In the Valley of the Kings: Stories

by Terrence Holt

  Only my wife resists; only in her do I feel as if time and the Law might have their exceptions. Our bodies, of course, it owns entire. They luff in a failing wind. We blow as we climb the hill to our home, and the second floor is shut off, cold in the winters, an odd, faint, salt smell there, as if in some forgotten closet my old sea-gear lies moldering. Every thing about us succumbs to the Law, except in certain moments, rare always but constant, moments, perhaps, when she walks me to the wharf, and places me so as to look out to the sea, knowing (I have complained of it) that I forget, and stands beside me in a companionable silence. In these moments, I notice that her eyes have not changed, not in all the years that have vanished under the Law. And though the pressure of her hand upon my arm is uncertain now, the shiver in it always there, the fingertips cold often of late, something there, as well, I feel has not changed.

  But is this enough? When the Law comes finally at last to claim us, what then?

  For I know this as well about the Law: It is inscrutable in its workings, irrational and slow. It will not take us together, nor will it take us quickly. Not often these days, not like in the early days, when an ax upon a scaffold, a scything of plague, or even shipwrecks that I read of in the news: these, it seems, are things of the past. It will be more decorous, more closely regulated, until, at last, even our breathing will come under its control. When that moment is here, and we are finally sunk beneath the Law, I doubt that even the color of her eyes will be the same to me.

  My crew have not responded to my letters; the telephone rings and rings in empty rooms. A few who linger here along the seashore tell me they are old now, the sea is no life for them. Only my wife and I still watch, and we are feeble, but still she helps me look toward the sea. We have been talking. At nights, when I cozen myself in thinking that the Law is asleep, we speak low together beneath the counterpane of what still might be. Tomorrow, I tell her, the winds may have changed, the currents may have brought her back again around the globe. Tomorrow she may ride there at the wharf, and we might board her. It could be done. They have done amazing things with ship’s tackle now: the two of us might manage her alone. And my wife, companionable, agrees, and plans what ports we might call on, what cargoes we might carry, what distant shores we might explore.

  It may be, I tell her, that the ship will founder. She may be, in a storm, too much for us, even if we fit her with the finest. It may be that those ports I used to visit all are closed now, and the shores I watched through spyglass in my youth, all jungle and desire, are settled now, are ports themselves, and under their own Law. It may be that the Law rules even over the ocean now, and that nowhere between the poles will see us free. It may be that the Maelstrom has been silenced, and the tides of Fundy channeled to the mill. All of this may be, but will you still set sail?

  She nods, warm, a gentle shiver coursing through the two of us, as if the bed itself has felt the turning of the tide. At the window, a breeze blows back the curtain. Gentle moonlight washes in. And from my window, high up in the second storey, down on the glassy harbor I see our ship is riding in.

  APOCALYPSE

  Thou canst understand, therefore, that all our knowledge will be dead from the moment the door of the future is closed.—INFERNO X: 106–108 (JOHN D. SINCLAIR, TRANSLATOR)

  In the gorge the echoes faded. I found myself listening, hoping there would be no voices. For a minute or so—it may have been ten—we waited. I could hear the kitchen clock tick.

  When the silence in the room became intolerable, we both stood to go.

  The slate steps down into the gorge were buried in snow, and we stepped carefully, taking turns. The cold dimmed our flashlights, leaving us only the light of the sky to tell wet slate from ice. When we reached the bottom and walked out onto the frozen stream, the light lay pale around us. Tonight’s wreck had joined the others without a sign. There was no fire. Through the sound of water under ice, we listened, and heard nothing.

  I could feel Ellen shiver. She told me once, after we had climbed back home, that she is afraid to let me come down here alone. She worries that another car will fall. As I put an arm around her—tried to, but in our parkas the gesture turned into a clumsy shove—I looked up to the rim of the gorge, where our house stands. There the road turns sharply down toward the bridge, and the safety barrier has long since broken down.

