Inferno

by Ellen Datlow

  The museum, situated in South Kensington, was split into two floors and again, laterally, between east and west. The internal closed-circuit cameras were switched off at night, for economic reasons. The lighting was also reduced by 50 percent, to save 50 percent. Attendance to the museum was down on last year, a trend that didn’t look like finding an upturn. The Natural History Museum and the Science Museum were nearby, and cast such large shadows that this building only ever seemed to be visited by people who stumbled upon it by accident. The expressions of its patrons coming in from the street was owlish, disappointed.

  Garner was checked upon, infrequently, by Paul Frobisher, who was little more than a clipboard and three extravagantly polished pips on each shoulder. Garner had tried to initiate conversations with the younger man on the few occasions that Frobisher had dropped by, but was cut off by Frobisher’s transparent disdain for lower rank guards. He spent more time studying the ball point of his Parker pen than he did Garner’s face.

  Garner had met the woman of his dreams here the previous day. Or had at least glimpsed her. Rita. He had named her after the Beatles song running through his head as she appeared, walking across the emptying funnel of space where the café was situated, in between the exhibits on the ground floor and the entrance hall. It was late in the day; thick bars of amber light played hopscotch with darker twins. She clutched a woolen scarf to her chest. Her shoes were silenced gunshots echoing across the marble. Like the floor, her face was slashed with bands of black hair. She marched out of the doors and into the street as the sun tumbled away from the corner of the windows.

  He liked the softening of the museum as darkness came on. Hard angles were beveled by shadow. The harsh gleam of light on the glass surfaces turned to an agreeable haze. He thought he could hear, if he strained for it, the retorts of her heels continuing, either as ghosts in the museum’s heights or finding him from the concrete of the Brompton Road.

  The woman of his dreams. He thought about that for a while. Did the girl you fell in love with command all your sleeping attention, or was there a template for her preceding that first sighting? Had she always been a part of his thoughts, on some subtle level, only to flower into significance when he clapped eyes on her? It would be nice to ask her opinion, but as yet he had only ever conversed with her in his own mind.

  Now, he whispered: “Did you enjoy your visit?”

  He imagined her stopping on her way to the door, looking up at him, perhaps finally ridding her face of those blades of hair. A smile. An eyebrow arching. Her voice rising into the domed ceiling like some soft unfolding. A flower. Origami. “Yes. Yes, I did, thank you.”

  He strolled the aisles between the timepieces. He knew his patrol so well now; could walk it in the dark if the museum bean counters ever decided to go the whole hog and turn the lights off completely. The first few nights he had paced out the various zones like a prisoner coming to terms with his cell. Most of the display cabinets were dotted arbitrarily around the floor, others were lined neatly along the perimeter. His favorites divided time into chunks, offering it in a variety of faces, from the ingeniously simple to the shatteringly elaborate. There were Chinese water clocks, a Congreve clock powered by a stainless-steel ball that zigzagged along brass grooves. Stopwatches, pendulums, gnomons, and pallets. Pocket sundials in beautiful leather boxes. Great iron intersections incorporating cogs and springs and gears. Every kind of escapement, from deadbeat to detent to recoil to floating balance. Cylinder watches, verge watches, repeating watches. Velvet-lined wooden boxes. Beautiful table clocks. Oscillators, winding barrels, anchors and counterweights. The turning of circles. Touch pins that had allowed the pre-electricity population to read the time in darkness. Skeleton plates, repoussé cases: silver and enamel, chased or damascened. Burnished zones where the fingers of people long dead had probed.

  An incremental grinding of teeth. The bruxism of time.

  The clocks were on the elevated portion of the museum; this was where a break-in would occur, not down on the ground where the doors were a hundred years old and two inches thick. In this way he could justify the extra time he spent up here. Striding around glass cabinets filled with bone shears, amputation knives and hacksaws made him feel queasy. He didn’t like to think how his life might be colored by that gruesome arsenal should he begin to spend more time casting his shadow over it.

  He paced. He drank the coffee in his flask. He ate his ham sandwiches, his banana, his piece of fruitcake. He read the Evening Standard, settling for a long time on the story of the corpse discovered the previous night in a large industrial bin belonging to a hotel a mere quarter of a mile away from the museum. Police had taken the unusual measure of divulging the cause of death—the tearing out of the victim’s heart—hoping it might lead to a swift arrest rather than an unlikely spate of copycat murders. He read a chapter from a novel. He paced. And another hour was measured out by countless immobile hands.

  He shaped her in his mind. He gave her breath. He gave her a voice.

  “You know Frank Whittle?” It wouldn’t matter what she said to him. How left field, how mundane. The way she spoke, he imagined, would enliven the recitation of a library’s opening times. Something deepish, something just the right side of husky.

  “Not personally,” he said. “But yes. Helped invent the jet engine, didn’t he?”

  “You know what he did when he retired?”

  “Took his ear plugs out?”

  “He bought a house at the end of a runway and watched planes taking off all day long.”

  This would be something about her that excited him. She would always be coming out with strange information. Trivia that had no bearing on anything. She would constantly be taking their conversation on jinking, unexpected routes. He could deduce this from the sparkle of her eyes, so far only ever seen from distance.

