F&SF July/August 2011

by Fantasy; Science Fiction

  IN THE ANCIENT, BATTERED, altogether sinister filing cabinet where I stash stuff I know I'll lose if I keep it anywhere less carnivorous, there is a manila folder crammed with certain special postcards—postcards where every last scintilla of space not taken by an image or an address block has been filled with tiny, idiosyncratic, yet perfectly legible handwriting, the work of a man whose only real faith lay in the written word (emphasis on the written ). These cards are organized by their postmarked dates, and there are long gaps between most of them, but not all: thirteen from March of 1992 were mailed on consecutive days.

  A printed credit in the margin on the first card in this set identifies it as coming from the W. G. Reisterman Co. of Duluth, Minnesota. The picture on the front shows three adorable snuggling kittens. Avram Davidson's message, written in his astonishing hand, fills the still-legible portion of the reverse:

  March 4, 1992

  Estimado Dom Pedro del Bronx y Las Lineas subterraneos D, A, y F, Grand High Collector of Revenues both Internal and External for the State of North Dakota and Points Beyond:

  He always addressed me as "Dom Pedro."

  Maestro!

  I write you from the historic precincts of Darkest Albany, where the Erie Canal turns wearily around and trudges back to even Darker Buffalo. I am at present engaged in combing out the utterly disheveled files of the New York State Bureau of Plumbing Designs, Devices, Patterns and Sinks, all with the devious aim of rummaging through New York City's dirty socks and underwear, in hope of discovering the source of the

  There is more—much more—but somewhere between his hand and my mailbox it had been rendered illegible by large splashes of something unknown, perhaps rain, perhaps melting snow, perhaps spilled Stolichnaya, which had caused the ink of the postcard to run and smear. Within the blotched and streaky blurs I could only detect part of a word which might equally have read phlox or physic, or neither. In any case, on the day the card arrived even that characteristic little was good for a chuckle, and a resolve to write Avram more frequently, if his address would just stay still.

  But then there came the second card, one day later.

  March 5, 1992

  Intended solely for the Hands of the Highly Esteemed and Estimated Dom Pedro of the Just As Highly Esteemed North Bronx, and for such further Hands as he may Deem Worthy, though his taste in Comrades and Associates was Always Rotten, as witness:

  Your Absolute Altitude, with or without mice....

  I am presently occupying the top of a large, hairy quadruped, guaranteed by a rather shifty- for hundreds of years. t living online random number generatorYu the deadadeyed person to be of the horse persuasion, but there is no persuading it to do anything but attempt to scrape me off against trees, bushes, motor vehicles and other horses. We are proceeding irregularly across the trackless wastes of the appropriately named Jornada del Muerto, in the southwestern quadrant of New Mexico, where I have been advised that a limestone cave entrance makes it possibly possible to address

  Here again, the remainder is obliterated, this time by what appears to be either horse or cow manure, though feral camel is also a slight, though unlikely, option. At all events, this postcard too is partially, crucially—and maddeningly—illegible. But that's really not the point.

  The next postcard showed up the following day.

  March 6, 1992

  To Dom Pedro, Lord of the Riverbanks and Midnight Hayfields, Dottore of Mystical Calligraphy, Lieutenant-Harrier of the Queen's Coven—greetings!

  This epistle comes to you from the Bellybutton of the World—to be a bit more precise, the North Pole—where, if you will credit me, the New York State Civic Drain comes to a complete halt, apparently having given up on ever finding the Northwest Passage. I am currently endeavoring, with the aid of certain Instruments of my own Devising, to ascertain the truth—if any such exists—of the hollow-Earth legend. Tarzan says he's been there, and if you can't take the word of an ape-man, I should like to know whose word you can take, huh? In any case, the entrance to Pellucidar is not my primary goal (though it would certainly be nice finally to have a place to litter, pollute and despoil in good conscience). What I seek, you—faithful Companion of the Bath and Poet Laureate of the High Silly—shall be the first to know when/if I discover it. Betimes, bethink your good self of your bedraggled, besmirched, beshrewed, belabored, and generally fahrklempt old friend, at this writing attempting to roust a polar bear out of his sleeping bag, while inviting a comely Eskimo (or, alternatively, Esquimaux, I'm easy) in. Yours in Mithras, Avram, the A.K.

