Nobody's Home: An Anubis Gates Story

by Tim Powers

  Jacky exhaled shakily. “Then I can spare quite a few drops.” She stepped away from the boiler toward the doors in the forward bulkhead, and Harriet was right behind her.

  Jacky and Harriet each crouched through one of the doors on either side of the narrow linen tent, and in the darkness beyond hers, Jacky felt her way for a couple of feet and soon touched the back bulkhead of what must have been a storage closet. Her boots had tangled in a length of cloth, and when she unsnagged it and felt it, she concluded that it was some sort of heavy woolen nightshirt. After a moment’s wary hesitation she decided that it would do, and that the possibility of her clothing being stolen here was remote, and so she tugged her wet clothes and boots off and pulled the woolen garment on over her head. She was unarmed, but the Nobody fellow didn’t seem strong, and if he tried anything she’d brain him with his clytemnestra or whatever the thing was called.

  She pushed open the door and was startled again by the green radiance from the two lamps—lamps he’ll bide in, she thought, while the oil goes replenished—as the other door opened and Harriet came out on her hands and knees, blinking. Jacky saw that they were both now wearing white robes—her own a bit wet and grimy in spots from being stepped on. The deck was chilly under her bare feet.

  “The pistol would be good to have,” spoke up Nobody, who had pulled a stool out from under the table and was now sitting down. His hands were open and palm-up in front of him.

  “It’s, uh, soaked,” Jacky pointed out.

  “Good to have,” repeated Nobody.

  Jacky shrugged, stepped back into the storage locker and returned with her dripping flintlock; after glancing around the cabin, she laid it beside the clay jar on the table.

  The man smiled, exposing two rows of little rounded teeth, and the boat shook as if it had run aground. White light flickered for a moment outside the portholes.

  He took no visible notice of it. He opened a cabinet on the starboard bulkhead and fetched out an inkpot, a pen, and two sheets of paper, and he laid them on the table beside Jacky’s pistol.

  “Dip the pen in the ink,” he said to Harriet, “and hold it and one of the papers.” When she had complied, he asked her, “Who is your ghost?”

  She visibly took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. “My husband, Moraji. He was from India. We were married almost three years ago, had two babies who died. He died a month ago, falling from a roof. Now that he’s dead he wants to burn me up.”

  The man nodded, as if this was not uncommon. He turned again to the cabinet, and this time it was a pint bottle of gin and a bowl of chocolate squares that he set down on the table. For a grotesque moment Jacky thought he was offering them refreshments.

  But, “Ghosts will come to candy and liquor,” he said, stepping away now toward the tent.

  “Moraji didn’t like candy,” said Harriet unsteadily, “and he didn’t drink.”

  “I said ghosts,” said Nobody. “Where you stand is up here, by the circle. Both, both.”

  Jacky and Harriet padded across the deck and stood beside the tent, and Nobody pulled the linen flap to one side; within stood a rough column of stone, four feet high and two feet wide, broken off on top. It looked like impure jade in this light, but when Nobody took off his spectacles and struck them against the stone, Jacky guessed what it was.

  “The other piece of the London Stone,” she said.

  “We were just there,” said Harriet faintly.

  Dropping the eyeglasses, both lenses of which were shattered, Nobody turned to the girls; his face was blank, and his eyes still seemed unnaturally small in his round face, like two raisins in a pudding.

  The gin bottle rattled on the table, and several of the chocolate squares burst apart.

  “Yes,” he said, and his voice was now definitely echoing. “The greater piece. A hundred years ago the Worshipful Company of Spectacle Makers used to break eyeglasses like these on it, on holy days, with priests in attendance and green stones in a hopscotch pattern on the street. And I’ve broken on it the lenses that held your ghosts.”

  A sudden cold wind was blowing across Jacky’s bare ankles, and when she spun around she saw a streak of white moonlight on the ladder that led to the upper deck; the hatch-cover was open, or gone. She wondered if it might have blown off its hinges until she saw two undissipating smoky columns standing now over there by the ladder; even as she watched, branching wisps coalesced into arms that bent and straightened and bent again, and billows at the tops paled and condensed into angular heads.

