“It shows the moment of your death. Orfanik made it, for whatever strange reasons he had. It found its way to me. And now I have the power —”
“Oh for Heaven’s sake!”
“Marlene —”
She snatched up the torch and flicked it on. It slipped from her hands, hit the table and dropped to the floor. And in those couple of seconds, as the beam of light span across the café, I saw two briefly illuminated images of Marlene.
The torch hit the floor and went out.
“No!” I stood quickly, knocking over my chair. Heads turned, but Marlene was the only person I could see, the only pair of eyes I could face looking into. Ironic, as I had just seen them melted away by fire. “Oh, no!”
Something in my voice convinced her. Doubt was extinguished, her anger faded, her face paled, and for those few quiet seconds after the disturbance she wanted to know what I had seen. I could see it in her eyes. I shook my head, trying to dislodge the image that had stuck there like a subliminal message.
those flames that scream the cries . . .
Marlene gasped out loud, stood and fled the café. As the door swung shut behind her I thought, I’m the one who should be running. I watched her cross the street and disappear behind a building, waiting for a car to run her down and explode at any second. None came. Her image had been of no definable age. Perhaps we had years left yet, meeting at Cicero’s and mourning a past that had not worked out.
Or perhaps I would never see her again.
I snatched up the torch. I had intended following Marlene, but as I left the café I turned in the opposite direction and ran.
What use was a tool that would let someone see their own death? Why would someone strive to invent such a device? Where would Marlene encounter the fire that would kill her? Had my seeing Marlene’s death brought it closer in any way? Had Orfanik used the torch himself? How had it left his possession and found its way through the centuries to me? Was I really related to a fictional character, or was this some cruel cosmic joke?
OLD LIGHT 381
Sitting in the park, the answers to these questions — and many more besides — eluded me. I ascribed each question to a garden opposite my bench, and watched as bees went from one to another, unable to provide any answers. Time would take these flowers and make them mulch, and in time perhaps my fears and questions would fade as well. But for now — this exact moment, the one instant in life that held greatest importance — all I had were more questions. Soon, I would need to find a larger flower bed.
Guilt took me home and stood me in front of my bathroom mirror.
I held the torch, pointed it up at my face, fingered the button.
I looked into my eyes, seeing myself as no one else ever had.
And like a suicide seeking only attention, I could not go through with the act. If the torch had been a .45 I would have thrown it away then, but it was too precious to damage like that. I lowered it, continued staring into my own eyes, watching the tears form and flow.
I stayed that way for a long time. I cried because I wished my father had known the truth, rather than the myth. The tears were also for what I had seen of Marlene. I hated the selfishness of that, the thoughtlessness, but I was already grieving for her, even though I still had no idea of when she would meet her horrible death.
In the end the torch slipped from my grasp and fate visited me again. It hit the floor, snapped on and bathed me with its strange light.
I saw through my tears.
Over the next few days I fell in love with Marlene all over again.
I eventually persuaded her to meet me at Cicero’s and we sat there for hours, talking about everything except what had happened. I was never sure whether she truly believed that I had seen something, and I did my best to keep the haunting truth from my eyes. I think I succeeded. In all that time, I never saw the shadow of fear cross her face.
We met again a day later, and three time the following week, and the week after that we sat outside at a pavement table. This was a huge step for us, eschewing the neutrality of the café’s interior, and it turned the meeting into a date. As I rose to leave Marlene stood up, closed in and kissed me on the lips. It did not surprise either of us, yet my heart paused for long seconds.
I walked away smiling and stepped carelessly into the street, knowing that no car would knock me down. That was not my way.
We take it one day at a time. The image of Marlene’s death haunts me still, but there is an unspoken agreement that it will never be mentioned again. Mystery cannot come between us, as it did before. Love holds so much more power over me.
Especially knowing what I know.
Having seen my own old, weathered face wither and bubble in flames, at least I know that we will be together until the end.
