City at the End of Time

  “Let’s discuss your future, young fate-shifter.” Whitlow’s words blurred across the short distance between them, followed by a dozen variations as all the remaining, cut-up strands of fate tried to sum. “Let’s discuss what is to come, now that you have a strong new body…before your memories fade again, always a problem for your kind…”

  Whitlow had repeated these words so often, Daniel had lost count. There could be no finer punishment for all his sins than this—and yet, he could not just throw aside the stone and end it all.

  He knew the stones in the boxes offered a circle of protection—and did not want to experience what it would feel like if he, like Whitlow, fell just on the edge of or outside that circle.

  I’ve survived worse—the worst, I think. But my memories are vaguer than the murk outside. If I could only think clearly!

  If I could make a move—any move—

  He still had hope.

  And so he gripped the boxes. At least there would be no hunger, no real pain. He could sit without moving, going through each train of thought in smeared iterations, the changes so slight no outside observer could ever know the difference—

  For now, Whitlow had been stymied—perhaps even defeated—by Terminus. The marionette across from Daniel labored as if strung from the hands of a broken clock. “Let’s discuss…what our Livid Mistress will have in store…for such a fine young betrayer of worlds…”

  Daniel leaned back and held the boxes at arm’s length behind him, removing their circle a few feet from Whitlow. The seated marionette slowed and fell silent, until Daniel’s arm tingled and he folded it back.

  The others—Whitlow’s partners, lost out in the vibrating murk—would never arrive to help their boss. As for the Moth—whatever that was or had been, no sign from that quarter, either.

  With a suck of breath and a cough, Daniel realized that any certainty, even doom, would be better than this staggered eternity.

  Still, his feelers—blunted, singed, traumatized—were sensitive enough that he knew this was not all there was. A refuge existed somewhere. Had Whitlow not found him, he might have made his way to that refuge just in time to elude all this.

  Caught—something less than frozen—facing a nemesis something less than toothless…

  Fully capable of boring Daniel to screaming insanity with his threats and schemes, like thin acid dripping on acres of exposed skin.

  “…before the memories of your past exploits fade and get eaten away by a fresh and resentful new mind. The Chalk Princess has such hopes…”

  Something changed.

  Daniel felt a thrill in his spine, an unmistakable difference in the room’s atmosphere. Though how he could recognize or even detect this in his present state was not clear. But here it was. A loosening. Something powerful jerking at the damaged strands, shaking them out, squeezing a few last hours of usable chronology that something might be done.

  Would be done.

  A knock on the door stabbed sharp and painful through Daniel’s ears. He forced himself to stand—amazed that he could stand.

  Whitlow’s eyes followed and his white face twitched, like a corpse jolted by an electric charge—but that was all he could do.

  Daniel crossed the damp boards and opened the door. A crash and roar buffeted him—ice calving from glaciers, mountains slamming against mountains, giant knives ripping up the sky.

  Worlds—histories colliding.

  Just outside the door a bulky shadow cringed, then separated itself from the confusion and squeezed inside by main force of will.

  “A little help,” said a squat, powerful man, hands outstretched, thick fingers grasping. His gray suit dripped water. “The Queen in White has abandoned us. Pardon me if I say it—I seem to have what you need. And pardon me again if I ask—what in hell are you?”

  CHAPTER 54

  * * *

  The Green Warehouse

  The book group ladies retired to a far corner with a few cots and blankets and pillows that Bidewell pulled from an old brass-bound wooden chest. Their lanterns cast long, dancing shadows on the warehouse’s walls and ceiling.

  Before he retired to his own quarters, Bidewell pulled down a volume from an otherwise bare shelf. The volume bore on the base of its spine the number—or the year—1298. In view of Jack and Ginny, he winked, put the book under his arm, and bade them good night.

  Then he slid shut the steel door.

  The warehouse became still.

  Ginny gave Jack an uneasy glance and retreated into her space.

  The ladies and Ginny had helped Jack clear another space a few yards away and provided him with another cot and blankets. Everyone in their little squares, insulated, protected. Waiting.

  He sat on the edge of his cot and let his shoulders slump with exhaustion.

  Ginny’s cot creaked on the opposite side of the stack of boxes and crates. They seemed far enough from the others—if they spoke softly, no one else would hear. “Is it time for stories?” she whispered.

  “Sure,” he said. “You first.”

  She walked around the crates, pulling along a chair, and sat, knees together, booted feet askew.

  “I’m eighteen,” she said. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “People say I’m lucky, but bad things keep happening.”

