Freeze Frames

by Katharine Kerr

  Richie blushes and makes his escape. Of all the girls to fall for! But Les is a nice kid, really, aside from all of this. As Maggie stores the groceries, she can hear them talking, hesitantly at first, then more naturally, two kids laughing together over the gossip of a small town. Maggie decides to stay in the kitchen a little longer and starts making a big pot of vegetable soup.

  o~O~o

  When the soup is ready, and fresh-baked cheese muffins to go with it, Leslie cannot stop herself from eating. She tells herself that she’s stuffing herself like this—two bowls of soup, three muffins and with butter, too—just to please Maggie, but it seems that her body has swerved out of control, that it’s determined to grab food with its hands and stuff food into its mouth, whether she wants it to or not. She does manage to pass on dessert, though she promises Maggie that she’ll have pie with her breakfast in the good old-fashioned way.

  With dinner over, Leslie finds herself yawning. She hasn’t slept much, this past few days.

  “Richie,” Maggie says. “I think you’d better get on the road. Les, you need to rest. I’ll just put this stuff in the fridge, then leave myself.”

  Richie follows orders, but he does linger long enough to carry the dirty dishes to the washer. Leslie considers walking out to his truck with him, but she cannot force herself to stand up. It’s all that food. It’s made me too heavy to think.

  “Thanks, Richie,” she says. “I really really appreciate this.”

  “You’re welcome. Hey, any time.”

  Leslie smiles, keeps smiling as he walks out, stops smiling only when she hears the truck start, then drive away.

  “I should help,” she says to Maggie.

  “No. You’re sick. You just sit there.”

  Maggie scrapes the dishes and puts them in the washer, then wraps up the food, tucking the muffins into the bread keeper, the leftover soup—there isn’t much—into a small covered bowl.

  “Now, you eat this tomorrow,” Maggie says. “I’ll call you in the afternoon.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Maggie. Thanks so much. I don’t know how to repay you—”

  “You don’t need to.” All at once Maggie grins. “Just eat some of that pie.”

  “I will. Promise.”

  As soon as Maggie’s gone, Leslie shuts up the house, then falls into bed. She has just time to pull the sheet over her before she sleeps.

  In the dream world they come for her, the Master and the Slave. The Master she has never seen, and this time as well she only hears his mind-voice, muttering incomprehensible words. The Slave has a face of sorts, two eyes high on a cylindrical skull, or it seems at times cylindrical, at others stretched and wavering like a reflection in a pool of water. She sees his head emerging out of robes, or at least, soft sweeps of blue and green that might be fabric wound round a neck. For some time they speak, Master and Slave; then the touch of Master’s voice disappears. Slave’s view widens to include a greenish sky and large fronds that might be growing from muddy ground. Thick air spreads over the view, the crystalline pear and blob shapes appear—bubbles in the chemical drink that either enhances or produces Slave’s psychic abilities.

  I am sorry I have no choice

  I know that they have set the beacon they will come

  The crystalline shapes spread, fuse, thicken to a pane of opaque glass. Screaming, Leslie is awake, sitting up naked in a disordered bed.

  She forces herself under control, stops screaming, stops crying, gets up and staggers into the bathroom. From the mirror two faces look out at her, her own and then, slightly behind and to the left, a cylindrical shape with eyes, the skin pale grey, the eyes pools of black. She twists away, stares at the shower wall, then glances back to find the second face gone.

  “You never should have eaten so much, you little pig. It made you dream, all that food.”

  She starts to cry again, walks back to the bedroom, picks up her dirty jeans from the floor and pulls them on without underwear. Tears blind her so badly that sits down on the edge of the bed, then remembers.

  “They’ve set the beacon.”

  The tears stop, leaving her cold, icy cold and calm. The Master knows, his entire race knows, where Earth lies in the spangle of their alien sky. She is the only one who knows they know. From the floor she grabs a shirt, slips it over her head, then stands, fumbling in her pocket for car keys. She has to warn the world.

