Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

  “Officially, yes,” she spoke with authority. “But the truth is, out of these twenty-six, twenty-five died within a year and a half after training. Only one of them is still alive.”

  “What? You mean—”

  “You. You’re the only survivor after three years. You’ve gone on with your shuffling, and you’ve had no problems or breakdowns. Do you still think you’re so ordinary? You are a most important person!”

  I thrust both hands in my pockets and continued down the corridor. It was getting to be too much, the way the scale of this thing kept expanding.

  “Why did the others die?” I asked the girl.

  “I don’t think they know. There was no visible cause of death. Some brain malfunction, nothing clear.”

  “They must have some idea.”

  “Well, Grandfather put it like this. Really ordinary persons probably can’t tolerate irradiation of their brain, which was done to catalyze the core consciousness. The brain cells try to produce antibodies and react with overkill. I’m sure it’s more complicated than that, but that’s a simple explanation.”

  “Then what’s the reason I’m alive?”

  “Perhaps you had natural antibodies. Your ’emotional shell.’ For some reason you already had a safeguard factor in your brain that allowed you to survive. Grandfather tried to simulate this shell, but it didn’t hold up.”

  I thought this over. “This antibody factor or guard or whatever, is it an innate faculty? Or is it something I acquired?”

  “Part inborn and part learned, I seem to remember. But beyond that, Grandfather wouldn’t say. Knowing too much could have put me in jeopardy. Although, according to his hypothesis, people with your natural antibodies are about one in a million to a million and a half. And even then, short of actually endowing them with shuffling, there’s no way to single these people out.”

  “Which means, if your grandfather’s hypothesis is correct, that my happening to be among those twenty-six was an incredible fluke.”

  “That’s why you’re so valuable as a sample. That’s why you’re the key.”

  “What did your grandfather have planned for me? The data he gave me to shuffle, that unicorn skull—what was that all about?”

  “If I knew that, I could save you right here and now,” said the girl.

  “Me and the world.”

  * * *

  The office had been ransacked, not to the same degree as my apartment, but someone had done a number on the place. Papers were strewn everywhere, the desk overturned, the safe pried open, the cabinet drawers flung across the room, the Professor’s and the girl’s change of clothes pulled out of their lockers and tossed like salad over a bed of shredded sofa. The girl’s clothes were, verifiably, all pink. An orchestration of pink in every gradation from light rose to deep fuchsia.

  “Unforgivable!” she cried. “They must have come up from below.”

  “INKlings?”

  “No, not them. INKlings wouldn’t come up this far above ground. And if they had, you could tell by the smell.”

  “What smell?”

  “A fishy kind of—swampy kind of—horrible smell. INKlings didn’t do this. I bet they were the people who trashed your apartment.”

  I looked around the room. In front of the overturned desk, a whole box of scattered paperclips glinted in the fluorescent light. There was something about them, I didn’t know what. I picked one up from the floor and slipped it into my pocket.

  “Was anything of importance kept here?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “Practically everything here is expendable. Just account ledgers and receipts and general research stuff. Nothing was irreplaceable.”

  “How about the INKling-repel device? Is that still in one piece?”

  She rooted through the debris in front of the lockers, throwing aside a flashlight and radio-cassette player and alarm clock and a can of cough drops to find a small black box with something like a VU-meter, which she tested several times.

  “It’s all right, it works fine. They probably thought it was a useless contraption. Lucky for us, because the mechanism’s so simple, one little whack could have broken it.”

  Then the chubby girl went over to a corner of the room and crouched down to undo the cover of an electrical outlet. Pushing a tiny switch inside, she stood up, gently pressed her palms flat against a section of the adjacent wall, and a panel the size of a telephone directory popped open, revealing a safe within.

  “Not bad, eh? Bet nobody would think of looking here, eh?” she congratulated herself. Then she dialed the combination and opened the safe.

