Winter Tides

by James P. Blaylock

  “No,” he said out loud, but the sound of pacing increased in intensity in that moment, as if the thrill of fear that ran through him now had intensified it, as if the sound itself came from somewhere deep within him, from a place of dreams and doubt.

  There was a wild rending and tearing sound behind him, the sound of nails prying out of lumber, of wood splitting and splintering, and he spun around and ducked away in time to see a broad patch of ceiling come down in a crashing, flaming roar, smashing open the door to the dressing rooms, burning debris littering the corridor floor. Smoke billowed toward him, filling the corridor, and instinctively he yanked his shirt over his mouth and nose and ran toward the door ahead. The door wouldn’t hold the fire out, but it might slow down the spread of smoke. The smoke would kill him.

  He slipped through the door, shutting it behind him. The ceiling was hot, and he could hear the fire burning over his head. He kept moving, into the costume room, shouting Jenny’s name at the top of his voice. Immediately he saw her, huddled beneath a rack of clothing, looking at him in stark terror. The exit door was shut. He leaped across and tried it. Locked. The key was gone from the bolt. He kicked the door, slammed at it with the heel of his shoe, listening to the ominous creaking in the timbers overhead, the backdrop of incessant, heavy pacing. He heard something then—a noise beyond the door, perhaps the sound of shoes scraping on the concrete landing.

  Somebody was out there.

  He pounded on the door panel, shouted at it, then turned around for Jenny. Smoke seeped through the ceiling now, drifted in under the corridor door.

  Then something in the room changed. The pacing stopped. He could feel a growing pressure in his ears, as if he had just dived into deep water. Something, some energy, occupied space that had been empty a moment before, and he saw the door to the corridor bulge outward, smoke pouring in around it, flames visible just beyond. The doorknob rattled, the walls vibrated. The clothing racks shook. He caught a glimpse of something moving in the room, a milky blur in the smoke.

  “Jenny!” he said, his voice tense and thin. He held out his hand and stepped across to where she still huddled under the costume racks. She put her hand out timidly, and he helped her stand, putting his arm around her waist and picking her up. She clung to him, her eyes wide with fear.

  “Elinor,” she whispered, looking past him.

  Elinor, Elinor’s ghost, stood before them in a swirling mass of smoke. He knew it was her absolutely, even before his eyes confirmed his knowledge. Her features grew solid and sharp in the smoke as she stood unmoving, staring at him, through him. She seemed to wear a red coat spun out of smoke, a misty facsimile of the coat with black buttons that Edmund had dressed the doll in, that had burned in the fire in the warehouse.

  For a moment Dave heard nothing but the rushing of his own blood in his head, like the hiss of broken waves running up a steep beach. The air in the room was suddenly cool, and smelled like salt spray from a winter ocean, and the hanging costumes around him wavered and rippled on their racks like surge-washed kelp. He envisioned the bracelet in the desk drawer at home, wished that he had it with him, that he could return it to her, as if it were an offering. He had the deep urge, the need, to apologize to her, to explain the ocean’s shifting tides, to explain the wave that had drowned her.

  Jenny yanked on his neck then, recalling him to the smoky room, to the fire raging overhead, and in that instant he understood the futility of his lingering guilt. He couldn’t explain away what had happened; it had simply happened. Anne, of course had been right. There was no blame. That was simply true, for all of them. Sometimes the world couldn’t be counted on always to work out for the best. A couple of seconds one way or another—a missed turn, a broken alarm clock—and everything changes in a moment. Elinor, what Elinor was to him, was a figment.

  Dave carried Jenny toward the door. Elinor’s image wavered as they walked through her. She was a thing of smoke and fog, of night air and imagination, a murky transparency, her feet not quite touching the concrete floor.

  The basement door swung open before them, and Edmund crouched through it, peering in at them through the reek, his clothes and face streaked with blood and white dust, his broken arm hanging limp. He held his head canted stiffly downward, so that he gaped up past his eyebrows. In his hand he held the key to the basement door, still grasped between his thumb and forefinger, as if he had more doors to open.

  Cool night air pushed into the room, swirling the smoke aside, and right then the door to the corridor burst into flame, fed by the draft of oxygen. The clothes racks near the door ignited. Edmund stepped eagerly into the room, oblivious to the heat and smoke, and began to speak, although it was instantly clear that he wasn’t speaking to Dave. He looked right past Dave and Jenny, a tight smile on his face, staring toward where Elinor’s image still hung on the air. Dave pulled Jenny out through the door and set her down, sheltering Jenny with his body and ready to knock Edmund down if he had to. Jenny ran up the stairs into the lamplit brightness of the alley, but Dave lingered one more moment. Elinor’s image seemed to him to be growing smaller, receding, as if the costume room were infinitely large and she were moving away along an invisible highway toward some unseen and distant horizon.