  The local TV station seems the obvious place to begin. Barefoot, Leslie runs outside, slides into the Honda, and leaves the door hanging, while for a moment she tries to organize her thoughts, her words, the things she’s going to say, the warning she’ll deliver. If only her mother were here, if only her mother weren’t dead—and she remembers again that her mother drank even though diagnosed diabetic. Did Laurel want to die, she whose world had shattered, she whose beloved stars had turned strange beyond reckoning? Leslie sobs once, then shoves the thought aside.

  When she turns the engine over, it starts right up, and she sighs in relief and shuts the door. She backs out of the driveway, then turns onto the main road fast. While she drives, curving down the mountainside and heading for the highway that goes down into Auburn, where the station is, she’s planning out what she will say. She’s watched the local news enough to know the names of the newscasters. Which one should she ask for? The Hispanic woman, Lupe, seems the most accessible.

  Leslie lets the car slow to take a sharp turn at a decent speed. The road here runs narrow, with the mountainside itself rising sharply on her right, and off to the left, dropping down and down into the far distance of a valley. All at once she realizes that she’s come away with no shoes. And in dirty clothes. And without combing her hair. They’re going to think she’s crazy, when she shows up like this talking about aliens from outer space. Is she crazy? She remembers Maggie, saying that the notebooks were all she had left of her mother. Orphaned so young. Grief counselling.

  “But I hear them. I know they’re there.”

  Yes, of course she hears them. They have been using her, an unconscious traitor, to track down the human race. For the first time she realizes the enormity of her crime. If she hadn’t kept working with the notebooks. If she’d burned them. She should have burned them. She should never have opened them. It’s all her fault. Once again yet again she’s failed. It’s all her fault. She’s not seen it until this moment, that the fate of the Earth, the coming subjugation of humanity, are all her fault, her sins, her shames, hanging before her in the sunlight like bubbles, crystalline bubbles.

  they use you as a beacon they will find you

  In perfect calm she wrenches the wheel to the left. The car spins, skids, bucks on the shoulder, and leaps free of the road and of the earth. For one brief moment Leslie knows how it feels to fly.

  o~O~o

  When the fire engine screams by, Richie is standing out in front of the eth pumps, his hands in his pockets, watching the road and hoping for a customer. The siren leaps out of nowhere and spins him round to watch as the red rescue unit races toward and then past him, the wail dying and echoing as it heads up the mountain in the direction of Leslie’s house. Leslie’s house. He feels a trickle of fear down his spine, reminds himself that she was too sick to drive anywhere, feverish and all of that. Yet he takes a few steps out into the road and watches in the direction the engine’s gone. Distantly he sees a thin plume of grey smoke rising into the sky.

  Richie moves, fast but not too fast, walks into the office and turns on the emergency shortwave radio. He fiddles with dials, picks up a clear signal at last.

  “We’ve found it. A car wreck. Must have gone over the edge up above a ways. Can’t really tell. A two-seater car.” More squawks, perhaps from the other end of this conversation. “It’s burning too bad to tell. But there’s someone in there. Ah shit!” A long pause, filled with static and dim voices, far from the mike, a long long pause, too long.

  Without thinking Richie turns the radio off and walks back outside. Plenty of people in Goldust dri
ve two-seater cars these days, with eth so expensive. When he looks up at the sky, he finds the smoke dispersing to a flat faint plate against the blue. They must have got the fire out, then. Too late for whoever it was, in there. He looks both ways down the road, sees no one coming, then turns and walks back into the office to turn the radio on.

  A lot of chatter, a call for an ambulance. One of the firemen has a burnt hand. The person in the car is dead.

  “Looks like a girl. Looks like the car might have been a Honda.”

  Richie turns off the radio. He knows, then, knows in his very soul as grief stabs like a knife, but he can pretend he does not know, cannot know, for another twenty-odd minutes, until the phone in the office rings. He answers it to find Maggie on the line.

  “Richie, honey, close up the station and come up to my house. I talked to your dad. He’ll be down to open it again. There’s something I have to tell you.”

