by Alan Trotter
‘So,’ says Hector, ‘the interest is not in the matchbook, not even really in the man, but in his murder. This is why it is interesting: because it recently came into contact with a man who was subsequently thrown from the rear of a train and to his death. How would you describe the man? Of course, you wouldn’t, is the straight answer: no one would. If you attempted it, you wouldn’t be able to do much better than to say, here was a man who would be unlikely to leave any evidence of himself. Neither by the end of this train journey, nor by the end of his life. And yet what do we have?’ Hector holds the matchbook up.
‘Evidence,’ says Charles. ‘The matchbook is interesting because it has become evidence in a murder. It has become entangled in a story about a man dying violently.’
They feel interested in the matchbook.
Then, they begin to feel less interested. They’ve explored their interest and in this way they have exhausted or maybe exposed it.
Hector drops the matchbook back to the rattling ground and, with a foot, pushes it from the train. There are hours still to go, and even those hours account for only this journey, and not all the hours there will be in all the other journeys they take. Even if they don’t take them, if they revolt from ever travelling again, they will be left only with other time, perhaps slower time, time not lulled by the movement and faded roar of a train.
Charles begins to wonder if, as well as being bored by the matchbook, there is another quality to the feeling that has settled on him like a bird too heavy for its branch.
PART 2
We were back to where all _____ had was his poker games and all I had was getting out to stretch my legs in the morning. He’d brought me nothing that didn’t wear out. He was the littlest lit fuse and not attached to anything, a fizzing piece of limp, loose string.
On any day that _____ didn’t disappear out, we’d go to Jarecki’s club and get chased away like bad luck, told to wait. If _____ knew why there was no work for us he would have said—he would have liked to show that Fylan cared to give him the straight—but he never said, so he didn’t know. Instead of going to Jarecki’s or once we’d been chased away, _____ would go running after women or drinking and I’d sit in his apartment and a feeling would come over me.
The feeling was that instead of sitting in an empty room I was looking at one from outside. There was no one there, not me and also not anyone else: no one who might choose to go out the door or open a window or throw themselves from it. A whole day would pass with nothing but this feeling, which left no space for anything else but was bottomlessly empty all the same.
_____ at least had the poker games. The apartment manager had stayed absent without leave and Lydia stopped playing, and without her there I couldn’t bring myself to sit at the table. I’d stay in the other room and be restless. I’d think maybe I should take to sleeping under parked cars and hope for the best.
*
One morning lying on the table with the abandoned cards there was a magazine. It was a pulp with the word ‘Astonishing’ on the front. The cover showed a cliff, and by the edge of it a machine about the size of two cars piled on top of each other. And on the far side of the machine, his back to you, was a man in a white lab coat, waving a fiery torch, and coming at him through sick yellow fog a gang of skinny, hairless, naked men, shiny wet. Naked but with a smooth curve where one shouldn’t be. The scientist’s torch didn’t seem to be discouraging them from getting closer to the machine. It said ‘Traveller Through Time!’
I looked inside the magazine. The story that matched the cover had Holcomb’s name at the top: he must have brought it to show off some of the words he’d been paid for. With nothing else to do I read it, and after I read it I couldn’t make much sense of that picture. There was no cliff-top or torch anywhere in the story. There was a race of almost human creatures, but Holcomb didn’t call them like the sweating, bald things in the picture. In fact, he hardly called them at all.
*
The story starts with the machine arriving. Wait, that’s not quite right. It starts with there being a strange, ‘violent’ kind of movement like the machine is there, but it’s not. Then the machine is there—in the middle of this empty plain. Well it starts with an empty plain, then the machine arrives—first there’s the violent blur, and then the machine is there and the scientist gets out of it and looks around the ‘stricken landscape’, though you don’t know at that point that he’s a scientist.
First there’s nothing, just—nothing—and then there’s this movement, this violent—well, first there’s nothing just this ‘desolate, stricken landscape’ and then there’s, firstly there’s the sense of movement, as if ‘of a candle being observed’ but ‘only at the furthest point to which its flicker reaches, as it is buffeted by an unremitting wind’. And then the machine appears. Well, the machine is part of the movement, part of the blur, and then the scientist, the man, gets out of the machine, only once the blur has settled and the machine has ‘appeared, both instantly and gradually—as an abrupt shout leaves behind itself a series of echoes that merge and vanish, like ripples after the sinking of the stone’, then the scientist, or the man, gets out. And he looks around and he laughs. Then these things appear. Though he laughs for a long time before that, I should have said.
First there is a ‘desolate, stricken landscape’, a ‘great vastness’ and not much else, then there’s this ‘impression of violent motion in the middle of the plain where previously had been nothing, not even any of the …’ I should have mentioned that scattered across the plain there are ‘large, dying’ shrubs.
There is a ‘desolate, stricken landscape; large, dying shrubs the single feature, embedded regularly throughout its great absence. In plains roiled by centuries of wind and rain, they were dying in large unmourned patches, shedding grey thorns from their great mangled bodies. Into this forbidding scene, there appeared what would have seemed a most unusual visitation, had there been any attentive eye to witness it: a sudden but lingering blur where before there had been nothing. From nothing a large grey mass appeared, a blur with an outline that was indistinct but unshifting, as though the contents of some unseen division were being agitated by a powerful force.’