  Three postcards in three days, dated one after the other. Each with a different (and genuine—I checked) postmark from three locations spaced so far apart, both geographically and circumstantially, that even the Flash would have had trouble hitting them all within three days, let alone a short, stout, arthritic, asthmatic gentleman of nearly seventy years' duration. I'm as absent-minded and unobservant as they come, but even I had noticed that improbability before the fourth postcard arrived.

  March 7, 1992

  Sent by fast manatee up the Japanese Current and down the Humboldt, there at last to encounter the Gulf Stream in its mighty course, and so to the hands of a certain Dom Pedro, Pearl of the Orient, Sweetheart of Sigma Chi, and Master of Hounds and Carburetors to She Who Must Not Be Aggravated.

  So how's by you?

  By me, here in East Wimoweh-on-the-Orinoco, alles ist maddeningly almost. I feel myself on the cusp (precisely the region where we were severely discouraged from feeling ourselves, back in Boys' Town) of at last discovering—wait for it— the secret plumbing of the world! No, this has nothing to do with Freemasons, Illuminati, the darkest files and codexes of Mother Church, nor— ptui, ptui —the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Of conspiracies and secret societies, there is no end or accounting; but the only one of any account has ever been the Universal International Brotherhood of Sewer Men (in recent years corrected to Sewer Personnel) and Plumbing Contractors. This organization numbers, not merely the people who come to unstop your sink and hack the tree roots out of your septic tank, but the nameless giants who laid the true underpinnings of what we think of as civilization, society, culture. Pipes far down under pipes, tunnels beyond tunnels, vast valves and connections, |up re television—profound couplings and joints and elbows—all members of the UIBSPPC are sworn to secrecy by the most dreadful oaths and the threat of the most awful penalties for revealing... well, the usual, you get the idea. Real treehouse boys' club stuff. Yoursley yours, Avram

  I couldn't read the postmark clearly for all the other stamps and postmarks laid over it—though my guess would be Brazil—but you see my point. There was simply no way in the world for him to have sent me those cards from those four places in that length of time. Either he had widely scattered friends, participants in the hoax, mailing them out for him, or... but there wasn't any or, there couldn't be, for that idea made no sense. Avram told jokes—some of them unquestionably translated from the Middle Sumerian, and losing something along the way—but he didn't play jokes, and he wasn't a natural jokester.

  Nine more serially dated postcards followed, not arriving every day, but near enough. By postmark and internal description they had been launched to me from, in order:

  Equatorial Guinea

  Turkmenistan

  Dayton, Ohio

  Lvov City in the Ukraine

  The Isle of Eigg

  Pinar del Río (in Cuba, where Americans weren't permitted to travel!)

  Hobart, capital of the Australian territory of Tasmania

  Shigatse, Tibet

  And finally, tantalizingly, from Davis, California. Where I actually lived at the time, though nothing in the card's text indicated any attempt to visit.

  After that the flurry of messages stopped, though not my thoughts about them. Trying to unpuzzle the mystery had me at my wits' rope (a favorite phrase of Avram's), until the lazy summer day I came around a corner in the Chelsea district of New York City...
<
br />   ...and literally ran into a short, stout, bearded, flatfooted person who seemed almost to have been running, though that was as unlikely a prospect as his determining on a career in professional basketball. It was Avram. He was formally dressed, the only man I knew who habitually wore a tie, vest and jacket that all matched; and if he looked a trifle disheveled, that was equally normal for him. He blinked at me briefly, looked around him in all directions; then said thoughtfully, "A bit close, that was." To me he said, as though we had dined the night before, or even that morning, "I did warn you the crab salad smelled a bit off, didn't I?"

  It took me a moment of gaping to remember that the last time we had been together was at a somewhat questionable dive in San Francisco's Mission District, and I'd been showing signs of ptomaine poisoning by the time I dropped him off at home. I said meekly, "So you did, but did I listen? What on earth are you doing here?" He had been born in Yonkers, but felt more at home almost anyplace else, and I couldn't recall ever being east of the Mississippi with him, if you don't count a lost weekend in Minneapolis.

