by Kage Baker
“Was he a religious boy?” Lewis asked.
“Oh, he was full of idealistic nonsense at first, but he woke up to the reality of the world pretty damn quickly. No fool he.”
“Really,” said Lewis, trying to sound bored but polite.
“Edward Bell-Fairfax, that was his name,” Nennius said, and Lewis’s heart contracted painfully. He raised a hand in a casual gesture, and the deck steward stepped within earshot, inquiringly.
“Another martini, please,” Lewis said. The steward ducked his head and hastened away.
Nennius went on: “So anyway, a dozen years went by, and then a few more, and I’d long since forgotten about Bell-Fairfax. In those days I used to belong to Redking’s Club. There was a cabinet minister I was dogging on the Company’s behalf—you don’t need to know whom, of course, but it was more of what you so kindly call stage-managing history. Well, we had our annual function welcoming new members, and to my utter astonishment I found myself seated opposite Bell-Fairfax.”
“What a surprise,” agreed Lewis. “I suppose that sort of man didn’t get into that sort of club?”
“I should say not! But there was no mistaking Bell-Fairfax: remarkably ugly fellow, big horse-faced gawk with a broken nose, so tall he couldn’t walk through a doorway with his hat on. Beautiful speaking voice, though,” Nennius said, “and tremendously charming when he wanted to be. At any rate he’d charmed his way into the club. A retired naval commander on half pay, mind you! I thought it must be his people who’d arranged it, of course. Funnily enough, I was dead wrong.” Nennius poured himself another glass of wine.
“Was he some sort of hero?” Lewis said carefully.
“Oh, I gather he’d served with some distinction off the Ivory Coast. Been sent out there to fight the slave trade, you know, probably some of that youthful idealism coming to the fore. But he got himself into trouble again. Nobody spoke of it to his face, but the rumor was he’d very nearly been court-martialed. Fighting again, just as he’d done in school. This time he’d laid his hands on a superior officer, and from what I heard, the only reason he was allowed to retire honorably was that he threatened to make the damnedest scandal.” Nennius looked arch. “The captain in question was notorious for certain things, even by the standards of the British Navy.”
“Rum, sodomy, and the lash,” quoted Lewis.
“Oh, rather worse than that, I think. However it happened, Bell-Fairfax came out of it all right.” Nennius watched as the deck steward set down Lewis’s martini and slipped away. “After all, there he was, across the table from me. Properly respectful, of course, to his old headmaster, and I was obliged to converse with him. I was gratified to discover that he hadn’t rotted away his brain on grog, or turned into one of those blustering seafaring gentlemen. Actually rather learned, for a Navy man. Superb command of rhetoric, though his Latin was abysmal.”
“Not much call for it in the Navy, I suppose.” Lewis took a bracing sip of his cocktail.
“No. No. But still a fine raconteur, quite dryly clever, and I found myself liking him. We became friends, as much as a former pupil and master can, saw one another at the club when he wasn’t traveling abroad. He did a lot of traveling abroad,” Nennius added in a meaningful tone.
Lewis merely raised his eyebrows in inquiry, not trusting himself to speak.
“You’ll recollect I said I was wrong to assume his people had bribed the admittance council,” Nennius continued. “Well. He had been sponsored by one of the Old Members!”
“You don’t say,” said Lewis faintly, marveling at the permanence of certain things Victorian.
“It seems he got in with a rather remarkable set.” Nennius lifted his glass and studied it. “A clique of Foreign Office people with certain esoteric interests.”
“Freemasons?” Lewis wondered to what god he ought to pray just now. Mercury, god of liars? Minerva, goddess of wisdom?
“No. You remember how it was back then, most of the ruling classes were Freemasons. That was old hat compared with what Bell-Fairfax and these other people—most distinguished some of them were, too—were doing.” Nennius looked sternly across at Lewis. “Did you ever hear of the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society?”
Mercury, Lewis decided, and as he wrinkled his brow in apparent perplexity, he uttered a silent but profound prayer of supplication. “Debating team at Oxford?” he said at last.
