Beyond the Barriers of Space and Time

by Judith Merril (ed. )

  “I think so. Eternity embraces all time, so when you’ve gone over from time into eternity, all time coexists for you.”

  “Not too precise an expression, but I think you grasp the essentials. Then perhaps you can see what’s happened. I’ve simply come back into time at the wrong point.”

  “How—”

  “Imagine yourself at large in three dimensions, facing a fence with an infinite series of two-dimensional slots. Think how easy it’d be to pick the wrong slot.”

  I thought a while and nodded. “Could be,” I admitted. “But if it’s that easy, why doesn’t it happen more often?”

  “Oh, but it does. You’ve heard of apparitions of the living? You’ve heard of Doppelganger? You’ve even heard of hauntings before the fact? Those are all cases like this—just slipping into the wrong slot. But it’s such a damned stupid thing to do. I’m going to take a terrible ribbing for this.” My ghost looked more downcast and perplexed than ever.

  I started to be consoling. “Look. Don’t take it so—Hey!” The implication suddenly hit me. “You said haunting?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that what you’re doing?”

  “Well… yes.”

  “But you can’t be haunting me?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then who are you haunting in my room?”

  My ghost played with his ghostly cigarette and looked embarrassed. “It’s not a thing we care to talk about. Haunting, I mean. It’s not much fun and it’s rather naive. But after all, it’s—well, it’s expected of you when you’ve been murdered.”

  I could hear the right arm of the chair crack under my clutch. “When you’ve been—”

  “Yes, I know it’s ridiculous and childish; but it’s such an old-established custom that I haven’t the courage to oppose it.”

  “Then you’ve been murdered? And that means I’ve been murdered? I mean, that means I’m going to be murdered?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said calmly.

  I rose and opened a drawer of the desk. “This,” I prescribed, “calls for the internal application of alcoholic stimulants. Damn,” I added as the emergency buzzer rang. All I needed was a rush operation now, with my fingers already beginning to jitter.

  I opened the door and looked out into star-bright emptiness. “False alarm.” I was relieved—and then heard the whiz. I ducked it just in time and got the door closed.

  My ghost was curiously contemplating the knife where it stuck quivering in the wall. “Right through me,” he observed cheerfully.

  It was no sinister and exotic stiletto. Just a plain butcher knife, and all the more chillingly convincing through its very ordinariness. “Your prophecies work fast,” I said.

  “This wasn’t it. It missed. Just wait.”

  The knife had stopped its shuddering, but mine went on. “Now I really need that stimulant. You drink rye? But of course. I do.”

  “You don’t happen,” my ghost asked, “to have any tequila?”

  “Tequila? Never tasted it.”

  “Oh. Then I must have acquired the taste later, before you were murdered.”

  I was just unscrewing the bottle top, and jumped enough to spill half a jiggerful. “I don’t like that word.”

  “You’ll get used to it,” my ghost assured me. “Don’t bother to pour me one. I’ll just dematerialize the bottle.”

  The rye helped. Chatting with your own ghost about your murder seems more natural after a few ounces of whiskey. My ghost seemed to grow more at ease, too, and after the third joint bottle-tilting the atmosphere was practically normal.

  “We’ve got to approach this rationally,” I said at last. “Whatever you are, that knife’s real enough. And I’m fond of life. Let’s see what we can do to stave this off.”

  “But you can’t.” My ghost was quietly positive. “Because I—or you—well, let’s say we already have been murdered.”

  “But not at this time.”

  “Not at this time yet, but certainly in this time. Look, I know the rules of haunting. I know that nothing could have sent me to this room unless we’d been killed here.”

  “But when? How? And above all by whom? Who should want to toss knives at me?”

  “It wasn’t a knife the real time. I mean it won’t be.”

  “But why—”

  My ghost took another healthy swig of dematerialized rye. “I should prefer tequila,” he sighed.

  “That’s too damned bad,” I snapped. “But tell me about my murder.”

