by John Shirley
He strode rapidly off, hands swinging at his side now, and I hurried to catch up.
Plants curled up from the swamp pools, to either side of the trail, here; they looked something like fiddlehead ferns, but more finely articulated. They seemed carved from translucent jade, translating the shafts of sunlight into rays of soft green, almost a stained glass effect. The plants were mirrored in the water in the shady places, like symmetrical abstract shapes floating rootless in space. As I watched, a red bird, like a cardinal but not quite, landed atop one of the curling plants, making it bob. Its reflection was so perfect it looked like there were two birds chorusing to one another as it sang. “Dah—dualism,” the bird chirped. “Dah-dualism . . .”
“Pretty things, those plants,” I said. “Never saw them back in the Before.”
He seemed amused. “Doubt if those plants can be found on the Before at all. They seem a product of the afterworld. That, Fogg, is wild frip! What the locals use to make their narcotic chaw. If narcotic is quite the word. Doesn’t have the cruel side of earthly narcotics.” He frowned. “When I was a physician, I saw many a sufferer from addiction. Morphine, laudanum, cocaine. One reason I wanted to move on from being a doctor was my fear of causing addiction through treatment. A physician can destroy a life in saving it.”
I remembered that his Sherlock Holmes had been a cocaine addict, for a time, and wondered if Doyle experimented with intravenous cocaine himself, but decided not to ask him about it. “Long way through the swamp to Merchant’s place?”
“Och, a little less than a mile, now.”
“Why does Merchant live so far from town?”
Still striding forcefully along, Doyle tugged thoughtfully at one of his mustaches. “Needs room to build, he says. And so he does indeed! Room to build and build and build some more.”
We walked on, occasionally coming to a forking path. One of them, leading off at a forty-five degree angle, curved into a dense stand of trees about two hundred yards off. I heard a raucous shout from the grove, then a wail of fear and warning. It was followed by a few echoing words—I could make out only, “I know . . . the whole . . .”
I recognized the voice; it carried well over the water. “That’s Bull Moore.”
“Yes,” Doyle said. “He has his tree house up there. Feels it’s more defensible. There are no firearms here—he finds that very discouraging. So he sets up traps, and the like, around his aerial domicile.”
“He builds traps? That’s on the violent side. You think he could have killed Harris?” What had happened seemed the closest thing the afterworld had to killing.
“Don’t know what his motive would be. But madness finds its own motives.”
“Maybe we should be talking to him about it.”
“We will. But . . . my feeling is, whoever committed the crime had some intricate, well-founded understanding of the works of this world. Of formulation and deformulation. Of the flux of life energies here. This would have taken some study. The man hasn’t been here a very long time—and . . .” He shook his head. “Even if he had been . . .”
“Yeah, you’re right. Moore doesn’t have that much discipline. Too scatterbrained and scared to focus.”
“Still—he could have an accomplice who knew how to do it. Or he could have stumbled on some means we’re unaware of. But I know of no connection between him and Morgan Harris. Of course, many a crime was unsolved till a hidden connection came clear . . .”
Doyle didn’t seem inclined to change routes and confront Moore; and I wasn’t in a hurry to see him again.
“Shut up, shut up!” came Moore’s voice, echoing more thinly to us as we left the area behind. “Be silent and shut up!”
As if to repudiate Moore’s demand for silence, Doyle spoke. “I don’t suppose you have any interest in cricket? We have a couple of teams . Seasiders and Woodsiders. Now, the best one is the Woodsiders . . .”
“Mayor Chauncey already tried to recruit me,” I told him. “Never played cricket. A little softball.”
“But consider—the afterworld is a place to try new things! Why live the same old habits over again?”
“You’re living cricket over,” I pointed out gently. “Why not try baseball?”
“Tosh, baseball! A bastardization, merely . . . one should try the essential things. You look like you have a fine strong arm. And you carry yourself well. That speaks of a good batsman! Once you’re trained to it, that is. But do not, in all events, let Chauncey recruit you for his vile Seasiders. They’re scoundrels! Every unsporting trick that’s not in the book . . .”
On we hiked, talking, with still no sight of the near-legendary Merchant mansion through the trees as yet. There was lichen on the trees, and something like finely articulated algae growing in emerald-green strands from the knees of the cypresses, underwater, waving in a leisurely way in the almost imperceptible current. There were no visible insects about except something zipping brightly through the air that looked like dragonflies. Dragonflies are predators—what do they feed on if not smaller insects? Or did they take their nourishment from the sun like I did? As I watched, I saw one of them settle on a twig, in a ray of amber light that made its way through the foliage; the creature spread its wings and I knew, empathically, that it was drinking in sunlight. It glittered, and when I looked closer it seemed made of small gemstones, like the dragonfly broach I’d seen women wear, but far more organically organized. “Those look like dragonflies, but . . .”
“They are and they aren’t. I’m sure an entomologist would be mystified by them, if he tried a dissection. Do you know how they reproduce? There are no eggs that we know of. They seem to get together and swap parts. One exchanges its head for another’s, and then a section of its thorax . . . and then there’s a blur and out of that comes a third, smaller one . . .”