Nennius laughed. “Not likely,” he said scornfully. “Imagine a secret fraternity that might admit Victor Frankenstein, Jules Verne, and Indiana Jones on equal terms. Sounds like a hoax, doesn’t it? However, I happen to know it was very real indeed, and Bell-Fairfax was a member.”
Nennius himself had been a member. Did he know Lewis knew? Was this a trap? Or was he simply leaving out his own involvement in order to be able to tell the tale? “Your mortal must have had no end of adventures,” said Lewis.
“Perfectly astonishing ones, if rumor prove true,” said Nennius. “Of course, at this late date very little evidence remains. I can assure you, though, that there were any number of quasi-scientific expeditions authorized by my cabinet member, who was also one of the Gentlemen’s number, as were some of the best scientific brains in England at the time. Their goal seems to have been world domination, in a mild sort of way.
“That was where Bell-Fairfax fit in, you see. He was no scientific genius, but he was frightfully clever and a damned good man of his hands, if you take my meaning: he’d grown accustomed to dirty work in a just cause and could be relied on utterly. He was one of their best agents, I believe.”
Lewis giggled shakily. “What a novel this would make.”
“If mortals read such things anymore,” said Nennius, looking out at the pirate ship in contempt.
“Well, but go on. This is fascinating,” Lewis said, remembering his martini and gulping half of it down. “I worked in Hollywood once, you know. I can’t help thinking what John Ford might have done with such a story.”
“Unfortunately, I don’t know many details.” Nennius shook his head. “They sent him to Egypt, and Jerusalem, and once—I believe—to a Jewish ghetto in Prague, of all places. Bell-Fairfax was a closed-mouthed chap, though. Wouldn’t have been much of a political if he hadn’t been. No, I got most of what I learned of his adventures from my cabinet member, who was rather a fool.”
“A ghetto,” said Lewis. New chapters were dancing before his eyes, in spite of his fear.
“The only mission I have any detailed knowledge of is his last one: poor old Bell-Fairfax disappeared, presumed killed.” Nennius sighed. “We kept his room at the club for seven years. Still, the adventure must have been choice. Ever hear of Santa Catalina Island? But you must have, you worked in Hollywood. I understand it became a fashionable resort in the early twentieth century.”
Lewis nodded, light-headed. “Twenty-six miles from the mainland. One used to be able to see it, on clear days, when there still were any in Los Angeles. I suppose one can again, now.”
Nennius leaned forward and lowered his voice. “As near as I could piece it together, the Gentlemen had got hold of a mysterious document that dated back to God only knew when and lay forgotten in the royal archives. An early explorer was out there, it seems, and discovered something damned queer on Santa Catalina. There were supposed to have been artifacts with the document, but I was never able to confirm that. The rumors, though! Hints about Atlantis, the Fountain of Youth, fabulous treasure. Whatever was actually there, the Gentlemen felt strongly enough about it to send an expedition, and so of course they prodded the Foreign Office into mounting one.”
“Now we’re getting into George Lucas’s territory,” said Lewis, surprised at his own sangfroid.
“Yes, aren’t we? The only difficulty with the plan was that the Yanks found out about it, and weren’t about to let a foreign power grab a bit of their coastline, especially when they had a civil war going on. This was in 1862, you see.
“Something went wrong, just as the expedition wa
s beginning to make real progress. Bell-Fairfax was sent in to salvage what he could from some fool’s mistake. They never saw him again.”
“And did they ever find the treasure?” asked Lewis.
Nennius shrugged. “My cabinet minister died not long after, so I lost my primary source of information. I have a general impression they kept sneaking back to search for it, and for Bell-Fairfax too. Do you know, you’re the only person I’ve told about this, in the four centuries since it happened? It seems like the wildest cheap literature, I know. I wouldn’t believe it myself if I hadn’t known the parties involved.”
“You say they kept searching for Edward?” Lewis asked distractedly.
Nennius was silent a moment, noting his familiar use of the name. He smiled at Lewis, thinking that it certainly wasn’t difficult to snare a Preserver. All one needed for a literature drone was a good story.
