluctance and he clipped in, McGowren asked, “You remember that water balloon fight where I filled one with tempera paint and nailed you coming around the corner?”
Leonard pulled into traffic. “I caught hell for that prank. The red never came out of my shirt. My mom bleached it till the fabric disintegrated and it was still pink. So was one side of my face for like a week.”
“It was pretty damned amazing. You dripped like some kind of swamp thing.”
“Yeah, real fucking amazing. Thanks. What are you, still fifteen? You’re an idiot, McGowren. You always were. You want a ride, then shut up.”
In silence Leonard drove awhile, stuck in the jam to get onto the parkway. This was all a mistake. He wasn’t going to do anything to McGowren— whatcould he do, push him out of the car at eighty mph? It would be just one more thing for him to stew over, one more imagined act that wasn’t going to happen.
Then down the ramp and merging onto the faster parkway, he reached for the radio knob, and McGowren spoke up. “You never did get the dynamic, did you, Len?”
“What dynamic?”
“Us. You and me. Even in high school. You got this image of it being like we were buddies or something. Like I was the person you’d call if you wanted to do something.”
“I don’t think so.” Where was this coming from?
“Oh, yes you do, and it was never like that. You didn’t want me joining the firm, you don’t want me in the car now—”
“Gee, I can’t imagine why I don’t feel much like doing you favors anymore.”
“Anymore? When did you do me favors?”
“I could have shit-canned you when you put me down as a reference. I should have. But I thought, ‘Hey, maybe he’s grown up, maybe he turned into an adult.’“
“You’re a snob, Len. You and your little pals, all you wanted from
me was to score some girls, you didn’t give a rat’s ass about me otherwise.”
Leonard looked out his side window. The driver passing stared back at him. “Jesus, it was high school, Gary.” He turned to face him. “And you know, I’ll tell you what I remember. I remember a dumbass jock who pissed off even the other jocks. Who managed to implicate everybody he was with so that they either had to fight on his behalf or else got hauled into the vice principal’s office along with him. A guy who is so terminally fucked in the head he doesn’t even know why maybe I’m less than enthused to be in his company right now, even though he’s tried to screw my wife. Christ. Why am I trying to talk to you?”
“Maybe you want to know.”
“What do I want to know?”
“Everything. Why you’re the way you are. Why I’m talking to you, despite your rejecting—”
“We’re not in high school, you asshole. What, you’ve been waiting for twelve yearsto get back at me for trying to convince the rest of our crew to get rid of you?”
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