McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales

by Michael Chabon

  She puts on another T-shirt and another pair of socks. She falls back to sleep. She wakes up at dawn and Shelly is holding her, spooning. She falls to sleep.

  The light through the vent is like a crack into a world uninterrupted by shape or definition. There is only white. White against white. She squints and reaches for her sunglasses, reaches around to no avail, feels only the rocks beneath the tent, and every rock beneath her fingers somehow makes its way into her head, every rock beneath her fingers is knocking against her head. She is breathing as deeply as she can but it has no effect. She knows her head is not getting enough blood. Her faculties are slipping away. She tries to do simple mental tasks, testing herself—the alphabet, states of the Union, Latin conjugations—and finds her thoughts scattered. She inhales so deeply the air feels coarse, and exhales with such force her chest goes concave. Shelly is still asleep.

  It’s the first light of morning. If there is sun the rain must have passed. It will not be so cold today—there is sun. Already she is warmer, the tent heating quickly, but the wind is still strong and the tent ripples loudly.

  What is that? There is a commotion outside the tent. The porters are yelling. She hears Frank, his tent so close, unzip and rezip his tent’s door, and then she can hear his steps move toward the voices. The voices rise and fall on the wind, fractured by the flapping of the tent.

  There is someone trying to enter the tent.

  “Shelly,” Rita says.

  “Yes, hon.”

  “Who is that?”

  “That’s me, dear.”

  Hours or seconds pass. Shelly is back. When did she leave? Shelly has entered the tent, and is now slowly rezipping the doorflap, trying not to bother her. Hours or seconds?

  “Rita, honey.”

  Rita wants to answer but can’t find her tongue. The light has swept into her, the light is filling her, like something liquid pushing its way into the corners of a mold, and soon she’s fading back to sleep.

  “Rita, honey, something’s happened.”

  Rita is now riding on a horse, and she’s on a battlefield of some kind. She is riding sidesaddle, dodging bullets. She is invincible, and her horse seems to be flying. She pats her horse and the horse looks up at her, without warmth, bites her wrist, and keeps running, yanking on its reins.

  And then it’s hours later. She opens her eyes and it doesn’t hurt. Something has changed. Her head is lighter, the pain is diminished. Shelly is gone. Rita doesn’t know what time it is. It’s still bright. Is it the same day? She doesn’t know. Everyone could be gone. She has been left here.

  She rises. She opens the tent door. There is a crowd around two men zipping up a large duffel bag. The zipper is stuck on something pink, fabric or something, a striped pattern. Now they have the duffel over their shoulders, the duffel connecting their left shoulders, and there are men around them arguing. Patrick is pushing someone away, and pointing the porters with the duffel down the path. Then there is another huge duffel, carried by two more porters, and they descend the trail. Grant is there. Grant is now helping lift another duffel bag. He hoists his half onto his shoulder while another porter lifts the other side, and they begin walking, down the trail, away from the summit.

  Rita closes her eyes again and flies off. There are bits of conversation that make their way into her head, through vents in her consciousness. “What were they wearing?” “Well, think about it like the cabbies again. It’s a job, right? There are risks. . . .” “Are you bringing the peanuts, too?” “Sleeping through it all isn’t going to make it go away, honey.”

  J.J. and Frederick are in electric chairs. The Brussels stenographer is there, standing next to Rita, and they are smiling at the children. It is apparent in the logic of the dream that J.J. and Frederick are to be executed for losing a bet of some kind. Or because they were just born to be in the chair and Rita and the Brussels stenographer were born to hold their hands. J.J. and Frederick turn their eyes up to her and sing. They are singing to her in unison, their voices falsettos, cool and strong:

  One two

  We always knew

  Three four

  You’d never give us more

  Rita is holding their hands as the vibrations start. She is resigned, knowing that there are rules and she is not the person to challenge them. But their teeth begin to chatter, and their eyes rise to her and she wonders if she should do something to stop it.

  “How you feel, sweetie?” Her head is clear and without weight. It again feels like

  “You just needed time to acclimate, I bet.”