This blur, this ‘mass’, ‘resolved itself into the shape of a machine, the metal skeleton of a box with a man at its heart’.
*
After what was neither an age nor a moment, the man climbed unsteadily from his seat in the machine and looked around the landscape without expression—whether of surprise, disgust, horror or delight. He seemed, as a man, the match of the wasteland he stared into. Until his lips parted and a laugh, both joyless and triumphant, climbed from him, and kept rising, a bitter witness to the death sentence of a ravaged world. As he leaned on his strange machine and laughed, tears glommed to his grey, crazed eyes and fell in the dust by his feet, already the colour of the dry dirt on which they stood, and still he laughed on and on, until his voice cracked and gave, and a rasp was all that the landscape swallowed.
Then, as the man’s voice seemed to have passed the final reaches of his strength, another noise arose.
This dull, regular sound came from neither the man nor his contraption. It gripped the man tight. He seemed for the first time more than the mysterious metal machine that had delivered him. He had become an animal, its senses overwhelmed.
The sound began as if a dismal echo of his laugh, as though the sound of the madman on his knees had been taught to the broken strings of old pianos and the crushed throats of clarinets, and they compelled to repeat it.
From one of the large plants there came a figure.
Small and grotesque, its mouth wide, emitting the troubling noise, or rather a share of the noise, it advanced on him.
Its appearance adjusted the man’s conception of the plant from which it had emerged. These plants, which everywhere blighted the landscape, and which he had assumed stood no taller than himself, he now understood to be larger than the tallest tree he had ever in
the whole of his life encountered. And as he turned towards another, a dozen more figures emerged from it, all the match of the first, all with their mouths open, cruelly imitating his own cruel laugh.
As they advanced their heads turned incessantly from side to side, the creatures surveying each other then turning again to the true man suddenly amongst them, and then away again. And with every steady turn of their heads, they came closer.
While the noise they gave and the movement of their heads was constant and smooth, their gait was quite the opposite: a jerky movement, as though they kept confronting and climbing an obstacle, though it was an obstacle they carried with them in their own godless design.
The man watching their approach was still. If his laughter before had been that of a man who felt no horrors were unknown to him, his humanity crawled anew at the sight of these greatly changed creatures. But he had no strength in him to move, or make so much as a noise.
Until a hand clasped his wrist.
Now he was amid tens of the creatures who grasped at him, while more approached. And in the alertness of terror he saw the hand that held his forearm and was appalled.
The palm was a bloated ball, as though swollen with disease, ill fit for any purpose he could imagine, and from this ball of flesh there sprouted fingers that resembled vines more than they did anything human. They were extremely long with a great many points of articulation. The touch was repellent, but still he did nothing. The Time Traveller’s eyes moved from the spindled boil of a hand to the dark gawping mouth of the creature, which carried the awful sound into his face on a rotten wind.
And from beside him came the same noise, and his face was blasted by another vulgar breath and another hand wrapped itself around him, between his arm and his side.
More of the creatures now laid hands on the Time Traveller, wrapping the vines of their fingers around each of his legs, and the first to have reached him placed its other around his neck, exploring the edge of his mouth.
Gripped by the long fingers of a dozen bulbous hands, abused by the cacophonous, foul sound of a hundred and more hideous voices, the Traveller remained still, only his eyes betraying his terror. It was as if the grip of the cold grey flesh was a horror endured without hope of it ever ending, without duration; he was a prisoner held within an unspeakable moment, bound by wet fingers that tied knots around him like the cold, hard ropes on the deck of a ship.
Suddenly the man shrieked back at the wailing creatures. And he tore violently at their hands. And as a glass might draw vibrations from those glasses around it, the piercing shriek spread from his human mouth to their all too different mouths.
As the Traveller clawed and tore at the hands he was unaware of the violence he was doing. It was only once he had almost freed himself, when almost all of the creatures’ voices had turned to a shriek, that the thought reached him of how weak the grip that held him had been, and how awful had been the effect of the blows he had thrown to save himself.
When the sights of his own struggle finally reached him, they were of long hard fingers being snapped and torn; hideous faces being split open by each punch as if they were soft, rotted fruit and collapsing on themselves like wet card. So great was the violence exhibited on the creatures that the Traveller imagined it a form of psychic terror he exercised against them, the manifestation of his revulsion at the touch of the swollen grey hands, which snapped and bled and withdrew badly frayed and hanging in pieces at unbearable angles. His fury at the ugly, braying figures introduced new geometric forms into them with great force: one face and then another suddenly dented almost in half, as if struck by a chisel. In this way he made sense of a brutality that seemed impossible from the tired swings and pushes of his limbs, but matched perfectly the vehemence of his will.
Screeching and bleeding, the creatures’ heads recoiled, and from the great darkness of its throat one of the beasts, a monster with half a shattered eye, gurgled sibilantly and sprayed a muddy dart of fluid across the Time Traveller’s clothes, then another did the same, until they were all spraying foul liquid across his neck and face, and only his eyeglasses prevented it from entering his eyes.
