The Shimmer

by Carsten Stroud

  “And you think I know something about the records?”

  She raised up, the sheet dropping away—her breasts were full and shell pink and teardrop round and her nipples were small and pink and tight, perfect rosebud nipples—he looked at them—how could he not?—and she tapped his cheek, a ritual rebuke, gentle, loving, but it got his attention.

  “You are not Cletus Redding’s relative.”

  “Well, yes, I am.”

  “You are deceiving. You use language to be oblique. Yes, you are a relative, but not in any way that word is usually understood. I’m not here to play those word games. Why did the records change? You know they did. And you know that it is impossible that they changed. So tell me, please, how this impossible thing happened, because I am very unhappy with what I fear I know, and I would be very grateful if you could tell me a lie I could believe so I could go back to sleep, thinking the world is what I always thought it was.”

  “And it isn’t?”

  “The record books changed. The ink was years old, the paper ancient, the books bound in linen thread. There is no way in this world that those record books could have changed. But they did. From three days ago to now, they changed. This is impossible, but it is also true. So, I think you know the answer to this.”

  Jack looked away, came back, and in that gesture, gave it away. She saw it and took it.

  “Yes. You look away. But you are not a gifted liar. So tell me...what is happening here.”

  Jack sighed, leaned back into the pillow, looked at her, thinking, Who are you?

  “I’m not lying to you—”

  “Not yet. But you are trying to find a way.”

  “Why would I be doing that?”

  “Why did you let me come to your room?”

  “Because...I wanted you to come to my room.”

  She gave him a sideways smile.

  “After one evening at the Two Sisters? A dinner and champagne. No, I don’t believe you. I am pretty, but I am no Valkyrie.”

  That word shook him.

  Why would she use it?

  She was still giving him that sideways smile.

  “So, I would love an answer to my question.”

  “The records. How they could change?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  Jack was silent for a while, partly because he wasn’t really sure of a good answer. She seemed to get this, and softened a little.

  “Okay, you can’t find a way to answer this yet. But I think you will, if I leave you alone with it for a while. I think I know what it is even now.”

  She turned into him, resting her cheek on his chest, laying a hand lightly on his belly, putting her leg across his hips, moving into him, her full rounded tummy on his hip, her pussy warm and scented, pressing against him, her breath a whisper on his neck.

  “May I ask you another question, then?”

  “You have already asked a lot of very difficult questions.”

  “Yes,” she said. “But this one is different.”

  He kissed her forehead, and she lifted her head up for a kiss on the lips. They shared that, and then she put her head back on his chest, and said, half asleep, half in a dream, softly into his skin.

  “Have you ever known a woman named Pandora?”

  * * *

  “Yes. I have.”

  “So have I. She has been coming to me in dreams. She looks like me, but she is not me.”

  “And what has she been telling you?”

  She lay down on her belly, drew the cover over her head, leaving nothing but her perfect bottom to admire. From under the covers, she said, “You are not from around here, are you?”

  “I am here now.”

  She threw the covers off, got onto her knees, came ferociously into him.

  “I am in trouble here, real trouble, and if you are truly a good man, then you will help me. I am asking for you to tell me the truth. What is happening here? What is happening to me? Who is Pandora and why is she coming to me in my dreams? When did the records change? HOW did the records change? WHY did the records change?”

  Jack looked at her and searched his soul for a good reason to be lying to her and failed to find it. When a woman is naked in your bed, and she is asking you for the truth, and if you have some illusions about being a good man, attention must be paid. Are you a good man? Then be a good man.

  “You’re right. I’m not from around here.”

  She lifted up, sensing a break in the iceberg.

  “So, then, from where?”

  * * *

  Jack took a deep long weary breath, and then he told her everything. And she listened, as only a woman naked in your bed can listen, and she asked only a few clarifying questions, until he got to the end of his story, which was where they were right now, here in room number 319 at the Monteleone.

  She took it all in, as if memorizing it.

  Her mood got colder.

  “No. I do not believe you. This is not possible.”

  “Then how did the records change?”

  She put her head back under the covers.

  “Why can’t you tell me a story I can believe?”

  He pulled her up to him, held her close.

  “I am telling you a story you are going to have to believe, because it’s the truth.”

  A long silence. He could feel her thoughts coursing through her skin, an underground river. She sighed and looked at him, the hurt in her eyes because she felt he was lying to her for reasons she was about to understand.

  “So. You say you are from another time? And you got here by chasing this woman down a long glass hallway lined with green stone gates, and the gate that opened for you was the one that led you here, to this time and place?”

  “Yes.”

  “How can this be?”

  “I have no idea.”

  She looked into him for a long time. The hurt in her eyes slowly dissipated as she studied him.