  Edmund shuffled forward, deeper into the burning room, holding out his good arm, still grasping the key. “Edmund!” Dave shouted, but Edmund didn’t turn around. Elinor’s ghost, as tiny now as one of her own dolls, hovered in the smoke and flame. Edmund lurched forward, drawn toward the image, muttering unintelligibly. Dave stepped into the room again, reaching out to grab Edmund’s shirt, but he was checked by the sound of something falling in the theatre above, a heavy crashing and splitting, and he turned and jumped back out through the door as plaster chunks rained down over the burning costumes, around Edmund’s head and shoulders, and a half-dozen floor joists smashed downward as the entire ceiling collapsed, yanking itself to pieces, fire showering around them, knocking Edmund forward into the blazing costume racks and half burying him beneath burning debris. Elinor’s ghost shimmered momentarily like a desert mirage and then blinked away. Edmund screamed, futilely trying to claw his way one-handed out from under the fallen beams and the clumps of flaming costumes, his clothing on fire now.

  Dave ran up the stairs into the alley, into the heavy, drenching mist of a fire hose. There was the sound of shouting, a hand on his arm guiding him down the alley through the water that poured down around them, deflected from the wall of the buildings on either side and raining down from the roof of the theatre. Dave sheltered his face, spotting Anne standing at the top of the alley in the mercury vapor lamplight that glared from behind the bumper of a hook and ladder truck. She held Jenny’s hand. Collier stood behind the two of them. Collier apparently saw Dave then, appearing out of the mist and tumult, and he waved both hands over his head, bent over and said something to Jenny. There was a heavy, echoing crash behind Dave then, the sound of what might have been the stage itself collapsing, perhaps the roof caving in. He caught a glimpse of the flames that edged the basement doorway now, but immediately the fire and the doorway disappeared behind a cone of water spraying from the nozzle of the fire hose, as the firemen moved into the building, white smoke pouring out around them.

  65

  THE EARL OF GLOUCESTER WAS HALF CLEARED OUT TO make room for a hastily assembled raked floor that was wide and deep enough to seat two hundred people in rented theatre seats. The temporary floor and outdoor-type stage had been shipped across town in pieces two days ago from the Light Opera in Fullerton, along with travelers and painted drops to take the place of the burned castle and the other set pieces that had gone up in the fire. Two of the baby faces had miraculously survived, and Dave and Anne had built and painted a third, and the faces hung from the ceiling of the Earl’s now like a trio of watchful moon men. Dave and Anne were both running on three or four hours of sleep a night, but so was Collier, who didn’t show any signs of slowing down, and who had been working with
a tireless sense of purpose, as if it wasn’t only the play he was trying to save, but the entire fallen world of the Earl of Gloucester, putting its broken-eggshell pieces back together with superglue and raw determination.

  The show was going up after all—sold out opening night and for two nights after. Tickets for the matinee show were going fast. Collier was already putting together a plan for rebuilding the old Ocean Theatre, restoring it to its original grandeur, just as the old pier had been rebuilt after the winter storm in ’88. And now that Collier was no longer under observation by Social Services, Mrs. Nyles had finally been drawn into the theatre’s orbit, taking over the role of Cordelia’s attendant from Mrs. deShane, who was the only member of the cast who had quit after the fire.

  Even the Earl himself was back in action. After they released him from hospital observation, he had spent a couple of days resting at Casey’s house on doctor’s orders. He couldn’t stand the solitude, though, and he stood along the edge of the raised floor now, directing the building of a temporary railing around the floor’s perimeter, searching through a big can of carriage bolts and nuts and washers, pointing at something with a carved walking stick that he had gotten out of props. He had Benny Goodman on the stereo and had spent most of the morning making phone calls to theatre companies as far away as Santa Barbara and San Diego in order to call in favors—borrowing costumes, cutting deals.

