The Last Christmas: A Repairman Jack Novel

by F. Paul Wilson

  Had she been screwing with his head, telling him to search to his heart’s content? The Bagaq might well be here, but he’d never find it alone. Like searching for a particular beetle in a rain forest. He’d need a team.

  He wandered back to the living room where he noticed her discarded fur coat. Was it possible? As soon as he lifted it off the stone head, he knew from the weight that he’d find nothing. He checked the pockets anyway: no Bagaq. That would have been way too easy.

  Last stop was the kitchen where he found her leaning back against a black counter and languidly stirring a cup of tea.

  “Well,” she said with a mischievous smile, “what took you so long? I thought you’d never get here.”

  “I was searching—”

  “And finding nothing.”

  As he began searching through the cabinets, she said, “I sense you are a disconnected person.”

  “Disconnected?”

  “Yes. You don’t have friends, only acquaintances. You’re not estranged from whatever family you have, but you don’t stay in touch.”

  Disconnected…yeah, that pretty much summed it up. He saw no use in denying it.

  “I guess so. What’s the point? You analyzing me?”

  “Simply assessing your suitability.”

  “For what?”

  She put down her cup. “I’d like you to meet someone.”

  “Where?” The place was empty.

  She led him out of the kitchen toward the apartment door.

  “Upstairs.”

  “This is a duplex?”

  She had a throaty laugh. “No. Burbank is in the penthouse.”

  Burbank again.

  She turned on a lamp and a panel in the wall slid open to reveal a spiral staircase.

  Damn.

  He followed her as she climbed the narrow winding steps to the next level where they stepped into a brightly lit, sparsely furnished room, nondescript except for the exquisite woodwork. No one here but the two of them.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Follow me.”

  She led him down a hallway lit with stained-glass sconces to a darker, cavernous space crammed with rows and stacks and racks of blinking, glowing electronic equipment, most of it old—like 1930s / vacuum-tube old—but some of it state of the art. Although what art, Tier wasn’t sure. A huge flat-screen TV, silent and black as onyx, hung on the wall. Whatever space the electronics didn’t fill was littered with books, hundreds of them, most of them old and dusty, in ramshackle piles threatening to keel over at the hint of a breeze. In a near corner, something that looked like a coffin lay on the floor. Its lid, intricately carved with primitive symbols, stood against the wall behind it.

  Figuring it couldn’t be, Tier veered toward it for a closer look and, yeah, an ancient-looking coffin.

  “Seriously?” he said with a glance toward Madame.

  She nodded. “Burbank doesn’t like to be far from his desk.”

  What?

  He glanced in and saw sheets, a blanket, and a pillow. He’d heard of people sleeping in coffins but had never seen…

  He pointed to the lid. “Some kind of native carving?”

  “A small, reclusive South American tribe.”

  This was moving further and further into the weird.

  “Why…?”

  “You can ask Burbank some time.”

  Shaking his head, he rejoined Madame.

  A hanging Tiffany lamp, its chain disappearing into the darkness above, illuminated a bent old man, bald as an egg, crouched before a keyboard and a huge, sixty-inch monitor. A big, old-fashioned, slotted-chrome microphone was seated between him and the keyboard. A world map outlined in white filled the otherwise black screen. The map—continents and oceans alike—was peppered with glowing dots.

  “Good morning, Burbank,” Madame said.

  “Twilight has come. Night will follow.” He spoke without looking around, his voice as soft as a shovel digging into snow.

  “Yes, I know.” She lowered her voice to Tier—“His mantra”—then raised it again: “I’d like you to meet Mister Tier Hill.”

  “Why would you like me to meet him?”

  “Mister Hill can hear the Sheep Meadow signal.”

  “Oh?”

  The old man’s neck barely rotated as he swiveled his chair to stare at him.

  Damn, he was old. Wild gray eyebrows, the bags under his cloudy eyes dragging down his lower lids. Jowls like a bulldog. A wizened gnome in an island of light on a sea of darkness.

