by Tim Powers
The old woman’s face was stony. Sydney sat back down.
“I loved her,” she said. “If I’d known that resisting her would end up killing her, I swear, I wouldn’t have resisted.” She smiled at him belligerently. “Crush an ant sometime, and then smell your fingers. I wonder what became of the clothes we buried her in. Not a sweatshirt and jeans.”
“A black linen suit,” said Sydney, “with a white blouse. They were damp.”
“Well, groundwater, you know, even with a cement grave-liner. And a padded bra, for the photographs. I fixed it up myself, crying so hard I could barely see the stitches – I filled the lining with bird-seed to flesh her out.”
Sydney recalled the vines that had seemed to be embroidered on Cheyenne’s bra, that first day. “It sprouted.”
Rebecca laughed softly. “‘Quickens, gladly grows.’ She wants something from you.” Rebecca fumbled in a pocket of her skirt. “Bring the moon to free her from these yellowed pages.”
Sydney squinted at her. “You’ve read that version of the sonnet?”
Rebecca was now holding out a two-inch clear plastic cylinder with metal bands on it. “I was there when she wrote it. She read it to me when the ink was still wet. It was printed that way in only one copy of the book, the copy you obviously found, God help us all. This is one of her ink cartridges. You stick this end in the ink bottle and twist the other end – that retracts the plunger. When she was writing poetry she used to use about nine parts Scheaffer’s black ink and one part her own blood.”
She was still holding it toward him, so he took it from her. “The signature in your book certainly contains some of her blood,” Rebecca said.
“A signature and a thumbprint,” said Sydney absently, rolling the narrow cylinder in his palm. He twisted the back end, and saw the tiny red ring of the plunger move smoothly up the inside of the clear barrel.
“And you touched the thumbprint.”
“Yes. I’m glad I did.”
“You brought her to this cycle of the moon. She arrived on the new moon, though you probably didn’t find the book and touch her thumb till further on in the cycle; she’d instantly stain the whole twenty-eight days, I’m sure, backward and forward. Do you know yet what she wants you to do?”
If I’d known, Rebecca had said, that resisting her would end up killing her, I swear, I wouldn’t have resisted. Sydney realized, to his dismay, that he believed her.
“Hold her hand, guide it, I guess, while she copies a poem,” he said.
“That poem, I have no doubt. She’s a ghost – I suppose she imagines that writing it again will project her spirit back to the night when she originally wrote it – so she can make a better attempt at killing me three years later, in 1969. She was thirty-five, in ‘69. I was thirty-three.”
“She looks younger.”
“She always did. See little Shy riding horseback, you’d think she was twelve years old.” Rebecca sat back. “She’s pretty physical, right? I mean, she can hold things, touch things?”
Sydney remembered Cheyenne’s fingers intertwined with his.
“Yes.”
“I’d think she could hold a pen. I wonder why she needs help copying the poem.” “
I –” Sydney began.
But Rebecca interrupted him. “If you do it for her,” she said, “and it works, she won’t have died. I’ll be the one that died in ‘69. She’ll be seventy-two now, and you won’t have met her. Well, she’ll probably look you up, if she remembers to be grateful, but you won’t remember any of … this interlude with her.” She smiled wryly. “And you certainly won’t meet me. That’s a plus, I imagine. Do you have any high-proof liquor, at your house?” “
You can’t come over!” said Sydney, appalled.
“No, I wasn’t thinking of that.
Never mind. But you might ask her –”
She had paused, and Sydney raised his eyebrows.
“You might ask her not to kill me, when she gets back there. I know I’d have left, moved out, if she had told me she really needed that. I’d have stopped … trying to be her. I only did it because I loved her.” She smiled, and for a moment as she stood up Sydney could see that she must once have been very pretty.
“Goodbye, Resurrection Man,” she said, and turned and shuffled away up the cement steps.
Sydney didn’t call after her. After a moment he realized that he was still holding the plastic ink-cartridge, and he put it in his pocket.