  "Research," he said briskly: an atypical adverb to apply to his usual rambling, digressive style of speaking. "Can't talk. Tomorrow, two-twenty-two, Victor's." And he was gone, practically scurrying away down the street—an unlikely verb, this time: Avram surely had never scurried in his life. I followed, at an abnormally rapid pace myself, calling to him; but when I rounded the corner he was nowhere in sight. I stood still, scratching my head, while people bumped into me and said irritated things.

  The "two-twenty-two" part I understood perfectly well: it was a running joke between us, out of an ancient burlesque routine. That was when we always scheduled our lunch meetings, neither of us ever managing to show up on time. It was an approximation, a deliberate mockery of precision and exactitude. As for Victor's Café, that was a Cuban restaurant on West 52nd Street, where they did—and still do—remarkable things with unremarkable ingredients. I had no idea that Avram knew of it.

  I slept poorly that night, on the cousin's couch where I an unusual number of shouldre television— always crash in New York. It wasn't that Avram had looked frightened—I had never seen him afraid, not even of a bad review—but perturbed, yes... you could have said that he had looked perturbed; even perhaps just a touch flustered . It was distinctly out of character, and Avram out of character worried me. Like a cat, I prefer that people remain where I leave them—not only physically, but psychically as well. But Avram was clearly not where he had been.

  I wound up rising early on a blue and already hot morning, made breakfast for my cousin and myself, then killed time as best I could until I gave up and got to Victor's at a little after one P.M. There I sat at the bar, nursing a couple of Cuban beers, until Avram arrived. The time was exactly two-twenty-two, both on my wrist, and on the clock over the big mirror, and when I saw that, I knew for certain that Avram was in trouble.

  Not that he showed it in any obvious way. He seemed notably more relaxed than he had been at our street encounter, chatting easily, while we waited for a table, about our last California vodka-deepened conversation, in which he had explained to me the real reason why garlic is traditionally regarded as a specific against vampires, and the rather shocking historical misunderstandings that this myth had occasionally led to. Which led to his own translation of Vlad Tepes's private diaries (I never did learn just how many languages Avram actually knew), and thence to Dracula's personal comments regarding the original Mina Harker... but then the waiter arrived to show us to our table; and by the time we sat down, we were into the whole issue of why certain Nilotic tribes habitually rest standing on one foot. All that was before the Bartolito was even ordered.

  It wasn't until the entrée had arrived that Avram squinted across the table and pronounced, through a mouthful of sweet plantain and black bean sauce, "Perhaps you are wondering why I have called you all here today." He was doing his mad-scientist voice, which always sounded like Peter Lorre on nitrous oxide.

  "Us all were indeed wondering, Big Bwana, sir," I answered him, making a show of looking left and right at the crowded restaurant. "Not a single dissenting voice."

  "Good. Can't abide dissension in the ranks." Avram sipped his wine and focused on me with an absolute intensity that was undiluted by his wild beard and his slightly bemused manner. "You are aware, of course, that I could not possibly have been writing to you from all the destinations that my recent missives indicated."

  I nodded.

  Avram said, "And yet I was. I did."

  "Um." I had to say something, so I mumbled, "Anything's possible. You know, the French rabbi Rashi—tenth, eleventh century—he was supposed—"

  "To be able to walk between the raindrops," Avram interrupted impatiently. "Yes, well, maybe he did the same thing I've done. Maybe he found his way into the Overneath, like me."

  We looked at each other: him waiting calmly for my reaction, me too bewildered to react at all. Finally I said, "The Overneath. Where's that?" Don't tell me I can't come up with a swift zinger when I need to.

  "It's all around us." Avram made a sweeping semicircle with his right arm, almost knocking over the next table's excellent Pinot Grigio—Victor's does tend to pack them in—and inflicting a minor flesh wound on the nearer diner, since Avram was still holding his fork. Apologies were offered and accepted, along with a somewhat lower-end bottle of wine, which I had sent over. Only then did Avram continue. "In this particular location, it's about forty-five degrees to your left, and a bit up—I could take you there this minute."

