“There are kangaroos in Australia,” Lily said.
The Lieutenant winked at her. “Plenty of kangaroos, my girl. Thick on the ground.”
Caroline was charmed but breathless. Australia? “What would we do in Australia?”
“Live,” Colin said simply.
The next morning a porter knocked at the door and told them they would have to leave at once or the hotel couldn’t guarantee their safety.
“Surely not so soon,” Caroline said. Colin and the porter ignored her. Probably it was true, they ought to leave. The air had grown unbearably foul overnight. Her lungs ached, and Lily had started to cough.
“Everybody east of Thames Street out,” the porter insisted, “that’s what the Mayor’s Office says.”
Strange how long it took a city to burn, even a city as small and primitive as London.
She gathered her bags together and helped Lily pack. Colin had no luggage — no possessions he seemed to care about — but he folded the hotel’s bedsheets and blankets together into a bundle. “The hotel won’t mind,” Colin said. “Not under the circumstances.”
What he meant, she thought, was that the hotel would be ashes by morning.
Caroline adjusted her hair in the bureau mirror. She couldn’t see at all well. The atmosphere outside was a perpetual twilight, and the gas had been off since the attack. She combed this spectral wraith of herself, then reached for her daughter’s hand. “All right,” she said. “We’ll go.”
Colin disguised himself during their trek into the vast tent city that had sprung up west of the city. He wore an oversized rain slicker and a slouch hat, both purchased at outrageous prices from a rag vendor working the crowd of refugees. Army and Navy personnel had been detailed to emergency relief. They circulated among the makeshift shelters distributing food and medicine. Colin didn’t want to be recognized.
Caroline knew he was afraid of being captured as a deserter. In the literal sense, of course, he was a deserter, and that must be difficult for him, though he refused to discuss it. “I was hardly more than an accounts clerk,” he said. “I won’t be missed.”
By their third day in the tent city, food had grown scarce but optimistic rumors spread wildly: a Red Cross steamer was coming up the Thames; the Americans had been defeated at sea. Caroline listened to the rumors indifferently. She’d heard rumors before. It was enough that the fire seemed at last to be burning itself out, with the help of a frigid spring rain. People talked about rebuilding, though privately Caroline thought the word ludicrous: to reconstruct the reconstruction of a vanished world, what folly.
She spent an afternoon wandering among the smoldering campfires and fetid trench latrines, searching for her aunt and uncle. She regretted having made so few friends in London, having lived such an insular existence. She would have liked to see a familiar face, but there were no familiar faces, not until she came across Mrs. de Koenig, the woman who had looked after Lily so often. Mrs. de Koenig was glum and alone, wrapped in a streaming tarpaulin, her hair knotted and wet; at first she failed to recognize Caroline.
But when Caroline asked about Alice and Jered, the older woman shook her head miserably. “They waited too long. The fire came down Market Street like a live thing.”
Caroline gasped. “They died?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Are you certain?”
“Certain as rain.” Her red-rimmed eyes were mournful. “I’m sorry, Miss.”
Something is always stolen, Caroline thought as she trudged back through the mud and rotting plants. Something is always taken away. In the rain it was possible to cry, and she cried freely. She wanted to be finished crying when she had to face Lily again.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Fireworks bloomed over the Washington Monument, celebrating the victory in the Atlantic. Sudden lights colored the Reflecting Pool. The night air smelled of gunpowder; the crowd was gleeful and wild.
“You’ll have to leave town,” Crane said, smiling vaguely, hands in his pockets. He walked with a Brahman slouch, at once imperial and self-mocking. “I assume you know that.”
When had Vale last seen a public celebration? A few halfhearted Fourth of July fêtes since the strange summer of 1912. But the victory in the Atlantic had rung across the country like the tolling of a bell. In this throng, at night, they wouldn’t be recognized. It was possible to talk.
He said, “I would have liked time to pack.”