  “You know... I think you truly believe what you are saying.”

  “Yes. I do. Can you?”

  She was quiet for a long time.

  “Can you persuade me to believe you?”

  “I’m trying right now.”

  “So who is Pandora? This person who looks like me and comes to me in my dreams.”

  “Her name was Pandora Jansson. She was a friend of mine.”

  “When?”

  “In another time.”

  “In the future, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “So why is she talking to me in my dreams?”

  “What is she saying? In your dreams?”

  “That you can’t kill this boy?”

  “What boy?”

  “I don’t know the name. Wait. Yes I do. His name is Anson. He is a bartender at the Alcazar Hotel.”

  That shook him and she saw it.

  “How do you know about the bartender at the Alcazar Hotel?”

  “As I said. Because Pandora tells me about him. This dead woman who talks to me in my dreams.”

  “The dead woman?”

  “Yes. The dead woman.”

  “Why do you think she’s dead? The Pandora I know—”

  “The Pandora you love!”

  He stopped, took that in.

  “The Pandora I love—”

  “Is dead.”

  “She isn’t dead. She is not dead. Why do you say she is dead?”

  “The night you left where you were, the night you came to here, to this time, there was a storm? Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “So in my dream, Pandora tells me this story. You are sitting together on a sofa, a bench, something like that, in a white place with windows that look out onto an ocean and there is a storm coming. It is a big black storm, full of fur
y and wind, like a hurricane, yes? And there is this motorcycle, it is green and has sparkles, and Pandora sees this white car, no, a truck, and she thinks that this truck, this white truck, is important...but you don’t. And because you don’t, some men come and she is killed.”

  “She told you this? In a dream?”

  “No...not like that. She has no memory of dying. Only of being shot, and then you go away.”

  “But she didn’t say she was dead?”

  “No. But if she isn’t dead, she is close to it. Wherever she is.”

  Jack was trying to refuse to believe that what he was most afraid of had actually happened that night, and that Pandora had been killed. Annabelle saw him making this effort and her heart went out to him.

  “So this is true, then? What Pandora is telling me? This thing actually happened? I can see in your face that you think it could have happened.”

  He sighed, looked at her, and everything that had happened to him since he and Julie Karras has spotted the black Suburban southbound on A1A rolled over him and drove him down. As she watched he seemed to fade away, and for a moment she thought he was actually going to disappear. But he didn’t. It was just an illusion. She reached out and touched him, just to make sure.

  “Actually, Annabelle, right now, in this time, none of this had happened yet. Pandora won’t even be born for another thirty years.”

  He tried for a smile, failing miserably. Annabelle considered him, her expression neutral.

  “So I’m being visited by the ghost of a dead woman who isn’t even born yet.”

  Not a question. A statement.

  Acceptance? Perhaps.

  “Yes. You are.”

  “And why is she asking me to warn you about a bartender?”

  “Because that young bartender wants to be a doctor when he grows up. And he does exactly that, and he has a long and admirable career as a surgeon working in Jacksonville and very late one Christmas Eve sixty years from now, when he is eighty-three years old, for no reason we can discover, he crosses the median on a bridge over Matanzas Inlet on the east coast of Florida and he kills my wife, Barbara, and my daughter, Katy.”

  “Is that why you are here. To kill this boy before he can kill your wife and child?”

  “No. I never meant to be here at all. I got pulled into this time stream because I was chasing the woman you know as Aurelia DiSantis.”

  “The one you call Diana Bowman?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you both—you and Clete—think she’s the same woman... What did you call her? A serial...?”

  “A serial killer, someone who kills over and over again.”

  “And you now think that this woman’s real name is Selena D’Arcy, the woman who lives at the Pontalba? Where the three people were killed?”

  “Yes. And that’s what you saw, in the records.”

  “About the records, the ones that changed?”

  “Yes.”

  “They changed a few days ago. Did they change when you got here?”

  “I think so. I think they changed because the woman Clete and I are hunting came back here, and when she came back, everything changed.”

  “Including the records?”

  “Yes.”

  “This woman...Selena D’Arcy...she is also this Diana Bowman, who is still alive sixty years from now?”

  “Yes. That’s what we think.”

  “And she can slip through time?”

  “Yes.”

  “And now she is back here?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you have followed her?”

  “I was pulled back, I think. I didn’t intend to follow. I was caught up...”

  “In what?”

  “In the Shimmer.”

  “What is the Shimmer?”

  “It’s something that happens when people die. I think something opens up when they die, and this woman knows how to ride that force.”

  “Ride the Shimmer, back in time?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  “And now you are here. Hunting her. But you also have the death of your wife and daughter. And now you know where the man who will kill her sixty years from now is working? As a bartender at the Alcazar Hotel, in St. Augustine?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you believe that if you kill this boy, this bartender, who wishes someday to be a doctor, then sixty years from now he will not kill your wife and child?”

