Vacancy & Ariel

by Lucius Shepard

“What’s my novel have to do with anything?”

  “If you’ll listen I’ll explain.”

  She disengaged from me, sat up cross-legged, but did not rebutton her blouse. “Go ahead.”

  “It may be difficult for you to hear this. I…”

  “Just tell me! It’s not necessary to qualify what you say.”

  And so I told her. Everything. From my stoner moment at Cal Tech to our meeting in the hills outside of Durbin to my latest thoughts concerning Springheel Jack and my hypothesis that she might soon be receiving a visitor who resembled him. She neither moved nor commented while I spoke. Once I had finished she asked why I hadn’t told her previously.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d believe me. I didn’t want to trip you out.” A few seconds ran off the clock and I asked, “Do you believe me?”

  “I believe you believe it.”

  “But I might be crazy, huh?”

  “That’s not a judgment I can make so quickly. But I’m of a mind to think you’re sane.” Her eyes drifted toward the stack of notebooks on the nightstand. “What you said about the project and the crash. Ah’raelle’s transformation. Her memory loss and Isha tracking her down to California. It’s the plot of my second book. I thought I’d dreamed it.” She relaxed from her rigorous pose and settled beside me, laid a hand on my cheek, suddenly ultra-feminine, holding me with her eyes. “Let’s not think about it. I’ll deal with it later.”

  “How can you not think about it? Jesus! If somebody told me what I just told you, I’d…”

  “The future can wait, but the present cannot wait.” A smile came slowly to her lips. “If I’m the woman you believe I am, how can you deny me?”

  I MUST NEGLECT the story of how we were with one another, of the accommodations we reached, the mutualities we achieved, and the unmemorable civil wedding that followed. I would like to show you, to demonstrate with scene and line the exact proportions of the contentment we enclosed in our arms; but that is a common tale whose minutiae would distract from the less common one I am compelled to relate. Suffice it to say that it seemed we did have a connection. We became lovers with none of the usual falterings and tentativeness. It was as if we were lovers who had been apart awhile and needed only to reconnect in order to resurrect the institutions of our relationship. If someone had told me that I could be happy with a woman given to fits of temper and days-long periods during which she became cold and distant, a woman given to barking orders at me, I would have laughed at the prospect and said, “Not my type.” But Ariel was exactly my type. It appeared there were places in me into which the spikes of her behaviors fit perfectly and, conversely, she was tolerant of my shifting moods which—I came to understand—were not dissimilar in their intensity and variety from her own.

  I could not persuade Ariel to leave California. She was committed to uncovering her past and if she had to confront mortal danger in the process, that’s what she would do. I moved in with her, bought the cabin in which she lived and a dozen acres around it, and spent a small fortune in having it enlarged and made secure. Electrified windows. Motion detectors in the surrounding trees—the cabin was situated in the midst of an evergreen forest, grand old-growth firs mixed in with pine and spruce. I purchased a small armory of rifles and handguns, but Ariel refused to let me keep any of them, limiting our defenses to a tranquilizer rifle. She did not want to kill Isha. Though he might be unable to communicate with her, to tell her about her old life, dead he would be useless.

