The Millennium Express: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Nine

  He is certain now, with the sort of strange certainty that comes in dreams, that the man in the dreams is a real person, trapped in that other world the way one of the dream-figures had become trapped on the ledge of that building, the way another had been seized by the door of that train. And he is sending messages asking for help.

  How could he ignore that call? He sees that it is his task to reach into the other world and pull that poor sufferer forth, just as Charlie had jokingly suggested, or he will never have a night’s peace again himself.

  Mon semblable,—mon frère!

  He had never been a particularly compassionate man—that may have been one of the reasons for the breakup of his marriage—but, chilly and aloof though he often was, he had never refused aid to someone in trouble. It was his saving grace.

  He will not refuse now. He will offer help.

  But how? How?

  He tells himself, as he makes ready for bed, that when that night’s dreams come, he will do everything he can to initiate contact, to extend a hand across the border between the one world and the other.

  Tonight the dream-figure is stumbling across an endless Sahara, tongue thick and blackened with thirst, eyes wild. He is plainly at the end of his endurance. Just beyond the next dune lies a fertile green oasis, but he lacks the strength to get there.

  Keep going! Come on—come on—just a little way more!

  No use. The man staggers, stumbles, falls face-forward into the hot sands.

  And on another night he is lost in a city where the streets melt and flow before him as he walks, substantial avenues turning to water, great thoroughfares becoming flaccid ropy masses of dough. He knows he must get to the other side of the city before nightfall —the welfare of someone precious to him depends on it—but he can make no progress; all is fluid and indeterminate. He pauses, contemplating the possibility of some more stable route that would take him to his goal, and indeed the dreaming observer knows that there is such a route, just a few blocks ahead, but when he calls out to tell him that, the words are swept away by the wind. And as he stands there the pavement begins to move beneath his feet and he is swept backward as though by a relentless river. Darkness begins to descend; the city vanishes; he is swept by the wildest terror.

  His real life, such as it had been, has nearly vanished altogether. He rises at the same hour as always, but instead of looking at the newspaper or watching the morning news he transcribes his notes on the night’s dreams. He eats the same breakfast as ever, without tasting his food. He goes to the office by the usual route and does his work mechanically, competently, no more and no less engaged with it than he had ever been. During the lunch break he generally stays at his desk and eats a sandwich. He has almost no contact with his fellow workers. Charlie, plainly aware that something is amiss, comes over to inquire about the state of his health, but he replies with a shrug and a vague smile.

  “Still having nightmares?” Charlie asks.

  “Sometimes,” he says.

  He has stopped calling the few women he had been seeing. None of them call him. Just as well: even though he no longer awakens screaming from his darker dreams, now that they have become such a customary part of his existence, it would be a distraction to have someone lying beside him in bed at night. He wants to focus all his attention on the dreams themselves.

  The thing to do, he has decided, is to try to redream one of the dreams he has already had, particularly one in which the dream-figure is obviously pleading for help. Since the scenario of the dream is already known to him, like the plot of some movie he has seen before, he believes that he will be able to intervene sooner, at some point where the situation has not yet become irrevocably catastrophic, and offer the dream-figure the succor he needs. The window-ledge dream, he thinks, would be a particularly fruitful one to employ. To be able to go immediately to the right window, to open it, to pull the man through to safety.

  But deliberately to recapitulate some already dreamed dream is not such an easy thing to accomplish. In the hour before bedtime he lets his mind dwell on the images he hopes to conjure up; he goes to his own window-ledge, runs his hand along it, measures its width, imagines what it would be like to climb out onto it right now and sidle along the face of the building. Then, closing his eyes, he pictures the tormented figure he had seen out there, the frightened man despairingly struggling to keep his balance as he inches along. The picture is a vivid one. He can almost even make out the features of the man’s face, something that he has not really succeeded in doing before: he thinks he has an idea of what the dream-figure’s face looks like, he is certain that it is the same man in each and every dream, but the specific details elude him when he tries to describe them to himself. He could not have drawn a sketch of his face, nor even responded usefully to the expert questions of some police-department artist trying to guide him toward a description. Yet in these rehearsals for sleep it seems to him that he has envisioned the face in essence if not in specifics, that with only a little more effort he could come to see it clearly.

  As he waits for sleep he keeps the window-ledge scene in mind; but when he drops off—and it has been taking him longer and longer to fall asleep each night—some other dream always comes, some dream of jeopardy, of course, but always a new one, as though the supply of these nightmares is infinite and none will ever recur. He is caught by surprise each time by the new surroundings in which the dream is set, unable to move himself into the right position to be helpful, unable to take the necessary steps to effect the desired rescue.

  A month goes by, two, three. The sunny days of summer give way to the first rains of autumn.

  And then, one night, the dream-state comes over him moments after he reaches his pillow and he realizes that at last he has been granted the recurrence of a dream. It is one in which the man is floating in a huge bottomless pool of chilly black water, unable to direct his own movements, simply drifting helplessly from one side to another across the face of that watery abyss like some bit of flotsam while sleek glossy monsters of the deep with gaping jaws and yellow eyes circle hungrily about him, closing in for the kill.