High-proof liquor, he thought unhappily.
Back in his apartment after making a couple of purchases, he poured himself a shot of bourbon from the kitchen bottle and sat down by the window with the Fleming book.
But when the Resurrection Man shall bring
The moon to free me from these yellowed pages,
The gift is mine, there won’t be anything
For you.
The moon had been full last night. Or maybe just a hair short of full, and it would be full tonight.
You might ask her not to kill me, when she gets back there.
He opened the bags he had carried home from a liquor store and a stationer’s, and he pulled the ink cartridge out of his pocket.
One bag contained a squat glass bottle of Scheaffer’s black ink, and he unscrewed the lid; there was a little pool of ink in the well on the inside of the open bottle’s rim, and he stuck the end of the cartridge into the ink and twisted the back. The plunger retracted, and the barrel ahead of it was black.
When it was a third filled, he stopped, and he opened the other bag. It contained a tiny plastic 50-milliliter bottle – what he thought of as breakfast-sized – of Bacardi 151-proof rum. He twisted off the cap and stuck the cartridge into the vapory liquor. He twisted the end of the cartridge until it stopped, filled, and even though the cylinder now contained two-thirds rum, it was still jet-black.
He had considered buying lighter-fluid, but decided that the 151-proof rum – seventy-five percent alcohol – would probably be more flammable. And he could drink what he didn’t use.
He was dozing in the chair when he heard someone moving in the kitchen. He sat up, disoriented, and hoarsely called, “Who’s there?”
He lurched to his feet, catching the book but missing the tiny empty rum bottle.
“Who were you expecting, lover?” came Cheyenne’s husky voice. “Should I have knocked? You already invited me.”
He stumbled across the dim living room into the kitchen. The overhead light was on in there, and through the little kitchen window he saw that it was dark outside.
Cheyenne was sweeping the last of the ants off the counter with her hand, and as he watched she rubbed them vigorously between her palms and wiped her open hands along her jaw and neck, then picked up the half-full bourbon bottle.
She was wearing the black linen skirt and jacket again – and, he could see, the birdseed-sprouting bra under the white blouse. The clothes were somehow still damp.
“I talked to Rebecca,” he blurted, thinking about the ink cartridge in his pocket.
“I told you not to,” she said absently. “Where do you keep glasses? Or do you expect me to drink right out of the bottle? Did she say she killed me in self-defense?”
“Yes.”
“Glasses?”
He stepped past her and opened a cupboard and handed her an Old Fashioned glass. “Yes,” he said again.
She smiled up at him from beneath her dark eyelashes as she poured a couple of ounces of amber liquor into the glass, then put down the bottle and caressed his cheek. The fruit-and-spice smell of crushed ants was strong.
“It was my fault!” she said, laughing as she spoke. “I shouldn’t have touched her with the barrel! And so it was little Shy that wound up getting killed, miserabile dictu! I was …nonplussed in eternity.” She took a deep sip of the bourbon and then sang, “‘Take my hand, I’m nonplussed in eternity …’”
He wasn’t smiling, so she pushed out her thin red lips. “Oh, lover, don’t pout. Am I my s
ister’s keeper? Did you know she claimed I got my best poems by stealing her ideas? As if anybody couldn’t tell from reading her poetry which of us was the original! At least I had already got that copy of my book out there, out in the world, like a message in a bottle, a soul in a bottle, for you to eventually –”
Sydney had held up his hand, and she stopped. “She said to tell you … not to kill her. She said she’d just move out if you asked her to. If she knew it was important to you.”
She shrugged. “Maybe.”
He frowned and took a breath, but she spoke again before he could. “Are you still going to help me copy out my poem? I can’t write it by myself, because the first word of it is the name of the person who killed me.”
Her eyes were wide and her eyebrows were raised as she looked down at the book in his hand and then back up at him.
“I’d do it for you,” she added softly, “because I love you. Do you love me?”