  Richie hesitates, wondering if he can pretend he doesn’t know for the time it’ll take him to ride up to her house. Since Big Rick has the van, he’ll have to take one of the horses.

  “Richie?”

  “Still here. I saw the fire engine. She’s dead, isn’t she, Gram? Leslie I mean.”

  “Oh God. How—”

  “The radio. The radio in the office.”

  “Oh God. Just get yourself up here.”

  As he hangs up it occurs to Richie that his grandmother needs him. He saddles up a horse, swings into the saddle, and heads out without even telling his mother where he’s going. That afternoon he discovers an advantage horses have over cars; you can cry and ride at the same time.

  o~O~o

  That afternoon Maggie spends pacing round her living room, alternately storming and weeping, blaming herself or cursing Leslie’s father. She will have to call him, she supposes, better her than the police, after all, even though she’s never met him, even though he’s nothing but a name and a set of nasty habits to her. He’s in England, Leslie told her once, teaching for the summer. She hopes she can find his number over at the house. Eventually she will have to go over there and sort out things for a dead friend once again, just as she did for Laurel.

  For these hours Richie sits in a chair and says nothing, barely moves, until she feels like screaming at him to weep, to curse, to do something anything for God’s sake. Finally, when the sun hangs low in the sky and shadows fall dark across the windows, Richie gets up, stretches, sits down again.

  “You know why she was out driving around?” he says.

  “I don’t, no. I’ve been wondering. She could have called me if she’d needed anything.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought. She was too sick to handle the car, I guess.”

  Maggie hesitated, considering whether or not to tell him the truth. Judging from everything she knows about Leslie, put together with the skid marks that the rescue crew found, most likely Leslie killed herself.

  “She was real feverish,” Maggie says. “I don’t know why she was out of her bed, much less out driving. Those curves up there are tricky.”

  Richie nods, looking away.

  “It’s getting dark out,” Maggie says. “I’m going to go get the cats in.”

  He nods again, staring at the far wall.

  The herd of cats comes not exactly to Maggie’s call, more in answer to the sound of food being shaken on a tin plate, but slowly, a few at a time, they wander into the kitchen. By the time the last of them has condescended to come eat, the shadows have turned to twilight on the hills, though far above and to the west the high peaks still gleam gold. Maggie returns to the living room to find Richie sitting on the floor, his back to the sofa, all six feet of him sprawled akimbo, one hand clutching the remote. On the hanging screen of the TV some faded frenzies of Donald Duck play soundlessly while he stares at them without, mostly likely, really seeing them, his face illuminated only by the silver glow in the dark room. For some minutes she stands in the doorway and watches him watch. At last he turns his head to acknowledge her presence.

  “I could give Janet a call,” Maggie says. “I was wondering if you wanted to get away for a little while. She’s got an extra room, you know. You’d be welcome to go down to the city, stay a couple of weeks.”

  Richie turns his head back to the screen and flicks the remote. The same cartoon starts again from the beginning, still without sound.

  “If you think she wouldn’t mind,” he says at last. “Don’t know if I should, though.”

  “Well, you don’t need to decide right away. She’s told me a couple of times that you’d always be welcome.”

  “Thanks. Real nice of her.”

  This is, Maggie realizes, the first time he’s ever mourned anyone. Her husband died in a logging accident when Richie was two and a half. The grandson, that skinny little toddler with sandy hair who was Little Rick back then, did notice Grandpa’s absence but found the news that he was in Heaven solace enough.

  “Do you want to stay here tonight?” she says. “Not go home?”

  He turns to her and manages a smile.

  “Yeah. How’d you know?”

  “I guessed.”

  He lets the smile fade, considering something.

  “Real nice of Aunt Janet,” he says at last. “But I don’t think so. But you’re right about getting away.”

  “Well, is there anywhere else you want to go?”

  “I was thinking ’bout going down to Grass Valley. I’ve been thinking, you know, ’bout learning to drive a real team. A four-in-hand, you know? Or even a rig of six. There’s a guy there, said he’d teach me.”

  “Old Tim Wilson?”

