by John Farris
“I’m not religious. And this is not a funeral. Call him lucky to have laid that hammer down for good. Except, of course, tomorrow he’ll be right back on the old squad chain. Minus a little something I off-loaded from him. Drive on back to town, Patrick. I now am what I came here to be. And I should be getting along.”
“By YOURself? But y-you said—”
“Patrick, I know I promised I’d look over that old heap of yours, but believe me, sweetie, it’s no use. I don’t have the power to budge it. The Vortex swallowed you, and all of the others who once had bright ideas about how to travel through time. But Fresno’s Vortex—if the old blues-man was right—can’t spit you out again. Sorry.”
“Then how will you—”
“Hey, Pat, I’m a hundred percent flesh and blood but I’m not a real girl. I’m a doppelganger.” He stared at her with glimmer eyes, uncomprehending. Gwen breathed deeply and made another try. “I’m, like, part of a set. I have a homebody, my mirror image but in a through-the-looking-glass way, follow that so far?” Openmouthed, Patrick nodded a little. Transfixed, aghast, as stiff in his limbs as a toad-eating dog. “—Even though my homebody and me are presently not on good terms, and I plan for us to stay kaput. I got doctored up by a little guy who’s like the mad scientist in those old horror flicks. So if I took my clothes off right now I’d just be naked, not invisible.” Patrick blinked. “Nix, that wasn’t intended to be a turn-on, I’m not taking off my clothes.” She flashed a smile. “Okay. Let me just say that as a doppelganger I have special faculties. For one thing, I can time-trip to my heart’s desire, change over from one universe to another, even one that retrogrades every twenty-four hours. How? It’s, um, like changing escalators that are side by side virtually forever, and that go up and up forever too. That’s the easy part, but getting back to where you started isn’t. Too tricky to explain that part right now. No time. I like you a lot, kid, and I know you’ve got this red-hot adolescent crush on me, but I’m leaving and unfortunately you have to stay. Please don’t start bawling. Keep your chin up. I doubt that tomorrow you’ll—”
All Patrick saw was a twinkle in the afternoon air. At night it could have been a meteor burning up in the atmosphere. But Gwen grabbed herself below the breasts with a howl, twisted 180 degrees in torment, and tripped over the outstretched feet of Jericho Smith. She sprawled headlong, clutching the place where she had been struck or bitten.
“What was that?” Patrick said. “HorseFLY? Gwen, you okay?”
She dragged herself to her feet, still doubled over.
“Do you need a doctor?”
“No,” she gasped, getting her breath back. “Now will you please shut up?”
“But what happened?”
Gwen straightened slowly, not replying. She rubbed her solar plexus while painfully regaining her breath. She walked away from Patrick, talking oddly but not to him.
“Okay, what the hell did happen? Yes I know I’ve lost it! Felt like jerking an arrowhead out of me. What am I going to do? I don’t know what I’m going to do about it! Someone must’ve touched the skull or dared to move it. Linc would never do that! But I don’t have a—Yes. There’s life force all around me. Thousands of naked souls, but I can’t use them. No, no, wrong. Nature does forbid it! We’re talking Celestial Law. Draining souls for our use is not an option. Anyway they couldn’t provide enough whoomph to break us away from the Fresno Vortex. Get us back to where I came from. Even with a lot of hyperdimensional power I couldn’t calibrate a destination mechanically. I need the skull. I need my simulacrum. Otherwise we are truly and totally fucked!”
Wandering, her back to Patrick, head nodding and becking like someone sorely tetched.
Patrick called, “Who are you t-t-talking to?”
The look she gave him was as jarring as a hard slap and backed him up a couple of steps. In a hurry. Gwen shook her head ferociously, sunlit hair lashing her face. She breathed in nasally snarls. Then her hands dropped from her violated breast. Her head shakes gradually became less agitated until a kind of hopeless calm settled over her. She was crying. She wiped away her tears and looked at her wet fingers in amazement and then dismay.
“Doppelgangers don’t cry! But I’m not—not a dpg anymore ! Only half. Worse than nothing. Oh what a mistake! I’m stuck here too. I wish I wish I wish I could be a full doppelganger again! But it was that sneaking bastard Woolwine. Implanting some nanotech gizmo in my neck that altered my magnetic field just enough—and now I’m disconnected from my homebody! I can’t go back to Eden. She can’t find me to bring us back!”