  Rita raises her head and there is no pain. Lifting her head is not difficult. She is amazed at the lightness of her head.

  “Well, if you’re coming, I think you’ll have to be ready in a few minutes. We’re already very late. We gotta get a move on.”

  Rita doesn’t want to be in the tent anymore. She can finish this and have done it, whatever it is.

  The terrain is rocky, loose with scree, and it is steep, but otherwise it is not the most difficult of hikes, she is told. They will simply go up until they are done. It will be something she can tell herself and others she has done, and being able to say yes when asked if she summitted will make a difference, will save her from explaining why she went down when two hikers over fifty years old went up.

  Rita packs her parka and food, and stuffs the rest into her duffel bag for the porters to bring down to the next camp. The wind picks up and ripples the tent and she is struck quickly by panic. Something has happened. She remembers that Shelly had said something happened while she was asleep—but what? What was—

  Mike. Oh, Christ. Her stomach liquifies.

  “Is Mike okay?” she asks.

  She knows the answer will be no. She looks at Shelly’s back.

  “Mike? Mike’s fine, hon. He’s fine. I don’t think he’ll be joining us today, but he’s feeling a little better.”

  Rita remembers Grant going down the trail. What happened to Grant?

  “I’m honestly not sure why he left,” Shelly says, applying a strip of white sunblock to her nose. “He’s not the most normal guy, though, is he?”

  The sky is clear and though the air is still cold, maybe 45 or so, the sun is warm to Rita’s face. She is standing now, and almost can’t believe she is standing. She steps over the shale to the meal tent, the thin shards of rock clinking like the closing of iron gates.

  Mike is at breakfast. It’s eight A.M., and they are two hours behind schedule. They quickly eat a breakfast of porridge and hard-boiled eggs and tea. Everyone is exhausted and quiet. Grant has gone down the mountain and Mike is not going up. She smiles to Mike as he bites into an egg.

  The remaining paying hikers—Rita, Jerry, Shelly—and Frank and Patrick say goodbye. They will see him again in about twelve hours, they say, and he’ll feel better. They’ll bring him some snow from Kibo, they say. They want to go and drag their bodies to the top, from which they can look down to him.

  From the peak Rita can see a hundred miles of Tanzania, green and extending until a low line of clouds intercepts and swallows the land. She can see Moshi, tiny windows reflecting the sun, like flecks of gold seen beneath a shallow stream. Everyone is taking pictures in front of a sign boasting the altitude at the top, and its status as the highest peak in Africa, the tallest freestanding mountain in the world. Behind the signs is the cavity of Kibo, a great volcanic crater, flat, paisleyed with snow.

  On the Moshi side of the mountain, the glaciers are low and wide, white at the top and striped from her viewpoint, above. She sees the great teeth of a white whale. Icicles twenty feet tall extend down and drip onto the bare rock below.

  “They’re disappearing,” Jerry says. He is standing behind Rita, looking through binoculars. “They melt every year a few feet. Coming down slowly but steadily. They’ll be gone in twenty years.”

  Rita shields her eyes and looks where Jerry is looking.

  “No more snows of Kilimanjaro, eh?” he says, and sighs in
a theatrical way.

  There are others at the top of Kibo, a large group of Chinese hikers, all in their fifties, and a dozen Italians in light packs and with sleek black gear. The hikers who have made it here nod as they pass each other. They hand their cameras to strangers to take their pictures. The wind comes over the mountain in gusts, like ghosts.

  The hike up had been slow and steep and savagely cold. They rested ten minutes every hour and while sitting or standing, eating granola and drinking water, their bodies cooled and the wind whipped them. After four hours Shelly was faltering and said she would turn back. “Get that pack off!” Frank yelled, tearing it off her as if it were aflame. “Don’t be a hero,” he’d said, giving the pack to one of the porters. Shelly had continued, refreshed without the weight. The last five hundred yards, when they could see the crest of the mountain just above, had taken almost two hours. They’d reached the summit as the sun crested through a band of violet clouds.

