City at the End of Time

  “Beg pardon?”

  “You asked about the Kalpa,” the voice said.

  “I don’t even know what that is.”

  “Are there lapses? Lost moments?”

  “I think so.”

  “How often do your dreams occur, where and when—petty details.”

  “I’ve seen a doctor—”

  “No doctors. I need details. My pen is poised.”

  “Is this some sort of a business? Who are you?”

  “My name is Maxwell Glaucous. My partner is Penelope Katesbury. We answer calls and sometimes we answer questions. Time is short. Now…your name and call number, please.”

  “My name is Jack. My phone number—”

  “I have that. A call number is what I am after. You have been issued a call number, have you not?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t know.”

  “There is such a number, you have such a number,” the voice said with certainty. “Go find it, then call again, I suggest sooner rather than later. If someone else should learn about your lapses, it might not go well for you. We can help, however.”

  “Do you know what’s wrong with me? Is it serious?”

  “Certainly it’s serious. But there’s nothing wrong. It’s a marvel. You are blessed. Find your number and call us back.”

  “Where would I look?”

  “You have hosted a visitor. Look in his effects—whatever he’s left behind.” Glaucous coughed and hung up.

  Jack sat for a moment, face red, both angry and curious—then walked on quivering legs to his small bedroom and pulled back the trunk.

  The folio was gone. He stared in astonishment, then ransacked the room, looking under the bed, pulling back the sheets, the mattress, returning to the trunk. Nothing.

  He felt in the shadows behind the trunk. His fingers swept out a small hexagonal piece of paper. He picked it up. The hexagon had been intricately folded, like origami or one of those mathematical puzzles kids learned how to make in school. It was clever, so tight he could not pry it open far enough to peer in. No loose bits. As far as he could tell, all the corners and edges met inside.

  You’d have to have very clever fingers indeed to fold a piece of paper that way.

  “Stop it!” Jack shouted to the room’s still air. He squeezed the folded paper between his fingers from two opposite sides, then from another angle—trying all combinations to get it to pop open, to flower.

  Nothing. Then, tentatively:

  They want a call number. The catalog number of your special volume. Whatever you do, don’t give that to them, under any circumstance.

  “Why not?”

  No answer.

  “To hell with you.” He felt a growing pressure in the air, fogging his thoughts.

  Jack looked up. Someone was climbing the stairs. Footsteps outside—heavy thumps. He hoped it was Burke—someone to talk to. So much had happened today. The pressure increased. His head began to hurt. Anything to make it stop. The rain and wind blew harder.

  The thumps slowed to the pace of an older person—a cautious person—not Burke, who was quick and athletic. Jack suddenly wanted to be anywhere but where he was. Then the sensation passed, painted over by another wave of pervasive sweetness. All would be well…

  Across the curtains in the living room window, something big cast a shadow. The big shadow passed and a smaller shadow replaced it: short, broad, like a gnome.

  A heavy fist slammed on the door, rattling the frame and the wall and shivering the curtains.

  “It’s Glaucous, dear boy,” cried a rough voice—the same voice that had answered the phone. “I’ve brought my lady to meet you. Let’s find that number, shall we?” The fist slammed again and the voice added in an amused undertone, “Easy, dear.”

  CHAPTER 33

  * * *

  The Green Warehouse

  Ginny paced in front of the thick steel door. She laid her ear flat against the cold, thick-painted metal, listening to voices on the other side. Murmurs…rising and falling pitches, several women speaking with Bidewell.

  She made out only a few phrases. “…all here. Gathered…” Then, Bidewell, “The girl doesn’t have it with her…” And another, deeper female voice, “Pawnshops, the usual…”

  Ginny drew her brows together, then twisted her neck to look up. A thin blue-gray light seeped from the skylight into her makeshift living quarters, pressed between stacks of crates and cardboard boxes, all filled with books. Big drops of rain blundered with dull tunks against the wired glass in the high arched panes. A storm was gathering. She could feel the electricity, the moisture in the air. Two bolts of lightning struck nearby, flashing violet. An instant later thunderclaps shuddered the old warehouse and echoed from far skyscrapers.