  “Yes. Yeah, that’s about it.”

  “So there is this question.”

  “Yes?”

  “This is what Pandora has been saying to me, in my dreams. If he dies now, this boy, how many people will not be saved by him?”

  He had already considered this.

  It was the main question, the one Clete had asked, as well. How many lives were his wife and child worth?

  “Actually, I think I might try to kill him later—”

  She smiled at him.

  “Closer to the death moment?”

  “Yes. That’s what I was thinking.”

  “But you tell me you have no control over this...traveling thing. Through time?”

  He admitted this.

  “So then how will you manage to arrive at exactly the right time? Before your wife and child are dead, but after this boy has saved all the lives he can save?”

  Jack had no answer for this.

  “So what if you just made sure your wife isn’t on this bridge on Christmas Eve?”

  “Same problem. I have no control over this thing. I may not even be able to go back at all.”

  “Well,” she said, “I have mixed emotions about that,” and she kissed him softly, and then not so softly. The champagne was gone.

  She released him, sighing, said something pithy in a Cajun dialect, got on the phone and ordered up another bottle of Dom, came back to him.

  “So...”

  “Yes?”

  “So... I believe you. I believe all of it.”

  “Because of the way the records changed?”

  “That, yes, but also because of what Pandora is telling me. I hadn’t even met you when she started talking to me. Yet I knew about the bartender at the Alcazar. And the records have changed. There is no other explanation for any of this. It has to be true. It’s impossible, but it is also true.”

  “That’s what you said this evening, and earlier, at The Court of the Two Sisters.”

  “There is one thing we are not talking about, and we should.”

  “Yes. Where is Philomena? Where did she come from, what was her connection to Will D’Arcy and why did she kill them all?”

  “Yes. And where is she now?”

  Jack considered her for a while.

  “I think we both know where Philomena is now.”

  “Do we?”

  “If Selena D’Arcy was killed at the age of five—”

  “Yes. She was. The records were very clear on that. I read all the reports. She’s buried with her mother and father—with Bea and Will—in a cemetery in Plaquemine Parish Church.”

  “Then who is there left to be Selena?”

  Annabelle got that in a heartbeat.

  “The one who was never found. Philomena?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a knock at the door.

  Jack pulled on a bathrobe and answered the door, a bellman with a silver ice bucket full of ice and champagne and two fresh crystal glasses, the shallow bowl-shaped ones they used before flutes became popular.

  He tipped the boy and closed the door and came back into the bedroom, eased the cork out of the bottle and poured two glasses while Annabelle watched him.

  He came back to bed, leaned into the pillows, sighing. “So, you believe me?”

  “Yes. I do. We nee
d to find out more about Philomena. Go to the hospital and look at their records. And then we need to confront Selena—or Philomena—whoever she really is.”

  “Yes. In the morning. We’ll drive there.”

  “Yes.”

  She paused, took a breath.

  “But I have two questions? Before you make love with me again.”

  “Yes?”

  “The first is, do I look like Pandora?”

  “Yes. You could be her twin.”

  “So I am Pandora in another life?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  “And you loved her?”

  “Yes. I did.”

  “So you loved me, then? When I was Pandora?”

  “Yes.”

  “And now you love me, here in this time?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “Because of who you think I am? Or who I will be sixty-one years from now?”

  “Because of who you are right now.”

  She kissed him, a slow lingering kiss, pulled away a few inches, looking into his eyes.

  “That is a very good answer.”

  And because it was a very good answer, they didn’t go anywhere in the morning. They stayed in bed, more or less, not counting some time spent in the shower and a couple of interludes on the sofa in the parlor, all day and into the night.

  Clete, who was nothing if not discreet, left them to themselves.

  never send to know for whom the phone rings

  With Jack clearly occupied elsewhere, Clete spent the next couple of days wandering the streets of New Orleans. He went to the Hall of Records, where he confirmed that the Tenancy Logs for the Pontalba were exactly as Annabelle had described them.

  He called Mary Alice at the Forrests’, had a lovely talk, and she reassured him that there was a patrol car out front, that it had arrived there late Sunday night, and that she was certainly not going for a drive until she heard from him again. He told her he loved her, and she told him that she loved him very much, and they said goodbye.

  Adrift, lonely, vaguely envious of Jack and his Annabelle, he thought about Aurelia DiSantis and Jack the Time Traveler, and what his own future might be like. Tuesday evening he ended up at The Court of the Two Sisters again, where he drank quite a bit, and then he drank some more at the Carousel Bar at the Monteleone, and then he went—unsteadily—to bed.