  “This is true, Mister Hill?”

  “I’m not sure. I heard something out there just now. This is the first time anyone’s ever mentioned a ‘Sheep Meadow signal.’ Signal for what?”

  “Twilight has come. Night will follow.”

  She said, “He’ll need something more specific, Burbank.”

  “You tell him, dear.”

  “Very well,” Madame de Medici said. “We don’t know for what. And we don’t know from what. We do know that only rare people—very rare—can hear the signals.”

  “‘Signals’? You mean there’s more than one?”

  “Hundreds,” Burbank said, pointing at his screen. “Hundreds all over the world.”

  “One of them—the signal from the Sheep Meadow—emanates from the Earth,” she said. “The rest come from out there and go into the Earth.”

  “‘Out there’? Out where?”

  “The Void,” Burbank said. “They form no pattern and they all have different frequencies and amplitudes.”

  “All right. Fine. Who’s sending them from ‘the Void’?”

  She shrugged. “We don’t know.”

  None of this made any sense.

  “All right then, how long has it been going on? Judging from the look of this place, I’m going to guess you folks have been monitoring these signals for a long time.

  “No ‘folks’,” Burbank said. “Just me since the spring of 1941. Other signals followed, but the Sheep Meadow tone was the first. It began at 8:56 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on April 23rd, 1941, to be precise.”

  “That sounds…pretty damn precise,” Tier said.

  “I never knew that,” Madame said.

  “You never asked.”

  “The date must mean something,” she said.

  “Not to me. But I remember it well, because I too can hear the signals. Also, it happened during the month of my tenth anniversary here.”

  Tier’s grandfather used to talk a lot about the Allard. He loved the building and took such pride in raising the steel, especially this tower. But…

  “Wait. This place was completed in 1930.”

  “Exactly. I moved in shortly thereafter.”

  “But that means you must be…”

  “Over one hundred years old? Yes, I most certainly am.”

  “How far over, may I ask?”

  Burbank turned his head about ten degrees. Tier figured arthritis had pretty much frozen his neck. “I’m not sure. You keep track of these things, dear. Tell him.”

  Madam de Medici leveled her amber gaze at Tier and said, “He was one hundred and eighteen last month.”

  Tier felt his jaw working. How…how was this possible?

  “And you sleep in a South American native coffin? Is that the secret?”

  Burbank’s chuckle disintegrated into a cough. “It has a mattress and is quite comfortable. And convenient, of course. Mostly I take naps.”

  Tier jumped as a voice from a speaker somewhere in the dark said, “Sector four-seven-two reporting.”

  With that, a white line began undulating across the map on the screen.

  Burbank tapped on his keyboard and 472 appeared below it. He leaned forward and pressed a button on the mike’s base.

  “What is the frequency?”

  “Eleven point-seven-five megahertz.”

  He tapped that in, then said, “Recorded.”

  Tier looked at Madame. “What the—? That’s in the normal hearing range.” />
  He’d learned a little about hearing after suffering acoustic trauma from that IED in Afghanistan. Luckily that was all he’d suffered that day. A couple of his fellows lost limbs.

  “You’re thinking of sound waves,” Burbank said. “These are electromagnetic transmissions. Quite different.”

  “You mean like microwaves?”

  “Quite so.”

  “Then how come I can hear it? You can’t hear microwaves.”

  “These signals don’t follow the usual rules. Rare people like you and me can hear them. We’re special.”

  Tier didn’t know if that was the kind of special he wanted or needed. Young Ellie sure as hell didn’t want it.

  Burbank added, “The signal just reported happens to be medium frequency with a wavelength of over one hundred meters. As you may or may not know, wavelength is inversely proportional to frequency.”

  Tier did the conversion—a meter ran a little over three feet, so…

  No.

  “You’re talking a wavelength longer than a football field?

  “Exactly. The signals are all below the visible spectrum. They started out fluctuating between one hundred gigahertz with a wavelength of a fraction of a centimeter at the high end, and ten kilohertz with a wavelength approaching 100 kilometers at the low end. All fluctuating, that is, except the Sheep Meadow signal. That remained a constant thirty megahertz.”