Crane, unlike the gods, would tolerate a complaint.
“No time, Elias. In any case, people like us don’t need worldly possessions. We’re more like, ah, monks.”
The celebration would go on until morning. A glorious little war. Teddy Roosevelt would have approved. The British had surrendered after devastating losses to their Atlantic fleet and their Darwinian colonies, fearing an attack on Kitchener’s rump government in Canada. The terms of the victory weren’t harsh: a weapons embargo, official endorsement of the Wilson Doctrine. The conflict had lasted all of a week. Not so much war, Vale thought, as Diplomacy by Other Means, and a warning to the Japanese should they choose to turn their martial attention westward.
Of course, the war had served another purpose, the gods’ purpose. Vale supposed he would never know the sum of that purpose. It might be no more than the increase of enmity, violence, confusion. But the gods were generally more incisive than that.
There had been a sidebar in the Post: British nationals and sympathizers were being questioned in connection with the murder of Smithsonian director Eugene Randall. Vale’s name hadn’t been mentioned, though it would probably make the morning edition. “You ought to thank me,” he told Crane, “for taking the fall.”
“Colorful expression. You aren’t, of course. You’re too useful. Think of it this way: you’re discarding a persona. The police will find you dead in the ashes of your town house, or at least a few suggestive bones and teeth. Case closed.”
“Whose bones will they be?”
“Does it matter?”
He supposed not. Some other victim. Some impediment to the due and proper evolution of the cosmos.
Crane said, “Take this.” It was an envelope containing a rail ticket and a roll of hundred-dollar bills. The destination printed on the ticket was New Orleans. Vale had never been to New Orleans. New Orleans might as well have been East Mars, as far as he was concerned.
“Your train leaves at midnight,” Crane said.
“What about you?”
“I’m protected, Elias.” He smiled. “Don’t worry about me. Perhaps we’ll meet again, in a decade or two or three.”
God help us. “Do you ever wonder — is there any end to it?”
“Oh, yes,” Crane said. “I think we’ll see the end of it, Elias, don’t you?”
The fireworks reached a crescendo. Stars erupted to the roar of cannonade: blue, violet, white. A good omen for the new Harding administration. Crane would flourish, Vale thought, in modern Washington. Crane would rise like a rocket.
And I will sink into obscurity, and maybe that’s for the best.
New Orleans was warm, almost sultry; the spring became tropical. It was a strange town, Vale thought, barely American. It looked transported from some French Caribbean colony, all lacy ironwork and thunder and soft patois.
He took an apartment under an assumed name in a seedy but not slummy part of town. He paid his rent with a fraction of Crane’s money and began scouting second-story offices where he might conduct a little spiritualist business. He felt strangely free, as if he had left his god in the city of Washington. Not true — he understood that — but he savored the feeling while it lasted.
His craving for morphine was not physical, and perhaps that was part of the package of immortality, but he remembered the intoxication fondly and spent a few evenings trolling the jazz bars in search of a connection. He was walking home through a starry, windy night when two strangers jumped him. The men were muscular, their blunt faces shadowed under navy watch caps.
They dragged him into an alley behind a tattoo shop.
They must have been god-ridden, Vale decided later. Nothing else made sense. One had a bottle, one had a length of threaded steel rod. They demanded nothing, took nothing. They worked strictly on his face. His immortal skin was slashed and gouged, his immortal skull fractured in several places. He swallowed several of his immortal teeth.
He did not, of course, die.
Swathed in bandages, sedated, he heard a doctor discuss his case with a nurse in a languid Louisiana drawl. A miracle he survived. No one will recognize him after this, God knows.
Not a miracle, Vale thought. Not even a coincidence. The gods who had closed his skin to the morphine needle in Washington could just as easily have staved off these cutting blows. He had been taken because he never would have volunteered.
No one will recognize him.
He healed quickly.
