Dead Lines, A Novel of Life... After Death

by Greg Bear

  Peters head began to throb. He could hear his teeth grind and feel his throat stiffen; they wanted to use him, all of them at once. He clutched and slapped at his neck with one hand, then turned to run, but the floor between him and the front door suddenly blurred, then rippled like water. Shadows obscured the marble tiles: swerving serpents, formless waves, swiftly advancing and rising. They covered up the walls, the windows, then whirled around and brushed against him with a careless and needy familiarity.

  The ultimate homeless, the saddest panhandlers of all, long dead: Michelles victims.

  How many?

  The door to the elevator opened with a buzzing snick. A single naked bulb burned orange within. The tiny cage dropped, vibrated, and adjusted itself once again to be level with the floor, as if something had stepped inside.

  Something invisible and bulky.

  No, Peter said. No way in hell.

  Hell, someone echoed, using his throat.

  Hell, said another presence, and Hell, agreed yet another, all in strangling seizures of his vocal cords. He bit down on his tongue to keep it still, until he could taste blood in his mouth. Muffled groans continued.

  They surrounded him, ripples, silhouettes, suggestions, fragments of dead humanity compressed and herded by others, or maybe just one other, not human. Awkwardly, Peter took a reluctant step toward the elevator. His eyes shut involuntarily, he could not stand the small space, and then he was shoved inside.

  The bronze meshwork door closed. The interior was even smaller than he had imagined.

  The air smelled smoky.

  The dim orange bulb flickered. Pulleys and cables jerked. An electric motor whined.

  The cage bounced and descended.

  CHAPTER 41

  PETER LEANED INTO the corner, eyes flickering, trying to keep as much space and distance in front of his face as he could, an illusion of volume, of not being locked inside a coffin. His face was wet with tears and sweat and his heart galloped in slide rhythms.

  He knew that if he died, right now, he would be stuck on the freeway, stuck in traffic. He would never get out, never find the off-ramp and move on to whatever neighborhood had been his destination to begin with.

  Heaven, staid and orderly and calm, like the Cheviot Hills.

  Or out into the night to just fade away.

  Peter Russell was determined not to die, not here and not now. His heart slowed and steadied.

  The orange light above his head hummed and winked. The cage door slid aside with a reverberant scrape.

  He opened his eyes wide and pushed out of the corner with a hasty flinging of arms and scuffle of shoes, as if fanning a cloud of mosquitoes. But he was alone. The crowd in the elevator had gone. The big presence, the invisible grizzly, was not obvious, either; he had no sensation of being accompanied.

  They could move faster than he, or did not need to move to get out of the way. Jerk edits.

  He stood with arms hanging and hands clenched on a linoleum floor in a room lined with steel storage cabinets. In the far corner an antique washer and a dryer were half hidden by a stack of wooden fruit boxes, and beyond them hunkered an immense water heater, mounted sideways on concrete piers like a ships steam boiler. Framed pictures of long-dead actors and actresses lay in toppled piles, blocking the cabinets, dozens of smiles frozen in black and white behind broken glass, strongly handsome and winsomely beautiful faces peering up in false promise of friendship and seduction.

  To Lordy and especially to his better half, Emily.

  To Morty and Frances.

  I owe it all to you.

  XXXXs Galore!

  Cardboard boxes had been dumped beside the stacked photographs. Old scrapbooks, bound in rotting leather, all bore the initials LT. One lay opened to a page of curled sepia Brownie snapshots of a slight, smiling blond in a black swimsuit, arms spread, body angled as if ready to leap into a swan dive. Emily Gaumont. Peter turned the page with the toe of his shoe. Other snapshots resurrected pretty young starlets, inges all, and stately old cars. A Packard. A Bentley. An antique fire truck.

  He flipped back. There was something oddly familiar in Emilys expression, a winning smile but a critical tilt of the eyebrows. Lordy Trentons young wife reminded him of Michelle. But the picture was more than sixty years old.

  Throw out the old, hang up the new, Peter whispered. Michelle had a passion for redecoration. Joseph had indulged her in everything.