  Now Rita is breathing as fast and as deeply as she can—her headache is fighting for dominion over her skull, and she is panting to keep it at bay. But she is happy that she walked up this mountain, and cannot believe she almost stopped before the peak. Now, she thinks, seeing these views in every direction, and knowing the communion with the others who have made it here, she would not have let anything stop her ascent. She knows now why a young man would continue up until crippled with edema, why his feet would have carried him while his head drained of blood and reason. Rita is proud of herself, and loves her companions, and now feels more connected to Shelly, and Jerry, Patrick, and even Frank, than to Mike, or even Grant. Especially not to Grant, who chose to go down, though he was strong enough to make it. Grant is already blurry to her, someone she never really knew, a friend she knew as a child but who moved away before they could grow up together.

  Rita finds Shelly, who is sitting on a small metal box chained to one of the signs.

  “Well, I’m happy anyway,” Shelly says. “I know I shouldn’t be, but I am.”

  Rita sits next to her, panting to keep her head clear.

  “Why shouldn’t you be happy?” Rita asks.

  “I feel guilty, I guess. Everyone does. But I just don’t know how our quitting would have brought those three porters back to life.”

  Last night, Shelly says. Or the night before last. The last night we slept, when you were sick, Rita. Remember? The rain? It was so cold, and they were sleeping in the mess tent, and there was the hole, and the tent was so wet. They just didn’t wake up, Rita. You didn’t know? I know you were asleep but really, you didn’t know? I think part of you knew. Who do you think they were carrying down? Oh lord, look at the way the glaciers sort of radiate under the sun. They are so huge and still but they seem to pulse, don’t they, honey? Where are you going?

  All the way down Rita expects to fall. The mountain is steep for the first hour, the rock everywhere loose. None of this was her idea. She was put here, in this place, by her sister, who was keeping score. Rita had never wanted this. She dislikes mountains and peaks meant nothing to her. She’s a boat person; she likes to sit on boats in the sun, or in the sun with her feet in the powdery sand! As the mountain is still steep she runs and then jumps and runs and then jumps, flying for twenty feet with each leap, and when she lands, hundreds of stones are unleashed and go rolling down, gathering more as they descend. She never would have come this far had she known it would be like this, all wrong, so cold and with the rain coming through the tents on those men. She makes it down to the high camp, where the porters made her dinner and went to sleep and did not wake up. This cannot be her fault. Patrick is responsible first, and Frank after him, and then Jerry and Shelly, both of whom are older, who have experience and should have known something was wrong. Rita is the last one who could be blamed; but then there is Grant, who had gone down and hadn’t told her. Grant knew everything, didn’t he? How could she be responsible for this kind of thing? Maybe she is not here now, running down this mountain, and was never here. This is something she can forget. She can be not-here—she was never here. Yesterday she found herself wanting something she never wanted, and she became something else and why go up when everything is wrong? Every day the porters walked ahead, helping them to get to some frigid place with a view and a savage wind, carrying watermelons and coffee for Christ’s sake, and it felt wrong and she was hollow and shamed. She wanted to be able to tell Gwen that she’d done it, and she wanted to bring J.J. and Frederick a rock or something from up there, because then they’d think she was capable of anything finally and someday they would come back to her and—oh God, it was a mess and she keeps running, sending scree down in front of her, throwing rocks down the mountain, because she cannot stop running and she cannot stop bringing the mountain down with her.

  At the bottom, ten hours later, she is newly barefoot. The young boy who now has her boots, whom she gave them to after he offered to wash them, directed her into a round hut of corrugated steel, and she ducked into its cool darkness. Behind a desk, flanked by maps, is a Tanzanian forest ranger. He is very serious.

  “Did you make it to the top?” he asks.

  She nods.

  “Sign here.”

  He opens a log. He is turning the pages, looking for the last names entered. There are thousands of names in the book, with each name’s nationality, age, and a place for comments. He finds a spot for her, on one of the last pages, at the bottom, and after all the names before her she adds her own.

  The Nazis entrusted the future of their party to the capable hands of Sir Seaton Begg, Metatemporal Detective—the only man who could possibly destroy them!