  It was a mistake to look. No cars (the night was soundless): only the hard angles of the rocks, and the bare trees threading the sky. The night was bitter cold, clear and moonless. Before, a night like this would have burned with stars, and the sky seemed infinitely far away. This night, I saw four, six, seven stars swimming, awash in a faintly luminous haze that lowers, night by night.

  Ell caught me staring and pulled at my arm. She dragged us stumbling over rocks hidden in the snow to where the new wreck lay, broken-backed on the streamside. Its engine had spilled out in a single piece, hissing into the ice. Glass glittered everywhere. We bent to a place where a window had been. Inside were six bodies, all fallen on their heads. Their arms were tangled, as if still gesturing.

  LAST NIGHT WAS Sunday. I had lost track of the day until, as we were halfway up the stairs, Ell asked if I had remembered to wind the clock. She has asked me this every Sunday night for seven years. It used to irritate me.

  It is an heirloom, the clock. It was my father’s, and his father’s, and the story goes that it has been around the world ten times: a great, gleaming ship’s chronometer. When I was young, my father would—rarely—consent to show me its works. I would dream about them, sometimes, in the conscious dreams that come before sleep. The gleam and the motion, the oddly susurrant ticking, merged with my pulse and my own breathing to whirr me into sleep.

  At an early age I conceived the notion that the clock was responsible for time. I remain superstitious about keeping it wound, and have never let it stop since the day I inherited it, still ticking. When I opened its back that first day, I was surprised how my memory had magnified its works: the springs and cogs occupy no more than a quarter of the massive, largely empty casing. I use it to hide spare keys. Last night, when Ellen asked if I had remembered to wind the clock, I stopped on the stairs, and without a word turned back down. I felt her eyes on my back, and felt ashamed at my own carelessness.

  IN LIFE I was the editor of a small science quarterly. I read widely in the literature, and so for ten years or more I was forewarned. But some part of me always believed that the world written up in the journals was imaginary. It never touched me: there were no people in it. It was an elegant entertainment, nothing more. This world—the one we live in—was real, and there could be no connection.

  Can I understand what is happening? No, nor can I imagine the hour that launched it, some sixty thousand years ago, from the heart of the Milky Way. I can only tell myself facts: since I began this paragraph, it has moved two million miles closer. The words clatter emptily about the page. I know only that when it emerged last June—a faint gleam, low in the summer sky—the world changed.

  Part of me feels certain this cannot be, that all of us are in a dream, a mass psychosis: the second week of January will come after all, and we will waken, grinning at ourselves. The other part of me feels the emptiness in those words.

  THERE IS A quiet over the land. We drive often now—gasoline is plentiful once more—in the hills outside the town, past farmsteads that could have been abandoned last week, or ten years ago. The livestock have broken down their fences. Cattle, horses, pigs stand in the road, root in the ditches. I saw a goat standing on a porch, forefeet up in a swing-chair, staring abstractedly into the distance. I wonder where the owners of the animals have gone, if anyone still feeds or waters them. I worry for them, should the snow lie deep this winter, and the ponds ice over.

  We stop at the grocery store, and the quiet has penetrated there, too, a chill emitted from the frozen foods, the dearth of certain products. The aisles are quiet, but there is no serenity in this place. Out in the countryside there
could be something like serenity. I think when I am out there that my intrusion has shattered the peace, this edginess I feel will depart with me, and the pigs will lie down again in the road and sleep. Here in the supermarket, every selection asks us: This large? How long? For what?

  The pet food aisle is empty. A man had hysterics there this week; we could hear him across the store. Everyone looked up, checked his neighbor, and looked down again.

  When we found him, he was standing sobbing by his cart, his face gleaming in the fluorescent lights. I wanted to make him stop.

  When I laid a hand on his shoulder, he wheeled.

  —Do you have any?

  I offered a package of cheese.

  —No. He sleeved his nose.—Do you have any cats?

  I tried to move him toward the dairy aisle, but he shrugged my hand away.