He yawned and said, “Perhaps they hoped he wasn’t really dead, after all the tight corners he’d got himself out of without a scratch. I’d like to believe that. I was rather fond of him, at least as fond as one can be of the monkeys.”
“But he must have died,” Lewis said.
“Well, of course. And yet, you know, rumors persisted that he’d been seen, much later than was possible for a mortal.”
Lewis caught his breath. “Really?”
“Yes. Who knows? Perhaps all that nonsense about a Fountain of Youth was true. Certainly they did find something remarkable, in a cave on the windward side of the island.” Nennius observed Lewis’s reaction. “Or so I heard. I must admit I’ve felt the urge to go out there and see for myself if Bell-Fairfax is still strutting about. Wouldn’t you? What if he somehow dragged himself into that cave and cheated death?”
Lewis smiled but was silent, thinking very hard. Not hard enough, however, as it turned out.
That night he dreamed of a cave in the hills behind Avalon. He was in the long passage that led into the cave, terrified, though it was a pleasant passage, full of sweet melancholy perfume. It glowed with a white light that deepened to blue as he went farther in and farther down. Joseph was with him.
They emerged into a great vaulted room that stretched away into unfathomable darkness, lit only by white screens where films were playing, old films from Hollywood’s golden age, when he’d lived there. He saw Sean Connery and Michael Caine being British adventurers: The Man Who Would Be King. And there was Harrison Ford in Egypt in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and there was Ford too on another screen seeking the Holy Grail with Sean Connery. A silent film flickered in all shades of ash-silver and gray, biblical-era people dancing on the steps of an impossibly big temple set. On another screen, Jackie Cooper waded ashore from the beached Hispaniola onto the sands of Treasure Island, singing Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum. On yet another screen, Rudolph Valentino rode down the side of a dune.
“That’s Pismo Beach, really,” Joseph said knowingly.
Lewis turned away from the screens. “Father of Lies,” he told Joseph, indignant, though he knew Joseph was right.
“No, I’m the son of lies, and you are too,” Joseph replied.
And there was Mendoza, so sad but so beautiful: she was sleeping in a vault, in a light like blue cellophane, dreaming peacefully, shrouded round in her fiery hair that drifted, drifted. Lewis ran toward the vault.
“What a cheap horror matinee,” Joseph said, because a skeleton came flying into Lewis’s path, but anyone could have told it was mounted from a boom and jointed together like a puppet. It was a very big skeleton, though, and a strange one. The skull’s top had been sawed off and reattached with wire. That was only done during autopsies, though, wasn’t it?
Lewis knew whose skeleton it was, hanging there so silly beside Mendoza’s vault with its bones still rattling: Edward’s. Edward hadn’t cheated death, he’d been shot and died in Mendoza’s arms. No happy ending. Lewis began to cry. Joseph leaped on the skeleton in a fury, and it fell to the floor, scattering like ivory dice.
“Bastard!” Joseph was screaming. “You got her into this condition, now you’ll have to marry her!”
“Aye, but he’s dead,” Lewis objected.
“But he won’t stay dead!” Joseph kicked the strange skull across the room, and Lewis realized that his friend had become a werewolf—no, the jackal-headed god Anubis, or was it Imhotep? No, he was only a coyote, after all. He pointed his muzzle at something over Lewis’s shoulder, and Lewis turned and caught his breath.
There they were together on the biggest screen of all, Edward and Mendoza, alive. He wore his commander’s uniform, she wore a sleeveless gown of beaded peach silk. He had brought her down an aisle of great palm trees to a caravanserai. Sinuous sensual music was playing, a piece Lewis remembered from the late twentieth century called “Mummer’s Dance.”
He was unable to take his eyes from the romance. Edward led her to a high white room, shutters open to the blue sky. They undressed, smiling, clothes falling effortlessly like dropped scarves, and on a great wide bed of tapestry silk, all dark colors, gold, wine, burnt orange, green, he lay her down. Her arms went around his neck, and they kissed.
Lewis watched everything he’d ever guiltily imagined.