  He looked to his right and saw a Dutch door painted yellow and beige. The two halves of the door stood askew. Joseph, you fucking bastard, he said, radiating his fury. The room seemed to vibrate in response. You brought Michelle here. You brought her here and . . .

  He couldn't finish. What lay beyond those accusations was a void, a desert filled with all that he had gone through the last two years, the madness and the searching. What if Joseph had guessed rightwhat if he had not brought Michelle here, not the essential, commanding part of her? What if that had been at Salammbo already? An ancient creature patiently awaiting the arrival of just the sort of female found around rich, desperate old menawaiting another nae and vulnerable young vessel . . .

  Michelle. Shocked by two murders, her stunned and frightened consciousness had finally shrunk away, hiding in a very deep and dark corner, leaving an almost empty cup waiting to be filled.

  Scragg had asked if Peter could provide any more clues, anything that might point to someone familiar, someone who had known them.

  As it had to, his anger turned inward. He could not possibly have guessed. Could he?

  And now he saw the smoke and scorch marks curling up and around the ceiling above the platform. Whether it was imagination or nothe was inclined to think notPeter felt a wind blowing out of the tunnel, carrying with it an ancient, acrid smell of barbecuesmoke and burned meat. He could not feel the wind on his skin; it was in his mind. Fragments of thoughts came with the wind like soot falling into a special and all-perceiving eye. Pain, fear. And not just from the victims of the old trolley tunnel fire.

  Peter covered his mouth and nose with his hand.

  CHAPTER 42

  BEYOND A PLATFORM about six paces on one side, the trolley tunnel to Jesus Wept stretched like a miniature subway into murky darkness, lit only by widely spaced incandescent bulbs hanging from a thin black wire. Some of the bulbs had burned out. Piles of lumber, black with char and gray with dust, lay blocking half the tunnel. More boxes cluttered the other side of the small platform, some split and spilling more albums, more photographs, more history. An enclosed trolley car lay on it's side in the far right-hand corner, four grooved wheels sticking out from the carriage. Beside the trolley lay an empty toolbox. Dust and soot obscured everything but a trail leading to the tunnel, as if a towel had been swiped with a heavy hand between the piles of debris. Someone had been dragging burdens. Small footprints marred the edge of the cleared path.

  Peter looked down at the trail.

  Bent over.

  Looked closer, not believing what he saw.

  Scraps of phantoms lay low to the linoleum, wobbling like plastic wrap or busted balloons, of no material substance but stuck there nonetheless. Flattened pieces of faces, hands upthrust, fingers in spasmodic motion. Empty eyes in empty skins. Gossamer leavings from so many scavenger feasts, decaying to an indigestible dust that would blow through these spaces and up and out into the world to become fleeting impressions, whims, to stick in dreams like raisins in a pudding, incomprehensible by themselves. Shards of inspirations and hopes. The broken crockery of memories and shapes.

  What kind of broom could sweep this away? What kind of wind? There is never an escape; we swim in this all our lives, and cannot know where the impressions come from. Like dust inhaled into our lungs. Explaining ESP, past lives, you name it . . . Trans has just made it visible.

  Peters terror had broken once again on a shoal of the rational. Speculation to the rescue. Yes, he would die; yes, he had encountered unimaginable horrors and would soon encounter more. Bits
of what he was would join this crockery, this dust. No doubt. Loss and betrayal. And so? Hundreds of billions had gone before him.

  Life was not simple, death was far from simple.

  Lets get this over with, he said. He walked to the edge of the platform. Joseph and then Michelle had come down here and hidden things. He needed to know what.

  Who. Other than the two thieves who had threatened to kill Joseph. He stared down into the gloom a few yards from the platform. Saw a roughly troweled slab of newer concrete under some pried-up and rusted rails that had then been laid back down, the bolts left undone.

  Sloppy.

  CHAPTER 43

  THE RAILS RAN straight into gloom. Peter walked with mincing steps along the miniature parodies of railroad ties. Water pooled in the gravel between the ties, gray with scum. Black curls of smoke had painted the long, crumbling plaster of the roof.