  Casey’s head was shaved, and there was a hole in his skull, the skin over the top stitched up. As soon as the doctor had drained the fluid off, Casey had been wide awake and ready to go, as if a light bulb had gone on inside and the darkness swept away. In fact, he was so ready to go that the doctor had told him he could return to full activity within a few days. As soon as his scalp healed, he could even surf, as long as he didn’t get hit in the head again. This morning he had been at the pier early, watching a new south swell and hooting at the locals out in the water at dawn, whistling advance notice of waves from the superior height of the pier. Nancy was still shaky about Casey’s recovering so fast. Just a few days ago they had drilled through his skull with a fancy surgical router, and already he was talking about a trip to Puerto Escondido.

  But Nancy had been out on the pier with Casey this morning, and she and Anne had even been talking about Dave and Casey teaching them how to surf, which was an idea that was going to take some getting used to, like Fred Mertz and Ricky Ricardo teaching Lucy and Ethel to shoot golf. Dave, unfortunately, had made that comparison out loud about an hour ago, which had been an incredibly witless mistake.

  Dave watched the Earl work. The old man’s face was furrowed with concentration, but there was no sign of anything wrong, no sign that what they were all doing right now was connected with Edmund’s falling apart. Edmund’s charred bones had only been hauled away a couple of days ago, his identity verified by the coroner and a set of dental records. But for the Earl, Edmund was apparently dead and buried in more ways than one. Dave could easily imagine the old man’s never mentioning Edmund’s name again, as if Edmund had gone out of the world like a bad spirit, as if he had simply never existed. Perhaps this was denial on some grand new scale. Or perhaps the Earl was fueled by the pure joy that he derived from Casey’s recovery. He seemed to have taken Casey’s return absolutely in stride, as if there had never been any question about it, as if one more hole in the head didn’t make a damned bit of difference. The Earl, Dave decided, was simply too deep to fathom. He himself had spent a lot of years uselessly dwelling on the past. The Earl seemed to have buried it instantly.

  The old man was shouting something now, gesturing at the ceiling with his stick, saying something about the light grid, which had just been hung that day. At the Earl of Gloucester it was business as usual, the beach washed clean by the outgoing tide, the darkness turning toward the morning.

  EVEN THOUGH IT WAS LATE IN THE SPRING NOW, THERE had been a storm last night, and the afternoon sky was still black with clouds, the wind out of the west. Every once in a while rain fell, and the ocean danced with raindrops, and the water grew gray and ominous. The beach was empty in the bad weather, the sand wet, the concession stands closed down. Even the seagulls huddled together near the disused fire pits, as if waiting for the sky to clear. Dave was alone in the water, which was winter-cold with the new swell, and he turned around and paddled into a shifting peak that surged up out of nowhere, but then fell away again and disappeared before he could catch it.

  The waves were knocked apart by the storm and were breaking haphazardly in chunky peaks, the entire surface of the ocean rising and falling in pieces, like water in a washing machine. Still, he had managed to paddle into a few of those peaks—a steep drop and a quick sprint for the shoulder, and about half the time a treacherous ledge or a collapsing section that dumped him into the white water and worked him a little before the wave lost its energy and faded.

  THERE WAS A LULL NOW, AND HE DRIFTED SOUTH WITH the current, idly spinning around and watching the shore, recalling the plume of smoke in the sky on that long-ago day, the burning surfboard in the fire pit, the small dark figures of Anne and her mother pacing them down the strand. Right now, at least, the world and everything in it was muted and distant, veiled by the beach and by the Highway beyond, by the rainy weather and cloud shadow and the sound of breaking waves.

  He reached into the sleeve of his wetsuit and took out Elinor’s wristlet—the white beads that spelled out her name. He held it in the palm of his hand for a moment, not really looking at it, but looking into the ocean instead. They had never found Elinor’s body. Anne had told him that when he had asked her finally. So she was still out here somewhere, maybe right below him—who could say?—her bones drifting on the tide.

  The clouds parted then, and the sun shone through, instantly illuminating the surface of the ocean, throwing the depths into startling, bottle-green clarity. He turned his hand over and dropped the bracelet, which splashed into the water and swirled away downward, the porcelain beads catching the spring sunlight for a few moments until clouds covered the sun again, and the bracelet passed into shadow and disappeared.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  World Fantasy Award winning author James Blaylock, one of the pioneers of the steampunk genre, has written eighteen novels as well as scores of short stories, essays, and articles. His steampunk novel Homunculus won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, and his short story "The Ape-box Affair," published in Unearth magazine, was the first contemporary steampunk story published in the U.S. Recent publications include Knights of the Cornerstone, The Ebb Tide, and The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs. He has recently finished a new steampunk novel titled The Aylesford Skull, to be published by Titan Books.