THE SELENE GARDENING SOCIETY by Molly Brown
Gradually writing himself out of his depression, Verne produced another sequel. Sans dessus dessous (1890), translated as Topsy-Turvy but better known as The Purchase of the North Pole, brings back the members of the Baltimore Gun Club, twenty years after their moon venture. The Gun Club acquire the land at the North Pole where they believe are vast mineral deposits. In order to get at them they need to melt the ice cap and decide the best way to do this is to shift the axis of the Earth. Despite the cataclysmic consequences the Gun Club continue in their project only to fail because of a mathematical error in their calculations. While it appears to be another preposterous novel, it is in fact, like Hector Servadac and Robur the Conqueror, another parable about the potential irresponsibility of man in trying to act like God.
Although Verne did not write again about the fellows of the Gun Club there is no doubt that these individuals would stop at nothing. We have already learned of their further adventures in space in two earlier stories. In the next two we learn of their later escapades.
Chapter One: J. T. Maston takes up gardening
An open-topped carriage turned up the long drive to one of the grandest houses in New Park, Baltimore. The mansion’s doors flew open, a stream of servants filing out into the afternoon sun to greet their mistress, the former Mrs Evangelina Scorbitt.
Evangelina patted the large box on the seat beside her. It contained her latest purchase: a wide-brimmed hat garnished with a cluster of tall feathers. Despite having invested — and lost — nearly half of the late Mr Scorbitt’s fortune in the Baltimore Gun Club’s failed scheme to melt the polar ice cap, she was still one of the wealthiest women in Maryland, well able to afford the occasional new hat. And this hat was something special.
At the age of forty-seven, Evangelina was painfully aware that, even as a girl, she had never been a beauty. But the moment she’d tried on that hat, she’d felt transformed. The milliner insisted she looked ten years younger, and for the first time in her life, this overweight middle-aged woman with hair the colour of dirty straw had actually liked what she saw in the mirror. It was the most wonderful hat in the world, and she couldn’t wait for her new husband to see her in it.
Her driver was slowing the horses to a walk when the ground beneath them was rocked by an explosion. Evangelina was thrown back in her seat as the horses reared up, then bolted across the lawn.
She calmly grabbed hold of the side of the carriage as it careered across the grass, pursued by a gaggle of uniformed servants. And every dog in the neighbourhood was barking. “You’d think they’d be used to it by now,” she sighed.
She was sitting in front of her dressing table when the house was shaken by another explosion. The maid standing behind her jumped, nearly skewering her with a hat pin. “Sorry, Ma’am.”
Evangelina shook her head. The staff were as skittish as the horses. And the neighbourhood dogs were at it again. She told her maid to close the window.
Melting the North Pole had seemed a good idea at the time. There must be limitless supplies of coal in the Arctic — once you got past all that ice. So a plan was devised to straighten the Earth’s axis by firing a gigantic ca
nnon set into the side of Mount Kilimanjaro, the idea being that the recoil from the shot would nudge the planet into the desired position.
Despite the cannon’s failure to affect the Earth’s orbit — due to a slight mathematical error involving the accidental erasure of three zeros — and the loss of all that money, Evangelina continually reminded herself that everything had worked out for the best in the end. Everyone now agreed that melting the polar ice would have drowned half the civilized world, including Baltimore. And so the mistake in calculations became a cause for celebration, and the man who had made it became a hero. And that hero was none other than Mr Jefferson Thomas Maston, generally known as J. T.
J. T. Maston was nearly sixty, with an iron hook at the end of one arm (the result of an accident with a mortar during the Civil War), but he was a great man: not only a renowned mathematician, but an inventor (he’d designed the mortar that removed his hand himself). It was not long after their first meeting that Evangelina had decided she wanted nothing more than to be this great man’s wife, and it was now a little over three months since Evangelina had got her wish, and had become Mrs J. T. .Maston.
She should have been deliriously happy, if not for one thing: J. T. Maston had taken up gardening.
