Strange Itineraries

by Tim Powers

  Would a better priest, a better man, have seen the woman as she had appeared last week, when she’d been alive?

  The world, before the first sentient man left the Garden of Eden and looked at it, had not yet been defined by attention – it had been a spectrum of worlds-in-potential that had not included humanity, an infinity of possible prehuman histories; but by the time Adam stepped out and turned his attention on it, he had sinned mortally, and so the history that came to the fore as the actual one was a history of undeserved suffering and death. When Adam’s foot touched the soil, when his eyes took in the landscape, it stopped being many potentials and became one actual: a landscape that had been a savage killing-ground for millennia.

  Light turns out to be particles if you measure for particles, he thought, waves if you measure for waves. Adam had helplessly measured for misery. What sort of world would a sinless first man have found pre-existent out there? Animals that had never starved, cats that had never killed?

  I’ve measured for … evasion, he thought. Even last week, here.

  “Ego te –” he began; then halted.

  She might kill him if she touched him again. And where would he be then? A moment ago he had told himself that her soul was now with God – but what if it weren’t? What if it were still sentient, but somewhere else?

  What if Purgatory and Hell are real? It had been a longtime since he had entertained any such notions; in fact it had been a long time since he’d believed in the existence of any sort of actual Heaven.

  But this dead penitent sitting in front of him made all sorts of horrible ideas possible. Did he want to die right after using his priestly powers – thou art a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek – to perform the mockery of a sacrament? He had started to do it – Ego te …

  And I’m not in a state of grace anyway, he thought, if all these damned legalisms actually apply, if all the awful old supernatural stories are true!

  He wasn’t aware of being scared, but he was shivering in the warm room, and his hands were tingling.

  I’d probably go to – everlasting punishment! – and a snakeskin half-wit piece of me would join her in her lost ghosthood, to be another specter forever haunting confessionals, looking for impossible absolution. Visible, perhaps, only to other doomed priests.

  “Can you have a firm purpose of amendment?” he asked her unhappily. “Can you … mend your ways, go and sin no more?”

  The little girl held out her hand; not threateningly, but he flinched back from the offered touch.

  “I came for the sacrament,” she said.

  He was suddenly sure that there was no one waiting outside the door – the others he had seen had only been her, fragmented as if in a kaleidoscope, and this conversation was taking place in some corner outside of normal time. If he were to open the door, pull it open, he’d see beyond the door frame only the gray fog he had seen when he had been in the shell of the old woman.

  “There’s nobody else,” she said. ‘Nobody else talks to me but you. Hollowed be thy name.”

  The dead shall look me through and through.

  “Give me the sacrament,” she said. “Deliver us from evil.”

  Or to it, he thought.

  Her hand came up again, but hovered between them as if undecided between touching him and making the sign of the cross.

  “Okay,” he said.

  The hand wavered sketchily in the air, and then subsided into her lap.

  God help me, he thought. If I’m not dead already myself, and beyond all help.

  He stood up slowly, his head bobbing; and the little girl just watched him solemnly. He stepped to the closet and slid from a high shelf one of his sick-call kits, a six-inch black leather box with hinges and a latch.

  He returned to his chair and sat down, and he opened the box on his lap. Inside, tucked into fitted depressions in red velvet, were a silver crucifix, a silver holy-water sprinkler, a round silver box that held no consecrated hosts at the moment, a spare folded stole … and a little silver jar of oil.

  It was olive oil, and it would probably be rancid by this time, but he recalled that the oil in this kit was real Oleum Infirmorum, blessed by the bishop.

  In recent years he had come to the conclusion that the oil had no efficacy on its own – whether it was olive oil or motor oil, blessed or not – and was simply a comfort to sick people with heads full of Biblical imagery; but now he was cautiously glad this was precisely the prescribed kind.

  “I’ve got a lot of oily rags in my soul already,” the little girl said. She was frowning and shifting on the chair.

  She looks me through and through, he thought. “I’m going to give you the sacrament,” he said, forcing his voice to be steady.

  He unscrewed the lid of the little silver jar, and leaned over it. “God of mercy,” he said, “ease the suffering and comfort the weakness of your servant – uh –” He looked up at her with his eyebrows raised. He could feel drops of sweat on his forehead.

  “Jane,” the girl said. “This – isn’t Confession.”

  “Jane …”

  The breath caught in his throat as he abruptly remembered what would shortly be required of him here.

  After several seconds he exhaled and went on, bleakly, “Jane, whom the Church anoints with this holy oil. We ask this through Christ our Lord.”

  “Amen,” said Jane. “This is last rites.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  He would have to touch her. The sacrament of Extreme Unction – or Anointing of the Sick, as they called it now – would require that he touch her forehead.

  Her light touch, through two layers of cloth, had nearly killed him a few moments ago. This would be virtually skin-to-skin, with only the insulation of the oil.

  And was this just another mockery of a sacrament? The rules permitted this sacrament to be administered to a person who appeared to have been dead for as much as two hours, who might in fact very well be dead, since no one could be sure precisely when the soul left a body that had died.

