The Shimmer
Page 15
“So, what did you find?”
She held up the iPhone.
“Would you like to see it?”
“Yes. I would.”
She flicked through the apps, found Photos, clicked on Videos. Touched Play. They were getting a spider’s-eye view of the hospital room, from a corner position up near the ceiling, covering the hospital bed and the people standing around, Mace and Jack standing a little closer, Karen in the middle of the video, with her head on Pandora’s shoulder, Pandora sitting on the bed, comforting her. It was in high-def and color, but there was no sound. When you’re talking to a subject who might be indicted based on what she says, and she’s underage, and she doesn’t have a lawyer, you don’t want sound.
“I only took the cut with...what I saw. It’s coming up. This is where you were asking her about the Shimmer and what Bowman could do with it.”
“Actually, that was you.”
“Whatever. Here it comes. Watch this.”
Karen was leaning on Pandora’s shoulder, then, in response to something that was said, she jerked back, and started shaking her head—you could see her mouth the words—you don’t know what she can do—and then she starts to struggle—Jack goes for the knapsack, roots around it in it—comes up with the blue canister. Karen reaches for it, pauses and shakes her head—no mine was silver—and now the head nurse comes into the shot, moving fast and with authority.
She plucks the puffer out of Jack’s hand, gets it onto Karen’s mouth, supporting her back as she does so—Karen inhales once, twice—three times, and then she arches backward and starts to convulse.
“This is hard to watch,” said Pandora. “But it’s right here. Don’t blink.”
Karen was writhing on the bed, arched into a bow, her hands clutching at the sheets, her head thrown back...
“Jeez,” said Jack, in a hoarse whisper.
“I know. Me too. But watch.”
Karen stiffens—her face is scarlet and her mouth an open wound—teeth bared—then she stops, stops like a freeze-frame in a film. And there is a flash so bright it seems to burn out the lens. It is there—bright white—vibrating—blue around the corona—it fills the frame like a white-hot flower—and then...it’s gone, and the film runs on as the crash team floods into the room—all the busy pointless things get done...then it’s over. Karen is dead.
“You saw that? Jack?”
“I don’t know. A reflection?”
“Off what? Mace’s skull?”
“Flaw in the hard drive?”
“No. The techs checked it. There’s nothing wrong with it. And they did a Gaussian read on it. That flare is real, it flamed up in a nanosecond but the source—where it started, the epicenter—was Karen Walker. Karen Walker at the moment of her death.”
“Play it again. Can you slow it down?”
“I can.”
And she did. Slower, faster, freeze-frame.
It was always the same. That sudden incandescent flower of blue light, flaring out at the speed of light, filling the room, burning into the lens, whiting out the image—and then gone. They watched it a few more times, as if something different was going to happen on the thirteenth repeat. Then they sat back into the couch, feeling battered, limp. And utterly at sea.
The outside world was hammering on the roof, the room lights were flickering low, like a candle flaming out. The street was full dark, lit by stroboscopic explosions of sheet lightning. There was an end-of-the-world feeling rising up in the room, and it occurred to Pandora that what she really needed right now was for Jack Redding—who was so close his heat was warming her core—to turn to her and—and the front door blew inward in a blinding flash, a deafening booming concussion—men were rushing into the room—four, now five—wearing rain slicks. Men with guns—Vizzini soldiers. And a woman came behind them—Diana Bowman—bringing the fire that Tessio had promised her.
Pandora and Jack went for their weapons—the room was lit by strobing gunfire and Pandora felt something like a sledgehammer hit her in the right hip.
She had her gun up and was firing it—carefully—but firing fast—she felt Jack at her side, a little in front of her—his face lit up by the muzzle flashes—a round zipped by her ear—she saw her bullets strike three of the Vizzini gunmen—she felt herself going down—saw Jack on his knees in front of her, firing his weapon into the pack of men—stillness and a hush was enveloping her—and then Jack was above her—bending over her—a woman—the Bowman woman—was standing over them both—the room was suddenly silent and it stank of cordite and blood and ozone.
The woman had a gun and she held it to the back of Jack’s head. Her eyes flicked to the locket, lying on the coffee table.
“My locket.”
She reached for it, and Jack grabbed her by the wrist, pulling her down, and as she fell her weapon fired again—there was a bright blinding flash—and everything went away for Pandora Jansson, everything went hushed and silent, and she fell all the way into the silence.
selena finds a curved space in the air
Selena was in the Long Hall and she knew it very well, although she only remembered anything about it when she was inside it. It rose up and curved away into the shining blue distance, into a shimmering vanishing point that was always receding. There were lights in the ceiling, embedded in what looked like glass but might have been ice and she ran into and out of the pools the lights cast on the floor, which was also made of glass, but glass so clear she could see through it.
She saw what looked like the lights of a great city far down in the velvet darkness, grids and circles and squares of glittering lights in green and gold and red and blue and violet, streets and lanes and avenues, and other patterns too, leaf shaped with glowing silver veins that might have been rivers flowing in valleys between mountains, and diamonds and spheres and discs of pulsing light.
