With a grunt of relief, the servants deposited this mound of sentient garbage in a love seat of emerald brocade. A smaller chair would have been crushed under that weight.
“My little dear, come closer. So that I may see you. My old eyes…” Out of the girl’s mouth came easily a spate of obscenities (on close summer nights she had often sat below the balconies of the local whorehouse where the girls had appeared in the dusk like pale, parasitic flowers). Wyle and Alek had entered silently to stand behind Arcana but only Wyle laughed.
“Bring the witchlet closer. So that I may see her.”
* * * *
She was shoved almost into the soft bulk of the old man’s belly. “Yesss, Arcana, Guardian of the Violet Door.” His breath was the slime on the surface of stagnant ponds and his voice resonated through the layers of fat like music in some obscene instrument.
“I’ve heard of such a door,” said Arcana, a guileless look appearing all too naturally upon her young face. “And many another such tale as old women tell in their idle moments.”
The old man called a servant who brought him a garnetwood chest, carved in a disquieting pattern of flowers, fruit and snakes. “Here. Look at this,” he said opening the box and thrusting it forward in his shaking hands.
Wyle pushed her forward again and she ground her teeth together as if wishing to bite yet not quite daring to. Then her gaze entered the chest and stayed there. Something was there, that was certain. But she couldn’t make sense of it. A numbness grew behind her eyes and she jerked as if a cold hand had touched her. The fat man shut the box with a click, turning an ornate golden key. Arcana squeezed her eyes shut and shuddered. “What did you do? What have you taken from me?”
“How quickly you. Put your finger on it,” said the old man and laughed so hard that he began to cough and wheeze, the phlegm in his throat rattling nastily. “You shall have it back. When you return. If you have done well, Sweeting. I have heard it told that the violet door opens. All ways—even into Time’s Center.
“You say nothing,” he continued. “I see you know the place. Only someone like me. Could appreciate the gifts. That such a land can bestow—eternal youth. And happiness. It is for this. That you will bargain. With the Time lords.”
“The rulers of Time, I can’t—”
“Oh but you must do it. For me, my Pretty.” His thumb and forefinger pinched Arcana’s cheek with more than playfulness. She looked at the carven box and felt mortality slip down around her like a cumbersome garment.
“And you, Alek, and you, Wyle. Will go with her. Do not let her fail. With eternal youth and happiness. I will not need my house. My treasures. They will. Be yours.”
* * * *
Arcana led the way back through her maze of alleys. Inside the ruined shell of a stone building she entered a gap between two fallen pillars and scraped a pile of rubble off a wooden trap door. There was a straight drop of about seven feet and then a tunnel that slanted downward. A damp wind blew perpetually through the passageways and at times they were crawling on stomachs and elbows through incredibly narrow places and at others they passed through sticky webs that clung gauze-like to their faces (they only imagined the spiders).
“Here.” Arcane tossed the word carelessly into dead silence, but they could see nothing.
Blindingly: a hairline crack of intense pink-violet. And then, seeing only the radiance with patterns overlaid by the weakness of their eyes, they went through the violet door. And shrill shrieks, a landscape of broken glass, bright & yellow & sizzling, smell and feel of wet fur—(all this and more) spun through their fragile and overloaded sensory equipment.
The sun (if it is the sun) stands still in Time’s Center, giving off a clear and steady illumination. Arcana and her companions stand on a plain of white crystals, a field of warm, unmelting snow. As they move across this timescape, the smooth granules slip back into their footprints as if no one had ever passed this way. Arcana is remembering a face, immobile, as if abraded from stone. The expression of this face will be patient beyond belief.
“What do you see?” asks Wyle.
“Nothing. I was just trying to recall something. I don’t think it was important.”
They wander about disorientedly on the shining plain; Alek sees a tree and they make for it as the only landmark on a barren horizon. As they stand beneath the bare and crooked branches, a timewind causes buds to unfurl into fresh green leaves, and as suddenly shrivel, die and fall. Arcana remembers that she will walk down the leisurely paths of an artificial garden of some rigid material, made by a craftsman who had a passion for detail. “I know where to find them,” says Arcana. “I remember it—no—I mean I’m remembering what will happen. Can’t you?”
“Wait. A little,” says Wyle, “but I can’t—it’s all ajumble.”
“This place has addled your minds,” says Alek, the barely suppressed look of fear on his acid face betraying him. “No one can remember the future.”
“Perhaps not, but my memory has shown me the way to a Time Lord’s castle.” She strides out boldly, knowing that they will follow her, but though some of the future lies in her memory, it is fragmentary, imperfect, mixed in with a chaotic past. It becomes frightening to think of it, so she concentrates on walking.
The sun vanishes—a wind, blowing in all directions at once, tears at clothing, hair; tosses debris into their faces until in the darkness they call out and try to reach one another. Arcana stumbles against someone; she reaches out and clasps his hand. The flesh is solid to the touch, then melts like wax against her fingers, growing smaller, bonier. Crooked fingers clutch her hand. The wind screams.
When Arcana opens her eyes she is confronted by a stranger, an ancient man with sparse white hair and cheek and jawbone thrusting out against brown-paper skin.