  She looked away quickly, her heart pounding in her chest. Was one of those awful figures Colin’s ghost? Her hand darted to her chest, but the vial on the ribbon wasn’t there; she realized that she had left it with her clothes in the storage locker.

  Harriet was looking past her toward the ladder, and her face was pale green in the emerald lamplight, her lips sucked tightly over her teeth. Jacky knew her own face must look the same.

  “Write his name on the paper,” Nobody called to Harriet, “and then go stand on the first square. Both feet, no need of hopping while we’re on flowing water.” When she hesitated and threw a frightened glance toward Jacky, he added, “He won’t molest you—he will be bound by all he is now, his name.”

  Harriet bowed her head and scribbled on the paper, using her left hand as a backing—Jacky was relieved to see that she knew how to write—and then, looking only down at the deck, she hurried to stand in the first square.

  One of the spidery figures by the ladder waved its jointed arms over its head, and a windy hissing from it contorted into recognizable words: “You come with me!”

  “Do not speak!” said Nobody quickly to Harriet. “Write the name again, and step into the second square.”

  The hissing kept up as Harriet slowly made her way through six more squares, spasmodically writing the name again before stepping into each one, but after its first statement the faintly articulated noise sounded only like the twittering of birds.

  When Harriet was standing unsteadily in the seventh square, Nobody told her to halt. From a shelf near the cabinet he took a glass jar and another pen and crossed to where Harriet stood swaying. Peering more closely, Jacky saw that the new pen appeared to be made of bone, and that it was bristly with points at the nib end.

  He handed Harriet the pen and with trembling pudgy fingers unscrewed the lid of the jar. “River water,” he said. “Dip the pen and write the name once more.”

  Harriet winced as she gripped the pen, and when she dipped it into the jar Jacky saw blood on the girl’s fingers. Harriet gingerly scribbled the name one more time, though the water left no visible track on the paper.

  “Crumple the paper,” said Nobody hoarsely, “and drop it into the circle below the stone.”

  Jacky was glancing at Nobody when the ball of paper tapped the deck, and she saw him inhale deeply—and her ears popped and the tent flap twitched; and just for that moment the man’s blank face was darker, and sharpened into distinct features, and a deep sigh escaped the now-clearly-drawn mouth; and looking the other way, Jacky saw that only one dark swaying figure stood by the ladder now.

  Her gaze swung back to Nobody, and his face had subsided into its previous pallidly unlined anonymity.

  The ghost didn’t go away to any afterlife, she thought dizzily, it never made it as far as the stone. This Nobody fellow ate it. Nobody’s prickly bone-pen took Harriet’s blood and then through that link he inhaled her husband’s ghost.

  Jacky yawned, and her ears popped back to normal hearing.

  “It’s gone,” said Nobody, and Harriet sat down abruptly and buried her face in her hands, breathing deeply. Both pens rolled away across the deck.

  “Now yours,” said Nobody, turning his moon face to Jacky. “To be put back quiescent into that small bottle—” He leaned closer to her, blinking. “Which you have put where?”

  The wind over the river must have picked up; a draft had begun whistling somewhere in the cabin.

&nbs
p; Jacky’s face was cold with sweat. “I left it in that closet. But is he going to speak to me?” She pointed at Harriet. “Hers spoke to her.”

  Harriet, still sitting on the floor, looked up at her bleakly. “You’re more afraid of yours than I was of mine.”

  Jacky looked toward the ladder; the wobbling form still stood there, slowly bending its arms and twisting its head. Then she crouched beside Harriet.

  “He came to my house,” she said to her in a fast whisper, “my parents’ house. He was in a stranger’s body, covered with fur and dying of poison, and Dog-Face Joe had chewed the tongue to ribbons before he switched Colin into it, but—Colin managed to come to me, because—because he loved me.” Jacky took a deep, hitching breath. “Damn it, it was midnight and—and I heard the front door bang open, and then what seemed to be a big gorilla with blood all over its mouth came rushing up the hall at me! There was a pistol—” She nodded toward the table, “—that one—and I—how in Hell could I have known it was Colin?”