She couldn’t be taller than five-foot one-inch, and with her long neck and thin arms, and her big eyes under the disordered hair, she looked young and frail.
“Yes,” he said. I do, he thought. And I’m going to exorcise you. I’m going to spread that flammable ink-and-rum mix over the page and then touch it with a cigarette.
It was printed that way in only one copy of the book, Rebecca had said, the copy you obviously found, God help us all. A soul in a bottle.
There won’t be another Resurrection Man.
He made himself smile. “You’ve got a pen, you said.”
She reached thin fingers into the neck of her blouse and pulled out a long, tapering black pen. She shook it to dislodge a thin white tendril with a tiny green leaf on it. “May I?” he asked, holding out his hand.
She hesitated, then laid the pen in his palm.
He handed her the book, then pulled off the pen’s cap, exposing the gleaming, wedge-shaped nib. “Do you need to dip it in an ink bottle?” he asked.
“No, it’s got a cartridge in it. Unscrew the end.”
He twisted the barrel and the nib-end rotated away from the pen, and after a few more turns it came loose in his hand, exposing a duplicate of the ink-cartridge he had in his pocket.
“Pull the cartridge off,” she said suddenly, “and lick the end of it. Didn’t she tell you about my ink?”
“No,” he said, his voice unsteady. “Tell me about your ink.”
“Well, it’s got a little bit of my blood in it, though it’s mostly ink.” She was flipping through the pages of the book. “But some blood. Lick it, the punctured end of the cartridge.” She looked up at him and grinned. “As a chaser for the rum I smell on your breath.”
For ten seconds he stared into her deep green eyes, then he raised the cartridge and ran his tongue across the end of it. He didn’t taste anything.
“That’s my dear man,” she said, taking his hand and stepping onto the living room carpet. “Let’s sit in that chair you were napping in.”
As they crossed the living room, Sydney slid his free hand into his pocket and clasped the rum-and-ink cartridge next to the blood-and-ink one. The one he had prepared this afternoon was up by his knuckles, the other at the base of his palm.
She let go of his hand to reach out and switch on the lamp, and Sydney pulled a pack of Camels out of his shirt pocket and shook one free.
“Sit down,” she said, “I’ll sit in your lap. I hardly weigh anything. Are there limits to what you’d do for someone you love?”
Sydney hooked a cigarette onto his lip and tossed the pack aside. “Limits?” he said as he sat down and clicked a lighter at the end of the cigarette. “I don’t know,” he said around a puff of smoke.
“I think you’re not one of those normal people,” she said.
“I hate ‘em.” He laid his cigarette in the smoking stand beside the chair.
“Me too,” she said, and she slid onto his lap and curled her left arm around his shoulders. Her skirt and sleeve were damp, but not cold.
With her right hand she opened the book to the sonnet “To My Sister.”
“Lots of margin space for us to write in,” she said.
Her hot cheek was touching his, and when he turned to look at her he found that he was kissing her, gently at first and then passionately, for this moment not caring that her scent was the smell of crushed ants.
“Put the cartridge,” she whispered into his mouth, “back into the pen and screw it closed.”
He carefully fitted one of the cartridges into the pen and whirled the base until it was tight.
George Sydney stood up from crouching beside the shelf of cookbooks, holding a copy of James Beard’s On Food. It was his favorite of Beard’s books, and if he couldn’t sell it at a profit he’d happily keep it.
He hadn’t found any other likely books here today, and now it was nearly noon and time to walk across the boulevard to Boardner’s for a couple of quick drinks.
“There he is,” said the man behind the counter and the cash register. “George, this lady has been coming in every day for the last week, looking for you.”
Sydney blinked toward the brightly sunlit store windows, and in front of the counter he saw the silhouette of a short elderly woman with a halo of back-lit white hair.
He smiled and shuffled forward. “Well, hi,” he said.
“Hello, George,” she said in a husky voice, holding out her hand.