“Alek!” shouts Wyle and “Alek?” as he begins to know the old man’s face, the mouth twisting in the familiar bitter smile.
“Give my love to the fat frog,” he says, “and use his money better than he knew how to.”
Arcana holds the crooked hand of a corpse, and reluctantly she lets it go. “I would return now,” says Wyle, “so that another old man can know what it is to die.” He mutters the curses that serve him for tears.
“He was caught in a freak vortex of the timewind,” says Arcana. “Nothing is as it should be here.”
“You knew it would happen? Then why didn’t you warn us?” He grips her by the wrists and shakes her.
“Knowing the past doesn’t mean that you can change it. It’s the same with the future.” She suddenly finds it hard to look into his ugly, kind-natured face. He lets her go, shakes his head over Alek’s body.
Arcana knows the way now and something of what lies before. They need stop for neither food nor water, for as long as they are here, the cells of their bodies are unchanging. Arcana feels herself playing a kind of game that she truly doesn’t care about. She thinks of the wine-red chest and wonders what can be in it to make her feel that nothing matters, that even the sadness she feels now is too unimportant for tears.
A gray structure appears before them, tall, cylindrical, reminiscent of a castle in its color and conformity (though it is perhaps something else entirely). Arcana and Wyle arrive at a seamless gray wall with great metal gates. At first the wall looks too smooth for climbing, but Arcana’s eye, trained in burglary, sees some depressions and projections on the stone, and monkeywise she swarms up the wall, leaving Wyle gaping below her.
Dropping lithely down inside, she tugs at the heavy bar on the gate, but to her strength, at least, it is immovable. “You’ll have to wait for me,” she shouts to Wyle, unseen.
She takes the path toward the castle, noticing the grass and flowers that border the path. Though the lawn is brilliant green, it is rigid beneath her fingers as she bends to touch it. And though the flowe
rs are of radiant colors and have a look of freshness, they too, seem artificial. All else is the same; the willows whose foliage arches and trails fluidly to the ground, even the very insects of the place. Beneath the willows she sees two figures and she walks toward them, not sure she wants to make contact with the Lords of Time.
She pauses, seeing that the two are but statues, though beautifully and realistically made. One is a lady, dressed in a white gown that hangs in elegant folds from a voluptuous body. The other statue is seated and the face is so familiar, so patient, so pleasing with its full beard and lines around the eyes that she wishes to climb up into his lap and lean her face against his. At last she does so and stays there for some moments, thinking that the body of the statue is giving back some answering warmth. She can feel its pulse, but she soon realizes that it is her own blood beat transferred to unliving stone. Feeling foolish and wiping wetness out of her eyes, she climbs down. This is not getting her where she needs to go. As she approaches the gray castle, it buries her in its shadow; she feels the weight of that shadow as if centuries have passed as she nears the tall brass doors. She shivered, feeling herself standing at the door of a tomb—she knows that there is nothing alive here. A large wrought iron bell hangs beside the door, and she pulled the cord; the bell moves imperceptibly, but there will be no sound. The doors are tight against her, but trailing streamers of stone ivy decorate the walls and these allow her to climb up to one of the narrow windows. It will be easy to wiggle her scrawny body through and drop (landing on her feet) on the tessellated floor. The room was. She cannot describe it in any way except that it is like lying back and looking up at the cold perfection of the stars until a feeling of helpless fear makes you quickly look away. She went from room to room, afraid to call out, and even more afraid of meeting whatever lived in this austere environment. No one or no thing is here, and she must wait until it decides to return.
* * * *
“There is a ghost in the house.”
Idrene picks a starflower from a bush where blossoms have opened in cream-white profusion all the long summer. She laughs and turns to face her husband, tucking the flower into the red richness of her hair.
“I have felt it passing through the garden just now. I think it touched me.” (A generation was born and died as he spoke.)
“You were dreaming”—(Mountains weathered; rivers cut new channels through porous earth.)—“as you dozed in your chair.”
“No, it flew through the garden like a moth; I almost saw it.”
Arcana wandered a dim passageway; the atmosphere of the place hangs heavy on her shoulders, squeezed about her rib cage. Emerging into yet another room, she sees the red haired statue that she has come to accept as a motif, a constantly recurring part of the decor. This room contorted itself wildly with mirrors set at crazy angles. Everything in the room was reflected endlessly, but when she looks for herself, her own reflection is missing. She touched her narrow face, outlined her sharp nose and felt the softness of her eyes under their lids. When she was able to verify her existence, she began to snoop about the room. An enameled jewel box was set back on a shelf in one of the cleverly concealed closets. In it she finds a necklace of jewels that did not glitter but burned with a steady interior light. She clasps it around her neck where it glowed against the greasy fibers of her old shirt. She will explore the rest of the gigantic house at her leisure, feeling not the absence of time, but its absolute presence.
“I heard the bell ring this morning,” he said, “and when I answered it”—(In a real world, war was fought and two treaties were written and broken.)—“no one was there.”