  “Don’t get into such a dither. What difference does it make? Nothing you can do can possibly affect the outcome. You have sense enough to understand that. Foreknowledge can never conceivably avert. That’s the delusion and snare of all prophecy.”

  “All right. Grant that. Let’s pretend it’s just my natural curiosity. But tell me about my murder.”

  “Well—” My ghost was hesitant and sheepish again. “The fact is—” He took a long time to swallow his dematerialized rye, and followed the process with a prolonged dematerialized burp. “To tell you the truth—I don’t remember anything about it.

  “Now, now!” he added hastily. “Don’t blow up. I can’t help it. It’s dreadfully easy to forget things in eternity. That’s what the Greeks meant by the waters of Lethe in the afterworld. Just think how easy it is to forget details in, say, ten years, when the years are happening only one at a time. Then try to imagine how much you could forget in an infinity of years when they’re all happening at once.”

  “But our own murder!” I protested. “You couldn’t forget our murder!”

  “I have. I know we must have been murdered in this room because here I am haunting it, but I’ve no idea how or when. Excepting,” he added reflectively, “that it must be after we acquired a taste for tequila.”

  “But you must at least know the murderer. You have to know the guy you’re supposed to be haunting. Or do you just haunt a place?”

  “No. Not in the strict rules. You merely haunt the place because the murderer will return to the scene of the crime and then you confront him and say: ‘Thou art the man!’ ”

  “And supposing he doesn’t return to the scene?”

  “That’s just the trouble. We know the rules all right. But the murderers don’t always. Lots of times they never return at all, and we go on haunting and haunting and getting no place.”

  “But look!” I exclaimed. “This one will have to return because he hasn’t been here yet. I mean this isn’t the scene of the crime; it’s the scene set for a crime that hasn’t happened yet. He’ll have to come here to… to—”

  “To murder us,” my ghost concluded cheerfully. “Of course. It’s ideal. I can’t possibly miss him.”

  “But if you don’t know who he is—”

  “I’ll know him when I see him. You see, we ghosts are psychic.”

  “Then if you could tip me off when you recognize him—”

  “It wouldn’t do you any—What was that?”

  “Just a rooster. Dawn comes early these summer mornings. But if I knew who he was, then I—”

  “Damn!” said my ghost. “Haunting must be so much simpler in winter with those nice long nights. I’ve got to be vanishing. See you tonight.”

  My curiosity stirred again. “Where do you go when you vanish?” But he had already disappeared.

  I looked around the empty consulting room. Even the dematerialized rye had vanished. Only the butcher knife remained. I made the natural rye vanish too, and staggered back to bed.

  The next morning it all seemed perfectly simple. I had had one hell of a strange vision last night; but on the consulting-room desk stood an empty pint which had been almost full yesterday. That was enough to account for a wilderness of visions.

  Even the knife didn’t bother me much. It would be accounted for some way—somebody’s screwy idea of a gag. Nobody could want to kill me, I thought, and wasn’t worried even when a kid in a back-lot baseball game let off a wild pitch that misse
d my head by an inch.

  I just filed away a minor resolve to climb on the wagon if this sort of thing became a habit, and got through a hard day’s work at the clinic with no worries beyond the mildest of hangovers. And when I got the X-rays on Nick Wojcek’s girl with her lungs completely healed, and the report that she hadn’t coughed for two weeks, I felt so gloriously satisfied that I forgot even the hangover.

  “Charlie,” I beamed at my X-ray technician, “life is good.”

  “In Cobbsville?” Charlie asked dourly.

  I gloated over those beautiful plates. “Even in Cobbsville.”

  “Have it your way,” said Charlie. “But it’ll be better this evening. I’m dropping by your place with a surprise.”

  “A surprise?”

  “Yeah. Friend of mine brought me a present from Mexico.”

  And even that didn’t tip me off. I went on feeling as chipper and confident as ever all through the day’s work and dinner at the Greek’s, and walked home enjoying the freshness of the evening and fretting over a twist on a new kind of air filter for the factories.