A new city, a new name, a new face. He learned to avoid mirrors. Physical ugliness was not a significant impediment to his work.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Guilford found the Bodensee where a glacial stream entered the lake, frigid water coursing over slick black pebbles. He followed the shoreline slowly, meticulously, riding the fur snake he had named Evangeline. “Evangeline” for no reason save that the name appealed to him; the animal’s gender was a mystery. Evangeline had foraged more successfully than Guilford had over the last week, and her six splined hooves covered ground more efficiently than his toothpick legs.
A gentle sun blessed the day. Guilford had rigged a rope harness to keep himself sprawled on Evangeline’s broad back even when he lost consciousness, and there were times when he drifted into a nodding half sleep, head slumped against his chest. But the sunlight meant he could shed a layer of furs, and that was a relief, to feel air that was not lethally cold against his skin.
As snakes went, Evangeline had proved intelligent. She avoided insect middens even when Guilford’s attention lapsed. She never strayed far from fresh water. And she was respectful of Guilford — perhaps not surprising, given that he had killed and cooked one of her compatriots and set the other free.
He was careful to keep an eye on the horizon. He was as alone as he had ever been, frighteningly alone, in a borderless land of shaded forests and rocky, abyssal gorges. But that was all right. He didn’t much mind being alone. It was what happened when people were around that worried him.
He credited Evangeline with finding the arch of stone where the expedition’s boats had been cached. She had nosed her way patiently along the pebbled shore, hour by hour, until at last she stopped and moaned for his attention.
Guilford recognized the stones, the shoreline, the hilly meadows just beginning to show green.
It was the right place. But the tarpaulin was gone, and so were the boats.
Dazed, Guilford let himself down from the fur snake’s back and searched the beach for — well, anything: relics, evidence. He found a charred board, a rusted nail. Nothing else.
The breeze slapped small waves against the shore.
The sun was low. He would need wood for a fire, if he could muster the energy to build one.
He sighed. “End of the road, Evangeline. At least for now.”
“It will be, if you don’t get a decent meal into yourself.”
He turned.
Erasmus.
“Tom figured you’d show up here,” the snake herder said.
Erasmus fed him real food, lent him a bedroll, and promised to take him and Evangeline back to his makeshift ranch beyond the Rheinfelden, just a few days overland; then Guilford could hitch a ride downriver when Erasmus floated his winter stock to market.
“You talked to Tom Compton? He’s alive?”
“He stopped by the kraal on his way to Jayville. Told me to look out for you. He ran into bandits after he left you and Finch. Too many to fight. So he came north and left decoy fires and generally took ’em on a goose chase all the way to the Bodensee. Saved your bacon, Mr. Law, though I guess not Preston Finch.”
“No, not Finch,” Guilford said.
They paralleled the Rhine Gorge, following the land route Erasmus had established. The snake herder called a halt at a pool of water fed by an unnamed tributary, shallow and slow. Sunlight had heated the water to a tolerable temperature, though it was not what Guilford would call warm. Still, he was able to wash himself for the first time in weeks. The water might have been lye, for all the skin and dirt he shed. He came out shivering, naked as a grub. The season’s first billyflies bumped his torso and fled across the sunlit water. His hair dangled over his eyes; his beard draped his chest like a wet Army blanket.
Erasmus put up the tent and scratched out a pit for the fire while Guilford dried and dressed.
They shared canned beans, molasses-sweet and smoky. Erasmus cooked coffee in a tin pan. The coffee was thick as syrup, bitter as clay.
The snake herder had something on his mind.
“Tom told me about the city,” Erasmus said, “about what happened to you there.”
“You know him that well?”
“We know each other, put it that way. The connection is, we both been to the Other World.”
Guilford shot him a wary glance. Erasmus gave him back a neutral expression.
“Hell,” the snake herder said, “I would of sold Tom those twenty head if he’d asked. Yeah, we go back some. But Finch showed up all blood and thunder, pissed me off… not to speak ill of the dead.”