  “Maybe they’d be worse if you weren’t lucky.”

  “I answered the ad, just like you. I called the phone number.”

  “Jesus,” Jack said.

  “Some of it’s hard to remember,” she began. “I came from Minneapolis. I was living in a house full of musicians, musical types—they all played instruments, deejayed raves. We chipped in and did odd jobs. They said I brought them luck because we kept getting better gigs, play dates, black sick jams.”

  “That’s good?” Jack asked.

  She nodded. “I loved it. We were free and we ate total shack and I felt…” She glanced at Jack.

  “You’ve lost me,” he said. “But keep going. I’ll catch up.”

  “One day…I knew my friends were forgetting about me. I thought it was the drugs.” Her voice and face hardened. “We would hang out in old houses, talk about music, movies and TV, stuff that passed the time. Every week or so they acted just like I was new. They didn’t remember anything about me. Sometimes it hurt so much I would go off by myself, but I didn’t like being alone. I asked, what would happen if I stopped remembering who I was? I did a lot of drawing.”

  Jack winced, her voice had become so flinty.

  “They were snuffing up X—Ecstasy. I tried it a few times—they all thought if you didn’t do X, you were a hard case, unable to form true friendships. It made me so happy and loving. I would give anybody everything I had, all the loving little twinkles in my little brain just lining up like pinball hits. Anybody could walk in and I’d feel that love-juice flooding me, I was so grateful…I couldn’t hand out my goodies fast enough. And it didn’t matter. They still forgot me.”

  “Wow,” Jack said.

  Ginny watched his expression warily. “Yeah. All the time I was with them, I didn’t jump the lines—I didn’t fate-shift. I thought that was over. I thought I had a home. But I was still having the dreams. I’d draw—that was fine, everybody liked weird art. Everything creepy, everything about death, is fine, dying is the ultimate giving. Eternal giggles. And then, everyone would forget. They’d think I was new. They’d tell me their stories all over again.”

  Jack sat quiet, letting her get it out.

  “I would have died,” she murmured. “But then this…person came to me, the one who did most of the really strange drawings—when I was gone, blanking out. She’s part of my dreams, too—I think. One day she left a note. It was in little block letters—like it was written by a child: ‘Put your skin back on. Get out. We have work to do.’ And I knew just what she meant. This wasn’t love or even friendship, what we were doing in that house, it was turning oneself into a snail between a boot and a side
walk. I had no defenses left, just raw nerves. So I quit the house and I quit the X and all my friends, and after a few days I was sitting under a bridge, out of the snow, when I read an ad from a newspaper I was using to stay warm.” She drew quotes. “‘Do you dream of a city at the end of time?’ And a phone number.”

  Jack winced again.

  “I still had some charge on my cell, so I called the number, mostly just to have something to do. Another bad decision, right?”

  Jack lifted one corner of his lips.

  “That’s what I do. I run away from good decisions, toward bad decisions. This was the worst, I think. A man came to the bridge and picked me up. He looked young, Asian—in his thirties, tall and skinny but fit, with deep black eyes. He drove an old gray Mercedes. There was someone in the backseat—a woman. She wore a veil and never said a word. She smelled like smoke. We left the city behind. Off the highway, the man and I got out and had lunch at a diner, but the woman never left the backseat. She wasn’t dead—I could hear her breathing.

  “After we ate, back on the highway, she started a fire. The guy had a fire extinguisher under his seat. He pulled over and opened her door and yelled and sprayed foam all over. She whimpered but never said a word.”

  Jack’s fingers knotted in his lap.

  “I thought he looked young, but his tiny black eyes were old. Mostly, he was friendly. The front seat was so comfortable—heated, soft but firm. He did tricks with his silver dollar—one-handed, the other hand on the wheel, pretty clever. The coin did everything he wanted it to—like it was alive and he was its master.

  “He remembered my story—what I told him as we drove. We might go on forever, tricks and stories and the long, straight road. I was so out of it, so accepting—still just a little fool, I guess.

  “We finally came to a big house out in the woods near St. Paul. There were piles of lumber and stuff all around, but I didn’t see any workmen. The guy told me they had found an old vault under the house with thick walls where things could get really quiet. They put me down in the vault and I slept for a couple of days. It was quiet. I got better, stopped gritting my teeth and biting the insides of my cheeks. I felt so lucky, and thought maybe I was learning how to feel gratitude, real love. He would visit every day, bring me food and clothes, and I knew from the beginning he wasn’t interested in sex—he respected me. I thought this was a good place. He was good to me. My dreams stopped.”