  “Yeah. He told me he used to drive a stagecoach, back when they had those ’Old Timey Days’ for the tourists.”

  “I remember that, yeah. Him and his brother Jack, but Jack’s gone now.”

  “Yeah. And well, if old Tim dies, there won’t be anyone left who knows, will there? He’s damn near ninety. No use in me putting it off much longer. I was just thinking about that.”

  “Yeah, I bet you were.”

  Richie nods, wipes his eyes on the back of his hand, and turns back to the screen, where the cartoon is ending. A flick of the remote begins it again. Maggie sits down in a chair nearby, where she can see Richie more than the screen. She wishes that she’d taken some snapshots of Leslie, just to put in the album with those of her mother. Someday Richie will want to see her again, a picture of his first love, no matter how badly it ended. Someday Maggie herself will want a picture too, when she stops wishing she had done something more, reached out a little more, asked perhaps the one right question or made the one right comment that would have started Leslie talking about whatever problem it was that drove her first to starving herself, then to suicide. If only I’d stopped by again this morning early, if only I’d helped her, if only if only—a requiem in her mind for the dead, even though she knows that she did try, that nothing, probably, would have saved Leslie’s life since, it seems, she was determined to kill herself.

  “Tim said he’d put me up for a couple weeks, while I learned,” Richie says.

  “Um? Well, right. It’s not something you can learn in an afternoon, handling a four-in-hand. Or a coach rig.”

  Richie nods, staring at the screen. A different cartoon is playing now, but still he hasn’t turned up the sound.

  “You better call your dad,” Maggie says. “Tell him you’re staying here tonight.”

  “Yeah.”

  Richie gets up, hands her the remote, and walks into the kitchen for the phone. Maggie lays the wand in her lap. She can only hope that Leslie’s found whatever peace she so desperately craved, if indeed something does happen to a person after she dies, if a soul is somehow translated or recycled or given at least a few moments to consider how it lived. For the first time in fifty years she finds herself thinking of Nick Harrison and her odd fantasy that he was the Devil incarnate. Too many drugs, she supposes, we all took too many drugs. But we had hope, back then,
drugs or no drugs, hope that kids like poor Leslie don’t have anymore, hope that the future would be good or at least fair somehow, justice for all, or at least damn it all interesting. Strange the way things work out, but well, nothing lasts forever, not even hope.

  Maggie finds herself on the edge of tears. She wipes them away and gets up, then goes into the kitchen to make Richie something to eat.

  Asylum

  “I’ve always loved Britain so much,” Janet says. “It’s going to be wonderful, this couple of weeks. I haven’t had a vacation in so long. Jam tomorrow, jam yesterday.”

  Rosemary smiles. Ever since they met at Oxford, some forty years ago now, they’ve kept in touch across the Atlantic by phone calls and faxes, e-mail and bulletin boards, the occasional paper letter, the even rarer visit. They have shared their careers, their divorces, and their family news during those years, as well as this long-standing joke about Janet’s lack of vacations.

  “Well, then.” Rosemary supplies the punch line. “I’d say that you’ve finally got your jam today.”

  “Finally, yeah,” Janet says, grinning. “And the view from here is an extra helping. It makes me feel all John of Gauntish. This sceptered isle and like that.”

  They are standing at a window on the top floor of the Canary Wharf office building, rising among the ruins of the Docklands. Since they are facing west, London stretches out before them into the misty distance on either side of the Thames, glittering in the bright sun of a warm autumn day. All along the banks the new retaining walls rise, bleak slabs of concrete, while the river runs fast and high between them. Janet can pick out the complex round the Tower and the new barricades round its ancient walls, protecting them from tides gone mad. Just east of the Tower, near what used to be St. Katharine’s Docks, huge concrete pylons, hooded like monks in sheet metal, rise out of the river. Boats swarm round, workmen overrun them, all rushing to finish the new barrier before the winter sets in.

  “Well,” Janet says. “Maybe not John of Gauntish. Rosemary, this is really pretty awful, the floods, I mean.”