It was too dark to see anything but those ghost lights far away down in the dark and she had no time to think about them.
Because she could feel the man following her down the hallway, a dark force, closing in on her, relentless, and it terrified her, because no one had ever followed her into the Shimmer.
But he was there, chasing her down the hallway... There were doors—gates really—tall arches set into the glassy walls lining the hallway—hundreds and hundreds of them—perhaps thousands perhaps millions—although she had never gone that far down the tunnel—each one identical—a wide Gothic arch of green stone with inlaid bands of polished steel stretching away into the blue distance—and they were all marked with signs—bars and oblongs and diamonds and circles in some silvery metal that shone with a pale moonlight glow in the haloes of light from the ceiling—signs that seemed to have a meaning that floated just beneath the surface of her understanding, and if she only had a moment to study them their meaning would arise and become clear.
But she didn’t, she couldn’t, because he was right there, so close behind her she could feel his radiance, his force, his heat, a steel-gray shape flying down the hallway behind her, flickering in and out of the ceiling lights, getting closer, and this had never happened before—or had it?
She had the lost locket in her closed hand—she had a faint memory of how it had gotten into that policeman’s hands—and the locket radiated there, burning her skin, and the sheer joy she should have felt because she had it back again was muted and faint. She had not expected to find it in that policeman’s house, but in another part of her mind—that part that only opened up for her when she was in the Long Hall—she had always known where it would be.
But she could savor its return later, right now she had to evade the man chasing her...so she ran faster and faster...scanning the gates looking for something familiar—a sign a shape—she didn’t know what it would be, but when she saw it she would know, because that was what memory was like when she was inside the Shimmer—
And then, there it was.
The marking signs were clear, and she stopped—the gate towered above her—she pressed her hand against the stone, it was as hot as the skin on her belly—it turned into a shimmering green cloud—and she stepped into the gate...
* * *
...and the sun was hot on her face, and the air was full of the sound of motorboats and yachts plying the open waters of Matanzas Harbor on the other side of Bay Street, and she could feel Tessio’s hands on her, smell his cigar scent on the linen of his splendid suit, feel the hairs sprouting from his ear tickle her cheek... She suppressed a shudder, and he pulled away to hold her and look at her in the shadow under the portico of the Monterey Court—
“You shiver, Carrissima? You are cold?”
She shook her head, noticing a heavy black Ford parked across the street, the sun lying harsh on its dusty hide. The driver’s-side window had been rolled down, but the sun was on the car and she could make out nothing of who might be inside. But the car looked...official.
Tessio was still holding her, wondering now, and she didn’t want him to wonder, she wanted him to desire. In her mind a faint memory of a winding tunnel...a feeling of being pursued...hovered there for a moment, and then went away, a mirage, fading into nothing, leaving only a curved space in the air. So she stopped looking at the dusty Ford sedan across the street, although she did not stop thinking about it.
That was something for later. Right now, she had Tessio to deal with, and that was enough.
“I am fine, lover,” she said, kissing his neck, which she knew he loved, and pulling back.
“Let’s go inside. I must have you. I must have you now!”
Tessio, breathing like a bull, smelling like a bull, heavy as a bull, trotted after her into the dark of the Monterey Court Motel lobby.
His breathing was labored and rapid and she knew from bitter experience that the afternoon would be long, long and wearisome.
* * *
Out in the street the cars and trucks and buses flowed by, and the sun began to slide into the far west, and in the black Ford across Bay Street, Clete Redding snapped a final shot.
Clete was using a Nikon S for this job. It was rock-solid steel, a great lens, used 35 mm film, and the shutter was smooth as silk. No loud clattering sound as he snapped the photos. He had her right in the picture—she was kissing Tessio Vizzini very well, and, although he loved his wife, the lovely Mary Alice, whom he adored, Clete felt a pang of carnal envy just watching them get all tangled up in each other under the portico of the Monterey Court Motel.
Annamaria, Tessio Vizzini’s wife, was Sicilian aristocracy, from her lush and sensual body down to her perfectly manicured toes. If she knew what was going on every Wednesday afternoon at the Monterey Court Motel she would cut Vizzini’s heart out with an ice-cream scoop. And take several days to do it.
Vizzini knew this, but Vizzini had this new girl dug right in under his ribs and he was willing to risk his liver and lights to get the rest of her underneath him.
Clete leaned back, watching them as they disappeared under the shadows of the Monterey Court entrance, a final flicker of sunlight reflecting off the closing door. He set the camera down, leaned back, sighed, mopped his sweating face—it was ninety degrees out and the inside of the car was an oven—and looked into his rearview mirror, where a large man in some kind of gray uniform was looking back at him. He jerked his revolver out of his belt, turned with a snarl to stick it in the guy’s face... The seat was empty.
Empty.
No.
One.