  Harriet whispered, “You shot him?”

  The windy whistling was louder.

  Jacky closed her eyes and nodded. “And when he was dying there on the floor in front of me, I looked into his eyes and—his eyes were the wrong color of course, but—we recognized each other. We both knew I had killed him. And then he died.” She balled her fists. “I can’t face him, have him speak to me!”

  “But it was that, that Dog-Face Joe person who really killed him.”

  Jacky shook her head. “I fired the ball that pierced his heart.”

  The blowing draft had a hollow sound now, not whistling anymore, and then it rose in pitch and formed the word Jacky.

  Jacky spun, still crouching, and stared at the thing by the ladder.

  “…Colin…!”

  The wind said, “Is it you? I can’t see.”

  “Do not be approaching it,” said Nobody. “Fetch your pendant and I will put the ghost back in, and cool it to sleep.”

  “Yes,” said Jacky, looking away from the ghost and getting to her feet, “quickly.” He inhaled Harriet’s husband’s ghost, she thought, but he can’t do that with Colin’s. I’ll be able to sense it if Colin’s ghost—sleeping again, merciful God!—is put back in the vial.

  She had taken two steps toward the storage locker when the ghost voice said, “Let me go.”

  Jacky turned to the infuriatingly empty face of Nobody. “Is he—it—aware? Of us, what we’re saying?”

  “As an imbecile would be.”

  Harriet had stood up too, and now put her hand on Jacky’s shoulder. “It’s not him,” she said. “There’s not enough there to really want anything.”

  Jacky heard a high, whispered note that might have been a wail. “Jacky,” said the voice, “are you here? I’m alone.”

  Even as Nobody opened his small mouth to forbid it, Jacky turned to face the thing across the deck and called, “I’m here, Colin!” Her voice scraped her throat. “And you won’t be alone, you’ll be with me all the time, just like you were before tonight!”

  “Let me go where I am.”

  The airy voice had no inflection. Jacky blinked tears out of her eyes and peered at the dim figure in the green radiance, trying to see any expression, any face in it.

  Go where I am? she thought. Does it want to rejoin Colin’s departed soul? She thought of figures in dreams, and wondered if they felt lost when the dreamers awakened and turned their attention to the affairs of the day.

  Harriet was peering at the fingers of her own right hand, which had held the wounding pen, and then she looked narrowly at Nobody.

  “Don’t do the hopscotch,” she said to Jacky.

  Jacky glanced to the side at her, and momentarily wondered if Harriet guessed that Nobody had cheated her and simply consumed the ghost of her husband.

  “If it says—” began Jacky.

  “It doesn’t know what it’s saying,” Harriet said.

  “Its words are like numbers on rolled dice,” said Nobody. He did his boneless-looking shrug again. “Fetch the pendant or pick up the pens.”

  It doesn’t matter, Jacky thought, what the ghost may want, even if it is distinct enough to want something; if I do the hopscotch trick, Nobody will inhale Colin’s ghost, and I will not permit that, I will not see Colin’s remembered features briefly animate Nobody’s stagnant face.

  “I’ll get the pendant,” said Jacky, and she trudged barefoot across the deck to the door in the forward bulkhead and pulled it open. When she was in the narrow locker and had pulled the door closed behind her, she crouched and felt through her tumbled wet clothing, and she found a fold of cloth that was hot; she flipped the fabric this way and that, and soon disentangled the ribbon with the vial attached to it.

  But she had felt something hard in another bundle of wet cloth, and she dug around until her fingers found their way into a pocket and closed on three little cylinders—her thimbles. Probably the India rubber pea was in that pocket too, but she didn’t bother to feel for it.

  She stood up in the darkness and draped the ribbon around her neck; immediately she could feel the heat of the vial through the cloth of the robe. And after a long moment’s thought she closed her fist on the three pewter thimbles.

  She opened the door and stepped back into the cabin. Harriet and Nobody were still standing on this side of the hopscotch pattern, and Colin’s ghost bobbed its shadowed head on the far side by the ladder.

  “What do I do?” she asked.

