“I could kill him,” the Colonel said coldly. “He’s certainly proved to be a right pain in the ….”
“What, and rob me of the little amusements he brings?”
From the look on the Colonel’s face, Gray knew he hadn’t understood. She held out the journal for him to examine. “It’s Sixteenth Century — not quite my usual period of interest.”
“Why give it to you then?”
“It appears to be the log book of the dubious explorer, Sir Charles Bellingsfield. After pestering Cadez on behalf of Elizabeth the First, curiosity — and rumors of treasure — drove him into the Mediterranean.”
“So what?” the Colonel replied, not at all disinterested.
“It seems he may have done in 1590 what Arthur Evans has only scratched at this year. He found a codex on Crete that he claims he used to translate early, pre-Mycenaean texts. Minoan, as they call it.” Gray began earnestly flipping pages back and forth. “It is possible that this is a fake. There’s no record of Bellingsfield being on Crete, let alone discovering anything significant. And he was known to be quite mad.”
“This is an official Ministry assignment, Madame Archaeologist?”
“Well, not entirely. But I thought you wouldn’t mind another shot at Malcolm Davies.” The Colonel responded by taking her glass of pomegranate juice and drinking half. “I rather expected you might like that,” she said to his slight smile.
“The book is in Latin.”
“Hardly difficult to translate.” It was no surprise to her that an Elizabethan gentleman wrote his formal observations in the accepted language of learned men. The drawing on the right-hand page was a copy of a circular tablet, with the letters tracing a path down toward the center.
The Colonel stared at the snail of symbols. “Davies translated this gibberish?”
Gray shook her head. “Nonsense. Arthur only just found ancient hieroglyphs like these on Crete last year. ‘Linear A.’ That is what Arthur and Flinders Petrie are calling it. The text is a complete mystery. No one can translate it.” Gray turned the book, following the spiral of the writing. It appeared to be a labyrinth that the reader’s eyes were drawn into with numerous drawings of strange shapes.
The Colonel leaned forward. “Can you translate all the rest?”
As Gray’s eyebrows rose coyly, she knew that she was going to be a very determined Archaeologist. Poor Colonel.
“I have a proposal, which I believe you might actually like, and that could be linked to the greatest find in archaeological history. Bellingsfield disappeared in 1597 while searching for the fabled Treasure of Minos. If he had a codex to translate Linear A, he took it with him. And, per his book, he was headed to a site on Crete, on a specific date, to observe an astronomical event that happens infrequently. But, one that points to Minoa’s greatest secret.”
“Look at you, you’re excited.”
“And concerned. The Mycenaeans pillaged the whole civilization — it is ridiculous to think that one coin survived the invasion, let alone a whole treasury — we could be chasing after rumor only. This could be a gigantic failure.”
“And Davies will be there?”
“Of course.” Noting the Colonel’s returning smile. “I’m sure you two will have plenty to chat about?”
“Isn’t this where that ghost of the dead Minotaur protects the treasure, blah, blah?”
“Oh my, yes.” Her hazel eyes twinkled. “Locals say they hear it howling in the mountains and by the sea.”
“Wind.”
“Are you absolutely certain?”
Ghost and the Birdman
by AJ Sikes
Ghost squints in the dim electric light and writes the address on a matchbook. The dark skin of his fingers stands out against his sharp white suit, and Ghost thinks about what it means to go up in smoke.
He’s worked for Mr. Bacchus going on five years now, since Christmas 1923. This isn’t the first time he’s had reason to question their affairs. But it is the first time Ghost feels strongly enough about things to actually open his mouth.
Mr. Bacchus plays a mean hand, but never lets things slip too far one way or the other. Now here he comes with this address and this job, and Ghost is thinking.
He slips the matchbook into his hatband, puffs on his cigarette, and cocks an eye at the man by the window. Mr. Bacchus didn’t move an inch while he spoke about the job, and he keeps his near three-hundred-pound self statued now.