“You’d have me seeing ghosts in every dark corner.” Her laugh was deep and thick, resonating up from her ample chest cavity. (Great trees grew to immense size in a land where no one saw them.) Arcana kept busy by accumulating treasures—too many, she knows, to take them all with her, but she only does it to avoid remembering too much. She had recalled a richly-appointed, though familiar, room. She had felt so cold and brittle, the very sound of the wind outside the high windows was threatening. When she had looked down at herself she had seen the fallen breasts of an old woman, the dried-leaf hands. It should have been a reassuring memory, but it isn’t.
“My necklace has been stolen!” She was vibrant with rage. (A species of flightless birds dwindled in number, became extinct.)
“Now you see the handiwork of my ghost.”
“You don’t really think—”
“I think I must manage to contact this ghost. It haunts us for a purpose of its own.”
“You would catch a thing of air and an overcrowded imagination?”
“If I want to.”
Arcana will enter the library, an echoing place webbed thick with shadows. The rows of books along the walls reminded her of tombstones, each with its neat inscription. She made a quick intake of breath as she turned and saw the statue. It is standing in front of a row of books as if studying the titles. “I don’t remember seeing you in here before, but you look like you belong in this room.” She spoke to him in the usual, slightly impertinent tone; she always found herself talking to this particular statue. She had thought it funny at first, but she didn’t feel like laughing now. Her body is beginning to feel an immense sluggishness. She would have dropped into a chair from the weight of her own body, but her legs have become rigid. Then her perceptions went crazy as the statue moved—the eyes blinked.
“You see, Idrene. I have our ghost.”
The female statue, now animate, crossed the room to stare angrily at Arcana. “My necklace!” She tears it from Arcana’s throat, breaking the clasp.
“You’re from the real world,” said the Time Lord with a certain awe.
“I am Arcana, Witch of the Crossways,” she says, hearing the incredible slow, low tones of her own voice. “1 have come to bargain with you on behalf of the Duke of Glain.”
“You would bargain with”—he laughed sharply—“a Lord of Time for this, this ephemeral heap of ordure who calls himself powerful. In your world I could walk out and gather children like you as one would pick bouquets of wildflowers, and before midday all would be withered and dying in my hands.” In his laughter was all the careless cruelty of time. “So, my light fingered ghost, you’ve managed to slide into Time’s Center and into my stronghold. Let’s bargain in earnest and I’ll set you a quest. If you win it, you may make your Lord’s request. You must enter the forest where leaves fall forever: and find a certain dwelling. I think you will know it when you see it; most worldlings do. A mysterious hermit you will find there wears a ring like none you have ever seen. Bring it to me.”
“As good as done,” says Arcana, turning to go.
“There is one warning I must give you. Do not look directly upon his face.”
Arcana felt herself growing lighter as he speaks. The lips of the statue are hardening, the eyes glazing. Arcana stretched her arms and legs, feeling as if she is awakening from a too long, too deep sleep. Yet she knows she has not been dreaming because the Time Lady held the recovered necklace around her plump white throat. Immediately Arcana feels that she wants to be away from this place. There was an alien aspect to the Time Lord’s face that has not been apparent to her until now. Centuries will pass like the slow grinding of stone on stone before that carven smile, those dead eyes, would change.
She began to run, down an indigo corridor, mad with deepwater reflections, up to a window and through it into the light of an eternally ascendant sun. The weight and dust-smell of centuries fall away as she scales the wall, the stone abrading her hands and knees.
* * * *
“Wyle!” She half-fell from the wall and ran forward to assail him.
“I didn’t know if you’d come out of there or not,” Wyle says, when he is able to make sense of her jabbering. “But waiting isn’t hard here. One minute is much the s
ame as the next. I was dreaming, or maybe I wasn’t even asleep. I walked through a place of shadows and a long figure without a face—”
“Forget your dreams. The Time Lord has given us a quest. If we fulfill it, he will grant the Duke’s request. We’ll be able to leave this awful place. Come, I’ll tell you, as we walk, what the Lords of Time are like and how they live.”
A duskiness in the air and shadows had begun to envelop them. They had sensed rather than seen the trees about them, ancient and twisted trees, whose upper branches were obscured in distance and blurred by the intense blueness of the air. The utter silence of the place had intimidated them, but Arcana had reached out to take Wyle’s hand. Leaves like pale silver outlines of ghosts were whispering down from above, slowmotion falling, drifting, twisting, hypnotic in their motion. Arcana had felt that she was being buried alive in the light crispness of leaves and their warm organic smells and she wished she could die with them, grow brown and withered and gone.
Only a terrible inner toughness that life on the street had given her kept her on her feet. Wyle tries to lie down, but she kicks him sharply. They wade knee deep in the curling crisp leaves, drunk on the smell of leaf-mold, half in love with the perpetual dying season of the year.
“There,” says Wyle.
A dimness is all they can see, a gathering mass of solid shadow. “You said it would be easy, but I don’t like this place. I’ve been here before, or to someplace like it.” Wyle nervously caresses the smooth staghorn handle of his dagger.
The Second Time Travel Megapack: 23 Modern and Classic Stories Page 12