Joseph, behind him, was barking and howling, because they had come for Lewis at last, the little stupid men with his death. It didn’t matter. He reached up his arms to the lovers, and the realization came to him: This is my salvation. Dissolving in tears, he melted into the moving images and was lost, and it was so peaceful.
But he woke shaking and cold in his cabin. He sat up and turned on the gimbal light: no pale men, only a white dress shirt over the back of a chair and his own pale face reflected in the mirror over the dresser, its round brass frame like a halo. Shivering, he got up and fumbled with the thermostat. He sat huddled in his bed until morning, staring at the wall, and he never got warm.
New Hampshire, 2276
AFTER UNPACKING his suitcase and testing the bed, Lewis glanced at his chronometer. Two hours yet until his job, and the cemetery was within walking distance. He adjusted the room’s climate control—nothing seemed to warm him these days—and sat down at the courtesy terminal. He tapped in Joseph’s code and waited for the screen to clear.
Joseph, mouth ringed in white foam, was brushing his teeth. “Make this quick, okay?” he said. “I’m turning in.”
“Are you going on vacation any time soon?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact,” Joseph said. “I just came off a job. I was thinking of San Francisco.”
“What a coincidence,” Lewis said. “I was going out to the West Coast myself, for a couple of weeks. Why don’t we relive our madness in Ghirardelli Square.”
“You all right, Lewis?” The green face—this was a cheap hotel and the terminal’s color values were abysmal—loomed grotesquely close to the screen in a gigantic parody of concern. “You don’t look so good.”
“Do I ever?” Lewis said.
“Any more of that trouble?” Joseph held up his hand in a pistol-shooting gesture.
“None whatsoever.”
“You realize we can’t get any Theobromos at Ghirardelli Square. All those laws the Yanks passed.”
Lewis gave a theatrical sigh. “Well then, what about Santa Catalina Island?”
Even with the awful picture resolution, he could see the lightbulb going on above Joseph’s head. “Hm,” Joseph said. “Independent republic, lots of little loopholes to let people party. We might be able to score a couple of bars at that. I haven’t been over there since—when was it?—1923, I think.”
“It’s settled, then? Where shall we meet?”
“Where are you now?”
“New Hampshire. Little town called Arkham.”
“Ah,” Joseph said. “I know what you’re doing there. You should be done by noon tomorrow. When you finish, book the next flight to Santa Barbara. I’ll meet you in the Street of Spain, and we’ll drive to the ferry from there. Bring a lot of cash. I hear it’s expensive.”
“I have cash to burn these days,” Lewis said.
“How nice for you. So, you got that?”
“Street of Spain,” Lewis said, accessing a map and locating the ancient shopping quarter of the tiny republic. “I expect to be there at twenty hundred hours tomorrow.”
“See you. And, Lewis?”
“Yes?”
“Take care of yourself, okay?”
“Always, old boy.”
“Good. Mañiana.”
Lewis signed out, got up and showered, and took some pains combing his hair afterward. He wanted to look his best. A few minutes past twenty-one hundred hours, a yet unknown young Eccentric would limp into the local cemetery with an old pillowcase full of his writing, intent on offering it and himself in a fiery holocaust to shame the philistine world. There the youth would meet a kindly stranger who would talk him out of it, or so his autobiography would later state: a small fair-haired man in an expensive suit who would give him cash for the contents of his pillowcase, enough cash to pay off the writer’s debts and buy him that all-important ticket to New York . . .
Avalon
AT LAST,” LEWIS SAID, spotting the old Casino looming white at the entrance to Avalon Bay. “I don’t see why we couldn’t have taken a ferry from San Pedro.”
“Did you really want to drive through Los Angeles?” Joseph asked, and Lewis shuddered.
A little Island Guard cutter sped close and abreast of them for a few miles, scanning the Catalina Thunderer. It was doing this primarily for show; on Catalina it was illegal to sell liquor, meat, refined sugar, dairy products, or other proscribed substances, but it was not illegal to own them. This careful loophole brought the island a great deal of happy tourist trade. Avalon Harbor was packed with luxury craft at every mooring, and bigger vessels anchored discreetly farther out to sea, sending launches ashore.