She found her husband bending over a howitzer in a far corner of the grounds. “I thought that would be a good spot for the azaleas,” he said, pointing at a patch of cleared soil between the fountain and the grotto.
She positioned herself directly in her husband’s line of sight. “Well?”
“Well what?”
She did a little twirl, raising a hand to indicate her hat.
“What do you think?”
“About what?”
She stopped twirling. “Never mind.”
Her husband shrugged and turned his attention back to the cannon. “Stand back.”
Evangelina covered her ears as the gun went off, discharging a cloud of seeds.
Chapter Two: In which a solution is suggested
“I wouldn’t even mention it,” Evangelina said, “but the neighbours are complaining, the staff are threatening to leave, and now he’s dug up all my rose bushes and is talking about turning the ornamental pond into an onion patch.”
The monthly gathering of the New Park Ladies’ Gardening Society burbled their sympathy. They were meant to be discussing their annual “Best Delphiniums” award, but the conversation had drifted off-topic.
It was a warm day, and the various scents of lavender, musk, rose, and vanilla emanating from the ladies around her seemed to be fighting a losing battle against the reek of garbage wafting in through the windows of the Methodist meeting hall.
“And he didn’t even notice my new hat,” she added, fanning herself. This was greeted with such an eruption of clucking and tsk’ing that Fiona Wicke was forced to bring down her gavel.
Once the most beautiful woman in Baltimore, these days the thrice-widowed chair of the gardening society contented herself with being the most fashionable. She leaned back in her seat — at least as far back as the stiff horsehair-padded bustle beneath her dress would allow — and formed a temple with her lace-gloved fingers. “I take it Mr Maston and Mr Barbicane are still not speaking?”
It seemed everyone in Baltimore knew about the rift between J. T. Maston and the president of the Gun Club. It all went back to those three silly little zeros. The one thing Mr Impey Barbicane refused to forgive was an error in calculations — even an error that had saved the world — with the end result that Mr Maston had not only resigned his position as club secretary, but had completely forsworn mathematics. And taken up gardening instead.
“Therein lies the source of your problem,” Fiona said, “and also the solution. Find a way to reconcile those two men, and you shall have your garden back.”
“But how?”
“You might distract the men from their quarrel by providing them with a new goal on which to focus their attention.”
“As you might distract a vicious dog by throwing it a piece of meat,” the society’s first vice-chair (and one of its youngest members), the forty-three-year-old Hermione Larkin, added.
Fiona raised an eyebrow at her vice-chair before turning back to address Evangelina. “Give them a new project to work on and all past differences will quickly be forgotten.”
“As your garden will also be forgotten .. . by your husband, I mean,” added Hermione.
“A project?” Evangelina said. “What kind of project?” Prunella Benton rose to her feet. “Wasn’t your husband involved in that expedition to the moon some years back?” “That’s it!” a voice at the back of the room exclaimed.
“That’s your project, a return to the moon!”
Chapter Three: A delegation
“There is no point in returning to the moon,” Mr Impey Barbicane stated categorically, the beads of sweat on his upper lip betraying his discomfort at being confronted by a delegation of middle-aged women. “The moon is uninhabitable.”
“Baltimore was uninhabitable a hundred years ago,” Prunella Benton said, dismissing Barbicane’s argument with a wave of her hand. “No society to speak of, at any rate.”
“My house was uninhabitable until I replaced those awful curtains,” Hermione Larkin added, rolling her eyes.
Barbicane, exasperated, turned to his compatriot, Captain Nicholl. Though it was only a few months since Evangelina had last seen them, both men looked older than she remembered. The face below Barbicane’s trademark stovepipe hat seemed thinner and more haggard, while Captain Nicholl seemed pale and tired.
Even the room seemed different from how she remembered it. The formerly gleaming clusters of muskets, blunderbusses, and carbines that adorned the walls now seemed dingy and uncared-for, the glass display cases of ammunition were covered in a layer of dust, and the exuberant atmosphere she recalled from her previous visits had been replaced by an air of gloom.