  This is not a new dream. He has had it before, and he knows exactly what he must do. There is a stout coil of rope lying in a neat stack on the far side of the pool. The last time he dreamed this dream, the rope had been there also but he had simply remained where he was, watching as though in a stupor as the beasts unhurriedly closed in, surrounded their victim, toyed with him, and finally, in a frenzy of thrashing flukes, fell upon him and devoured him. This time he fights away that stupor. He wills himself around to the other side of the pool, crossing the great distance separating him from it with the speed of thought, and seizes one end of the coil of rope in a tight grasp, and, pivoting sharply, flings the other end far into the water.

  “Quick!” he calls. “Grab hold of it!”

  The man in the pool looks up, startled. Sees the rope; swims to it and seizes it; lets himself be drawn toward the edge of the pool. The man standing on the shore has no doubt of the other’s face, now. The features are his own.

  He reels the other in.

  “Here,” he says, kneeling by the water’s edge, reaching his free hand down toward the other.

  He extends his hand into that dark abyss, makes contact, grips and braces himself and pulls. Yanking with all his strength, he draws the other to him, draws him up and out and through, and in that same moment he feels a snap and a twist and a twirl of reciprocity, as though he is standing upon a moving turntable that is swinging him around into the mysterious realm beyond. He struggles to resist the force that is catapulting him onward; but resistance is impossible. He is powerless against that unyielding pressure. He is hurled through that invisible wall.

  On the far side he finds himself alone in a soundless world.

  And then he is sprinting frantically up some bright windy beach from the edge of the surf, the cold rising tide licking at his heels, desperately trying to reach the dark rockpile
at the foot of the nearby cliff where he can clamber up above the rapidly rising water.

  SMITHERS AND THE GHOSTS OF THE THAR

  I am not, of course, noted for writing ghost stories, but I have had a lifelong interest in them, going back to my discovery of the classic Wise & Fraser anthology Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural when I was eleven or twelve years old. My unsurprising favorites have been, all these years, the stories of Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, M.R. James, and Oliver Onions, whom I have read and re-read many times. A mere reference to a story title (“The Beckoning Fair One”…“O Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”…“The Willows”) summons up memories of rainy evenings curled up in my chair, agreeable shivers, pleasingly uneasy dreams afterward.

  Reading ghost stories has always been a sort of guilty pleasure for me. In my own life I am relentlessly logical, rational, sensible. I don’t believe in ghosts or other sorts of supernatural manifestations. But a writer needs to know how to induce the willing suspension of disbelief in his readers, and I know how to induce it in myself as well. So I’m quite capable of a belief in spooks of various kinds for the duration of a story I’m reading, and perhaps for a little while afterward. And as the list of my favorite ghost-story writers indicates, I’m a bit of an Anglophile with a love for Victorian and Edwardian atmosphere: fog, carriages, the nineteenth-century architecture of London. The stories don’t have to be set in London, though, so long as they have the right period flavor. Another favorite ghost-story writer of mine, from approximately the same period as Blackwood, Machen, James, and Onions, is Rudyard Kipling. Most of his best stories take place not in London but in India, but they have that Victorian-Edwardian swing to them as well, and for me they provide a somewhat different but closely related sort of delight.

  I haven’t written ghost stories because no real market has existed for them over the past fifty years. I did dabble in the horror-story genre for a bit in the 1980s, and a couple of the things I wrote, like the Mexican-based “Not Our Brother,” could probably be considered ghost stories. But that market, so far as I know, has gone away now, and I’ve written nothing ghostly in a couple of decades.

  But when Nick Gevers and Jack Dann, an editorial team with one member based in South Africa and the other in Australia, asked me to contribute to an anthology of modern ghost stories paying homage to the British masters, the suggestion struck me exactly the right way and almost immediately I found myself sketching out a Kiplingesque tale of supernatural doings in remote and still mysterious Great Indian Desert, the Thar. I wrote the story in December of 2009 and it appeared in the 2011 anthology Ghosts by Gaslight.

  What happened to Smithers out there in the Great Indian Desert, may seem a trifle hard to believe, but much that happens in Her Imperial Majesty’s subcontinent is a trifle hard to believe, and yet one disbelieves it at one’s peril. Unfortunately, there is nobody to tell the tale but me, for it all happened many years ago, and Yule has retired from the Service and is living, so I hear, in Palermo, hard at work on his translation of Marco Polo, and Brewster, the only witness to the tragic events in the desert, is too far gone in senility now to be of any use to anyone, and Smithers—ah, poor Smithers—

  But let me begin. We start in Calcutta and the year is 1858, with the memory of the dread and terrible Mutiny still overhanging our dreams, distant though those bloody events were from our administrative capital here. That great engineer and brilliant scholar Henry Yule—Lieutenant-Colonel Yule, he was then, later to be Sir Henry—having lately returned from Allahabad, where he was in charge of strengthening and augmenting our defenses against the rebels, has now been made Secretary of the Public Works Department, with particular responsibility for designing what one day will be the vast railroad system that will link every part of India. I hold the title of Deputy Consulting Engineer for Railways. Our young friend Brewster is my right-hand man, a splendid draughtsman and planner. And as my story opens Brewster has come to us, looking oddly flushed, with the news that Smithers, our intense, romantic, excitable Smithers, whom we have sent off on a surveying mission to Jodhpur and Bikaner and other sites in the remote West, has returned and is on his way to us at this very moment with an extraordinary tale to tell.

