by John Farris
“MAGICIAN! This is Sherard!” Bravado reverberating around the distressed freighter, metallic words whipped away by the winds. “I’m in the officers’ dining room! Dining room! Waiting for you! Come and get me, you filthy misbegotten bastard! I’ll kill you as many times as I have to, devil! DEVIL!”
All of it designed to enflame the were-beast’s lust for revenge. If it hadn’t been washed overboard. If it truly had a desire to tear him to pieces, the apparent fate of the rest of the crew.
But Sherard’s taunts and invitation had been ignored; now he was shaking too badly, too hoarse to call anymore. At each steep roll of the ship it seemed to Sherard that the Stella Salamis must at last break in half. Although he wore a flotation vest, he would drown before he could hope to free himself from the ropes binding him to the leg of the metal table.
He hadn’t thought about Riklis for several minutes. Didn’t know if the captain was alive or dead somewhere on the galley deck, in one of the dining rooms or the salon. Riklis had been losing blood steadily while they put together a makeshift plan to confront the monster. But Sherard’s field of vision was limited to what the bloody glow of an emergency light, mounted on a bulkhead, afforded.
There was another light, or at least a faint shining like the first glimmer of dawn, which he had seen through a starboard porthole as the ship struggled to right itself. As if out there in the gale another ship loomed, fixing the Stella Salamis in the beam of a searchlight. Sherard was fascinated. Waiting for the momentary glow in the porthole glass was like waiting for the face of God to appear. When he didn’t see it he felt a rip of despair in his chest.
“You should see what the two of you have done to me, Hunter!”
The thing was in the doorway between the galley and the dining room. All but filling the space with his awkward-looking bulk. Still partly the feline beast from about the waist down. But holding on with a human hand. The shape of the head was familiar. So was the voice of Lincoln Grayle.
“Our pleasure,” Sherard said, then repeated it, because he knew the Magician hadn’t heard him the first time. The ship rolled a good fifty degrees, and this time it seemed to Sherard that they must turn upside down—but that terrifying moment passed; the Stella Salamis stayed groaningly on keel. Sherard saw that blip of light through the porthole glass again. Just enough light to afford him a glimpse of the state the Magician was in. He felt both horror and satisfaction.
“HOW DID YOU GET OUT?” he said, straining to be heard.
“A power was granted to me! I used it!”
“What . . . power? The lightning that struck your container?”
“It wasn’t lightning. Where is she? Are you hiding the bitch Avatar from me?”
Sherard managed to laugh. “Don’t know when you’ve had enough? You’re bloody . . . stupid. And you look like shit!”
“I’ll catch up to Eden later! When I’m feeling . . . more like my old self. I always win.”
“But you . . . can’t make it back . . . can you? You’re stuck between man and monster!” The Magician’s once-handsome face looked like a backyard-barbecue accident. “That old . . . black magic doesn’t work anymore!”
“How little you know about me!”
“Can’t hear you! Come closer! I’m wearing my FUCK YOU GREAT ONE T-shirt tonight!”
Sherard blinked, momentarily focusing on the searchlight out there amid gale seas.
The Magician saw the light too.
“My ride’s here. I’ll be leaving you now, Hunter!”
“You’re going . . . nowhere but down! We go together! Twenty thousand fathoms deep! What power will help you escape from a canyon in the bottom . . . of the ocean?”
The Stella Salamis tilted like a carnival ride from the impact of what Sherard reckoned was a rogue wave. Steel plates twisted as they were pulled apart. Water gushed into the house. The Magician was washed from the bulkhead doorway by the incoming flood. He managed to grasp the tilted table with his human hand, clinging there like an oversized gargoyle off the parapet of a skyscraper. The mismatched entity was a blur to Sherard’s salt-stinging eyes. Its tail twitched smartly above one shoulder. It smelled awful, an evolutionary reject expelled from the bowels of a cosmic corruption.
“Taking a souvenir . . . home with me! Your head ought to do. Think that will impress our girl, Great White Hunter?”