  Holding back the pain, I helped her right the desk and set out the contents of the safe. There was a thick rubber-banded bundle of bank books, a stack of stock certificates, a cloth bag holding something solid, a black leather notebook, and a brown envelope. She poured out the contents of the envelope: a gold ring and a discolored old Omega watch, its crystal crazed.

  “A memento of my father,” said the girl. “The ring was my mother’s. Everything else got burned.”

  She slipped the ring and watch back into the envelope. Next, from the cloth bag, she removed an object in an old shirt; unwrapped, it turned out to be a small automatic pistol. It bore no resemblance to a toy. This was a real gun that shot real bullets. I’m no expert, but my years of moviegoing told me it was either a Browning or a Beretta. With the gun was a spare cartridge and a box of bullets.

  “I guess you Calcutecs are all good shots,” said the girl.

  “You’ve got to be kidding. I’ve never even held a gun before.”

  “Really? Shooting’s another thing I learned by not going to school. I like it as a sport. Anyway, seeing as how you don’t have any experience with a gun, I’ll hold on to it.”

  “By all means. Just don’t shoot me by mistake. I don’t think I could stand any more damage to my body.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m very careful,” she said, slipping the automatic into her pocket.

  She then opened the black leather notebook to a middle page and studied it under the light. The page was scribbled entirely in an unintelligible rune of numbers and letters.

  “This is Grandfather’s notebook,” she explained. “It’s written in a code that only he and I know. Plans, events of the day, he writes it all down here. So then—what’s this now?—September 28th, you’re down as having finished laundering the data.”

  “That’s right.”

  “There’s a (1) written there. Probably the first step. Then, he has you finishing the shuffling on the 29th or the 30th. Or is that wrong?”

  “Not at all.”

  “That’s (2). The second step. Next, there’s … uh, let’s see … noon, the 2nd, which is (3). ‘Cancel Program’.”

  “I was supposed to meet your grandfather on the 2nd at noon. My guess is that he was going to disarm whatever program he’d set inside me. So that the world wouldn’t end. But a lot has changed. And something’s happened to him. He’s been dragged off somewhere.”

  “Hold on,” she said, still reading the notebook. “The code gets pretty involved.”

  While she read, I organized the knapsack, making sure to include her pink jogging shoes. Slickers and boots were scattered about, but thankfully they weren’t slashed or anything like that. Going under the waterfall without rain gear would mean getting soaked and chilled to the bone; it would also mean wonders for my wound. My watch read a little before midnight.

  “The notebook is full of complicated calculations. Electrical charge and decay rates, resistance factors and offsets, stuff like that. I don’t understand any of it.”

  “Skip it. We don’t have much time,” I said. “Just decode what you can make out.”

  “There’s no need to decode.”

  “Why not?”

  She handed me the notebook and pointed to the spot.

  There was no code, only a huge scrawl:

  “Do you suppose this marks the deadline?” she asked.

&
nbsp; “Either that, or it’s (4). Meaning, if the program is cancelled at (3), X won’t happen. But if for some reason it doesn’t get cancelled and the program keeps on reading, then I think we get to X.”

  “So that means we have to get to Grandfather by noon of the 2nd.”

  “If my guess is correct.”

  “How much time is left? Before the big bang …”

  “Thirty-six hours,” I said. I didn’t need to look at my watch. The time it takes the earth to complete one and a half rotations. Two morning papers and one evening edition would be delivered. Alarm clocks would ring twice, men would shave twice. Fortunate souls would have sex two or three times. Thirty-six hours and no more. One over seventeen-thousand thirty-three of a life expectancy of seventy years. Then, after those thirty-six hours, the world was supposed to come to an end.

  “What do we do now?” asked the girl.

  I located some painkillers in the first-aid kit lying on the floor and swallowed them with a gulp of water from the canteen. Then I hiked the knapsack up on my shoulders.

  “There’s nothing to do but go underground,” I said.