  She appraised the rumpled bedding on her cot, the chipped antique bureau pulled into place at the cot’s foot. This part of the warehouse was large, dusty, drafty.

  Once, she had enjoyed rain, even thunderstorms; not now. But the storm wasn’t hunting her—not this time. The warehouse was protecting her.

  No, this storm was after someone like her, someone else who had read an ad or seen a billboard alongside a highway and was about to make the mistake of his or her life—and Ginny thought she knew whom: the young man on the bicycle at the Busker Jam. She wanted desperately to warn him, find out what he knew. There wasn’t much time left for him, for her, for anyone.

  The storm was here.

  All of us—cut loose and bumping into the end.

  That image made her suck in her breath with a sad hiccup.

  For a few moments she paced before the door, biting her thumbnail. All her nails had been chewed to the quick. Her mother had once told Virginia she would have pretty hands, if only she would stop chewing on them. Quickly bored with chewing, she twisted a strand of hair until it draped in an elongated ringlet over her nose.

  Enough.

  She lifted her fist to the huge sliding door. Before she could strike the first blow, the door groaned, then pulled aside wide enough for Bidewell to shove through a scrawny arm. With an emphatic grunt, he heaved the door back on its track until it bumped against a rubber stop. All the while, he carried on his former conversation. “We shall use the century rooms, I think. I’ve kept them empty and ready. If you’re sure you can find them all.”

  In Bidewell’s private library, in the rear half of the warehouse, three women sat in high-backed reading chairs. White lightning flashed through a tall window covered with steel bars, carving brilliance on the ceiling-high shelves.

  “We’ll find them,” one woman answered.

  All the women were older than Ginny by three or more decades. One had short brown hair and green eyes and wore a long green coat and brown skirt; she had answered Bidewell. Ginny turned to examine the second woman, with long red hair and a pretty, round face. Though her gray eyes seemed confident, she picked at a brass button on her denim jacket and smoothed her cut velvet dress.

  Ginny’s heels scuffed on the old wooden floor as she faced the third woman. This one, dressed all in purple, a rich green scarf draped over her shoulders, was stout and older than all but Bidewell, and her eyes were bold and black. Ginny did not like the way this woman assessed her: unrolled, weighed, measured, ready to snip off a length.

  She was not sure she liked any of them.

  Bidewell smiled, revealing strong teeth like mottled bone tiles. “Would you please join our group, Miss Virginia Carol?” he asked. “A little premature, perhaps. Dr. Sangloss is not yet here.”

  Ginny remembered the doctor who treated her at the clinic, who told her about Bidewell and the green warehouse. Nothing surprised her now.

  The pawnshop—her stone.

  The women regarded her with wary curiosity, awaiting her reaction. I might bite. Who are they?

  Another rumble of thunder.

  The woman with the green coat got to her feet and extended her hand. “My name is Ellen,” she said. Ginny held back, but the woman advance
d. Given no polite option, Ginny relented and shook with her.

  Ellen then introduced the redhead, whose name was Agazutta.

  The stout woman with the appraising look was Farrah. She said, “The storm is just getting started, Virginia. This time, it’s not after you—not yet.”

  “I know that,” Ginny said.

  The stout woman continued. “We have an hour at most. We should have made our move sooner.”

  “I’ve been slow, it’s true,” Bidewell confessed. “A little tired of late. Forgive me. We need you, Virginia, because none of us is a fate-shifter.”

  “What’s a fate-shifter?” Ginny asked, and then it dawned on her. Her mouth opened. Her eyes narrowed. Suddenly, she was more than suspicious—she was frightened. She had never told anyone, for fear of losing that which she wasn’t even sure she had—and now others knew. That either made it real, a confirmation of years of frightened dreams and desperate hopes, or a shared delusion.

  A roomful of crazies, just like her.

  Introductions over, Ellen held up a plastic bag and pulled out a crumpled tabloid, the Seattle Weekly. “I found this in my recycling bin,” she explained, and opened the paper on the wooden table to the classifieds. A small section had been torn out, about the size of one or two personals. “Virginia might know what it means.”