Sherard had no fear left in him. Beheaded or drowned, what difference? Looking into the face of the Magician, he saw in his mind that old scary movie unspooling; comfortingly he recalled the light-boned girl pressed against him as they sat on the commissary floor. He’d given her a deeper visceral thrill by solemnly kissing her hand as they watched the movie, licking a fingernail as if it were a piece of hard candy. She was the daughter of the Swedish ambassador to Kenya. Pale, pale blond with lashes as fine as spider’s silk, lips that tended to blister in the equatorial sun. Soon after they both turned thirteen he slept with her on a double safari cot. The innocent, primal bliss of first sex. Outside their tent, grunts and coughs and eerie cries of nocturnal prowlers in the bush.
Paradise he had known at an early age: now, on a doomed ship with the were-beast in his face, he wondered just what God was up to, why God believed he deserved a hell more bizarre than human imagination could invent.
The besieged characters in The Thing had figured out a way to electrocute their nemesis, cooking it down to a stew of vegetation.
Moral was, Sherard thought, when the going got tough . . . the tough set the table and had dinner.
He and Riklis had cooked up a plan of their own, but Riklis probably was a goner. And Sherard was deathly cold. He couldn’t feel his fingers beneath the flotation vest. He had lost touch with his only hope of survival.
The were-beast’s claws gripped his throat. The Magician, always theatrical, taking a little time, wanting Sherard to break emotionally before he died, to scream and scream again.
Her name was Sigrid.
Sherard hadn’t thought about his first love in a long while. But hers was a fine memory to hold in his mind during those few seconds before the muscles of his throat were severed and his life blew out through torn arteries.
Still the Magician hesitated, as if he had reconsidered killing Sherard. Or had another fate in mind. His own, perhaps.
Something bit into Sherard’s numbed forebrain like an egg-laying insect.
Unlike the rest of him, Sherard’s sense of smell wasn’t frozen. He caught the reek of acetone an instant before the captain of the Stella Salamis, more dead than alive, loomed behind the were-beast. Riklis was tethered to a line of his own. It kept him from being swept down the tilted, back-broke deck in the next torrent of sea and washed overboard.
He held an open can of highly flammable acetone above his head.
The were-beast sniffed it too. It turned its misshapen head with a cry of rage.
The table to which Sherard had tied himself was coming free of the deck. The entire house of the Stella Salamis seemed to be pulling apart in the sledgehammer seas. The light from whatever ship was out there appeared again to reveal the dark, sensual eyes in the head of the were-beast, a grotesque reminder of what and whom Lincoln Grayle had been but could never be again.
With a snarl of arrogance the were-beast released Sherard’s neck and swung its claws while holding on to its perch with the human hand.
Riklis’s head was crushed to pulp above the brow line as the gallon of acetone showered the were-beast. Blinded by the volatile solvent, it howled in agony.
Riklis vanished in a fresh incoming deluge. The swallowing sea surged from all directions, though doorways and splitting bulkheads.
Sherard, groping beneath the flotation vest, found the butt of the Kilgore flare gun hidden there. It was loaded with a twenty-thousand-candlepower parachute flare.
The table was set. A moment or two left, he hoped. Time to turn up the heat on the main course.
He yanked the Kilgore from beneath his vest and fired point-blank a
t the were-beast, just before the table was wrenched loose in an upheaval of deck plates and washed toward a widening breach in the starboard bulkhead.
The last thing Sherard saw was a livid explosion in which the were-beast’s shape was revealed like a glow-in-the-dark skeleton painted on a child’s Halloween costume. Then it disappeared in an expanding explosion like dawn in paradise, or a beacon atop a watchtower in hell. Then Sherard, still holding on to his pistol, rode a jet surge along with the uprooted table into darkness, powerless in that crush of water.
Yet he sensed that somehow, in spite of being engulfed, thrust down into drowning depths, he was meant to survive.
No. Not just survive.
To reign.
JUBILATION COUNTY, GEORGIA • JULY 23,
1926 • 1740 HOURS MOBIUS TIME
Over HERE!” Patrick called, in his creaky elevator of a voice.