Ghost takes a long drag and holds the smoke in his lungs, lets the fingers of calm trace their way through his chest and mind. He reclines against the cushions of the chaise lounge, the only seat in Mr. Bacchus’ office, and one Ghost would rather not be in. But it’s where he was told to sit, so he sat.
“Are you sure, Mr. Bacchus, about me bringing the girl in?”
Ghost’s employer shifts his bulk and rotates where he stands until his wide back aims at the window and his wider front aims in Ghost’s direction. The slanting light haloes the man’s dark face, and Ghost forces his lips to stay straight. Mr. Bacchus is no angel, and everyone in New Orleans knows it.
“Am I sure, Ghost? I believe I am. Are you sure you want to remain in my employ?”
Ghost nods.
“But?” Mr. Bacchus says, arching an eyebrow.
“She’s fifteen, Mr. Bacchus. I know it’s only for—”
“Fifteen’s as good as sixteen when it’s just a month between them. She can stay here until her birthday comes. Now answer my question, Ghost. With words this time, not just a nod of your fool head.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Bacchus. I’m sure.”
“Acceptable. But this is a first for us, and I’m of a mind to caution you. I don’t need to caution you, do I, Ghost?”
The heavyset man holds his hands over his midsection, resting them across the roll of his stomach protruding from under his waistcoat. The gold rings on his thick fingers shine like fireflies in the dim room.
“No, sir, Mr. Bacchus.”
“Then what are you waiting for?”
Ghost stubs out his cigarette in an ashtray on the round table beside him. He stands, straightens his slacks and shifts his jacket on his shoulders. With a tip of his hat, he leaves Mr. Bacchus alone in the gloomy space of his parlor.
Ghost departs his employer’s house. He steps fast to his sedan and drives away with gloom and suspicion swirling in his head like whispers of crimes gone by.
A block from the house, Ghost cuts the engine and coasts to a stop out back of the property. The gas lamps flicker and flutter along the street. The new electric lamps are supposed to go in soon. They just have to come down the river from Chicago City. It’s been a decade of dirty work since Ghost has seen his hometown. Maybe now’s the time to head back north and see if his roots can hold him steady.
Maybe after this job.
The house hugs the ground, like it’s afraid it’ll fly off the earth otherwise. Across the alley, two old steam cars gather rust in the warm night. A horse and buggy pull away from a house a little down the way. The horse clops by Ghost’s sedan, and the driver wisely keeps her eyes on the road.
Ghost rolls up a new smoke and has it half gone when two bicycles clatter by. Young boys out late, racing each other around the city, like Ghost and his brother used to do once upon a time. A dog howls from the next yard over. Ghost gets out of his sedan.
He’s putting a family out of their home tonight, and Mr. Bacchus is set to have him do much worse. Five years of working for the man and Ghost has avoided the gala house mess. He’s made sure his employer gets paid what’s owed him. And he’s made sure Mr. Bacchus has never had to teach a lesson more than once. More often than not, Ghost shows up and that’s lesson enough. People pay their debts when they have to look down the barrel of a stare like the ones Ghost sends their way.
This family is different, though. They just have it rough, and sometimes having it rough is just a matter of how the cards come down.
Ghost stamps out his smoke and follo
ws a stone path around the house. Along the side he spies movement through a window. He pauses to look in and sees the girl and her mother arguing.
The girl’s long dark hair hangs down in strings and tatters. The mother grabs at it and the girl swats the woman’s hand away. Then two little boys come in, all pasty faces and filthy cheeks. Ghost recognizes the bicycle racers.
Ghost shakes his head and wipes a hand across his brow. Five years gone and not once did he have to do a job as dirty as this.
The man who called himself your father would tell you different. If he could still speak.
Ghost sniffs at the memory trying to force its way into his conscience. He has a job to do tonight, and he’ll do it. He follows the stone walk up to the front door. He lifts a hand to knock and pauses when the door flies open. The girl stands there, eyes wide and full of fire.
“Momma,” she says, tears spilling down her pink cheeks, squelching the flames. Nearly sixteen she might be, but Ghost would have a hard time believing it if he didn’t already know.