  “Is he now?” Yule said, without much sign of animation. Yule is a Scot, stern and outwardly dour and somewhat fierce-looking, though I am in a position to know that behind that grim bearded visage lies a lively mind keenly alert to the romance of exploration. “Did he find a railroad already in place out there, I wonder? Some little project of an enterprising Rajput prince?”

  “Here he comes now,” said Brewster. “You will hear it all from the man himself.” And an instant later Smithers was among us.

  Smithers was fairhaired and very pink-skinned, with gleaming blue eyes that blazed out from his face like sapphires. Though he was somewhat below middle height, he was deep-chested and wideshouldered, and so forceful was his physical presence that he could and did easily dominate a room of much taller men. Certainly he dominated his friend Brewster, who had known him since childhood. They had been to university together and they had entered the service of the East India Company together, taking appointment with the Bengal Engineers and making themselves useful in the Public Works Department, specializing in the building of bridges and canals. I could best describe the lanky, dark-complected Brewster as timid and cautious, one who was designed by Nature as a follower of stronger men, and Smithers, who in his heart of hearts looked upon himself as part of a grand English tradition of adventurous exploration that went back through Burton and Rawlinson and Layard to Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake, was the man to whom he had attached himself.

  “Well, Smithers?” Yule asked. “What news from Bikaner?”

  “Not from Bikaner, sir,” said Smithers, “but from the desert beyond. The Thar, sir! The Thar!” His blazing blue eyes were wilder than ever and his face was rough and reddened from his weeks in the sun.

  Yule looked startled. “You went into the Thar?” A reconnaissance of the vast bleak desert that lies beyond the cities of Rajputana had not been part of Smithers’s immediate task.

  “Only a short way, sir. But what I learned—what I have heard—!”

  Yule, who can be impatient and irritable, made a swift circular beckoning gesture, as though to say, “Aye, out with it, man!” But Smithers needed no encouragement. Already a story was tumbling from him: how in the desert city of Bikaner he had fallen in with an itinerant Portuguese merchant newly returned from a venture into the Great Indian Desert—the Thar, as the natives call it, that immense waterless void 150 miles in breadth that stretches northeastward for some 400 miles from the swampy Rann of Cutch. Breathlessly Smithers retold the tale the Portuguese had told him: an unknown valley far out in the Thar, the sound of strange voices floating on the air, sometimes calling alluringly, sometimes wailing or sobbing, voices that could only be the voices of spirits or demons, for there was no one to be seen for miles around; the eerie music of invisible musicians, gongs and drums and bells, echoing against the sands; and above all a distinct sensation as of summoning, the awareness of some powerful force pulling one onward, deeper into that valley. The Portuguese had resisted that force, said Smithers, for he was a hard-nosed trader and was able to keep his mind on business; but from villagers at an oasis town the man had picked up fragmentary anecdotes of an entire ancient city hidden away in that valley, a lost civilization, a land of ghosts, in fact, from which that potent summons came, and into whose mysterious realm many a traveler had vanished, never to return.

  I saw what I took to be the unmistakable glint of skepticism in Yule’s eyes. He has never been a man to suffer foolishness gladly; and from the knotting of his bristling brows I interpreted his response to Smithers’ wild fable as annoyance. But I was wrong.

  “Singing spirits, eh?” Yule said. “Gongs and drums and bells? Let me read you something, and see if it sounds familiar.”

  He drew from his desk a sheaf of manuscr
ipt pages that were, we already knew, his translation of The Book of Ser Marco Polo—the earliest draft of it, rather, for Yule was destined to spend two decades on this magnum opus before giving the world the first edition in 1870, nor did he stop revising and expanding it even then. But even here in 1858 he had done a substantial amount of the work.

  “Marco is in the Gobi,” said Yule, “in the vicinity of the desert town of Lop, and he writes, ‘The length of this desert is so great that ‘tis said it would take a year and more to ride from one end of it to the other. Beasts there are none, for there is nought for them to eat. But there is a marvelous thing related of this desert, which is that when travelers are on the move by night, and one of them chances to lag behind or to fall asleep or the like, when he tries to gain his company again he will hear spirits talking, and will suppose them to be his comrades. Sometimes the spirits will call him by name; and thus shall a traveler ofttimes be led astray so that he never finds his party. And in this way many have perished.’”

  “It is much like what the Portuguese told me,” said Smithers.

  Yule nodded. “I will go on. ‘Sometimes the stray travelers will hear as it were the tramp and hum of a great cavalcade of people away from the real line of road, and taking this to be their own company they will follow the sound; and when day breaks they find that a cheat has been put upon them and that they are in an ill plight. Even in the daytime one hears those spirits talking. And sometimes you shall hear the sound of a variety of musical instruments, and still more commonly the sound of drums.’”

  Smithers said, and his face grew even redder, “How I long to hear those drums!”