Gwen brushed away more tears and Patrick’s florid face came into better focus. He looked terrified, his mouth twitching out of control.
“Wha-what’s got INto you, Gwen?” Then he had an inkling that it might have been the wrong question.
Not much change in her face, but he smelled something unpleasant wafting his way: a stewpot stench of garlic, sulfur, wolfsbane. Her eyes had tightened as if stitches had been taken; they seemed elongated. They yellowed like fall leaves as he stared. Pat felt a rush of blood to his temples, as if he’d been upended and, while dangling, was being ruthlessly inspected.
“A fit’s upon our Gwen; her mind has gone amiss. Besotted, anguished, prison’d in despair, unsuitable for sense. Faith, she suffers not in abatement, whilst I, unchafed by low fortune, resolute, enduring as the Phoenix, claim sovereignty: two persons kindred in one, yet remarking only for myself.”
The voice was different from Gwen’s, contralto, cultured, the style of language familiar to him. It had rolled off the tongue of Mr. Whippet, Patrick’s tenth-grade English teacher, who savored every syllable. Julius Caesar had been the text.
Patrick blinked and took a peek to make sure his feet were on the ground. When he looked, she seemed to have shot up to a height of nine feet or more. Looking down at him with the keenness of a raptor eyeing a pip of a sparrow. Patrick’s chapped lips parted, but he couldn’t speak. Something compelled him to glance over at the gnarly old pine where he and Gwen (suffering not in abatement?) had laid out Jericho Smith. There no longer was an impressively muscled body. What remained of Smith was the tattered clothing he had worn, his high-topped shapeless work shoes leaking smoke. Char and ash had sifted out through popped stitching or the worn places of the soles.
“Ay, there be sadness in the mute farewell of death. He was always a man, not the cur chains made a’ him.”
The mixture of smells, with an additive of blackened flesh, was overpowering. Patrick gagged and looked back and up and was jolted to his toes. Her hair was now silver and smoke, spun out around a reptilian head and lushly spiderwebbed, a ghostly nightmare of a ’do. Especially because there seemed to be spiders scurrying out of it.
Patrick had no spit but managed to say, “Who ARE y-you?”
“I have oft preferred the name Delilah.”
Her right hand moved quickly down as if from an un-reeling length of arm and, vinelike, stroked him across the forehead. A light touch, but it froze all of Patrick except for his bladder: the bottom dropped out and in shock and humiliation he gushed down one leg. His eyes were tightly shut. When he opened them again and thawed enough to grimly unknot his sneakers, the Delilah-thing had resumed Gwen’s normal size and appearance. The stench of sulfur and wolfsbane dissipated. She pretended not to notice what he’d done. This creaturely Delilah. It made Patrick hate her all the more. He pulled the saturated pant leg of his railroader overalls away from his thigh and held it like that while he walked stiffly through the tall pines and across sunblaze drowsing pasture and cannonballed off the bank into a two-acre pond. He pinched his nose shut and kept his head under water while sitting on the mucky bottom, but before he ran out of breath and started gulping he knew it was no use, he didn’t have the gumption to drown himself. And if he did, who would look after his uncle Mick?
Delilah as Gwen (and much more pleasing to the eye) was sitting on a running board of the yellow taxi. She looked up with a smile of
apology when he returned dripping and muddied, carrying his tied-together sneakers over one shoulder.
“My pardon, young sir. ’Twas confounding of the senses inspired me thus to foul and furious craft. Thou hast no cause to be affrighted.”
“I’m not,” he said. “I wasn’t.” Trying to sell the lie with a sneer that failed. “Just please don’t EVer do that thing again. With the hair.” He shuddered, although not because of a failure of nerve. He was wet and miserable. “Is G-Gwen okay?”
“She sleeps in mild repose ’pon Lethe’s bosom, whilst in her borrow’d shape I dwell, no longer captive, destiny eclipsed, my greater soul forsaken, interr’d in grief by enemies whose villainy abideth in holy bones.”
“Uh, yeah. Borrowed? Are you ever going to leave Gwen aLONE?”
“Ay, good Patrick. I swear this world that cheats and beggars Time will not long contain us.”