  20

  The Death of the Beasts

  THE beasts have already lost several of their number. The first ice-bound morning, a few of the old beasts succumbed, their winter-whitened bodies lying under two inches of snow. The morning sun tore through the clouds, setting the frozen landscape agleam, the frosty breath of more than a thousand beasts dancing whitely in the air.

  I awake before dawn to find the Town blanketed in snow. It is a wondrous scene in the somber light. The Clocktower soars black above the whitened world, the dark band of the River flows below. I put on my coat and gloves and descend to the empty streets. There is not yet a footprint in the snow. When I gather the snow in my hands, it crumbles. The edges of the River are frozen, with a dusting of snow.

  There is no wind, no birds, no movement in the Town. I hear nothing but the crunching of snow under my feet.

  I walk to the Gate and see the Gatekeeper out by the Shadow Grounds. The Gatekeeper is under the wagon that he and my shadow repaired. He is lubricating the axles. The wagon is loaded with ceramic crocks of the kind used to hold rapeseed oil, all roped fast to the sideboards. I wonder why the Gatekeeper would have need for so much oil.

  The Gatekeeper emerges from under the wagon and raises his hand to greet me. He seems in a good mood.

  “Up early, eh? What wind blows you this way?”

  “I have come out to see the snow,” I say. “It was so beautiful from up on the Hill.”

  The Gatekeeper scoffs and throws a big arm around me as he has done before. He wears no gloves.

  “You are a strange one. Winter here is nothing but snow, and you come down from your Hill just to see it.”

  Then he belches, a locomotive cloud of steam, and looks toward the Gate. “But I will say, you came at the right time,” he smiles. “Want to climb the Watchtower? Something you ought to see from there. A winter treat, ha ha. In a little while I will blow the horn, so keep your eyes open.”

  “A treat?”

  “You will see.”

  I climb the Watchtower beside the Gate, not knowing what to expect. I look at the world beyond the Wall. Snow is deep in the Apple Grove, as if a storm cloud had specifically sought it out. The Northern and Eastern Ridges are powdered white, with a few dark-limned crags to mar their complexion.

  Immediately below the Watchtower are the beasts, sleeping as they usually do at this hour. Legs folded under them, they huddle low to the ground, their horns thrust forward, each seeking sleep. All peacefully unaware of the thick coat of snow that has fallen upon them.

  The clouds disperse and the sun begins to illuminate the earth. Beams of sun slant across the land. My eyes strain in the brightness to see the promised “treat”.

  Presently, the Gatekeeper pushes open the Gate and sounds the horn. One long note, then three short notes. The beasts awaken at the first tone and lift their heads in the direction of the call. White breaths charge the air anew, heralding the start of the new day.

  The last note of the horn fades, and the beasts are risen to their feet. They prow their horns at the sky, then shake off the snow as if they had not previously noticed it. Finally they walk toward the Gate.

  As the beasts amble by, some hang their heads low, some paw their hooves quietly. Only after they have filed inside do I understand what the Gatekeeper has wanted me to see. A few beasts have frozen to death in their posture of sleep. Yet they appear not dead so much as deep in meditation. No breath issues from them. Their bodies unmoving, their awareness swallowed in darkness. After all the other beasts have gone through the Gate, these dead remain like growths on the face of the earth. Their horns angle up into space, almost alive.

  I gaze at their hushed forms as the morning sun rises and the shadow of the Wall withdraws, the brilliance melting the snow from the ground. Will the morning sun thaw away even their death? At any moment, will these apparently lifeless forms stand and go about their usual morning routine?

  They do not rise. The sun but glistens on their wet fur. My eyes behind black glasses begin to hurt.

  Descending the Watchtower, I cross the River and go back to my quarters on the Western Hill. I discover that the morning sun has done harm to my eyes, severely. When I close my eyes, the tears do not stop. I hear each drop fall to my lap. I darken the room and stare for hours at the weirdly shaped patterns that drift and recede in a space of no perspective.

  At ten o’clock the Colonel, bringing coffee, knocks on my door and finds me facedown on the bed, rubbing my eyes with a cold towel. There is a pain in the back of my head, but at least the tears have subsided.