  But two days? – and anointing this, while the body was at a mortuary somewhere? Briefly he imagined explaining it to his bishop: But she was still speaking!

  He dipped his right forefinger into the oil and lifted it out – but just sat staring at it while two drops formed and fell silently back into the jar.

  He thought of his sister, baptizing cats and dogs; and he thought of Adam, who had imposed suffering and death on all soulless things.

  And he dipped his finger again, and leaned forward. “Per istam sanctam unctionem –” he said, and he touched his finger to Jane’s forehead.

  Her skin was as cold as window-glass, and though he felt no impact and his heartbeat didn’t accelerate wildly this time, his finger, and then his knuckles, were numb.

  He drew the sign of the cross on her forehead with the oil and went on speaking, remembering now to do it in English, “ – may the Lord in His love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit.”

  Jane was motionless, looking up at him.

  “Amen,” she whispered.

  Oil trickled down and collected under her eye sockets like tears. The numbness was gone from his hand, and he dipped his finger again.

  With his left hand he took hold of her right hand – it was as cold as her forehead – and then made the sign of the cross on the back of her hand.

  “May the Lord who frees you from sin save you and raise you up,” he said.

  “Amen,” she said again. Her voice was remote now, as if she were speaking from the far end of a corridor.

  He reached for her other hand, but it was gone; her face, alone, hung over the chair like a reflection of sunlight on a wall, and for an instant it was the face of the woman who had come in here a week ago.

  He couldn’t see her mouth move, but he heard the receding voice say, “And what’s my penance?”

  Five Our Fathers? Tell your parents you love them? You don’t get a penance with Extreme Uncti
on, he thought – but she seemed to need it. He was at a loss, and cast in his mind for some prayer out of the Bible.

  Only after he had said it, and the face had seemed to smile and then disappeared, did he realize that what he said had not been from the Bible:

  “Go gentle into that good night,” he had told her. “Rest easy with the dying of the light.”

  Bastardized Dylan Thomas! But it seemed to have been adequate – he was alone in the room.

  When his pulse and breathing had slowed to normal, he made the sign of the cross, spotting his surplice with oil, and he thought, was that all right?

  There was only silence in his mind for an answer, but for once it was not an empty silence.

  And so he sat motionless until the door opened – outward, giving him a glimpse, as he looked up, of the dim church beyond.

  A young man stepped in hesitantly, sniffed the air, then shuffled to the chair that had so recently been Jane’s.

  “Bless me, Father,” the young man said huskily as he sat down, “I have sinned.”

  And the priest listened, nodding, as the young man began talking, and he absently replaced the lid on the oil jar and put the sick-call kit aside.

  We Traverse Afar

  James P. Blaylock St Tim Powers

  HARRISON SAT in the dim living room and listened to the train. All the sounds were clear – the shrill steam whistle over the bass chug of the engine, and even, faintly, the clatter of the wheels on the track.

  It never rained anymore on Christmas Eve. The plastic rain gauge was probably still out on the shed roof; he used to lean over the balcony railing outside the master bedroom to check the level of the water in the thing. There had been something reassuring about the idea of rainwater rising in the gauge – nature measurably doing its work, the seasons going around, the drought held at bay. …

  But he couldn’t recall any rain since last winter. He hadn’t checked, because the master bedroom was closed up now. And anyway the widow next door, Mrs. Kemp, had hung some strings of Christmas lights over her back porch, and even if he did get through to the balcony, he wouldn’t be able to help seeing the blinking colors, and probably even something like a Christmas wreath on her back door.

  Too many cooks spoil the broth, he thought, a good wine needs no bush, a friend in need is one friend too many, leave me alone.

  She’d even knocked on his door today, the widow had; with a paper plate of Christmas cookies! The plate was covered in red and green foil and the whole bundle was wrapped in a Santa Claus napkin. He had taken the plate, out of politeness; but the whole kit and caboodle, cookies and all, had gone straight into the dumpster.

  To hell with rain anyway. He was sitting in the old leather chair by the cold fireplace, watching snow. In the glass globe in his hand a little painted man and woman sat in a sleigh that was being pulled by a little frozen horse.

  He took a sip of vodka and turned the globe upside down and back again, and a contained flurry of snow swirled around the figures. He and his wife had bought the thing a long time ago. The couple in the sleigh had been on their cold ride for decades now. Better to travel than to arrive, he thought, peering through the glass at their tiny blue-eyed faces; they didn’t look a day older than when they’d started out. And still together, too, after all these years.

  The sound of the train engine changed, was more echoing and booming now – maybe it had gone into a tunnel.

  He put the globe down on the magazine stand and had another sip of vodka. With his nose stuffed full of Vicks VapoRub, as it was tonight, his taste buds wouldn’t have known the difference if he’d been drinking VSOP brandy or paint thinner, but he could feel the warm glow in his stomach.

  It was an old LP record on the turntable, one from the days when the real hi-fi enthusiasts cared more about sound quality than any kind of actual music. This one was two whole sides of locomotive racket, booming out through his monaural Klipschorn speaker. He also had old disks of surf sounds, downtown traffic, ocean waves, birds shouting in tropical forests …

  Better a train. Booming across those nighttime miles.