  That was why I didn’t see the car. I was crossing the street to my house, and my first warning was a bass bellow of “John!” I looked up to see the car a yard away, rolling downhill straight at me. I jumped, stumbled, and sprawled flat in the dust. My knee ached and my nose was bleeding; but the car had missed me, as narrowly as the knife had last night.

  I watched it roll on down the hill. There was no driver. It was an old junk heap—just the sort of wreck that would get out of control if carelessly left parked on a steep grade. It was a perfectly plausible accident, and still—The car hit the fence at the bottom of the hill and became literally a junk heap. Nobody showed up to bother about it. I turned to thank Father Svatomir for his shout of warning.

  You’ve seen those little Orthodox churches that are the one spot of curious color in the drab landscape of industrial Pennsylvania? Those plain frame churches that blossom out on top into an exotic bloated spire topped by one of those crosses with an extra slantwise arm?

  Father Svatomir was the priest from one of those, and his black garments, his nobly aquiline nose, and his beautifully full and long brown beard made him look as strange and Oriental as his own church. It was always a shock to me to hear his ordinary American accent—he’d been born in Cobbsville and gone back to the Near East to study for the priesthood—and to realize that he was only about my age. That’s thirty-two, for the record; but Father Svatomir seemed serenely ageless.

  He waved away my thanks. “John, my son, I must speak with you. Alone and seriously.”

  “O. K., Father”—and I took him around to the door into my own room. I somehow didn’t want to go into the consulting room just yet. I was sure that there was nothing there; but night had fallen by now, and there was no telling.

  I sat on the bed, and the priest pulled a chair up close. “John,” he began quietly, “do you realize that you are in danger of your life?”

  I couldn’t help a glance at the door of the consulting room, but I said casually, “Nuts, Father. That little accident out there?”

  “Accident? And how many other ‘accidents’ have befallen you recently?”

  I thought of the butcher knife and the wild pitch, but I repeated, “Nuts. That’s nonsense. Why should anybody want my life?”

  “Because you are doing too much good. No, don’t smile, my son. I am not merely indulging in a taste for paradox. I mean this. You are doing too much good and you are in danger of your life. Martyrs are not found in the Church alone. Every field has its martyrs, and you are in most grievous danger of becoming a martyr to your splendid clinic.”

  “Bosh,” I snorted, and wished I believed it.

  “Bosh it is indeed, but my parishioners are not notably intellectual. They have brought with them from their own countries a mass of malformed and undigested superstitions. In those superstitions there is some small grain of spiritual truth, and that I seek to salvage whenever possible; but in most of those old-country beliefs there is only ignorance and peril.”

  “But what’s all this to me?”

  “They think,” said Father Svatomir slowly, “that you are working miracles at the clinic.”

  “I am,” I admitted.

  He smiled. “As an agnostic, John, you may call them miracles and think no more of it. But my parishioners cannot see matters so simply. If I, now, were to work these wonders of healing, they would accept the fact as a manifestation of God’s greatness; but when you work them—You see, my son, to these poor believing people, all great gifts and all perfect gifts are from above—or from below. Since you, in their sight, are an unbeliever and obviously not an agent of God, why then you must be an agent of the devil.”

  “Does it matter so long as I heal their lungs from the effects of this damned cement dust?”

  “It matters very much indeed to them, John. It matters so much that, I repeat, you are in danger of your life.”

  I got up. “Excuse me a minute. Father… something I wanted to check in the consulting room.”

  It checked all right. My ghost sat at the desk, large as death. He’d found my copy of Fanny Hill, dematerialized it, and settled down to thorough enjoyment.

  “I’d forgotten this too,” he observed as I came in.

  I kept my voice low. “If you can forget our own murder, small wonder you’d forget a book.”

  “I don’t mean the book. I’d forgotten the subject matter. And now it all comes back to me—”

  “Look!” I said sharply. “The hell with your memories.”

  “They’re not just mine.” He gazed at me with a sort of leering admiration.