Erasmus found a pipe in his saddlebag, filled it and tamped it and lit it with a wooden match. He smoked tobacco, not river weed. The smell was exotic, rich with memory. It smelled like leather-bound books and deep upholstery. It smelled like civilization.
“Both of us died in the Great War,” Erasmus said. “In the Other World, I mean. Both of us talked to our own ghosts.”
Guilford shivered. He didn’t want to hear this. Anything but this: not more madness, not now.
“Basically,” Erasmus said, “I’m just a small-potatoes third-generation Heinie out of Wisconsin. My father worked in a bottling company most of his life and I would of done the same if I hadn’t shied off to Jeffersonville. But there’s this Other World where the Kaiser got into a tangle with the Brits and the French and the Russians. A lot of Americans got drafted and shipped off to fight, 1917, 1918, a lot of ’em killed, too.” He hawked and spat a brown wad into the fire. “In that Other World I’m a ghost, and in this one I’m still flesh and blood. You with me so far?”
Guilford was silent.
“But the two worlds aren’t strictly separate anymore. That’s what the Conversion of Europe was all about, not to mention that so-called city you wintered in. The two Worlds are tangled up because there’s something wants to destroy ’em both. Maybe not destroy, more like eat — well, it’s complicated.
“Some of us died in the Other World and went on living in this one, and that makes us special. We have a job ahead of us, Guilford Law, and it’s not an easy job. I don’t mean to sound as if I know all the details. I don’t. But it’s a long and nasty job and it falls on us.”
Guilford said nothing, thought nothing.
“The two worlds get a little closer all the time. Tom didn’t know that when he walked into the city — though he may have had an inkling — but he knew it for sure by the time he left. He knows it now. And I think you do, too.”
“People believe a lot of things,” Guilford said.
“And people refuse to believe a lot of things.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I think you do. You’re one of us, Guilford Law. You don’t want to admit it. You have a wife and daughter and you’d just as soon not be recruited into Armageddon, and I can hardly blame you for that. But it’s for their sake, too — your children, your grandchildren.”
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Guilford managed.
“That’s too bad, because the ghosts believe in you. And some of those ghosts would like to se
e you dead. Good ghosts and bad ghosts, there’s both kinds.”
I won’t entertain this fantasy, Guilford thought. Maybe he’d seen a few things in his dreams. In the well at the center of the ruined city. But that proved nothing.
(How could Erasmus have known about the picket? Sullivan’s cryptic last words: You died fighting the Boche… No, set that aside; think about it later. Yield nothing. Go home to Caroline.)
“The city,” he heard himself whisper…
“The city is one of theirs. They didn’t want it found. And they’re going to great lengths to keep it hidden. Go there in six months, a year, you won’t find it. They’re stitching up that valley like a sack of flour. They can do that. Pinch off a piece of the world from human knowledge. Oh, maybe you or I could find it, but not an ordinary man.”
“I’m an ordinary man, Erasmus.”
“Wishing won’t make it so, my mother used to say. Anyhow.” The snake herder groaned and stood. “Get some sleep, Guilford Law. We still have a distance to travel.”
Erasmus didn’t raise the issue again, and Guilford refused to consider it. He had other problems, more pressing.
His physical health improved at the snake farm. By the time the stock boats arrived from Jeffersonville he was able to walk a distance without limping. He thanked Erasmus for his help and offered to ship him Argosy on a regular basis.
“Good idea. That book of Finch’s was a slow read. Maybe National Geographic, too?”
“Sure thing.”
“Science and Invention?”
“Erasmus, you saved my life at the Bodensee. Anything you want.”
“Well — I won’t get greedy. And I doubt I saved your life. Whether you live or die is out of my hands.”
Erasmus had loaded his stock into two flat-bottomed river boats piloted by a Jeffersonville broker. It was Guilford’s ride back to the coast. He offered the snake herder his hand.
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