  The man reached out to the green-glass lamp on the starboard bulkhead and lifted the conical iron cap from the top of it; Jacky winced, for it must have been very hot, but Nobody’s face continued to show no expression as he reversed the cap and set it back in place. It was now a concave vessel, and he began picking up the chocolate squares from the bowl and dropping them into the inverted cap. Smoke sprang up immediately, and the coffee-like smell of burned chocolate filled the cabin.

  He lifted the bottle of gin, but just held it and extended his other hand toward Jacky.

  “Give me the pendant,” he said.

  “What will you do?”

  His little eyes darted to the smoking chocolate and back to her. “Quickly,” he said.

  “But—what?”

  “I will put it into the burning candy, which will draw and hold the ghost, and then pour the liquor in. It will burn, and his false alertness will burn away with it. Sleep again…is what he will have again, in the little glass jar of yours.”

  The ghost’s windy whisper intruded then, repeating her name.

  “Oh please!” she cried to the thing without looking at it, “just be silent for a minute!”

  It said her name again.

  “Speaking to it is not good,” said Nobody.

  But Jacky discovered that she had to. “We’ll be like we were,” she called in a pleading tone, still not looking in that direction, “you—quiet, invisible, but—there.” In a blessedly minimal way, she added to herself. “Us together. I—need you—like that. Damn it,” she added, and with her free hand she pulled the ribbon off over her head and thrust it toward Nobody. “Do it fast.”

  The whistling voice formed words again: “It spreads its wings, unmindful of the height…” and Jacky helplessly recalled the second line of the couplet: And takes the wind in half-forgotten flight. It was the end of one of Colin’s sonnets, about a long-confined bird finally set free. Jacky turned a stricken look on the agitated ghost across the cabin.

  She caught Nobody’s loose-skinned wrist. “I didn’t know it was you,” she said in a quiet but intense voice, speaking now to the pendant in Nobody’s hand. She forced the words out. “God help me, I didn’t know I was killing you.”

  “Forgive,” said the thing by the ladder.

  Jacky raised her head and made herself look at it. “Do you,” she whispered hesitantly, “mean you…forgive me?”

  “All,” it said.

  Jacky found that she took that statement, vague as it was and from a d
oubtful source, as definitive assent. Tears were running down her cheeks, but her shoulders relaxed and she wondered if they had been tensed ever since Colin’s death a month ago.

  She released Nobody’s wrist.

  The ghost went on, “He yearns to be away who cherished thee,” it said, “let nothing of his spirit here remain.” Those lines were paraphrased from another of Colin’s poems. And then the voice added, “I forgive, you forgive. Forgive all, release all.”

  After two jolting heartbeats Jacky seized Nobody’s hand, which had now moved so close to the hot iron cup that she burned her knuckles against its edge.

  And she pulled the pendant and ribbon out of Nobody’s fist.

  “No,” she said dully, “I must lose him twice.” In her other hand she squeezed the three thimbles, and she said to Nobody, “Let’s do the hopscotch.”

  Jacky wrote Colin Lepovre in ink on the other piece of paper.

  “Drop the vial onto the first square,” said Nobody, “and then stand in it.”

  Seven squares of Purgatory, she thought as she stepped into the square. It was rings, in Dante. It’s a sin, too, Harriet had said. Was this token Purgatory for Colin’s ghost, or for herself?

  Six more times she wrote his name and picked up the vial to drop into the next square, and each time she picked it up the vial seemed cooler. At last she stood in the seventh square, with the circle and the London Stone in front of her.

  “Halt,” said Nobody.

  She looked to the side and saw him dipping the bristly bone pen into the jar of river water; and while he was doing that she slipped the pewter thimbles onto her thumb and the first two fingers of her right hand. And when he handed her the dripping pen she kept the tips of her fingers folded in.

  Harriet opened her mouth to say something, but Jacky frowned and shook her head at her.

  She made sure to wince realistically as she gripped the bristly pen with her shielded fingertips and clumsily wrote Colin’s name one last time, in water, unreadably. The bone-spines scratched harmlessly against the thimbles; no blood was drawn.