  It didn’t really help to pass the time, and he grew embarrassed when he thought of Frobisher walking in on him while he was doing it, but it was fun to guess, too much fun to stop. The illusion of connection was too seductive.

  “Well you won’t find me moving across the road from a security firm,” he said. “Attractive though that might be to the ordinary man. What about you? What will you do when you retire?”

  “Long time off.”

  “I should think so. You don’t exactly look as though you’re entering the autumn of your senescence.”

  “I’d like to live by the sea. Somewhere clean. And cold. I’d like to spend whatever time I have left looking at the stars.” Her voice descended in octaves of sadness. He couldn’t prevent it, despite trying to fill her mouth with different lines, different avenues of escape. She said, “There are some things we were never meant to see. Never meant to have confirmed. The skull beneath the skin. The knowledge of what we truly are, what makes us. We ought never to see that.”

  The darkness at four o’clock in November seems so satisfied with itself one could be forgiven for thinking that daylight might never force its way back. Garner trudged home along deserted main roads. The refuse and shadows that once conspired to upset him on his journey now interested him only peripherally. He knew the darkness well.

  He had hung around at the end of his shift, reluctant to make the decision to go home and leave behind the only place where he had seen the woman. He knew she must be at home, sleeping, but the conviction remained that as soon as he turned his back, she would turn the corner onto this street.

  The knowledge of what we truly are, what makes us.

  Where had that come from? He ground his teeth together, frustrated with himself. Why couldn’t he manufacture a simple exchange? Why did he always have to seed his imagined conversations with doubt? He wondered whether the dark slant to their discussion had come from an external source, another snatch of intercepted polemic from the airwaves, but he dismissed it. The voice had not changed. He had fed her the words.

  Unusually, because of the light pollution in the center of the city, the sky was teem
ing with stars. He stopped for a while and stared at them. The longer he stared, the more it seemed he could see. Patches of ostensibly black sky opened up to show him dusty whorls of light. The illusion of the curved sky disintegrated. There was no shape to what he was seeing anymore. No end of depth. He reeled away when it occurred to him that his mind was too frail for what he was being shown. He thought he had seen a pattern there, for one unbearable second. Something that put him in mind of fingerprints, or the constellations of tiny muscle fibers that make up an iris. He felt cowed by the vision, such as it was, and the nearer he got to his home, the more he found himself doubting that he had seen anything. Another glance at the sky seemed to confirm this: just stars, just darkness.

  He hurried past two men at a bus stop, hunkered over cigarettes and secrets. Voices not so low that he could not hear: all ’is fuckin organs ’oovered out the poor bastard … ’is art … ’is fuckin’ art gone …

  Back home he tried to do what most people who work shifts do: create the illusion that his working span was like any other day. So he took a bath, watched television, cooked himself some dinner, and opened a bottle of wine. By six, although it still wasn’t getting light, the night had loosened somewhat. Garner headed off to bed, pausing on the way when a sudden jolt of sound—a known, frequent occurrence—drilled through his head. A film review, ostensibly, of a new picture by some European director called Guillame Angiers. He tried to find its echo on the shortwave radio by his bed but nothing remotely matched it. He fell asleep thinking of Rita, and the nature of the disease he had invented for her, all of it bracketed by words from the mysterious broadcast: gnawed hearts … gnawed hearts …

  The sound of roadworks wakened him, or rather, the sound of the men powering the tools that tore at the tarmac. Mechanical things he had never found disruptive of his slumber, but raised voices, swearing, laughter, especially the kind of forced laughter from laborers—as if it was important it compete with the ambient sound—always roused him.

  A low parallelogram of light on the wall suggested it was around midday. He lay in bed wondering about Rita. Lovely Rita. The name suited her. It was somehow exciting, but homely. Girl next door, with a bit of sass. He wished he had asked her to accompany him for coffee after work. He felt he knew her to the extent that an invitation would seem natural. He knew a great little place run by a Cuban called Paco that was open all night. He sold Turquino coffee that was so good it gave life meaning.

  It felt somehow wrong, offensive, to fantasize about a woman he had never talked to, so when he felt the first twitches of an erection he rose and showered. He grabbed his novel and his digital camera, and headed for the river.

  He could not shake off the feeling he had experienced the previous night. Although the stars were invisible now, he still felt able to see them. It was mildly alarming to know that they were there, against that dull carpet of pale gray, billions of them like a camouflaged army.

  Garner walked down to the National Film Theatre and browsed the secondhand books beneath Waterloo Bridge. He found a film guide by Leonard Maltin and flipped through it but could find no reference to Guillame Angiers. So what, he thought. Old guide, new director. Not everything had to have a shadow. He collected a pint of lager, took a seat, tried to immerse himself in the book he was reading. The words couldn’t bring him out of himself, which was what he always asked of a novel. It wasn’t the author’s fault. Rita, and something inexplicable, capered at the edge of his reason, fouling anything he tried to focus on. He wondered what the other might be. Something to do with the strange light, perhaps. Or the snatches of sound that fizzed through his thoughts from time to time. He felt anxious, but in an amorphous way. It was as if the anxiety existed only because he couldn’t pinpoint the reason for it.