  —It’s not fair, he howled.—She’s just a cat.

  The last word made him blubber again. At the end of the aisle I saw Ell, looking diminished, mute—one of the frieze of strangers gathered there. I could not meet her eye.

  Suddenly furious at him, I dragged him away, wanting to slap him into silence. Instead I pushed his cart across the back of the store, where he lapsed into a sullen calm. I pulled from the shelves anything I thought a cat might eat: marinated herring, heavy cream, Camembert. With each, I gestured, as if to say,—She’ll like this; there, that’s my favorite; isn’t this good? Until his flat stare unstrung me, and I led him to the checkout.

  I HAD BEEN down to the bridge, watching the sun go down across the valley. The lake is icing early this winter; the town was sunk in blue shadow. Below me, the gorge was already dark.

  The deck of the bridge is an open steel grid. I hate to look down through it: the trees, foreshortened, look like bushes. I came home and found Ellen gone.

  I thought at once of the gorge. In the darkening hall I stood and listened to the kitchen clock, and wondered how long I could wait before going to see. Then the door behind me opened, and she entered, swathed in her old, over-large winter coat. She looked as if she had walked in from an earlier year. She looked so familiar—and everything familiar now looks strange—I could not catch my breath and only nodded.—The roads are getting terrible, she said, bearing down drolly on the last word, balancing on one leg as she took off her boots. When she caught the expression on my face, she laughed.—Were you worrying about me?

  MY APPETITE DIMINISHES each day, as I wake before dawn and pad about the house, too restless to start writing. The time required to toast a slice of bread seems too long. Were it not for Ell, I would no longer cook at all. I am wasting, I know: my face in the mirror shows its bones clearly now in the morning light. But Ellen grows. She eats with an appetite she never had before, and seems taller, broader of hip, and of shoulder and breast as well. It suits her. Her face retains its graceful lines, and somehow her cheeks are still indented beneath the high, Slavic bones. Her eyes, too, are still hooded, guarded above the strong, straight bar of her nose.

  She has stopped wearing her glasses. She focuses as best she can on the empty air above her lap. What does she see? I have not asked. I watch her, and try to guess. Sometimes she looks up—suddenly, as if she has seen something marvelous—her mouth opens, and I catch my breath.

  THE TELEPHONE SYSTEM still works. I hear a tone when I lift the receiver. It sounds mournful now, this fabulously complex network reduced to carrying this message of no message, this signal that says only: Ready to send. Our phone has not rung in weeks, nor is there anyone I call: I cannot imagine what there is to say. Some numbers I try no longer respond: the weather, dial-a-joke, dial-a-prayer. The number for the time survives, telling the ten-second intervals in its precise, weary voice.

  Tonight I was alone in the kitchen, washing dishes. Something was rotting in the trash. For a long time I failed to recognize the smell (my sinuses are bad this winter), or even that I was smelling anything at all. Something was wrong. What had I done? I worked faster, scrubbed harder, but the feeling grew. What had I done? When I finally recognized the smell, my guilt and anxiety changed abruptly into anger. It had been Ellen’s turn to take out the trash. I was certain of it.

  When I found her, she was in the small upstairs room that still smells faintly of the coat of paint we gave it in the summer. She was sewing again; the light was bad. She looked up as I entered, her glasses on the table beside her, straining to focus on what I knew she could see only as the pale blur of my face. Her eyes still struggle to see at a distance; the effort gives her the look of a worried child. It is the expression that gazes out of the few early snapshots she still has. That look stopped me in the doorway. I tried to slow my breathing, hoping that, without her glasses, she had not seen the expression on my face. I pretended my grimace was a smile, walked over to her, and turned on the lamp. She smiled back and returned to her work, presenting me the part of her hair. I stooped, kissed it, and quickly left.