  To either side, he saw hooks and bits of wire and outlines of lighter plaster where paintings now missing had absorbed the pall of smoke. Only one painting remained, the canvas torn down the middle: a darkened, full-length portrait of what must have been Lordy Trenton, without his top hat and made up as a circus clown, but still sporting a long, slender gentlemans cane and wearing his trademark flappy spats. A brass plaque at the bottom of the frame read, DIGNITY, ALWAYS DIGNITY.

  Short-nosed, with a little goatee, behind the whiteface and red-dotted cheeks, Trenton looked happy enough, or would have, had he had eyes. They had been sliced out, leaving square pits. Plaster gleamed white through the holes.

  Beyond the slashed portrait, Peter noticed brownish markings on the cracked and baked walls. Imitations of claw slashes, downward strokes four or five to a set. Spiral eyes in sketchy masks. All crudely daubed in what could have been blood, now dried. Cave paintings, barely visible in the spaces between the dangling bulbs.

  AHEAD, AT THE far end of the tunnel, a gate or door must have been opened, because a real and steady current of air soughed toward Peter, touching the whiskers of his beard. He carefully stepped up to a large, square piece of plywood bolted to another set of carriage wheels. A rope had been threaded through holes drilled in the plywood. The rope hung down onto the gravel, damp and twisted. It was a makeshift dolly, made to roll heavy objects down the tunnel. Blood stained the plywood.

  He knelt for a moment. Dolly, trolley. Tunnel. Cave. Awful place, mold and mud. Just to roll people from one house to another, underground, out of the sun, a stunt; too many houses, too many toys, too many greedy and excessive dreams brought to life by money. Money and life faded; the folly remained. Dolly, trolley, folly.

  Peter got to his feet and edged around the plywood, soaking his shoes in the scummy puddles. A few yards farther on, a red panel door poked out from the bricks and plaster. A storage closet, a maintenance room, an electrical room. Or Lordy Trentons bomb shelter.

  Sheitcould be in there, hiding just behind that door.

  Don't want to die down here.

  Peter looked back. He had come about four hundred feet. The distance between Flaubert House and Jesus Wept was about a thousand feet, if one took a direct line under the hedge and under the low hill.

  A ways to go.

  And once more, the knowledge that a large presence was watching and waiting. Behind, in front, Peter could not be sure. Strangely, he did not feel menaced. Just another dread atop a whole stack of them.

  He examined the sliding panel. Both red paint and wood had seen better times. Something had gnawed at the bottom edge, probably rats. Fresh grease had been daubed on the wheels and runners. The panel had been opened recently.

  Peters nose wrinkled. Even under the perpetual stink of smoke, something smelled off. He shoved the door aside as best he could without exposing himself to the darkness within. Waited, listened to water dripping. Stooped to look in. A single old bulb had been screwed into a ceramic socket in the wall, yards off and very dim. Might have been left on for decades. Blackness in all the corners. He could not tell how far back the chamber reached.

  Michelle?

  For a startled moment, he felt something peer over his shoulder. Controlling himself, he slowly turned his head. A large shadow slid across the tunnels opposite wall and ceiling like a vertical sheet of fog.

  He recognized it immediately. The grizzly-sized nothingness had returned. It could change shape and flow.

  What in hell are you? Peter asked, but the shadow had seeped back into the plaster and bricks, indistinguishable from smudge. You don't want me. You could have taken me by now. Youve never been interested in me. What do you want?

  Then a different kind of tremor struck him. He was starting to laugh, slow and deep, an awful laugh. Could you at least make yourself useful? Fetch me something? he asked the opposite wall. Could you at least go back and get me a flashlight?

  He turned back to the space behind the door and the laughter gurgled in his throat. He coughed. His eyes had adjusted as much as they were going to. The chamber beyond the hatch was no more than twenty feet wide but deeper than he had thought. He could not see the rear wall. He stooped again and pushed through.

  THE CONCRETE FLOOR was old and cracked and roughly surfaced. He could make out lengths of iron rail propped up in a corner. Along the wall to his righthe tried to orient himself, just to keep his thinking clearthe northeast wall, stood a line of double bunk beds, like those used in barracks. He counted at least eight marching back into the gloom, sixteen beds in all, and all apparently occupied by still, recumbent forms, covered with dusty blankets. Even under the covers, the forms appeared shrunken, diminished.