He was somewhere beyond a precariously stacked still-life composed of busted machine parts, galvanized scrap metal, iron trusswork, and sheaves of old barrel hoops in Wick Hooser’s junkyard, all of it coated with a fine red dust. The junkyard was by Stinking Weasel Creek, which was only a weedy trickle at summer’s baking zenith. The temperature at this hour was, as always, oppressive, an unbreathing ninety-six degrees.
The feminine half of Mordaunt’s soul, who called herself Delilah and who was getting around in Gwen’s sultry purloined body, had paused to remove a shoe and shake some grit from the toe. She slapped a mosquito taking blood from the side of Gwen’s neck and felt something hard, like a larger piece of grit, beneath the skin. She didn’t think anything of it and caught up to Patrick, whom she found in that part of Wick’s junkyard devoted to abandoned time machines.
There was an oleophilic globe that flinched and hissed when approached; two metallic plates that revolved in the air and passed mysteriously through each other like the joining and unjoining of magician’s rings; there were armatures of highly polished brass and copper coils and cogwheels and levers. There was a child’s treehouse with TIME MACHINE—KEP OUT painted over the doorway. Patrick had often wondered about that one. All standing useless now, the pride of beings who had invented them on far-flung worlds, then taken them out—so to speak—for a little spin.
Straight into Jonas Fresno’s notorious Vortex.
And then there was the red ’55 Chevy Nomad.
Patrick’s expression was habitually glum whenever he circled the Nomad, kicked a softening tire, brushed off a little dust. The same routine every day. Usually he sat inside for a little while, dreaming of home, idly turning the key in the ignition. On, off. On again. No spark. No thrum of life beneath the hood. Vacancy in his heart, a drip of tears from red-rimmed eyes.
Today his expression was a kindling of delight and awe as he beckoned to Delilah.
“Here’s a NEW one!” His mouth was ajar as he looked up and up, at a multihued timeship looking not unlike a huge cellophane butterfly, wings quaking slightly as if reacting to the solar winds. The centerpiece of the magnificently spindly machine was a golden seat, infant-size if judged by human proportions, occupied by an also-spindly creature that resembled an inky scrawl of blood vessels in the human brain. The creature was held in place by girdles of scintillating space debris, like those that compose the rings of Saturn. It did not appear to have survived the jaunt from wherever or whatever to the center of the Vortex: the common fate of many time-travelers unsuited to the torpor of a Jubilation County summer’s day.
“Look you, boy,” Delilah said, standing beside Patrick and gazing full-bewildered at this marvel. “If Time’s hand dost stay the change from day to day to ending doom, which thou swear’st to be true of your unlikely world, how cometh something ‘new,’ as you proclaim this nollygost?”
“ ‘Nollygost’? That’s a good word,” Patrick said happily. “Well, as Gwen exPLAINED it to me, all these are allowable uh-uh-un-nomalies. Because of the Vortex that pulls them in from”—Patrick circled a freckled hand overhead—“just about everywhere.”
Delilah looked around at the array of time machines. She scratched the itch of the mosquito bite on the side of Gwen’s neck. The rake of nails produced a little blood.
“A way in, but no escape? FIE! Be it riddle or paradox, I say ’tis false. Such beliefs are the poor baggage of poppinjays, untutor’d boys of little kidney. I am DELILAH! Neither couched nor enfeebl’d by cunning paradox, born not to fret in my own grease, bawl my sorrows to the scowling Fates! I am Delilah! Bearing brain to wither confoundest argument, armored by degree of will known only to the Amazon. Mark me, I am purpos’d to see the enfolding Vortex, and study on’t. Thus to reverse the mystery and bid Time release us from this stagnant abode. Like kingly Alex on swift Bocephus, I shall not be long detained.”
“Do you really think—? I mean, GWEN explained that the Vortex is like a black hole, only, you know, it’s actually brass and much smaller. But the same PRINciple applies in a microregion of space/time.”
When Delilah let go of her towering temper, it was a sight that reminded him too vividly of spiders in spun clouds of freakish hair.
“Prate not to me another syllable! No more pimpering tattle! Hence, I say! Scrofulous sulk, pewling of diddled strumpet, importunate buzzling!”