  I’m not sure if Ariel firmly believed that Isha would appear. The story, after all, had for her the reality of a dream and talking about it often made her uncomfortable. Though determined to uncover her past, at the same time she yearned to set it aside, to think of herself as an ordinary woman. The idea that she had once been a creature such as I described undermined the stability she had contrived. But I believed Isha would come for her and I became fanatical about our security. I had so many floodlights installed, I could turn night into day, and I went hunting with a tranquilizer rifle, potshotting and overdosing a number of small animals, starting up birds and dropping them from the air, until I felt confident I would be able to knock Isha down, however high he leaped. It was a thoroughly paranoid existence. We worked behind locked doors; I patrolled but otherwise rarely left Ariel alone; and I would drag her away from the cabin whenever possible. Still, it was a better life than I had ever had before. It seemed something had been out of balance, some delicate mechanism in my brain aligned out of true, and I had gone through life with a slight mental list, not quite attuned to the right frequency, a confused static impairing my progress. Everything was in balance now. Standing guard over Ariel satisfied a need that had lain dormant in me, and being with her was a deeper satisfaction yet. For all our pettinesses and tempers, we had our perfect days, our golden weeks, and when days were less than perfect, we took refuge in our work; but though we grew close as coins in a purse, there were moments when I watched her with a clinician’s eye, wondering what part of her was hidden from me, what eerie comprehensions lay beyond the perimeters of her memory, a black exotic garden flourishing in her skull, and wondered, too, if those elements of her personality that allowed her to love me were merely a thin surface of learned behaviors that one day might dissolve and so release a fierce stranger into the world. Studying too much on these matters occasionally made me suspect that I had lost touch with reality. When given voice, the scenario into which I had bought sounded preposterous. Then Ariel would come into the room and my doubts would evaporate and I would know that however absurd the constituencies of my belief, I was in the presence of my fate.

  In October of the year, Ariel’s publisher called to let her know that they were sending her on tour in support of the second book. Though the start of the tour was months off, she brooded and grew distant. She said the thought of being away from the cabin depressed her, but the profundity of her depression persuaded me that some less discernable inner turmoil was its root cause. I doubt she completely understood it herself. When I asked what was wrong, she would fly into a rage—familiarity had taught me that this was her customary reaction to important questions for which she had no good answer. Left to my own devices, I tinkered with our security system, worked fitfully, and killed more small animals, including a toy poodle named Fidgets belonging to our nearest neighbors, an accident that encouraged me to break off my shooting spree. After burying Fidgets in the woods I returned to the cabin and began reading Ariel’s book. I had previously skimmed it in draft, searching for clues to her history, but since much of the novel involved a speculative future, not a merely dubious past, I found it less illuminating than her first. I did, however, come across one instructive passage that either I had missed or had been added after my initial reading.

  Ariel’s strengths as a writer were pacing and plotting. Her handling of setting was a definite weakness, but early in the book there was a scene whose setting was remarkably well evoked and located, so much so that I wondered why her editor had let it stand, it was at such variance with the rest of the writing. In the scene Ah’raelle, her memory in tatters, is hurrying along through the West Virginia woods, carrying equipment she has brought from her vehicle, and because she can no longer recall what the equipment is or how to use it, wishing to lighten her burden, she buries it at the foot of an immense boulder close by the confluence of two streams. The boulder is covered with graffiti, heavily spray-painted, and overspread by an enormous tree, a water oak judging by the description; in among the roots of the tree are a number of ritual objects: candles, hand-sewn sachets, crude homemade dolls, and so forth. On reading this, I recalled the pack that the woman who leaped from the pit had carried. Could it be buried in the West Virginia hills? If I were to accept the chronology of the novel, if that timeline reflected reality, the burial had taken place more than a year after the crash and thus the pack was probably buried somewhere in the vicinity of Durbin.

  That afternoon I called my old traveling companion Whirlie Henley
and asked if he was available for a walk in the woods; I would pay the same rate as before.

  “You ain’t goin’ after long, tall, and vicious again, are ya?” he asked.

  “It’s a related matter,” I told him. “But I can guarantee we won’t be running into her.”

  “How the hell you gon’ do that?”

  “Trust me. She’s not anywhere near West Virginia.”

  “You still chasin’ after her?”

  “You might say.”