I caught movement from the corner of an eye, turned to see a raccoon-sized slothlike creature with golden-red fur and a ringed tail. The sloth was moving sinuously up a tree trunk. It seemed to sense my attention to it and paused, turning its head to look at me with saucerlike green eyes. “Hey, what’s up, man,” it said, in a fruity voice. I could see its little furry lips moving. “Hey what’s up. What’s up.” Then it continued on up the tree.
“I wish animals wouldn’t talk to me, here,” I said. “I feel like I’m going to run into the Cheshire cat. Never liked that smartass cat.”
Doyle laughed softly. “Animals here don’t seem to say much, except a phrase or two, which I suspect they lift from our minds. Except for dogs. Eventually, you may come upon a loquacious dog.”
The water seemed to crowd up against the edges of the trail here so that we were forced to walk in single file, Doyle ahead. Peering down into moss-lined pools, I saw frogs that seemed silvery red, mottled with a cunning symmetry; their gold-and-black-flecked eyes were extra bulbous. “Do the frogs here talk, like the birds and the sloths?” I asked.
“Thank God, they do not,” Doyle replied. “They give out only the same reassuring croaking as they did back in Yorkshire or Florida. However, it’s said that if you put an afterworld frog on a man’s shoulder, the creature will stay like a trained parrot as long as the man does not tell a lie. If he’s at all insincere it leaps away.”
I saw only two instances of fallen trees, with broken off stumps. How had they fallen? Termites, here, seemed unlikely. Wind? People? Some unknown great beast of the afterworld? Afterlife termites?
“The mayor says the trees here aren’t exactly . . . botanical,” I said. “The plants and trees—do they . . . I mean, are these really willows? Are those really cypress?”
Doyle grunted. “Now that’s a question. They look like cypress. There are bees here, but are they bees, really? They do make a variety of honey—it melts into a delicious mist if you touch it to your mouth. But . . . when samples of plants are examined under
a magnifying glass, the histology is nothing like what we see in ordinary plant fiber. The trees here are more like . . . ganglia.” He gazed musingly at the forest. “Like the world’s own ganglia . . .” He shook his head. “I cannot explain, as yet. I have been here for decades, caught up in . . . well, a great many things, many of them personal. I haven’t made time for naturalism. It’s a study I hope to pursue at some point . . .” He glanced uneasily at me. “I should warn you, speaking of nature in the afterworld, there’s been trouble with this trail, lately. Some of the forgetters are trying to remember their original shapes—they dive down in the pools to do it. The usefulness of the procedure is unclear. But it sometimes causes the pools to overflow, covering over the trail, and people get lost. We may have to persuade some of the forgetters to withdraw. Those who’ve forgotten their own souls can be a deuced nuisance . . .”
We had proof of this after walking about a quarter mile deeper into the swampy woods. We entered a thick stand of trees, a mix of willows standing on hummocks, and cypress, where the raised pathway took a turn . . . slanted down . . . and vanished into the water.
We stopped a couple of paces from the water’s edge and stared . . .
Up ahead was what looked, at first, like a cloud of unusually large fireflies. Then I saw that they were even heftier than I’d thought—each one as big as a robin. They were big sparks like the one that had flitted up from Morgan Harris’s remains. They seemed to move randomly over the pond that had flooded the trail, but there was also an appearance of seeking about them.
“Are they souls?” I asked. “Like Harris’s?”
“They are forgetters,” Doyle said. “Yes, they are souls, after a fashion. But . . . that word can mean much more than these lost little sparks . . . still, a great deal is contained within a spark. They are soul sparks.”
I watched one of them, and saw that it repeated its motions, approximately, over and over. It rose, then veered right, then rose a bit, then went left, then rose some more, then spiraled upward, seemed to lose heart, and plunged back down again to start the process over.
Looking at another spark in the diffuse cloud, I saw it rise, turn left, go in a circle twice, then loop de loop upward . . . then drop to repeat the pattern. They each had their own approximate pattern of overall movement—collectively the movements seemed random. Individually they repeated their patterns.
“You’ve noticed the repeating paths they take, individually,” Doyle guessed. “I can tell by the way your eyes are tracking them.” When I nodded, he went on, “My belief is that each pattern indicates an overall path each one took in life, as it reacted to the cycles of life. Each motion may represent a typical frightened response, a frequent evasion, a heroic effort . . . the patterns of lives.”
“ ‘And the pattern never alters, until the rat dies,’ ” I said, quoting Paul Simon.
“Quite,” Doyle agreed.
“Not original to me. So some of us keep trying to repeat the same old patterns—even beyond death?
“Yes. It’s not just mere sparks. But something in us, and something in the simple soul spark, struggles for more freedom. And look!”
He stepped right up to the water’s edge and hunkered down, pointing. I came to crouch beside him—and I saw them, then.
In the water, not far under the surface, were the shapes of human beings—but they were transparent, very like human-shaped bubbles, most of them about as big as a ten-year-old child. Some were man-shaped, some woman-shaped, some seemed genderless or a mix of both. They swept along about just eight or so inches under the surface, raising slight ripples, rather like transparent mermaids and mermen, but without the gills or fins.