  Ginny turned away, face red.

  “No need to be frightened or ashamed,” Bidewell said.

  “Of course not. Where is Miriam?” Agazutta asked, looking to the wooden door at the other end of the room.

  Farrah continued to stare at Ginny, patient, implacable. Measuring. “The girl knows,” she said softly. “She’s been there—and escaped.”

  Ginny glared at her, then the others, helpless, defiant, like a deer surrounded by tigers. As if on cue, Minimus leaped onto the table and sat by the paper. He lifted a white paw and scratched madly at the tabloid, shredding it.

  “There is the question these hunters always ask as they lure their young prey into a trap,” Bidewell said. “Someone is about to answer.”

  “A young man named Jack,” Ellen said. “Another like you, Virginia. A fate-shifter.”

  “‘Do you dream of a city at the end of time?’” Ginny whispered.

  “We know,” Farrah said. “Our time’s shorter than we thought. What can we do?”

  The wooden door at the far end of the library opened and Miriam Sangloss entered. “Finally,” Agazutta said.

  “Apologies.” Beneath a dripping brown slicker, Sangloss wore a short white lab coat, blue blouse, and jeans. Under her left arm she carried a black leatherette folio. “Sorry I’m late.” She removed her slicker and looked around the room, sensing the tension, then grimaced and added, in an aside to Ginny, “Glad to know some people take my advice.”

  Bidewell cleared a space on the table, pushing the shredded tabloid into a wastebasket.

  Sangloss laid down the folio and untied it. “I’m now a burglar,” she said, and explained how she had just ransacked a young man’s apartment in the Queen Anne neighborhood. “I got the address from his clinic record. I found this, but couldn’t find his sum-runner. He must have it with him.”

  Again, Ginny blinked in surprise.

  “They’ve collected him and his stone,” the redhead, Agazutta, said, and slapped her hand on the top of a chair.

  “Perhaps not yet,” Miriam said. “But soon. He’s a very confused young man.”

  “No more confused than the rest of us,” Farrah said.

  The rain hissed on the roof. Minimus looked up, pupils round and deep.

  Bidewell turned to Ginny. “You should not be afraid of us, Miss Carol. We preserve and protect. The ones on the other end of that ad…” He shook his head. “They’re the monsters.”

  “Now that that’s clear,” Miriam said, “let me show you what I found in Jack’s apartment.” She opened the folio and laid a short stack of sketched pages before Ginny. The topmost had been executed in watercolor, crayon, and dark pencil, with daubs and sweeps of pastel color. “Anything look familiar?”

  Against her will, Ginny angled her head and looked down at the first drawing. Tiadba. The word—a name—just popped into her head. Remembering was difficult. My visitor…Tiadba has seen these. They look like ships surging into a heavy sea. They must be huge, all three of them…whatever they are. And now she’s sorry she ever left their protection.

  “That’s a yes?” Miriam asked, eyes bright. She flipped to the next sheet.

  Ginny covered her mouth and looked away.

  What had been sketched there, with crude skill and determination, was the last thing she would ever hope to see. A huge head rising on a weird scaffold over a rolling black land—tiny, fleeing figures giving it perspective. The head was big as a mountain, its one round, dead eye fixed on a distant point, stabbing a sharp gray beam through smoke and fog. A moan seized in her throat and turned into a fit of coughing.

  The Witness.

  “Poor child,” said Farrah. “Get her some water, Conan.”

  “I’m sorry,” Miriam said. “It does look grim, doesn’t it? I wish we could put all the pieces together. We’ve never actually seen these things.”

  “Neither have I,” Ginny said. “Not personally…I mean.”

  “In dreams,” Bidewell said. “Have you met the young man who drew these?”

  Ginny shook her head. “Is he the one they’re collecting?”

  “Let’s hope not,” Miriam said. “Ladies…”

  They all stood.

  “We need you to come with us,” Ellen told Ginny. “Conan will stay here, as always.”