There.
objects in the mirror are closer than they appear
Jack knew precisely where he was. Or at least, where he had decided to believe he was. Unless he was dead or dying—always a possibility—he’d seen An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge when he was just a kid but it had stayed with him—but if he wasn’t dead or dying, then the view out the window told him that he was sitting in the backseat of his grandfather Clete Redding’s detective car.
How he had gotten here he had no idea, but, in some weird way, he had been expecting something like this ever since he saw Diana Bowman’s face in a picture that was sixty-one years old.
They were parked on Bay Street, across the road from the Monterey Court Motel—Mr. and Mrs. W. H. McLain, Proprietors—and the time was probably going to be 1430 hours on the afternoon of Saturday the twenty-fourth of August in the year 1957. Clete was shooting the surveillance photos that he and Pandora had been looking at—seconds ago?
Or sixty-one years in the future?
He did have a trace memory, fading fast, of a long curved tunnel, pools of light on a glass floor that seemed to be made of stars, and a great green gate with silver letters... but even as he thought of it, the image shimmered into a curved space in the air and was gone from him.
And he didn’t care.
How this could be?
That all this should have happened, and he didn’t care? Tell you in a moment...
* * *
Jack sat in the backseat of the Ford, accepting all of this, in a way savoring it, mostly because his life back in the future had been a terrible burden ever since last Christmas, a crushing weight of grief that was driving him into the ground, so much so that a grave seemed like a fine and private place, and he had spent far too many nights thinking about the .45 in his gun belt.
Thinking about that gun brought him to Pandora, whom he had loved, before Barbara, and whom he was beginning to love again, after Barbara, and he thought about her for a while, what a loving heart she was, and he was sorry that he had lied to her about the way the gun had been calling to him.
He hoped she was okay—last time he’d seen her she was shooting very well, like the Valkyrie she was—maybe she’ll turn up here too—or she might be dead, killed in that gunfight—he deeply and passionately wished that this not be true, and that she was safely back in the future right now, picking through the pockets of several dead men and talking on the radio to Mace Dixon.
But then he might be dead too—and since he had no power over any of this, or even to tell if any of it was real at all—perhaps it was all a vivid dream—he let it all roll over him.
So he sat there, feeling the bake-oven heat, hearing the mutter and growl and hiss of motorboats and sailing ships and cruisers out on Matanzas Bay, hearing the far-off cry of gulls shrieking and wheeling, and the roaring of the Atlantic far away in the east, beyond Conch Island. Was it real, or just the last few seconds of his life bleeding away? Again, he didn’t care.
One thought ruled him now.
It filled his mind and drove out every other consideration. And it was this: if this really was the past, and not the last flickering sparks from his dying brain, then the future hadn’t happened yet. And Barbara and Katy, not yet born, were not yet dead. So he was going with that.
He was going with hope.
* * *
Clete looked into the rearview mirror. The guy was still there. Then he turned around and looked into the backseat, and the guy still wasn’t there. He decided not to do this a third time because it was just going to make him feel like an idiot. He looked at the guy in his rearview, and after a moment gave him a sideways grin.
“Okay. I’ve had too much to drink. Right?”
Jack shook his head.
“No. You haven’t. I mean, maybe, but that’s not why I’m here.”
“I’ve had a stroke? I’m dead and you’re some kind of fucking butt-ugly angel?”
“Pretty sure I’m not.”
“Then...what the fuck are you?”
“What
do I look like?”
Clete considered him in the mirror.
“That’s a uniform. You’re Florida Highway Patrol. A sergeant.”
“Yeah. I am.”
“That a nameplate, on your tunic?”
Jack had forgotten about it.
“Yes. It is.”
Clete leaned into the mirror, changed the angle.
Sat back, rubbed his hands over his face.
“‘Redding.’ It says ‘Redding.’”
“Yes. It does.”
“And that’s your name. Redding.”
“Yes.”
“Are we related?”
“We are.”
Clete sighed, blowing his lips out, watching the cars go up and down Bay Street for a while.
“Do I want to know how?”
“I don’t know if you do. I’m still trying to work out the complications myself. I’m not real sure what the hell is going on here either.”
Clete spent a few minutes fooling around with the camera and the film cases, stowed them in the passenger foot well, opened the glove compartment and pulled out a small bottle of Southern Comfort, turned to offer it to the man who still wasn’t in the backseat, stopped himself, and took a short sharp pull on it. Sighed again.
“You’re sure I’m not having a stroke?”
“Yeah, I think so. Try not to have one now, okay?”
“I’ll try. What the fuck are you, then?”
“I’m as real as you are.”
“That’s a slick way of saying one of us is hallucinating.”
“But we’re not.”
“Okay. Tell me as much as you can. I’ll figure it out from there.”
“Well, I have a couple of conditions.”
“Rules, you mean?”
“Yeah. Before I get into this, just to check the boxes. This is Saturday, August 24, 1957. And we’re in St. Augustine, Florida. It’s around 2:30 in the afternoon. And you’re Clete Redding, and you’re a Detective First Grade with the Robbery Homicide Division of the Jacksonville Police Department.”