  He pulled back a blanket corner. Dust sifted down over his feet. The bony face beneath the blanket had stringy, bleached-blond hair. Female. Not very large, but an adult, not a child. For that Peter was minimally grateful. The flesh of the face had been gnawed through to brownish skull. What remained was dry and leathery. Dust puffed again as he let the corner drop.

  Peter walked on, deeper into the side tunnel. This had to be Trentons bomb shelter, with accommodations for many dozens of friends. More bunks, more bodies, lined up in the darkness, toothy, grinning, leather-dark faces poking out from beneath rat-filthy blankets.

  The bunks stretched along the northeast wall for as far as he could see into the blackness. It was difficult to believe that Michelle could have done all this by herself. How long had she been at it? And how could Joseph not have known? What sort of complicity had been denied, and then shared, as the years went on? Peter realized he might never understand, much less know.

  No rats now. That fact struck him. A sinking household.

  Peter pressed against the wall, the light bulb to his right like a glowing match head in the gloom, the awful smell of dust and old decay thin and cold in his nose. Worse than the field where they had found Daniellas body. Worse by far than that sunny, grassy knoll in the hills. Scragg had told them that she had not been killed there. Her body had been laid out, as if with some minimal respect, hands crossed over her ruined chest.

  Peter stood straight. Reluctant to breathe the foul air, he was on the verge of passing out. He walked back toward the hatch, steadying himself with one hand against the rough, sandy concrete.

  A DARK SQUARE had been laid at the foot of the blanketed form in the rightmost lower bunk. Peter forced himself to kneel. His chilled fingers touched folded knit fabric. Holding it up, the sleeves and buttoned lapels unfolding, he recognized the one piece of clothing that had never been found. A girls blue wool sweater, stiff with blood.

  A souvenir.

  Peter could feel it coming again. The heat behind his eyes. The fear and the love. Between his memory and the blood, the identity of spirit and spilled tissue, between her father and the dust in the long burial chamber, with a clear picture of his daughter and a vivid memory of the way she had smelled, of Daniellas long brown hair . . .

  Like a fine autumn mist taking the shape of a little girl, she stood in the open hatchway, yards off, as if reluctant to enter. Barely visib
le, in this place where she had been taken by Daddys friend, where she had been killed, she watched him as he held out the sweater.

  Peter walked toward her to ask an awful question. Was it here?

  The shape raised and lowered a refractory outline of a chin. She extended one filmy hand.

  Peter reached out instinctively, without a thought for his own safety. Her fingers passed into his. For an instant, he felt youthful surprise and animal-deep panic. Her mouth and eyes darkened and sagged and parts of her gaped like rotten muslin. The ghost of his daughter shared what she had carried for so long, too long, shared how it felt to have the point of a knife slam into skin, punch through with a sound like ripping vinyl, over and over, pain so intense even now it threatened to tear this small ghost apart.

  The pain brought Peter to his knees. He voiced the short, hard, dying shrieks of his little girl and his hands ripped at his throat, trying to stop the appalling sounds.

  MORE THAN A projection, less than a presence, Daniella pulled back and released him. Clutching the sweater to his face, hiding his eyes, Peter wept, again hoping that his heart would split open. He did not want to live. Too much for any man to bear.

  She turned, not all at oncethe outer shell of skin rotating first, hints of bones beneath following as if disjoined in time . . . Flowed aside, out of sight, toward Jesus Wept.

  Again, Peters strength betrayed him. So much to do. The gashes on his throat soaked blood into his collar. He did not feel it; the memory of his daughters pain overshadowed all.

  PETER LEFT THE old bomb shelter, now a burial chamber, and stumbled the remaining length of the tunnel, passing from the glowing yellowish domain of one ancient light bulb to another, glancing at smears of brown on the walls, finger sweeps and handprints. Not Josephs large, beefy hand.

  Michelles.

  Perhaps the dead could only speak truth.

  Joseph had recognized Daniella, once the weather had changed under the influence of Trans. A few days ago, he had seen Daniella and the others and could no longer deny the long-suspected truth about what his woman was, what she had done. Terrors in the night, screams.