  Jesus.

  “I heard the same thing—signal—a few days ago.”

  “They all recur sporadically, at seemingly random intervals.”

  “And you’re gonna tell me you keep track of all the signals and their frequencies?”

  “Not all,” Burbank said. “I don’t have the resources for that. Just a hobby at first. My original job here in the thirties and forties was coordinating communications for a rather eccentric fellow—quite eccentric, actually—who let me pursue these curious signals during my downtime. I think he thought I’d gone crazy, and frankly I thought he might be right since I was the only one I knew who could hear them. But he humored me by buying extra equipment which I modified to pick up the signals and pinpoint their locations. He’s long since retired but he lets me stay here.”

  “And you’ve been monitoring them since 1941?”

  “Mostly just cataloguing them. Monitoring them made no sense, what with their frequencies and amplitudes randomly fluctuating all over the place. I send a monthly report to subscribers—by post in the beginning, now email.”

  “Subscribers? Who would—?”

  “You’d be surprised,” Burbank said. “People make decisions based on the frequencies. Just like a horoscope.”

  “But back in the sixties,” said Madame de Medici, “everything changed.”

  Tier caught an ominous tone.

  “Changed how?”

  Burbank said, “In early 1968, on February eleventh by my best calculations—I wasn’t paying all that much attention at the time—each and every signal stabilized its frequency. They still showed wide variations between them, but each one locked into a consistent cycle. And they held those frequencies for decades… until this past August.”

  He paused, wheezing.

  “What happened in August?” Tier said.

  Burbank huffed. “You tell him, dear. I’m out of breath.”

  Madame said, “In August, the signals suddenly began changing. Each signal—all except one—began increasing or decreasing its frequency. A rapid rate of change at first, which has gradually slowed to a crawl. But they still seem to be moving toward a common frequency.”

  “Progressing inchmeal,” Tier said.

  Yes!

  After a brief, questioning look, she said, “We have no idea why they’re moving toward synchronization.”

  “Twilight has come,” Burbank droned. “Night will follow.”

  Tier said, “The Sheep Meadow tone today was the same as I heard Friday.”

  She smiled. “You have a good ear, Mister Hill. The Sheep Meadow signal—the only one that originates on Earth—is not changing.”

  “That’s why I call it the Prime Frequency,” Burbank said.

  “Yes,” Madame continued. “The other signals are gradually moving toward it. But I don’t think it’s a good thing. In fact, I think it will prove to be a very bad thing.”

  Tier said, “Why does it have to be good or bad?”

  “Consider the reality,” she said in an exasperated tone. “All these signals shooting into the planet, originating from who knows where. That’s not normal. Neither is being able to hear them, yet rare people can.”

  “Well, it’s odd, but—”

  “A dark time is coming, Mister Hill—”

  “Twilight has come. Night will follow.” Burbank again.

  Madame finished: “And these signals may be harbingers.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of the beginning of a nightworld and the end of everything. Or at least the end of life as we know it, or wish to know it.”

  “Oh, come on…”

  “They await a signal,” Burbank wheezed.

  Tier repressed a laugh. “The signals are waiting for a signal?”

  “Exactly.” He seemed to have caught his breath. “A signal to complete their synchronization. And when that happens…”

  “What?”

  “Night falls.”

  “Night? I don’t—”

  “Why are the signals placed where they are?” Burbank said. “They never waver from their original position. Why, for instance, does one emanate from the center of the Sheep Meadow out there?”

  Tier shrugged. “I can’t even hazard a guess.”

  “Nor can I. But when synchronization occurs, something will happen where those signals are located. Something nasty, I fear.”

  “You mean, like for instance, in the center of the Sheep Meadow? Something ‘nasty’ will happen there when the time comes?”

  He nodded. “When night falls. Very nasty.”

  His certainty gave Tier a chill.