  Grudgingly, Henley accepted my offer and we arranged to meet two weeks from the day at Mickey’s—it would take me that long, I believed, to convince Ariel we should make the trip. As things turned out it took me only ten days. She flatly resisted at first on the grounds she might miss an opportunity to contact Isha. I told her it seemed that Isha was a persistent sort and I cited the plethora of material in her book relating to predestination. “If there’s any truth to it,” I said, “you can’t avoid another encounter.” Acceding to this argument, she tried another tack, saying she had no wish to return to a place where she had been so miserable. I hadn’t informed her of my actual reason for returning; she was in a fragile mental state and I did not want to risk upsetting her to the point that she would blow off her tour. Instead I’d told her I had business in Green Bank and now I suggested that while I was taking care of it, she could visit the Krishna temple in Moundsville. “You’ll make ol’ Shivananda’s day,” I said. Her memories of the temple were not altogether unpleasant, and finally she relented. Six days later, after a thirty-minute drive followed by a ten-minute walk, Henley and I stood beside a massive, richly tagged boulder at the confluence of two streams, shaded by a venerable water oak. Its leaves had turned, but few had fallen. The air was damp and cold, the ground soaked by a recent rain.

  “You told me what you’re lookin’ for,” Henley had said when I met him at Mickey’s, “I coulda saved you some worry. Everybody ‘round Durbin knows the Damsel Oak. Witchy women come out here to cast spells. High school kids use it for partyin’. Thing’s damn near a tourist attraction.”

  While Henley watched I dug with a short-handled shovel, excavating a trench around the boulder. Ariel’s description stated that Ah’raelle had buried her equipment deep. Given that she had been working with her hands, I had not expected “deep” meant other than the extreme end of shallow. A couple of feet down, maybe. But I had no luck at that depth. Sweaty and irritated, my shoulders aching, I took a break.

  Perched atop the boulder, Henley removed his Mountaineers cap, ran a hand through his graying hair and said, “Willowy Woman was pretty damn strong. You might hafta go down a ways.”

  “No shit.” I examined my palms. Unblistered for now, but not for long.

  “’Course we might have the wrong rock.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Then somebody coulda already dug up whatever it is you’re after.”

  “So how the Mountaineers doing this season?” I asked, hoping to cut short this litany of woeful possibility.

  Henley’s breezy mood soured. “Doin’ all right.”

  “Yeah, I caught part of the Syracuse game. That was a Little League game, they would have applied the mercy rule and shut it down.”

  “Boys had some injuries was what it was.”

  “Sure, that’s it.”

  The stream chuckled and slurped along in its banks. Henley appeared to be listening to it.

  “Maybe you better get on back to diggin’,” he said. “Ain’t much light left.”

  The sun lowered and a starless dark descended. The occasional rustle from the surrounding woods—that was all the sound except for the rush of the water and my grunts. Henley built a fire and cooked. After a meal of beans and franks, though I was fatigued and sore, I jumped down into the trench again, working in bursts, taking frequent rests. Around ten o’clock, at a depth of five feet, I struck something on the stream side of the boulder. I scraped dirt away from it, then fell to my knees and pried it free. A case covered in dark red material. My hands were so cramped I could barely pick it up, and when I managed to get a grip I discovered it weighed in the neighborhood of sixty pounds. I remembered how easily Ariel had leaped from the hollow, holding it in one hand. Like Henley said, she had been pretty damn strong.

  I dragged the case to the fire and sat cross-legged in front of it. With the fire leaping, casting the case in a hellish light, and the shadows of flames dancing on the side of the tent, I felt like a shaman staring at a magic box. I’d assumed it would be tricky to open, but was surprised to find that there was only a simple catch. Emergency equipment, I told myself. Designed for those who were losing their memories and might not be able to deal with something more complex. That did not explain, however, why they hadn’t secured it with a lock keyed to DNA. Perhaps they allowed for the possibility that the person stranded might be critically injured and require help in accessing the case. Overcome by fatigue, it was not until that moment I understood the magnitude of what I had found or considered the difficulties that might arise from the discovery. Cold, I grew colder yet.

  “You gon’ open it or what?” Henley asked, squatting at my side.

  “Maybe you don’t want to see this.”

  “I been waitin’ around all day for it!”

  “There’s people who might ask you questions about what’s inside. They’re not good people.”

  Henley tipped back his cap, rubbed his forehead with a knuckle. “You think it’s drugs or somethin’?”

  “I don’t know what it is.”