“I’m here to see your mother, yes,” he says, hating the words as they leave his tongue.
The girl steps back, putting a hand to her heart and letting the mother come between her and the threshold where Ghost stands waiting, one hand on his lapel, the other by his side.
“Mr. Gh — Mr. Ghost,” the mother says. “You here for the rent money, I expect.”
“No, I’m here for the house. The empty one,” Ghost says, glancing around the entry way at the ceiling, the walls, and the dirt on the stoop. He looks the mother in the eye. “Mr. Bacchus tells me it should be right here, seeing as how no rent’s been paid now two months gone.”
The mother nods and stammers a few sounds that don’t quite make it into words. Ghost finds the girl with his eyes, but keeps talking to the mother. “I get it now. You’re just here looking the place over. Mr. Bacchus is happy to let the house, but he needs two months up front.”
“Mr. Ghost? I don’t—”
“Go on,” he says, flashing his eyes on the mother. He uses the other stare, the one that makes people run from him instead of freezing them solid with fear. “Get some things together. You can’t take much. Car’s in the alley. I’ll tell Mr. Bacchus you snuck out on me. Saw me coming and lit out the back.”
The mother stares at him, and he can see she’s half ready to believe him. But she balks, stands there like a dummy in an uptown showroom window. Ghost puts both eyes into the work now, and the mother whips a hand up over her mouth as her eyes jump left to right looking for safety.
“I said get a few things together. Better do it now before I change my mind and do like Mr. Bacchus wants me to.” Ghost lets his eyes slide over to the girl and he does his best to send her a look that tells the story. The mother picks up the plot.
“Go on, Namah. Take your brothers and get some things together. Just some clothes. That’s all we need.”
“Momma?”
“I said go, girl! Dammit, get moving and do it fast!”
Ghost nods and keeps his face stony. The mother waits until the children are out of sight before she follows them into the house. Ghost stays on the front step. Sounds inside tell him they’re getting a few clothes together. Drawers slide in and out, closets and cupboards slam and clatter.
Ghost sends an eye around the street, looking for inconvenient passersby who might throw a wrench into his plans. Sure enough he spots two of Mr. Bacchus’ finest specimens along the way. They stand by a street lamp, the weak gaslight glowing the night above their heads and giving them parodies of the halo Mr. Bacchus wore earlier.
The men spot Ghost, too. He knows it, even if they keep up their smoking and jawing like they haven’t seen anyone or anything at all.
The back door opens and closes and Ghost reaches into his jacket for his revolver. He draws it as he runs inside, shouting and cursing. The two men came running his way as soon as he reached for his gat. He knows they’ll be inside the house, and behind him, before he can set up any signs of a story about how the family got the jump on him. He’ll have to hope they were too far away to overhear what he told the mother.
The boys come in as Ghost reaches the back door. He gets there in time to see his sedan go roaring off the curb. Ghost yanks the door open and jumps out like he’ll chase the car, but he draws up short when he sees Mr. Bacchus step out of the shadows to his right.
“I believe my instructions were to bring the girl in. Was I not clear, Ghost?”
“Mr. Bacchus,” Ghost says, lowering his gat so his boss doesn’t get any more wrong ideas. It’s plain enough from the look on the man’s face that Ghost has overstepped his radius. Better to just take the beating, he thinks, than risk getting cut off his tether and set adrift. Or handed a pine box to occupy. But Mr. Bacchus has other plans, Ghost discovers, and too late.
A rustling like dry paper and the scraping of steel on stone comes to Ghost’s ears. He turns on his heel, bringing his revolver up slow, and too slow he finds, as a dark shape covers his vision and the night goes black around him.
A stabbing pain rips into Ghost’s eye. He feels and hears himself screaming. He smells the musky damp of a barnyard and then the night rushes back in, billowing out in a spray of black feathers and gaslight and a laugh he hasn’t heard since he left Chicago City.