“So what do we do?”
She folded her hands, sat gazing at something greatly distant, or inward.
“For now, I knowest not.”
“Oh, great,” Patrick muttered, sitting on the rear bumper to put his sneakers on.
LAS VEGAS • 7:20 A.M.
Eden Waring in Cody Olds’s pied à terre, fast asleep one moment, wide-eyed the next, alone in the middle of the bed, staring at a streak of rosy sunrise across the ceiling. Reliving the emotional process through which she had been persuaded to be there for the remainder of the night. Dammit: the man just hadn’t taken no for an answer. Obnoxious seduction tactics, in a lesser breed. But where Cody hailed from, a roughshod remnant of knighthood might be in vogue. One of those codes of the West she’d heard about. So giving up and giving herself over (in a restricted sense) to Cody had become an act of trust. Determination, tact, propriety—Eden now reversed an earlier opinion of him. He certainly would be hell with the women he chose. In his modest-size aerie he’d brewed tea and shown her the layout, where things were. Some women’s necessities too, in the bathroom. He didn’t collect trophy dainties, leftovers from whistle-stops by long-necked toothy beauties as common around Vegas as jackrabbits in the sagebrush. That tendency might have put an impassable knot in the slender thread of their relationship. He’d given her an old flannel shirt, XXL, as a substitute for pajamas, which he said he didn’t own. But she had always been partial to men’s shirts for sleepwear. And what a sleep! On a featherbed, nearest thing to heaven for sheer bliss. The bedroom air, cleaned by an ionic purifier, was as sweet and bracing as morningtime in a breezy cedar wood.
If she had dreamed, then for once she couldn’t remember. There was nothing at the back of her mind to scribble down in apprehension or cold terror as she’d been compelled to do since childhood: her prophetic dreams.
The drapes parted at the touch of a button on a bedside console. The bedroom was simply furnished, country French in wormy chestnut, but the walls were chockablock with paintings by artists whom Cody admired and/or represented. Old-timers, newcomers. Frank McCarthy, Roger Hayden Johnson, Carrie Fell. Dried-out frontier faces dark as figs; rugged, empty, transfixing vistas. Eroded pinnacles stained bloodred by a setting sun. Cody had included only one of his paintings. A sharply ruled still life. Pastel. Meadowlark with an apple on a windowsill. Pale blues and yellows and that bright green apple. A French influence, Eden thought, remembering from a college course a painter she had particularly liked, Aristide Maillol.
Eden stretched and gave her weak knee a careful massage. No bad twinges this morning. Then she reached for her cell phone and alerted the Blackwelder people who had spent the night watching over an empty villa at Bahìa, letting them know she was awake and in good company. They knew where she had slept and probably were thinking she was an easy lay, but what of it? They were paid to guarantee her safety, not pass judgment on her character. By now they would have a dossier on Cody Olds, maybe his entire family. She didn’t think she would need to review it. For the moment she wanted only to hear Cody’s pleasingly gruff, no-bull voice again—and what was that hearty campfire odor seeping into the bedroom, bacon on a grill?
My hero, Eden thought, without irony or malice, and sprang out of bed. No headaches, less anxiety, just glad to have a day like this one to seize. And how long had it been since she’d felt that good, on reasonably friendly terms with herself?
Used the bathroom and went dressed as she was, shirt-tail to the back of her knees, barefoot, to the kitchen and breakfast nook that featured a bow window with a view of mountains in tones of sand and gray and blue. All the sky that she could see given over to heatless sunblaze the color of still champagne.
Cody was dishing diced peppers, chilies, and tomatoes into a bowl with several eggs he’d whisked, leaving in the yolks. No fad diets for him. He wore a tucked-in T-shirt with beltless jeans low on his hips. He hadn’t heard her coming. His attention was divided between the gas range and a small plasma-screen TV on the range counter. And of course the local news had to be focusing again on the efforts to recover the possible remains of Lincoln Grayle from the recent avalanche in the Spring Mountains. Eden clenched her hands at her sides, recalling that she had said something to Cody about bringing down Mordaunt’s house—although she wasn’t certain if she’d said “Mordaunt” or mentioned any name, Grayle’s in particular.
“Good morning,” she said.