  “Hell, I’ll take a peek if you don’t mind,” Henley said, kneeling. “Seein’ how she like to half-kill me, I reckon I got a stake in things.”

  Sap popped in the fire; silence seemed to gather itself into something big and black and bulging above the trees.

  I lifted the lid.

  Inside the case was a gray metal panel indented with several dozen shallow depressions—three dozen to be exact—most occupied by silver cylinders, each slimmer and shorter than a fountain pen. Four held larger items, also silvery in color, but with claw-shaped ends. I had no idea what I was seeing. My initial assumption was that they were tools, but thirty-two tools of the same shape and size…it made no sense. I lifted one from the case. It had to weigh half a pound. The metal was warm, signifying a heat source within.

  Henley picked another up and held it to catch the firelight, turning it this way and that. I set my cylinder back in the case and when I glanced at Henley again I saw that he appeared to be frozen in place, staring at the cylinder with a confused expression.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  He gave no answer and I touched his arm. The muscles were rigid.

  “Whirlie?” I said; then, after a pause, “You hear me?”

  He remained unmoving, not even a twitch.

  For several minutes during which I began to fear for him and wondered how I would explain a catatonic redneck, Henley did not stir; then, expelling a hoarse sigh, he dropped the cylinder and sank onto his side. Greatly relieved, I asked what had happened.

  “I can’t sort it out,” he said dazedly. “It was a buncha pictures and things.” He sat up. “They started comin’ when I was studying it up close and pushed in the ends. Go on…give ’er a try. Didn’t hurt or nothin’. It’s just weird.”

  Holding a cylinder up to eye level, I did as he had instructed. I felt a weak vibration in the metal. Then the pictures and things started to come. For the duration of the experience I was a receiver, accepting a flow of information relayed as images, and was unable to gain a clear perspective on what I was seeing. If, like Henley, I’d had no knowledge of the situation, I would have been mightily confused, and even given the knowledge I did have, I was somewhat confused, my head so full of strangeness, I too had difficulty sorting it out. But I understood that the cylinders contained what would be essential should one of the Akashel encounter an emergency and be stranded far from home: memories.

  Ariel’s memories.

&nb
sp; I tried four cylinders in all. One was a collection of images relating to the operation of the sarcophagus-like ships in which the Akashel traveled. The second offered an overview of the current state of the Weave; the third provided language instruction—I assumed it was the language Ariel had once spoken. All three used images to convey concepts and—in the case of the language instructional—to illustrate word sounds and ideographs, and these had been culled from her experience. It was her long-fingered grayish hands operating the controls of the ship, her voice sounding out words in my mind, her memories of missions past that increased my understanding of the Weave.

  Why hadn’t she taken advantage of this resource?

  I speculated that she might have been injured in the explosion. A head injury that caused her to lose her memory even before electron decay had wiped it out. Or maybe it had been a conscious decision. According to the second volume of the trilogy, she had despaired over having to kill Isha. She might have seen the destruction of the ship as an opportunity to avoid completing her mission. Or maybe the destruction of the ship eliminated any possibility of return and she had decided that memory loss was preferable to the yearning of an exile. But if that were so, why had she headed for the SETI array near Green Bank? Coincidence? From what I had just learned of the Weave, coincidence was a faulty concept. The cylinders with the clawlike ends might, I thought, have some application in this regard, but I was leering of experimenting with them.

  The fourth cylinder contained personal memories and made me reluctant to investigate a fifth. The intensity of Ariel’s emotional range, her sexual reactions, her extreme devotion to the man whose grotesque face loomed above her in the act of love, all this left my own emotions in a tangle. Nothing I learned from any of the cylinders fit perfectly in my brain. Receiving her memories was like trying on a hat that was too large—I kept having to prevent it from falling down over my eyes—and all my new knowledge was imperfectly seated, my comprehension full of gaps. Her passions leaped high in me, bright and fertile as flames, sowing patches of inappropriate heat throughout my body. I felt muddled, my identity eroded.