  “What has happened to you?” he asks. “The morning sun is stronger than you think. Especially on snowy mornings. You knew that a Dreamreader cannot tolerate strong light. Why did you want to go outdoors?”

  “I went to see the beasts,” I say. “Many died. Eight, nine head. No, more.”

  “And many more will die with each snowfall.”

  “Why do they die so easily?” I ask the old officer, removing the towel from my face to look at him.

  “They are weak. From the cold and from hunger. It has always been this way.”

  “Do they never die out?”

  The old officer shakes his head. “The creatures have lived here for many millenia, and so will they continue. Many will die over the winter, but in spring the survivors will foal. New life pushes old out of the way. The number of beasts that can live in this Town is limited.”

  “Why don’t they move to another place? There are trees in the Woods. If they went south, they would escape the snow. Why do they need to stay?”

  “Why, I cannot tell you,” he says. “But the beasts cannot leave. They belong to the Town; they are captured by it. Just as you and I are. By their own instincts, they know this.”

  “What happens to the bodies?”

  “They are burned,” replies the Colonel, warming his great parched hands on his coffee cup. “For the next few weeks, that will be the main work of the Gatekeeper. First he cuts off their heads, scrapes out their brains and eyes, then boils them until the skulls are clean. The remains are doused with oil and set on fire.”

  “Then old dreams are put into those skulls for the Library, is that it?” I ask the Colonel. “Why?”

  The old officer does not answer. All I hear is the creaking of the floorboards as he walks away from me, toward the window.

  “You will learn that when you see what old dreams are,” he says. “I cannot tell you. You are the Dreamreader. You must find the answer for yourself.”

  I wipe away the tears with the towel, then open my eyes. The Colonel stands, a blur by the window.

  “Many things will become clear for you over the course of the winter,” he continues. “Whether or not you like what you learn, it will all come to pass. The snow will fall, the beasts will die. No one can stop this. In the afternoon, gray smo
ke will rise from the burning beasts. All winter long, every day. White snow and gray smoke.”

  21

  Bracelets, Ben Johnson, Devil

  BEYOND the closet opened the same dark inner sanctum as before, but now that I knew about the INKlings, it seemed a deep, chill horror show.

  She went down the ladder ahead of me. With the INKling-repel device stuffed in a large pocket of her slicker and her large flashlight slung diagonally across her body, she swiftly descended alone. Then, flashlight thrust in my pocket, I started down the slick rungs of the ladder. It was a bigger drop than I remembered. All the way down, I kept thinking about that young couple in the Skyline, Duran Duran on stereo. Oblivious to everything.

  I wished I could have been a little more oblivious. I put myself in the driver’s seat, woman sitting next to me, cruising the late night streets to an innocuous pop beat. Did the woman take off her bracelets during sex? Nice if she didn’t. Even if she was naked, those two bracelets needed to be there.

  Probably she did take them off. Women tend to remove their jewelry before they shower. Which meant, therefore, sex before showering. Or getting her to keep her bracelets on. Now, which was the better option?

  Anyway, I’m in bed with her, with her bracelets. Her face is a blank, so I darken the lights. Off go her silky undergarments. The bracelets are all she has on. They glint slightly, a pleasant muffled clinking on the sheets. I have a hard-on.

  Which, halfway down the ladder, is what I noticed. Just great. Why now? Why didn’t I get an erection when I needed one? And why was I getting so excited over two lousy bracelets? Especially under this slicker, with the world about to end.

  She was shining her light around when I reached bottom. “There are INKlings about. Listen,” she said. “Those sounds.”

  “Sounds?”

  “Fins flapping. Listen carefully. You can feel them.”

  I strained, but didn’t detect anything of the kind.

  “Once you know what to listen for, you can even detect their voices. It’s not really speech; it’s closer to sound waves. They’re like bats. Humans can only hear a portion of their vocal range.”