For a moment he stood beside him. The old man smelled like carnations. Against his yellow skin broken capillaries bloomed blue and crimson. Andrew hesitated. Then he bowed his head until his lips grazed Howell’s scalp. He turned away to replace the booklet on its shelf and went to bed.
* * * *
That night the wind woke Howell. Cold gripped him as he sat up in bed, and his hand automatically reached for Festus. The dog was not beside him.
“Festus?” he called softly, then slid from bed, pulling on his robe and catching his breath before walking across the bedroom to the window.
A nearly full moon hung above the pine forest, dousing the snow so that it glowed silvery blue. Deer and rabbits had made tracks steeped in shadow at wood’s edge. He stood gazing at the sky when a movement at the edge of the field caught him.
In the snow an animal jumped and rolled, its fur a fiery gleam against the whiteness. Howell gasped in delight: a fox, tossing the snow and crunching it between its black jaws. Then something else moved. The old man shook his head in disbelief.
“Festus.”
Clumsily, sinking over his head in the drifts, the spaniel tumbled and rose beside the fox, the two of them playing in the moonlight. Clouds of white sparkled about them as the fox leaped gracefully to land beside the dog, rolling until it was only an auburn blur.
Howell held his breath, moving away from the window so that his shadow could not disturb them. Then he recalled the boy sleeping in the next room.
“Andrew,” he whispered loudly, his hand against the wall to steady himself as he walked into the room. “Andrew, you have to see something.”
The window seat was empty. The door leading outside swung open, hanging against the wall in the frigid wind. Howell turned and walked toward the door, finally stopping and clinging to the frame as he stared outside.
In the snow lay a green hospital gown, blown several feet from the door. Bare footprints extended a few yards into the field. Howell followed them. Where the shadows of the house fell behind him, the footprints ended. Small pawprints marked the drifts, leading across the field to where the fox and dog played.
He lifted his head and stared at them. He saw where Festus’ tracks ran off to the side of the house and then back to join the other’s. As he watched, the animals abruptly stopped. Festus craned his head to look back at his master and then floundered joyfully through the drifts to meet him. Howell stepped forward. He stared from the tracks to the two animals, yelled in amazement and stood stark upright. Then stumbling he tried to run toward them. When Festus bounded against his knees the man staggered and fell. The world tilted from white to swirling darkness.
It was light when he came to. Beside him hunched the boy, his face red and tear streaked.
“Major Howell,” he said. “Please—”
The old man sat up slowly, pulling the blankets around him. He stared for a moment at Andrew, then at the far door where the flagstones shone from melted snow.
“I saw it,” he whispered. “What you did, I saw it.”
Andrew shook his head. “Don’t— You can’t—”
Howell reached for his shoulder and squeezed it. “How does it work?”
Andrew stared at him, silent.
“How does it work?” Howell repeated excitedly. “How can you do it?”
The boy bit his lip. Howell’s face was scarlet, his eyes feverishly bright. “I—it’s this,” Andrew said at last, pulling the amulet from his chest. “It was my mother’s. I took it when she died.”
His hands shaking, Howell gently took the stone between his fingers, rubbing the frayed string. “Magic,” he said.
Andrew shivered despite the fire at his back. “It’s from here. The Indians. The Tankiteke. There were lots, my mother said. Her grandfather found it when he was little. My father—” He ended brokenly.
Howell nodded in wonder. “It works,” he said. “I saw it work.”
Andrew swallowed and drew back a little, so that the amulet slipped from Howell’s hand. “Like this,” he explained, opening his mouth and slipping one finger beneath his tongue. “But you don’t swallow it.”
“I saw you,” the old man repeated. “I saw you playing with my dog.” He nodded at Festus, dozing in front of the fire. “Can you be anything?”
Andrew bit his lip before answering. “I think so. My mother said you just concentrate on it—on what you want. See—”
And he took it into his hand, held it out so that the firelight illuminated it. “It’s like all these things in one. Look: it’s got wings and horns and hooves.”