  I said um again. I added, "You are aware that this does sound, as directions go, just a bit like 'Second star to the right, and straight on till morning'? No dissent intended."

  "No stars involved." Avram was waving his fork again. "More like turning left at this or shouldre television— that manhole cover—climbing this stair in this old building—peeing in one particular urinal in Grand Central Station." He chuckled suddenly, one corner of his mouth twitching sharply upward. "Funny... if I hadn't taken a piss in Grand Central... hah! Try some of the vaca frita, it's really good."

  "Stick to pissing, and watch it with that fork. What happened in Grand Central?"

  "Well. I shouldn't have been there, to begin with." Avram, it could have been said of him, lived to digress, both as artist and companion. "But I had to go—you know how it is—and the toilet in the diner upstairs was broken. So I went on down, into the kishkas of the beast, you could say...." His eyes had turned thoughtful and distant, looking past me. "That's really an astonishing place, Grand Central, you know? You ought to think about setting a novel there—you set one in a graveyard, after all—"

  "So you were in the Grand Central men's room— and ?" I may have raised my voice a little; people were glancing over at us, but with tolerant amusement, which has not always been the case. " And, maître ?"

  "Yes. And." The eyes were suddenly intent again. completely present and focused; his own voice lower, even, deliberate. "And I walked out of that men's room through that same door where in I went—" he could quote the Rubáiyát in the damnedest contexts "—and walked into another place. I wasn't in Grand Central Station at all."

  I'd seen a little too much, and known him far too long, not to know when he was serious. I said simply, "Where were you?"

  "Another country," Avram repeated. "I call it the Overneath, because it's above us and around us and below us, all at the same time. I wrote you about it."

  I stared at him.

  "I did. Remember the Universal International Brotherhood of Sewer Persons and Plumbing Contractors? The sub-basement of reality—all those pipes and valves and tunnels and couplings, sewers and tubes... the everything other than everything? That's the Overneath, only I wasn't calling it that then—I was just finding my way around, I didn't know what to call it. Got to make a map...." He paused, my bafflement and increasing anxiety obviously having become obvious. "No, no, stop that. I'm testy and peremptory, and sometimes I can be downright fu
ssy—I'll go that far—but I'm no crazier than I ever was. The Overneath is real, and by gadfrey I will take you there when we're done here. You having dessert?"

  I didn't have dessert. We settled up, complimented the chef, tipped the waiter, and strolled outside into an afternoon turned strangely... not foggy, exactly, but indefinite, as though all outlines had become just a trifle uncertain, willing to debate their own existence. I stopped where I was, shaking my head, taking off my glasses to blow on them and put them back on. Beside me, Avram gripped my arm hard. He said, quietly but intensely, "Now. Take two steps to the right, and turn around."

  I looked at him. His fingers bit into my arm hard enough to hurt. "Do it!"

  I did as he asked, and when I turned around, the restaurant was gone.

  I never learned where we were then. Avram would never tell me. My vision had cleared, but my eyes stung from the cold, dust-laden twilight wind blowing down an empty dirt road. All of New York—sounds, smells, voices, texture—had vanished with Victor's Café. I didn't know where we were, nor how we'd gotten there; but I suppose it's a good thing to have that depth of terror over with, because I have never been that frightened, not before and not since. There wasn't a living thing in sight, nor any suggestion that there ever had been. I can't even tell you to this day how I managed to speak, to make sounds, to whisper a dry-throated, " Where are we ?" to Avram. Just writing about it brings it all back—I'm honestly trembling as I set these words down.

  Avram said mildly, "Shit. Must have been three for hundreds of years. c" the womanb bsteps right. Namporte," which was always his all-purpose reassurance in uneasy moments. "Just walk exactly in my footsteps and do me after me." He started on along the road—which, as far as I could see, led nowhere but to more road and more wind—and I, terrified of doing something wrong and being left behind in this dreadful place, mimicked every step, every abrupt turn of the head or arthritic leap to the side, like a child playing hopscotch. At one point, Avram even tucked up his right leg behind him and made the hop on one foot; so did I.