He stepped across the remaining distance and shook her hand. “What –” he began.
“I was just on my way to the Chinese Theater,” she said. She was smiling up at him almost sadly, and though her face was deeply etched with wrinkles, her green eyes were lively and young. “I’m going to lay three pennies in the indentations in Gregory Peck’s square.”
He laughed in surprise. “I do that with Jean Harlow!” “
That’s where I got the idea.” She leaned forward and tipped her face up and kissed him briefly on the lips, and he dropped the James Beard book.
He crouched to retrieve the book, and when he straightened up she had already stepped out the door. He saw her walking away west down Hollywood Boulevard, her white hair fluttering around her head in the wind.
The man behind the counter was middle-aged, with a graying moustache. “Do you know who your admirer is, George?” he asked with a kinked smile.
Sydney had taken a step toward the door, but some misgiving made him stop. He exhaled to clear his head of a sharp sweet, musty scent.
“Uh,” he said distractedly, “no. Who is she?”
“That was Cheyenne Fleming. I got her to sign some copies of her books the other day, so I can double the prices.”
“I thought she was dead by now.” Sydney tried to remember what he’d read about Fleming. “When was it she got paroled?”
“I don’t know. In the ‘80s? Some time after the death penalty was repealed in the ‘70s, anyway.” He waved at a stack of half a dozen slim dark books on the desk behind him. “You want one of the signed ones? I’ll let you have it for the original price, since she only came in here looking for you.”
Sydney looked at the stack.
“Nah,” he said, pushing the James Beard across the counter. “Just this.”
A few moments later he was outside on the brass-starred sidewalk, squinting after Cheyenne Fleming. He could see her, a hundred feet away to the west now, striding away.
He rubbed his face, trying to get rid of the odd scent. And as he walked away, east, he wondered why that kiss should have left him feeling dirty, as if it had been a mortal sin for which he couldn’t now phrase the need for absolution.
This story originated in my frustration that the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay died two years before I was born. The character Cheyenne Fleming deviated from Millay by becoming, I’m afraid, a much less interesting person than her original model – certainly poor Fleming’s sonnets can’t hold a candle (lit at both ends or not) to Millay’s! But then I think Millay was the best sonnetist since Shakespeare, so I gu
ess Fleming shouldn’t feel too bad.
It was an entertaining chore for me to write sonnets – one in the story, and three for inclusion in the limited edition from Subterranean Press – from the point of view of a fictional character, and so later I did it again with the protagonist of the novel Three Days to Never.
The incident with the balloon man in the forecourt of the Chinese Theater really happened, and it was my wife who had the cigarette snatched from her mouth; the man was wearing a top hat, and she knocked it off. The used-book store, Book City, isn’t there anymore, unfortunately.
–T. P.
THE HOUR OF BABEL
A gust of rainy wind wobbled the old 350 Honda as it made a right turn from Anaheim Boulevard into the empty parking lot, but the rider swerved a little wider to correct for it, and the green neutral-light shone under the water-beaded plastic window of the speedometer gauge as he coasted to a stop in one of the parking spaces in front of the anonymous office building.
He flipped down the kickstand and let the bike lean onto it without touching his shoe to the gleaming black pavement, and he unsnapped his helmet and pulled it off, shaking out his gray hair as he stared at the three-story building. In sunlight its white stucco walls were probably bright, but on this overcast noon it just looked ashen.
He shifted around on the plastic shopping bag he had draped over the section of black steel frame where the padded seat had once been, and squinted across the street. Past the wet cars hissing by in both directions he could see the bar, though it had a different name now. Probably the last person he knew from those days had quit going in there twenty years ago.
He looked back at the office building in front of him and tried to remember the Firehouse Pizza building that had stood there in 1975. It had sat further back, it seemed to him, with a wider parking lot in front.
The spot where he used to park his bike was somewhere inside this new building now.
He reached a gloved hand below the front of the gas tank and switched off the engine.
“Is he coming in?”