“And over there—watch!” Doyle said.
He gestured at a spark diving from the glittering cloud, piercing down into the pool, making the water hiss just faintly on its entry; the spark glowed under the water, its blue-white shine undiminished; then the spark seemed to dim as a shape expanded outward from it, the outline of a human being, a man, forming horizontally in the water, spreading out from where the spark had been. I could see the spark’s glow was still there in the human figure, but greatly diffused.
“You see, they seem to be seeking a return to their biological human shape,” Doyle said, standing. “They somehow intuit that the water will replicate their original bodies in outline. It’s as if they’re trying to find some part of their identities that way. Diogenes tells us they have all forgotten who they were—who they might have been and who they could have become. Says they’ve forgotten their real I. They have a spark of what he calls ‘I am,’ but very little . . . yet it contains enough energy to displace some volume of water when they immerse and expand . . . hence the flooding where the trail dips.”
I stood up, stretching. “But—why’d they choose this spot?”
“So far as anyone can tell, it’s just monkey see, monkey do. One of the souls randomly plunges into the water, acquires a trifle of form, and the others notice this, somehow, and impulsively follow it down. After a while they sense they’re losing energy in the water, and accomplishing little, I suppose. Then they become fatigued in some wise, and they rise up . . . ah, there!”
He nodded toward a corner of the pool where a transparent, swimming body seemed to be glowing more brightly—it was compressing, getting smaller, brighter, compacting . . . at last becoming a spark again that flickered up into the space between the boles of trees.
“I’ll be damned,” I said.
“Not unless you want to be,” Doyle said mildly. “Right, I don’t care to slosh through this water. The buggers can get up your trousers, and then you find yourself wetted with their confused memories before they wriggle free. Most intrusive. Simply not the thing.”
I thought about that. You find yourself wetted with their confused memories before they wriggle free. “Don’t think I’m in the mood for that either, Doyle. Backtrack . . . ? You mean to the last fork?”
“Yes. I believe we can take the fork past Moore’s funny old perch, and then another to take us back on course . . . this way, my boy. This way . . .”
Moore’s funny old perch was a tree house in a grand, spreading cypress, the structure looking loosely, very loosely, inspired by the Disney film The Swiss Family Robinson—Moore was of the right generation for that influence. But unlike the movie-inspired tree house, this one was designed by a paranoid and carried out by an incompetent carpenter: one and the same person.
We stood about twenty yards from the off-kilter tree house, and tried to make out what organization it had. It had three tiers: the lowest, and largest, sagged crookedly just about thirty feet from the swampy ground under the huge cypress; off center from that was a second, a skewed box; off center the other way, the third was little more than a platform with scraps of wall around it like someone’s idea of battlements. Rope ladders connected the levels. The walls were made of uneven pieces of thin wood, overlapping like deformed scales.
“He couldn’t have ‘formulated’ that thing,” I said. “It looks nailed together.”
“He didn’t formulate it,” Doyle said. “I’ve never seen him formulate much. He constructed it out of scrounged—I will not say stolen—scraps of wood from old, disused cottages. We do have tools here, and even nails. Metal is hard to formulate, it requires great concentration because of its denseness. Some, not so good at formulating, have chosen to create it from ore deposits. And this world has all that’s found in the periodic table. There is more to that than you might suppose . . . but for now I’ll just say that he nicked wood, a hammer, and nails, and put it up by hand.”
Beards of moss obscured the details, but I could see Bull Moore’s silhouette, just his head and upper body framed in a glassless window, as he peered down at us from the second story.
“Keep back!” Moore shouted.
“Just passing by, M
r. Moore!” Doyle called, hands cupping his mouth. “Trail’s out, the other way!”
A compacted clod of soil struck the ground in front of us, bursting apart.
“Come on, Fogg!” Doyle said, running along the trail that skirted the tree. “We shall brave the barrage!” He ran lightly for a man of his bulkiness, but he’d always been athletic. He had played rugby, soccer, cricket, and he’d introduced recreational skiing to the world.
“Bull!” I shouted, as I followed Doyle. “You’re an idiot!”
Doyle seemed to relish rushing past Moore’s tree, as more clods of dirt and several small stones struck the trail behind us. “Ha, Moore! You’ll never make a cricketer!” Doyle cried, as we ran past the tree house.
A clod of dirt struck me sharply in the middle of the back, then. “Ow! He just might be good at pitching beanballs though . . .”
About thirty yards onward we came to a stop on the trail, mouths open but scarcely breathing hard. “What a buffoon the fellow is,” Doyle said.
“Doesn’t seem like a good time to interview him about Morgan Harris,” I said, as I looked around.
We were in a clearing, here, a meadow in spongy ground. Beyond it was another series of pools, a line of trees—and between them I could just make out what looked like the rooftops of a Bavarian village. “That a small town, over there?” I was curious about other settlements in the afterworld. There must be millions of them, out there . . .
“That is certainly not a town.” Doyle chuckled. “But it looks like one from here. That is our first sight of Merchant’s mansion.”