“And that’s how you hid from them.” Howell slapped his knees. “No wonder they never found you.”
Andrew nodded glumly.
“Well,” Howell coughed. He sank back into the chair, eyes closed. He reached for Andrew, and the boy felt the old man’s hand tighten about his own, cold and surprisingly strong. After a minute Howell opened his eyes. He looked from the flames to Andrew and held the boy’s gaze for a long time, silent. Then,
“You could fly with something like that,” he said. “You could fly again.”
Andrew let his breath out in a long shudder. “That’s right,” he said finally beneath his breath. He turned away. “You could fly again, Major Howell.”
Howell reached for the boy’s hand again, his fingers clamping there like a metal hinge. “Thank you,” he whispered. “I think I’ll go to sleep now.”
* * * *
The following afternoon the plow came. Andrew heard it long before it reached Sugar Mountain, an eager roar like a great wave overtaking the snowbound bungalow. The phone was working, too; he heard Howell in the next room, talking between fits of coughing. A short time later a pickup bounced up the drive. Andrew stared in disbelief, then fled into the bathroom, locking the door behind him.
He heard several voices greeting Howell at the door, the thump of boots upon the flagstones.
“Thank you, Isaac,” wheezed the astronaut. Andrew heard the others stomp into the kitchen. “I was out of everything.” Andrew opened the door a crack and peered out, glaring at Festus when the dog scratched at it.
Howell motioned the visitors into the bedroom, shutting the door behind him. Andrew listened to their murmuring voices before storming back into the living room. He huddled out of sight on the window seat, staring outside until they left. After the pickup rattled back down the mountainside, he stalked into the kitchen to make dinner.
“I didn’t tell them,” Howell said mildly that evening as they sat before the fire.
Andrew glared at him but said nothing.
“They wouldn’t be interested,” Howell said. Every breath now shook him like a cold wind. “Andrew…”
The boy sat in silence, his hand tight around the amulet. Finally Howell stood, knocking over his glass of scotch. He started to bend to retrieve it when Andrew stopped him.
“No,” he said hoarsely. “Not like that.” He hesitated, then said, “You ever see a drunk dog?”
Howell stared at him, then nodded. “Yes.”
“It’s like that,” said Andrew. “Only worse.”
Festus followed them as they walked to the door, Andrew holding the old man’s elbow. For a moment they hesitated. Then Andrew shoved the door open, wincing at the icy wind that stirred funnels of snow in the field.
“It’s so cold,” Howell whispered, shivering inside his flannel robe.
“It won’t be so bad,” said Andrew, helping him outside.
They stood in the field. Overhead the full moon bloomed as Festus nosed after old footprints. Andrew stepped away from Howell, then took the talisman from around his own neck.
“Like I told you,” he said as he handed it to the old man.
Howell hesitated. “It’ll work for me?”
Andrew clutched his arms, shivering. “I think so,” he said, gazing at the amulet in the man’s hand. “I think you can be whatever you want.”
Howell nodded and turned away. “Don’t l
ook,” he whispered.
Andrew stared at his feet. A moment later the flannel robe blew against his ankles. He heard a gasp and shut his eyes, willing away the tears before opening them again.
In front of Andrew the air sparkled for an instant with eddies of snow. Beside him, Festus whined, staring above his head. Andrew looked up and saw a fluttering scrap like a leaf: a bat squeaking as its wings beat feebly, then more powerfully, as if drawing strength from the freezing wind. It circled the boy’s head—once, twice—then began to climb, higher and higher, until Andrew squinted to see it in the moonlight.
“Major Howell!” he shouted. “Major Howell!”
To Howell the voice sounded like the clamor of vast and thundering bells. All the sky now sang to him as he flailed through the air, rising above trees and roof and mountain. He heard the faint buzzing of the stars, the sigh of snow in the trees fading as he flew above the pines into the open sky.