It felt as if everything in the place had somehow become smaller. Even the men seemed smaller.
“It’s not the same thing at all,” Captain Nicholl stepped in. “There is no air or water on the moon.”
“And there are no sandwiches in a forest,” Hermione responded. “If you wish to have a picnic in the woods, you bring the sandwiches with you!”
“Sandwiches?” said Barbicane.
“What Mrs Larkin means is: if a place is not inhabitable, you find a way to make it so,” Evangelina explained.
“May I remind you,” said Captain Nicholl, “Mr Barbicane and I have actually orbited the moon, and in our close observations of its surface, we saw no sign of life, and no sign of anything that might sustain life.”
Fiona Wicke spoke up at this point. “If, as you say, there is no air on the moon, it is worth bearing in mind that vegetation produces oxygen.”
“But there is no vegetation on the moon,” Mr Barbicane responded, a trace of irritation creeping into his voice.
“And there was precious little vegetation in my garden until I planted it,” said Hermione.
“Ladies,” said Captain Nicholl. “From what I have seen with my own eyes, I am forced to conclude that the lunar soil is incapable of supporting vegetation. You must believe me when I tell you that nothing can survive there. Nothing.”
Hermione seemed about to speak again, but Fiona silenced her with a discreet shake of the head. “Just one last question,” Fiona said. “Why did you send a projectile to the moon in the first place?”
“To prove it could be done,” said Barbicane.
“They were laughing at us,” Fiona said as the women emerged into the sunlight. “Not aloud, but inwardly; you could see it in their faces. And they had every right to do so. We were not prepared, we had not thought it through.”
A sudden gust of wind sent several sheets of discarded newspaper flapping about the square. Hermione grimaced in disgust as one of the dusty sheets plastered itself across the front of her carefully draped and bustled skirt. “When is someone going to do
something about the garbage problem in this city?” she demanded, shaking her skirt free.
Fiona watched the paper blow away down the street, her face creased in thought.
Chapter Four: Fiona thinks it through
“Is Mrs Wicke at home?” Evangelina asked, handing the maid her card.
Evangelina was left to wait in the front parlour while the maid went to see if her mistress was at home. She was admiring a cloisonné vase when she heard Fiona’s voice coming from behind her: “I’ve never really liked that vase, it was a gift from my first husband’s mother.”
Evangelina’s first reaction on turning around was to ask Fiona if she was all right. Though it was half past two in the afternoon, her hair was down and she was still in her dressing gown.
“Yes, yes, of course. I’m fine.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Evangelina persisted, trying not to stare at Fiona’s state of undress.
“Yes, yes! I’m glad you came, actually; I want to show you something.”
She led Evangelina out into the garden. “What is that?” she asked, pointing at a mound of grass cuttings and kitchen scraps.
“It’s a compost heap,” Evangelina said. “Are you quite sure you’re all right?”
“Take a look at it,” Fiona insisted. “What does it consist of?”
“Fiona, I don’t need to examine your compost heap to ascertain its contents. I know what’s in a compost heap, I have one myself.”
“Potato peelings, eggshells, coffee grounds,” Fiona began, counting each item off on her fingers. “Apple cores, hedge trimmings —”
“Fiona, what are you getting at?”
“Garbage! It’s all garbage! And what is the biggest problem in Baltimore today? The garbage problem.”
“So?”
“So we send our garbage to the moon!”
“But that’s what I came here to tell you about. Immediately after we left the gun club the other day, Mr Barbicane contacted my husband to tell him about our proposal — which they both found rather amusing — with the end result that Mr Maston has since been reinstated as club secretary and returned to the pursuit of mathematics, while I have this morning hired two men to repair the damage to my garden. So everything has turned out as planned and we can forget about the moon.”
The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures Page 41