  “I have no choice,” Bidewell said.

  “Where?” Ginny asked, glancing between them.

  “We’ll follow the storm,” Miriam said. “Track the lightning. It’s going to get worse, and nobody knows what this young man will do. If he’s as talented as you, he might just survive until morning. Oh, and one more thing.” The doctor reached into her lab coat pocket and pulled out a package wrapped in brown paper. “I found this in a shop near the clinic. Paid quite a lot to convince the pawnbroker to part with it.”

  CHAPTER 34

  * * *

  Jack’s thoughts fluttered like a bird in a net. Less than five minutes had passed since he’d made the call. He could climb off the balcony, swing to the porch below…run off down the alley. But a sugary warmth stopped him.

  On the other side of the door: friends, thick and sweet as treacle. No need to flee, no need to fear. His feet would not move. Every path equal. Every outcome a good one.

  “We are here!” Glaucous cried. “You called, and we are here to give you the answers you need.” Then, almost inaudibly, “I’m afraid I’ve stunned him. You may force entry, my dear.”

  Even after the third heavy bang on the door—as if a concrete block were about to shiver the poor wood to splinters—Jack could feel excellent conclusions everywhere.

  He recovered enough to step back. The fourth slam bent the door like a piece of cardboard and blew it from its hinges, twirling the jamb’s jagged splinter on a bent dead bolt. Wind blew into the living room. Somewhere, Jack’s rats squeaked. Despite the noise, the rush of wind, and the drops of rain, Jack did not feel afraid; his feet might as well have been glued to the thin carpet.

  A short, taut, bulky man in gray tweed entered and removed his flat cap with thick, ruddy fingers. His face was flat and pink as a doll’s, a hideous doll—and his eyes, small and efficient, swept the apartment and Jack with a minimum of motion. His instant smile was toothy and broad, like a Toby mug. He radiated sincerity and human kindness. “Good evening,” he insisted. His presence commanded respect—demanded cheer.

  “Hello,” Jack said.

  Through the frame of the broken door he saw a shadow loom, a heavy arm draw back, and at the end of the arm, an impossible hand—the hand of a comic book hero or villain, square-knuckled, fingers flexing with power and pain. The shadow drew into the light: a woman, very large. She
rose up forever. Her face was the white of packed ice or bone china. Raindrops fell along the curves and dips of her whiteness, down to the tip of her blunt, large nose, where nostrils opened like black manholes. Her eyes opened to central, cataract blankness. A quick smile on her thick, greenish lips, glittering with moisture, revealed small, precisely socketed teeth. A scut of hair splayed out beneath her flat, ludicrous hat like dead gray moss.

  The rats shrieked like terrified children. Both Glaucous and his companion had to be imaginary, Jack was certain. They had to be symptoms of the final and fatal dropping of all his marbles.

  “Shall we come in?” Glaucous asked, though he was already through the opening.

  Jack used all his will to back off another step. He could almost hear the awful sweet glue pulling up beneath his soles.

  The huge woman stooped to pass through.

  “This is my partner,” Glaucous said. “Her name is Penelope.”

  Jack sucked in his breath and half twisted, but the gnome’s sorrowful disappointment held him. Things seemed to fall into place; gusts of air, flits of dust, turns of tiny events conspired to hold him steady. That was interesting. That interested Jack no end.

  Glaucous turned to say something more to his partner.

  Jack unexpectedly broke loose. Momentarily free of the glue, nothing could have prepared him for the dread the pair exhaled, like the halves of a hideous bellows; they wheezed out terror. Without a thought, he dashed between world-lines, intruding on other selves—an unnoticed melding of ghost-soul upon ghost.

  Yet something reached through and snagged him.

  Glaucous pulled the adjacent world-lines in toward his own—changed circumstance directly rather than fleeing it. Jack had never heard of such a thing—but then, he was young. He focused on the man’s power, his skill, trying to feel his way through to any possibility of shaking loose again. Glaucous was strong, but Jack was stronger at exploring all the available paths, despite the spreading treacle. He would not be held, even by these two; he would not be pinned.