  He was just getting well relaxed when he began to hear faint music behind the barreling train. It was a Christmas song, and before he could stop himself he recognized it – Bing Crosby singing “We Three Kings,” one of her favorites.

  He’d been ready for it. He pulled two balls of cotton out of the plastic bag beside the vodka bottle and twisted them into his ears.

  That made it better – all he could hear now was a distant hiss that might have been rain against the windows.

  Ghost rain, he thought. I should have put out a ghost gauge.

  As if in response to his thought, the next sip of vodka had a taste – the full-orchestra, peaches-and-bourbon chord of Southern Comfort. He tilted his head forward and let the liquor run out of his mouth back into the glass, and then he stood up and crossed to the phonograph, lifted the arm off the record and laid it in its rest, off to the side.

  When he pulled the cotton out of his ears, the house was silent. There was no creaking of floorboards, no sound of breathing or rustling. He was staring at the empty fireplace, pretty sure that if he looked around he would see that flickering rainbow glow from the dining room; the glow of lights, and the star on the top of the tree, and those weird little glass columns with bubbles wobbling up through the liquid inside. Somehow the stuff never boiled away. Some kind of perpetual motion, like those glass birds with the top hats, that bobbed back and forth, dipping their beaks into a glass of water, forever. At least with the Vicks he wouldn’t smell pine sap.

  The pages of the wall calendar had been rearranged sometime last night. He’d noticed it right away this morning when he’d come out of what used to be the guest bedroom, where he slept now on the single bed. The pink cloud of tuberous begonias above the thirty-one empty days of March was gone, replaced by the blooming poinsettia of the December page. Had he done it himself, shifted the calendar while walking in his sleep? He wasn’t normally a sleepwalker. And sometime during the night, around midnight probably, he’d thought he’d heard a stirring in the closed-up bedroom across the hall, the door whispering open, what sounded like bedroom slippers shuffling on the living room carpet.

  Before even making coffee he had folded the calendar back to March. She’d died on St. Patrick’s Day evening, and in fact the green dress she’d laid out on the queen-size bed still lay there, gathering whatever kind of dust inhabited a closed-up room. Around the dress, on the bedspread, were still scattered the green-felt shamrocks she had intended to sew onto it. She’d never even had a chance to iron the dress, and, after the paramedics had taken her away on that long-ago evening, he’d had to unplug the iron himself, at the same time that he unplugged the bedside clock.

  The following day, after moving out most of his clothes, he had shut the bedroom door for the last time. This business with the calendar made him wonder if maybe the clock was plugged in again, too, but he was not going to venture in there to find out.

  Through the back door, from across the yard, he heard the familiar scrape of the widow’s screen door opening, and then the sound of it slapping shut. Quickly he reached up and flipped off the lamp, then sat still in the darkened living room. Maybe she wasn’t paying him another visit, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

  In a couple of minutes there came the clumping of her shoes on the front steps, and he hunkered down in the chair, glad that he’d turned off the train noise.

  He watched her shadow in the porch light. He shouldn’t leave it on all the time. It probably looked like an invitation, especially at this time of year. She knocked at the door, waited a moment and then knocked again. She couldn’t take a hint if it stepped out of the bushes and bit her on the leg.

  Abruptly he felt sheepish, hiding out like this, like a kid. But he was a married man, for God’s sake. He’d taken a vow. And a vow wasn’t worth taking if it wasn’t binding. She will do him good and not evil all the days of her li
fe, said Proverbs 31 about a good wife; her lamp does not go out at night.

  Does not go out.

  His thoughts trailed off into nothing when he realized that the woman outside was leaving, shuffling back down the steps. He caught himself wondering if she’d brought him something else to eat, maybe left a casserole outside the door. Once she’d brought around half a corned beef and a mess of potatoes and cabbage, and like the Christmas cookies, all of it had gone straight into the garbage. But the canned chili he’d microwaved earlier this evening wasn’t sitting too well with him, and the thought of corned beef …

  He could definitely hear something now from the closed-up bedroom – a low whirring noise like bees in a hive – the sewing machine? He couldn’t recall if he had unplugged it too, that night. Still, it had no excuse. …

  He grabbed the cotton balls, twisting them up tight and jamming them into his ears again. Had the bedroom door moved? He groped wildly for the lamp, switched it on, and with one last backward glance he went out the front door, nearly slamming it behind him in his haste.

  Shakily, he sat down in one of the white plastic chairs on the porch and buttoned up his cardigan sweater. If the widow returned, she’d find him, and there was damn-all he could do about it. He looked around in case she might have left him something, but apparently she hadn’t. The chilly night air calmed him down a little bit, and he listened for a moment to the sound of crickets, wondering what he would do now. Sooner or later he’d have to go back inside. He hadn’t even brought out the vodka bottle.

  Tomorrow, Christmas day, would be worse.

  What would he say to her if the bedroom door should open, and she were to step out? If he were actually to confront her.… A good marriage was made in heaven, as the scriptures said, and you didn’t let a thing like that go. No matter what. Hang on with chains.