  An old man with a white candyfloss beard played a violin in front of the book tables with violent panache. The river seemed hardly to move beyond him, but suggested its strength in the subtle ribboning of its surface. He surreptitiously took pictures of women who passed him by, wondering what it was that triggered attraction. It was beginning to panic him that he might never engineer a meeting between them. Soon it might be too late.

  The violinist stopped playing. Nobody applauded. The musician didn’t seem affected. He collected the change thrown into his violin case and walked away.

  “Have you had any more transmissions lately? On Radio Garner?”

  “Yes,” he said, gingerly touching the back of his head. He wished he had never told Rita about his accident, and the metal plate, and the occasional rushes of static, or voices, or music, that fled through his brain like something half-remembered. “I had one last night, before I went to bed.” He had seen her again, just as he arrived at the museum. There were more people around because he had turned up earlier than usual, and he had drunk a cup of tea while he watched the visitors drift toward the exit. He heard her before he saw her. The sharp, measured tattoo of her heels on the parquet. Her determined gait was in stark contrast to the meandering of the other people. It reminded him of an old film, a story dealing with escape from a prisoner of war camp. Soldiers dressing in the enemy’s uniform, marching out of the open gates under the scrutiny of men with guns. She had the walk of someone with escape on her mind, hoping not to be rumbled. Her face lost its frame of black hair to reveal a pale oval filled with angles, shadows, rouge, and kohl. One hand was pressed to the center of her chest, keeping the flaps of her raincoat in position. Breathlessly, he watched as moments of what lay beneath shivered into view. Her shape seemed agonizingly available. He closed his eyes and it was there, unwrapped for him, cuppable, yielding.

  “Go on.”

  “A film review. Well, part of one. I still get a bit of a jolt from it. Have to go and check the radio isn’t on. Before I believe it’s coming from me. Or coming through me, I should say.”

  “What was the film?”

  “A new film called Gnawed Hearts. By some European guy. Guillaume something.”

  “Guillame Angiers?”

  “That’s it. Have you seen it?”

  “No. I hardly ever get out to do stuff. Occasionally I visit the museum, soaking up a little history, you know. I spend a lot of time indoors. Just me, a glass of mineral water, a relaxing CD, and a nebulizer.”

  Garner winced, grateful that the dark prevented her from seeing his expression. Her health problems were clearly more acute than he’d realized. Her voice seemed happy enough though. She sounded as if she were describing something desirable. Like a holiday, or an unattainable man. He could almost believe that the echoes scattering around the museum weren’t only of his making.

  “Don’t waste your time,” she said. “Take advantage of the fact that you’re mobile. That you’re intelligent. Healthy. Fill each minute, because I promise you if you don’t, you’ll regret it.”

  In the dark he was aware of the minute movement of things. The slow slide of the moon’s light across the wall, the epically tiny repositioning of teeth and coils, the settling of age in his bones. He had always thought of time as this linear thing, a real thing, that measured out your span for you in handy chunks as you bumbled around from day to day. In the midst of its mechanical fashioning here in the museum, he got an idea of time that was more fluid and yet less recordable than that; something that reached out in many directions beyond forwards. Something instantaneous, with a lifespan shorter than the smallest particle of its own, immense scale. He thought of something being born and dying almost instantaneously. He thought of a world 4.5 billion years old and yet never truly existing beyond the superim-mediate moment.

  It was strange to think of his city, his street, this museum, hosting people from different decades, different days. It must have happened—there was plenty of photographic evidence—but it still provided a mental block for him. It didn’t exist anymore. It was dead time.

  During the night, usually in the two hours or so before his shift ended, Garner could hear the ministrations of time more clearly: the s
kittling of the ball bearing in the Congreve clock, or the ticking of the newest additions to the cabinets, the Seiko Kinetic watches, design classics from just a few years previously. Garner could imagine future generations goggling at these in the same way visitors gazed at the ancient sundials while they took for granted whatever exotic technology it was that allowed them to keep their appointments. Something stitched behind the eyelid. Something bolted to the brain. Time moved on. Or maybe it didn’t. Maybe time was static, and it was us that moved through it.

  Garner closed his eyes against these difficult thoughts and became gradually aware of a new sound, another ticking, although this time irregular, muffled and, he could somehow tell, not from this quarter of the museum.

  “Can you hear that?” he asked Rita.

  “Yes,” she said, equably. “What is it?”

  “I thought you might be able to tell me.”

  “It’s a clock, isn’t it? Of some sort?”

  “I don’t know. It sounds as if it is.” Garner couldn’t put his finger on why the museum collected such a softness, a vagueness, at this time of night. More and more he suspected that it was him instead, relaxing, becoming more attenuated, more responsive to the sensory krill as it floated by.

  He rose from his uncomfortable molded-plastic chair and strolled the usual figures of eight through the displays, in case a different position within the old building might reveal the source of the sound. It didn’t. It seemed to come from all angles, and none at all. Maybe it was coming from his own body.