  Out in the cold, the smell from the trash was thinner, almost fragile among the smells of wood smoke and snow as I walked past our stuffed and sealed garbage cans, through the hedge to the neighbors’ drive. Their house has been dark three weeks. They left their car, which I use as a temporary dump. I would use their house, if I could bring myself to try the door. Their car is starting to fill, and even in the cold stinks dangerously, but it will be enough.

  WE FOUGHT THE next morning instead. I had thrown something away—a magazine, the last number of a subscription that expired in November—before she had finished with it. She complained, I snapped, she turned and left the room. The fight continued as a mutual silence that went on throughout the afternoon. When I could no longer bear the rising tension, I brought her a cup of tea. She was reading in the upstairs room—the light was bad again—and when I set the tea beside her, she did not look up.

  As I turned to leave, she cleared her throat.—I was afraid you were going to go through the trash.

  I turned, and she was smiling at me over the brim of the cup.—I wouldn’t have wanted it, you know. It would have stunk. Her smile broadened as she spoke, but before she could sip the tea, she was crying. I tried to comfort her, and felt ineffectual as I always do, at a loss for words. I patted her back, and wondered at the empty sound.

  THE SAME DREAM has come to me these three nights. It starts in a scene I cannot forget, two faces I still see when I close my eyes. They were the first to fall into the gorge. We found them at first light, the car absurd among the boulders. The twin stars in the windshield told us what we would find inside. Perhaps it was the shock of finding them still so young, so peaceful behind the shattered glass, that reverberates now in my dreams; they looked asleep, their faces almost touching.

  In my dream they wake, they speak to us, and as they tell us their story weep—whether for each other or for us I cannot say. As they speak, their words live, showing us their last moments: the guardrail flying away, the slow, looming tilt of the far wall, and then the rocks uprushing. On the seat beside me, Ellen hovers at the corner of my eye. There is something I must tell her, but before I can speak, there is a noise, and then silence, which continues for a long time.

  Ell wakes me.—You were crying.

  Sitting up in the cold room, by the pale light the curtains cannot cover entirely I turn and tell her the words the dream would not let me say. But as I speak, Ellen grows smaller, the room lengthens, the distance between us grows and still she lies only just beyond the farthest stretch of my arm. My voice makes no sound. Her lips move. Each object in the room is isolated, meaningless, and I think, This is the end, it has happened, and Ell diminishes still farther, contracting to one clear point in the deepening gloom.

  When I finally awake, the world is still, and Ellen still beside me.

  Her face relaxes every night, so that by morning the angles and the lines have vanished, her nose is round and freckled, and her lips are parted. Every morning the urge to clutch her, shake her awake, almost overpowers me. I want to ask her something—j
ust what, I still can’t say. But this morning, as every morning, I let her sleep. The aching in my chest ebbs slowly, and the daylight grows around us.

  AT THE NEIGHBORS’ back door I looked in the curtained window: dishes in the sink, a dinner for four spread on the table. One of the chairs lay on its back, legs up in an expression of helpless surprise. The door swung open as I pressed, and a burst of hot, fetid air swept past me. Dinner had spoiled, filling the kitchen with a high, wild sweetness. The room was so hot the air seemed gelid: sweat burst out on my face. From the basement I heard the furnace roar. To leave in the middle of dinner seemed unremarkable; but why turn up the heat? I stopped amid the ruins of the meal, stooped, and righted the chair. As I bent, I saw in the far doorway another leg stretched out on the floor, and beyond it a room where nothing was right.

  I am afraid I understood. I could deduce—I could not stop myself from observing—the tools they had used, and how. Who must have gone first. Him last. But more than that I am afraid I knew exactly how they felt, as the moment came on them over dinner, and they rushed—in some terrible parody of joy—into each others’ arms.

  I locked the door behind me, and wondered how long I could keep this to myself.

  THERE IS A sound that comes at dawn. I have never heard it. I wake in a room full of echoes, holding my breath, and lie beside Ell sleeping, and watch the light change in the room. I cannot escape the sense that I have missed something important. But as the light grows, the room around me is utterly ordinary.