“Oh, jeez,” Patrick lamented. “Problem is, you see, I’m n-not even sure the Vortex is open this t-time of the day.”
Fresno’s Vortex was on the other side of Jubilation County in a rural area settled largely by Negroes. Patrick had discovered, before they left the junkyard, a flat tire on the taxi that needed patching, so with one thing or another and Delilah looking daggers at him because of the delay, it was after six o’clock Mobius Time when he pulled up near a 1926 Franklin sports coupe that glowed in its spiff newness as shadows from the pine grove around them lengthened and the tone and mood of the day acquired a more mellow, golding patina.
Patrick, an antique-auto buff, gazed reverently for a few moments at the rakish, boat-tail speedster. Without looking under the engine cowling he knew it had an air-cooled six-cylinder engine. This was one of the models with a heavily chromed, dummy radiator grille. The all-wood chassis was painted apple green. Pat didn’t think Jonas Fresno had ever driven it very far, but he was too bashful to ask.
“I mark there seems to be a fit upon thee,” Delilah said impatiently.
Patrick roused himself from his appreciative swoon, then hopped out to go around the fuming front end of the taxi to open the door for Delilah. He hadn’t let on to her—tried to say as few words as possible only when spoken to—but he came every night to the Vortex, in order to retrieve his besotted uncle Mickey and guide him stumbling into the backseat of the same taxi he had no business driving around in now. An allowable anomaly, for sure. Otherwise the world as he and all of Jubilation County’s citizens knew it to be would have imploded the instant he turned the key in the ignition, before he could drive the taxi away from its parking spot on the south side of the courthouse.
But he wondered with a run of shudders and gooseflesh what could happen if he wasn’t careful to have the taxi back in its customary place before that all-important twelfth stroke of midnight from the clock in the courthouse tower.
Delilah looked at him, looked all around in disbelief and fulminating displeasure. Eyes settling finally on the ramshackle, nearly windowless, and unpainted honky-tonk with a line of fatted crows idling on the swaybacked tin roof.
“What is this hovel I see before me?”
Patrick drew in a fortifying breath of air.
“This is it! Jonas Fresno’s Vortex.” He endured a coldly lifted eyebrow. “I mean, I never actually described what the Vortex was like, DID I? But it’s the real thing, you’ll see.”
“Unconscionable caitiff! Must I call ’pon the crows to dig at thy liver?”
“Caitiff” sounded like some breed of big dog to Patrick. He was sure that it was better than being called “pewling of diddled strumpet,” which sounded just plain nasty.
�
��Come on inside. Jonas is here.” He laughed uneasily. “I guess he’s ALways here. So if you have questions you wanta—”
But Delilah had turned her back on him and crossed her arms. The crows were leaving the roof as she angrily tapped a foot on the rutted red clay of the doorway. Six bombastic crows flapping fell wings that flashed in rosy sunlight. Their caws hard mirth to silence the trilling of other birds nearby.
“No, wait! You have to LISten to Jonas! Listen to him and the others; then you’ll know!”
Patrick cowered from the incoming glide of the largest of the crows. As it passed over the showroom–perfect Franklin Sport coupe, the crow thoughtfully released a glob of whitewash aimed at the stylishly vented hood, as yet unsoiled by the merest film of red Georgia earth. Patrick had wrapped his arms around his head, forgetfully leaving his liver open to attack, but even as he ducked to avoid the rush of the malevolent bird he saw the pud of shitbomb miss the speedster.
Although miss wasn’t the right word. The pud simply stopped falling and remained suspended a few inches above the engine cowling before side-slipping gooily as if down the slope of an invisible tent covering the fender-mounted spare tire. It spattered harmlessly on the hard ground. Where, Patrick now noticed as the crow circled and again glided toward him, the red clay around the coupe already was plentifully marked with past droppings.
Delilah also had followed the shitbomb as it went astray. She jammed both little fingers of Gwen’s hands inelegantly into the corners of Gwen’s mouth and whistled shrilly. The threatening crows departed in vocal disappointment. Delilah wiped some spit and looked at Patrick forgivingly.