  “It will begin in the heavens,” Burbank added, “and it will end in the Earth. But before it begins, the laws will bend and break.”

  “What laws?”

  “The laws of reality. And if I’m lucky, I won’t be alive to see it.” He cleared his throat. “We’re owned, you know.”

  Was he serious? Yes, he was.

  “Well, as the saying goes, everybody gotta serve somebody.”

  “I mean, we’re property.”

  Okay, he’d play along.

  “Whose?”

  “That’s in contention. One of them, you know…” He shifted his gaze back and forth to the ceiling. “…out there. One of them owns us but may lose us to a competitor. That will not be good for us. The game’s got rules but not everybody plays by them. The one behind the signals has been cheating.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “I’ve had almost a hundred and twenty years to learn a few things. I’ve tracked down books…lots of books. I’ve read them and kept them all. I still don’t know the exact purpose of the signals, but I believe we can use them as an early warning system about the end.”

  “End of what?”

  “Everything.”

  “On that happy note,” said Madame de Medici, “it is time for Mister Hill to leave.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. I really am going on a trip. I leave for Egypt tonight.”

  “Egypt?”

  “I appreciate Egypt. It changes, but very slowly. Some areas change not at all. I like that. Besides that, an Ugaritic tablet is coming up for auction that interests me. But I want to examine it first hand before I bid.”

  He wasn’t sure what to believe. Was she staying, was she going? She’d been so upfront about her apartment. Why? To put him off balance? And then showing him Burbank’s bizarre penthouse setup. Another push to keep him off balance?

  Well, if that had been her plan, it worked.

  Add to that the signal in the Sheep
Meadow and he was positively wobbly.

  He gathered his coat from her apartment, rode the elevator down alone, and returned to the relatively safer and saner reality of the street.

  5

  Isher Sports Shop? The fuck did that mean? Owned by a guy named Isher? But then it’d be Isher’s Sport Shop, wouldn’t it?

  Albert had thought this Jack guy might’ve went into the sports store to drop off the Bagaq, but then again, he might’ve just been dropping off the food he bought. So, he decided to play it careful like and wait outside. Which meant freezing his ass off. Hadn’t been so bad by the brownstone because he’d been out of the wind there. Outside the food store had been bad, but out here in the open…

  At one point he got so cold he considered going into the sports store to warm up while he pretended to be shopping for a hockey stick or something. But he shit-canned that idea real fast. He didn’t want Jack to make his face. The Ranger jacket was good camo ’cause they was all over the city, but if the guy connected Albert’s mug with the jacket and saw him again—busted.

  So, he kept crossing streets and stalking sidewalks, but always with an eye on the front door of the sports shop with the dumb-ass name. Desperate, he risked losing sight of the door to hit up a pushcart for a cup of coffee and a hot pretzel.

  The Arab-looking guy—probably a terrorist on the side—took the pretzel from the oven and held it up. “Mustard?”

  “No. Ketchup.”

  The guy frowned, grabbed the ketchup, and squeezed out a piddly red line.

  “Gimme that.”

  Albert grabbed the squeeze bottle and applied a righteous amount. No such thing as too much ketchup. Then he hurried back to where he could put eyes on the door of that sports shop again. Along the way he spilled ketchup all over his hand and his splint and on the sleeve of his Rangers jacket. No biggie about the sleeve since it was already red, but damn that splint made it hard to do anything right.

  Finally, after like forever, the guy came out without the white food bag but still carrying the yellow Bagaq-size bag. Albert had been hoping the Isher place was the drop-off point, now he guessed not.

  Jack made tracks uptown and Albert fell in behind him. Man, he’d thought the street outside the sport shop was cold, but when he turned uptown on Broadway, he felt like he was in a freakin’ wind tunnel at the North Pole.

  Okay, decision time: Keep following the guy or flatten him from behind and snatch the Bagaq? The second was dangerous, what with every fucker on the street with their phones out and itching to record any damn thing on a second’s notice. But if he timed it right…