“Ghost,” Mr. Bacchus says. “I apologize for your unsavory treatment. This is done out of necessity, you understand. Word on the wind is that new blood is coming down river. New names and new games, and this is my New Orleans. I’ll not lose her to anyone.
“Your services are no longer required, Ghost. This, I am sad to say, is the parting of our ways.”
Ghost’s eye is on fire. He turns on his heel and stumbles, trying to find Mr. Bacchus in the night. He turns and turns, looking for the man, but all he hears is his employer’s voice. Then he puts a hand to his face and feels the wet smear on his cheek, smells the coppery tang and knows he hasn’t just lost a job.
“My eye,” he says. “Why’d you take my eye?”
“Precedent,” Mr. Bacchus says. “People respond to threats when there exists precedent to prove the threats are not empty. That precedent is you, Ghost. The threat,” Mr. Bacchus says and laughs once. “I believe you already know the man.”
Ghost searches the night with the eye he has left. He turns slowly, watching shadows, hunting movement in the corners. The street is empty and quiet except for the rumbling of his sedan’s engine a few blocks along. He sees the family there, and the boys from the krewe gathered around them, holding the girl apart from her mother and brothers.
“Over here, pal,” says a voice from Ghost’s past. He spins to the right and sees the man, standing just inside the house and clutching a dark mass tucked under his arm. A rooster. The bird is big and black, and its beak is smeared with blood. The man is tall and thin, and his pale brown skin looks like cigarette papers in the weakening light of the street lamps.
“Good to see you again, brother,” the man says. “Thanks for the tip ’bout finding work down this way. All but dried up in Chicago City. Capone pullin’ back. But New Orleans? Man with both eyes on the street, he find work. Ain’t that what you told me? When you left me in that flophouse, alone?”
Ghost stares his one eye full of hate at his brother as the man steps out of the house and into the night. Before Ghost can offer any reply, Mr. Bacchus clears his throat and fills the last line on the balance sheet.
“She turns sixteen come next month, Ghost. That’s fine by me. Thirty days is all the time I need to send word to New York. Then we’ll have another of our debutante games. Now, if the man with the bird will accompany me, it is time I take my leave of this alleyway.”
Mr. Bacchus steps to the curb and Ghost watches his sedan slowly roll backwards down the street and stop beside his old boss. One of the boys gets out and opens the back door for Mr. Bacchus to climb in. Ghost’s brother trots by to join them, whistling a happy tune as he steps up to the car. “Be se
ein’ ya, Ghost,” he says over his shoulder and laughs at his joke.
Ghost watches them drive away. He watches the mother and her sons shuffle down the street in his direction. They shiver as the sedan roars past them.
“Be seeing you, Birdie. Someday soon,” Ghost says. The mother comes closer but keeps a few feet between them. She holds her sons to either side, hands around their backs and clutching them tight.
“Mr. Ghost,” she says. “What do I do? They took my Namah. What do—”
“She’ll be at the debutante table next month.”
“The deb— I don’t know what that means.”
“It means Bacchus is making her the grand prize in a game of cards. She’ll be won by whoever takes the game. And that means this one-eyed sonofabitch has a fortune to earn and he’s got only thirty days to do it.”
Visitor from the East
by Harry Turtledove
“Oh, hell,” Bill Williamson said when the alarm clock assassinated a particularly juicy dirty dream. Cussing at it didn’t make it shut up. Resigned that the dream was dead — he’d never be so limber in real life — the governor of the state of Jefferson hit the top of the clock with a massive fist. He got the OFF button and didn’t break the clock, though not from lack of effort.
Yawning, he sat up in bed. “So early?” his wife muttered.
“Sorry, Louise,” Bill said. “But I’ve got to get to the coast to greet the visitor, and Yreka ain’t exactly coastal.”
He lumbered into the bathroom and did what needed doing in there, then pulled a pair of shorts up over the thick, reddish hair on his legs. His wallet sat in one pocket; his keys clinked in the other. Out he went, to grab some breakfast before he hit the road.
Thirty Days Later: Steaming Forward: 30 Adventures in Time Page 2