  “The hell with them anyway. There’s a man in the next room warning me that my life’s in danger. I’ll admit he just saved my life, but this could be a trick. Could he be the man?”

  Reluctantly my ghost laid his book aside, came to the door, and peered out. “Uh-uh. We’re safe as houses with him.”

  I breathed. “Stick around. This check-up system’s going to be handy.”

  “You can’t prevent what’s happened,” he said indifferently, and went back to the desk and Fanny Hill. As he picked up the book he spoke again, and his voice was wistful. “You haven’t got a blonde I could dematerialize?”

  I shut the consulting-room door on him and turned back to Father Svatomir. “Everything under control. I’ve got a notion, Father, that I’m going to prove quite capable of frustrating any attempts to break up my miracle-mongering. Or is it monging?”

  “I’ve talked to them,” the priest sighed. “I’ve tried to make them see the truth that you are indeed God’s agent, whatever your own faith. I may yet succeed, but in the meanwhile—” He broke off and stared at the consulting room. “John, my son,” he whispered, “What is in that room?”

  “Nothing, Father. Just a file that I suddenly remembered needed checking.”

  “No, John. There’s more than that. John, while you were gone, something peered at me through that door.”

  “You’re getting jumpy. Father. Stop worrying.”

  “No. John, there is a spirit in this place.”

  “Fiddlesticks!”

  “Oh, you may not feel affected; but after all, a man of my calling is closer to the spirit world than most.”

  “Father, your parishioners are corrupting you.”

  “No. Oh, I have smiled at many of their superstitions. I have even disbelieved in spirits. I knew that they were doctrinally possible and so to be believed; but I never believed in them personally, as an individual rather than a priest. But now—John, something peered at me.”

  I swore silently and said aloud, “Calm yourself. Father.”

  Father Svatomir had risen and was pacing the room, hands clasped like Felix the Cat. “John, my son,” he said at last, “you have been a good friend to me and to my parish. I have long been grateful to you, and never been able to prove that gratitude. I shall do so now.”

  “
And how?” I asked, with a certain nervous foreboding.

  “John,” he paused in his pacing and laid a hand on my shoulder, “John, I am going to exorcise the spirit that haunts this place.”

  “Hey!” I gasped. “No, Father. Please!” Because, I reasoned hastily to myself, exorcising spirits is all very well, but when it’s your own spirit and if that gets exorcised—well, what happens to you then? “No,” I insisted. “You can’t do that.”

  “I know, John,” he went on in his calm deep voice. “You think that this is more superstition, on a level with the beliefs of my parishioners. But though you do not sense this… this thing yet, you will in time. I shall save you much pain and discomfort. Wait here, John, while I go fetch some holy water and check up the formula for exorcism. I’m afraid,” he added ruefully, “I haven’t looked at it since my days in the seminary.”

  I seized his arm and opened my mouth in protestation too urgent for words.

  “John,” he said slowly and reproachfully, “are you willfully harboring a spirit?”

  A knock on the door cut the scene short and gave me a breathing spell. I like Charlie, but I don’t think I’d ever before been so relieved to see him.

  “Hi,” he said, and “Hi,” again to Father Svatomir. “That’s the advantage of being celibate,” he added. “You can grow a beard. I tried to once, but the waitress down at the Greek’s didn’t like it.”

  Father Svatomir smiled faintly.

  “Three glasses, mine host,” Charlie commanded, and produced from under his arm a tall bottle of greenish glass. “Told you I had a surprise.”

  I fetched three whiskey glasses and set them on the table. Charlie filled them with a flourish. “Noble stuff, this,” he announced. “Want to hear what you gentlemen think of it. There’s supposed to be a ritual goes with it, but I like it straight. Down the esophagus, boys!”

  Was it Shelley who used the phrase “potable gold”? Whoever it was had surely tasted this liquor. It flowed down like some molten metal that had lost the dangerous power to scorch, but still glowed with rich warmth. While the subtle half-perceived flavor still clove to my mouth, I could feel the tingling heat reach my finger tips.