And then he saw it: more vast than ever it had been from the orbiter, so bright his eyes could not bear it. And the sound! like the ocean, waves of air dashing against him, buffeting him as he climbed, the roar and crash and peal of it as it pulled him upward. His wings beat faster, the air sharp in his throat, thinning as the darkness fell behind him and the noise swelled with the brightness, light now everywhere, and sound, not silent or dead as they had told him but thundering and burgeoning with heat, light, the vast eye opening like a volcano’s core. His wings ceased beating and he drifted upward, all about him the glittering stars, the glorious clamor, the great and shining face of the moon, his moon at last: the moon.
* * * *
Andrew spent the night pacing the little house, sitting for a few minutes on sofa or kitchen counter, avoiding the back door, avoiding the windows, avoiding Howell’s bedroom. Festus followed him, whining. Finally, when the snow glimmered with first light, Andrew went outside to look for Howell.
It was Festus who found him after just a few minutes, in a shallow dell where ferns would grow in the spring and deer sleep on the bracken. Now snow had drifted where the old man lay. He was naked, and even from the lawn Andrew could tell he was dead. The boy turned and walked back to the house, got Howell’s flannel robe and a blanket. He was shaking uncontrollably when he went back out.
Festus lay quietly beside the body, muzzle resting on his paws. Andrew couldn’t move Howell to dress him: the body was rigid from the cold. So he gently placed the robe over the emaciated frame, tucked the blanket around him. Howell’s eyes were closed now, and he had a quiet expression on his face. Not like Andrew’s mother at all, really: except that one hand clutched something, a grimy bit of string trailing from it to twitch across the snow. Andrew knelt, shivering, and took one end of the string, tugged it. The amulet slid from Howell’s hand.
Andrew stumbled to his feet and held it at arm’s length, the little stone talisman twisting slowly. He looked up at the sky. In the west, above the cottage, the moon hung just above the horizon. Andrew turned to face the dark bulk of Sugar Mountain, its edges brightening where the sun was rising above Lake Muscanth. He pulled his arm back and threw the amulet as hard as he could into the woods. Festus raised his head to watch the boy. They both waited, listening; but there was no sound, nothing to show where it fell. Andrew wiped his hands on his pants and looked down at the astronaut again. He stooped and let the tip of one finger brush the old man’s forehead. Then he went inside to call the police.
There were questions, and people from newspapers and TV, and Andrew’s own family, overjoyed (he couldn’t believe it, they all cried) to see him again. And eventually it was all straightened out.
There was a service at the old Congregational church in Kamensic Village near the museum. After the first thaw they buried Howell in the small local cemetery, beside the farmers and Revolutionary War dead. A codicil to his will left the dog Festus to the fourteen-year-old runaway discovered to have been living with the dying astronaut in his last days. The codicil forbade sale of the bungalow and Sugar Mountain, the property to revert to the boy upon his twentieth birthday. Howell’s son protested this: Sugar Mountain was worth a fortune now, the land approved for subdivisions with two-acre zoning. But the court found the will to be valid, witnessed as it was by Isaac and Seymour Schelling, village grocers and public notaries.
When he finished school, Andrew moved into the cottage at Sugar Mountain. Festus was gone by then, buried where the deer still come to sleep in the bracken. There is another dog now, a youngish English cocker spaniel named Apollo. The ancient Volkswagen continues to rust in the driveway, next to a Volvo with plates that read NASA NYC. The plows and phone company attend to the cottage somewhat more reliably, and there is a second phone line as well, since Andrew needs to transmit things to the city and Washington nearly every day now, snow or not.
In summer he walks with the dog along the sleepy dirt road, marking where an owl has killed a vole, where vulpine tracks have been left in the soft mud by Lake Muscanth. And every June he visits the elementary school and shows the fifth graders a videotape from his private collection: views of the moon’s surface filmed by Command Module Pilot Eugene Howell.
* * * *
Author’s note: Nicholas Margalis’ manuscript is in the archives of the National Air & Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution.