It was this barrage that finally propelled the Time Traveller back towards the machine, which, when he had stepped from it, he could not have conceived of ever entering again. Only this God-forsaken place could force him back into the contraption. This dead earth, with these monstrous creatures slinging venom, with their hard, weak flesh, the puppet shells that cracked and tore with such ease.
But now, moved by horror, disgust and a care for his own life he had thought lost, the Time Traveller wiped at his spectacles and started the machine.
For a moment, as the edges of the machine began to flicker, he took satisfaction in seeing the creatures nearest to it torn apart, the creature with the half-eye that was staggering and clutching towards him being reduced to a bloody spray.
This was an instant’s pleasure.
And then his own body felt as if turned to stone and, for the second time, his hell began.
Now, beside the machine, specks of dark blood clumped and inexpertly bound themselves with grey flesh into a creature with half an eye that moved as though tugged from behind. The other creatures also retreated, as a low wave upon reaching its furthest point slips back into the sea. And now withdrawing with them from the machine came the Time Traveller himself. He watched as his own image backed into the creatures and with great, decorative contortions enmeshed itself in a mound of greyness, bound by the clutching monsters.
The Traveller in the machine made to turn away, but his head remained facing the knot of bodies with himself at its centre, remained as the minutes passed and from this mound individual creatures extricated themselves and loped away, their gait even more awkward and ungainly than it had been when time proceeded untampered. And as the world began to retrace its unhurried steps and the creatures moved away, it was into a thickening white fog, which fell all around the machine. Until finally nothing at all was visible beyond the confines of the machine, as if the Time Traveller was a caged bird in a stage magician’s trick, and a sheet had been laid over him. Horror in torrents took the mind of the Time Traveller. He forced his arm towards the lever that would halt the machine, knowing that it would be many, many years before it achieved even the slightest movement. Knowing that, should he blink, he would watch the eclipse form for thousands of years.
Knowing that whatever the extreme sloth of his body that made his glorious invention function, his mind would be conscious of the passing of the years, the millions of years, between this and his own time.
He might have known the exact number of years—from a small change in darkness he had come to distinguish between, so he imagined, day and night—but at various points in his outward journey madness had robbed him of the figure. And now he waited for madness to come again, the only confessor, saint or nurse that could reach him in the rigid trap of his own frame.
For days, weeks, years and millennia, awake and without reprieve, as his mind sat in solitude for longer than any civilisation had ever survived, for longer than the legacy of species, or the formation of rocks, the Traveller’s mind sang a song it had written long before the end of its last journey through this frozen hell, and had forgotten and rewritten many times, and had reduced until it was one phrase thought in all the pitches the Traveller was able to conceive it, a childhood phrase told the Time Traveller by his brother as a boy when they were at play, which was actually combat, in which the older boy had forced him to the ground and, with the conqueror’s self-delight which even the boy beneath his heel admired as heroic, said, ‘I am an explorer and all this land is mine forever.’ And the Time Traveller prayed for madness or death, ‘And all this land is mine forever.’
*
That’s how the story ended: ‘all this land is mine forever’.
It would have been a better read with more talking in it, but it had still passed the time.
With _____ out somew
here chasing distractions, I read the rest of the magazine, but I hustled through it without interest. Instead I came back to Holcomb’s story. I examined the drawing on the front cover, and then I read it again.
*
I read it that whole day, and kept reading it, read it until I was just reading the last section, with the Traveller in his machine, frozen, waiting through the years backwards after waiting through them forwards.
I read it enough that it seeped out of the story. When I thought about _____ sitting in Cain’s chair waiting while the room darkened around him, I also thought about him sitting in the Traveller’s machine, and he was waiting through days and days, without moving so much as his eyes. _____ was thrown from a moving car into my life and as he tumbled at me it was the lurch of one of the creatures and I recoiled at his grip. I lay on _____’s bed and pulled the bedsheets over my face and I thought of the bird in the magic trick, the world fading to white around the Traveller until there was nothing he could see except the steady changing of the light.
I fell asleep there, because _____ woke me—giddy.
We were summoned.
I took the magazine with me.
*
Not Jarecki’s gambling joint this time—it was a club we went to, like Danskin’s Little Death, somewhere to see a leg show. It had been a picture house, then Jarecki bought it cheap after a cop was shot there. The circumstances hadn’t been good for the cop, but few enough people knew the details that the force only had to crack a few heads to claim the moral high ground and shut the place down.
Jarecki had ripped out the screen and the seats. He got tables made that accounted for the slope of the floor. He got chairs that didn’t, but put his waitresses in outfits that pretty much guaranteed no one would notice. And twice a night and three times on weekends there was an elaborate dance number on stage, and the rest of the time there were still leg kicks and sweet young souls singing their hearts out. It was a swell place, and swells filled it. The new club thrived—and Danskin’s Little Death didn’t suffer, pretty girls being one of those industries that makes its own rules, demand-wise.