He turned to acknowledge her with less of a sunny smile than she’d hoped for. But after a quick appraisal he seemed to like her exceedingly well in his ratty old shirt, a button missing where her navel would be.
“Morning. Sleep okay?”
“Out like a light. Dead to the world. All those other clichés.”
“Did I forget to set out a spare hairbrush?” He looked rumpled and transient himself from sleeping on the sofa.
Eden shook her tousled head self-consciously. “I have a brush, thanks. I rolled out just as God intended me this morning. Do I suffer in comparison with someone else?” She didn’t think so. There were no framed sweethearts in his condo, only family photos.
“Now you know that God made you just fine. Do you have a likin’ for Denver omelets?”
“I don’t know. What goes into a Denver omelet?”
“Depends mostly on what’s left over in the fridge,” he said, with a smile that still didn’t come easily. Trying to be casual and so far missing a note or two. Maybe he hadn’t done much sleeping himself, wondering just what he had back there in his bedroom.
“Yummy,” Eden said with a deliberate lack of enthusiasm. She couldn’t avoid looking at the TV, where someone named Skarbeck, USMC ret., who apparently was associated with Lincoln Grayle Enterprises, was being interviewed on CNN. He looked as if he could split rocks with his chin. Dyed-red hair, and Eden didn’t like his eyes much. Too canny and watchful, as if he’d never heard a straight answer. Or given one.
Cody poured the omelet makings into a heated pan, turned thick strips of bacon on the range grill, and gave most of his attention to the TV news while Eden curled the toes of one foot and then the other. She was still at the threshold of the open kitchen with its medieval-looking pewter hood over the range and a gourmet’s selection of hanging pots and pans. She sighed.
“Cody, have you decided you really want me here, or should I go put on my clothes and call for backup?”
He looked around at her like a man interrupted in mid-argument with himself.
“You know, I’ve had the time to do some heavy thinkin’ on that little matter.”
“Sure.” Her toes were tight, her lips tighter, bloodless.
“I want you here,” he said. “No need to bring it up again.”
Eden started to speak, couldn’t, nodded, then put her heart into an ultimatum, or a plea.
“Well—if you accept me, listen, it’s just who I am, no frills, no bullshit, and—there are things I have to explain that won’t go down easy.”
“Right now?”
“Yes. I think so. Because—” Her eyes, nervous, darted to the TV screen again.
&n
bsp; “You recognize that honcho’s on the news?”
“No.”
“Pardon, just somethin’ about your expression. I thought he might be one of those bad-hat guys you mentioned last night.”
“That was your terminology. Pesky bad-hat guys. What do you call a ‘bad hat,’ anyway?”
“Well, if it’s fur on the outside and there’s a big feather, that’s a bad hat L.A.–pimp style. But most of the time the hat has to be black and worn with the brim rolled cocky and low to the eyes. What about the Magician that’s not accounted for, Lincoln Grayle? You acquainted with him?”
“Was. I met him in Africa.” She was suddenly cold from nerves. Swallowing raw fear. “Cody, do you ever drink before breakfast?”
“There’s always a first time.”
“Why don’t you fix us a couple of snorts from that bottle of brandy you keep there on the counter for flaming crepes or whatever?”
Cody took down crystal snifters from a china cabinet and poured two ounces apiece.
“Now I think we ought to sit down while we have our brandies,” Eden said.
Cody held out a hand and escorted her to the round table, place settings for two. He closed the half shutters to mute the sun brightness in the breakfast nook.
“This isn’t going to be good, is it?” Cody said, turning his chair around and straddling it, still managing to look cheerful and ready for the hard fastball. Then he let her take her time. After a couple of minutes Eden stopped staring into the bell glass like a defrocked oracle, raised the glass, and drank her brandy neat. Cody did the same. He hadn’t taken his eyes off her.
“Have any bad dreams last night?” he asked.
“No.”
“I dreamed I got blown up on a yacht off Saudi Arabia.” Cody looked perplexed.
“Have you ever been to Saudi Arabia?”
“I can find all the sand that’s ever going to interest me in Arizona.” Cody excused himself from the table to attend to breakfast, taking the bacon off the grill, putting slices of sourdough bread in a toaster oven. “Any notion what my dream was about?”