In memory of Nancy Malawista and Brian Hart
<
* * * *
When the Rose Is Dead
DAVID ZINDELL
T
HIS IS the saddest story I know.”
On a gray winter night in the Endless City, in an alley off Blue Zone’s D-Street, four friends sat around a blazing oil drum, swapping stories. One-Eyed Nick was the oldest, and sometimes, the wisest of them. He fed some trash into the drum, and he adjusted his black eye patch as he addressed the other three. “This is the saddest story I know,” he repeated, “about a doctor who fell in love with a woman named Rose.” He stood with his back to fire, careless of the flames heating up his greasy parka and overalls; he had worked in a hospital once, often in the incinerator room, so he had learned not to worry about fire or grease. “Have I told you this story before?”
“No,” the Napalm Man said gravely. He sat on a pile of boxes beneath some covered parking. The whole tottering structure pinged with raindrops striking rusty metal; when the wind gusted, smoke from the oil drum blew over him. He was hunched over in his expensive but shabby trenchcoat, and he methodically sipped from a bottle of whiskey wrapped up in a brown paper bag. “No, tell us, Nick.”
A huge, damaged man called Sarge reluctantly agreed and said, “You never told us nothing. Well, almost nothing. Where’d you say the doctor met Rose, in the damned Ninth Sector of the goddamned Black Zone?” He fingered the scars crisscrossing the top of his bald head, then he muttered something that sounded like, “Aw, hell, I just want simplicity, ya mean?”
Atop the box between Sarge and the Napalm Man, a gaunt, old woman rocked slowly back and forth. One-Eyed Nick could see that she had once been striking-looking, but he couldn’t quite remember her name, couldn’t guess what she was thinking, because her face was as hard and sharp as the brick splinters of the bombed-out buildings down on G-Street. Her eyes were dark and silent, and if she remembered that poor, cut-up Sarge’s “ya mean?” was short for “Do you know what I mean?”, if she understood half of what they were saying or knew the meaning of anything at all, he couldn’t tell.
One-Eyed Nick smiled at her sadly. Had he told this story before? He remembered that he had a Ph.D. in molecular biology, and was wanted for some crime or other, but he couldn’t remember what he had eaten for dinner that evening or an old woman’s name. He sighed, shrugged his shoulders, and continued, “It was during the ninety-first phase of the war, just before the armistice with the Red Zone—a bad time, you know. And for Dr. Stone—that was his name, have I told you?—the worst time, the very worst. He was a doctor in the Zone Hospital, a psychiatrist, it’s true, but you know, some psyc
hiatrists actually help people, or at least try to. He’d spent most of his residency doing implants; in fact, he was well known for developing the biochips they used in the soldiers, in the really sad cases, the ones with serious head wounds. He should never have transferred out of the implant ward. But he was ambitious, Doctor Stone. Was it enough that he’d published articles in the Black Zone Journal of Medicine, that he was respected, maybe even close to being famous? No, it wasn’t enough. He wanted to learn how the mind really worked, to know. He could see that the big breakthroughs were coming from the remedial education ward. Deconstruction and reconstruction—he was fascinated with the idea of helping wound victims remember, with the fleshing out of beliefs and belief systems. Who wouldn’t be? And, of course, with the memories, recovering lost memories, or sometimes, creating memories where there hadn’t even been any memories. Creating— even though he wouldn’t have admitted it to anybody, he was just like a lot of doctors; I think he wanted to play God. And you have to be careful about what you want, you know, because you just might get it. After the Director of Psychiatry reviewed Dr. Stone’s application, he assigned him an unlimited security clearance. And then, when Dr. Stone found out what really went on in the remedial education ward, he just about went nuts, as nuts as any of the patients in the schizo or autistic ward. He wanted to back out, but a lot of times, in the Black Zone, there’s no way out. And anyway, after he’d done ten or twenty deconstructions it was too late for him because he was as hardened and numbed as the rest of the doctors.”
Full Spectrum 3 - [Anthology] Page 67