  The Case of the Nazi Canary

  A SEATON BEGG MYSTERY

  By MICHAEL MOORCOCK

  AUTHOR OF

  THE MASKED BUCKAROO, THE WHITE WOLF’S LEGEND, THE AFFAIR OF THE SEVEN VIRGINS, LOST SORCERESS OF THE SILENT CITADEL, KANE OF OLD MARS, THE MOON HAWK, CALLING JERRY CORNELL!, THE CARIBBEAN CRISIS, THE METATEMPORAL DETECTIVE, AGAIN, SEATON BEGG! THE ADVENTURE OF THE TEXAN’S HONOUR, BUCHAN OF WHITEHALL, THE “SIR MILK AND BLOOD” CASE, THE CASE OF THE PRINTER’S DEVIL, THE CASE OF THE CHINESE AGENT, THE WAR LORD OF THE AIR, THROUGH THE SHAVING MIRROR, THE TAROT MURDER CASE, THE CASE OF THE DREAMTHIEF’S DAUGHTER, AND MANY OTHER BEST-SELLING “THRILLERS” OF CRIME AND THE SUPERNATURAL.

  CHAPTER ONE

  MESSAGE FROM MUNICH

  It was, or would be, the misty autumn of 1931. A suite of comfort-able bachelor apartments in the highest tower of London’s exclusive Sporting Club Square. Sir Seaton Begg, former MI5 special operator now metatemporal investigator, reached across the fire-grate, singeing the sleeve of his smoking jacket. As he examined the silk, his aquiline, unconventionally handsome features were illuminated by the fire.

  “What d’you make of that, Taffy?”

  John “Taffy” Sinclair, Begg’s best and oldest friend, and the leading Home Office pathologist, accepted the rectangle of yellow paper. The balding giant had the mild but sturdy rectitude of an East End bishop. Balancing a cup of Darjeeling in one hand, he sank back into the depths of his armchair to read. Moments later, with an impatient expression, he set the telegram aside.

  “The National Socialists?” Taffy frowned. “Sort of German Mussolini-ites? Aren’t they even worse than the commies for going around beating up honest citizens? And, of course, there’s that lunatic anti-Jewish muck.”

  Begg smiled a familiar, almost sly, smile. “I gather they will restore ‘German pride’ and so forth, meaning, no doubt, the military. A very attractive message to the heavy industrialists, naturally, who find more profit in swords than ploughshares.” He lifted delicate bone china to his full, masculine lips. “The armorers and their jackals.”

  Like Sinclair, Begg supported world disarmament under the League of Nations and was disappointed when Woodrow Wilson had been forced to placate the parochial exigencies of his Congress by quitting the League.

  Begg continued with some emphasis. “Look here, Taffy, r
ead that thing again and let me know any other names you recognize, apart from their Little Corporal destined to become their German Napoleon.”

  “You mean that awful oik who looks like Charlie Chaplin? Musso’s effeminate pal Mr. Hitler? The Nazi general secretary or whatever he styles himself. Nothing new, is it?”

  “I’d agree he seems to be preaching a familiar line of l’intoxication special.” Sinclair reached a taper into the fire and relit his pipe. “These chaps have been getting more dangerous since the successes of Primo Riviera and Mussolini, of course.” He puffed heroically on his briar.

  “I agree, old man.” Begg glanced into the fire. For an instant his eyes burned an angry red. “Come on, Taffy. Be a pal and glance at that wire again.”

  Reluctantly, Sinclair adjusted his spectacles. “Well, Hess is a pretty common German name. But don’t you know a Baron von Hess? Some sort of relative of your cousin, Count von Bek?”

  “Von Bek?” Begg laughed at this mention of his old sparring partner, known to the British public as Monsieur Zodiac, the Albino, Count of Crime. “I doubt if my cousin would deign to involve himself in this. It’s not what you call an epicurean crime, eh? What about this Fräulein Raubal?”

  “Her first name, Geli, is short for Angela, I believe. Raubal’s a fairly common name in southern Germany and Austria. Who is she, do you know?”

  “Herr Hitler’s mistress, my dear chap.” Begg smiled self-indulgently, at once mocking and forgiving his own relish for scandal. “They are also, one hears, close relatives.”