  Ginny had started shaking, little tremors at first, but now her teeth were chattering. Jack reached out to touch her arm, but she pulled it away.

  “The last time he visited, he told me we were going to take a walk. We climbed the stairs out of the basement, and the wind was whistling outside. It was cold—below freezing. The air smelled like snow. I noticed that they hadn’t put in carpet or wood floors—just plywood. It was really just an old abandoned house that had never been finished. He said we were going to meet the Queen.”

  Jack pulled his hands apart so he wouldn’t bruise his fingers.

  “He said the Queen paid him to find special people. Somehow, I saw that the guy’s clothes were actually pretty shabby. She couldn’t be paying him much. And now his skin looked old. I thought maybe I’d found myself a real vampire—a poor one.” Ginny’s voice dropped below a whisper. Jack could barely hear her.

  The warehouse creaked. Yards off, a cat meowed. The meow echoed around the rafters as if there were dozens of cats.

  “He was as afraid of the woods as I was. I knew the Queen wasn’t the woman who started fires, because we passed the car when we walked into the trees—just parked there, on the dirt driveway. Smoke was drifting out of an open rear window. The woman was inside. I saw her veil move. She was looking right at me but I couldn’t see her eyes.”

  “You didn’t run?”

  “I couldn’t. I couldn’t even think about jumping the lines because I knew the woman in the car would set fires everywhere, and she wouldn’t even need to leave the backseat. I could almost see her doing it—hundreds of little blazes dropping from the air. She’d burn the woods, the house, any path I tried to take, anywhere I tried to go.”

  “Using fires—like wasps.”

  Ginny glanced left for a second, chin down, defiant, working hard to get it all out. “I wonder how many of them are out there, hunting us?”

  Jack cocked his head. “No idea.”

  “We walked between the trees for five or ten minutes. I thought we were walking in a big circle—we kept passing a black lake covered with green duckweed. Everything was getting dark. There was a storm coming in, low black clouds—lightning.”

  “Sideways lightning?”

  Ginny nodded. “Then he said something about a moth. Maybe it was the Moth. ‘The Moth is coming to introduce you.’ The trees—I noticed that their branches grew down into the dirt. The leaves moved, independently. But they weren’t really moving, they were just changing—getting bigger or smaller, shifting left or right, but without moving—because the trees were black and solid, like stiff tar. I thought, maybe each time a tree seemed to move, it was becoming a different tree—I don’t know how to describe what was wrong with them. The guy with the coin seemed as scared as I was. He said, ‘The Queen in White expects perfection. That’s part of her charm.’ I asked him how old he was, how old the Queen was, and he said, ‘What an odd question.’

  “I think I saw another man—but it wasn’t a man. It stretched up and out until I could see right through it—right through him. We came to the center of the woods. I knew it was the center, but we had never left the circle. Maybe the path was a kind of spiral, but special—curving inward, but not in space. There was like a big lake of frozen jade-green water—all carved up, gouged out. I couldn’t see the sky over the lake—it just wasn’t there.”

  Jack didn’t want to hear any more. He shifted a few inches to his right, as if she were a package about to explode.

  “The clouds dropped and cut off the trees. Leaves fell like little flat rocks, ice cold. They stung when they hit my head and my arms. The light became gray and icy. The shadows had edges sharp as knives—if you walked over one, it could cut you. Everything smelled like lemons and burning gravy and gasoline—I hope I never smell anything like that again.

  “‘Don’t say a word,’ the thin man told me. He pocketed his coin, held out his hand, wiggled his long fingers. I couldn’t help it—I showed him the stone, still in its box. He reached out as if to take it, but instead he backed away and said, ‘Don’t move. Don’t look. I’m sorry.’

  “He started running. He left the circle we were on, and I heard him crashing through branches. I guessed that the circle was a trap—I had been hypnotized by the spiral. I couldn’t lift my feet.”

  Jack covered his mouth.

  “The same clouds…in the sky…like the ones that flew in over the city to get you,” Ginny said. “The man wanted to deliver me to something that didn’t belong here, something angry, sad. Disappointed. I stood between the trees. The leaves were spinning around the Queen or whatever it was in the center…I couldn’t see her. But she was tying up everything into one big knot. Her knot was the center of the spiral. I didn’t believe it, but I understood it—everything that could happen was going to happen, and all of it would happen to me, and some of it would even be stuff that couldn’t happen.

  “I was about to see everything, all at once. I turned around—completely around—and the trees spun by, but only halfway, and I saw the man in the trees—he lowered his hands and his eyes were like snowballs in his head. I turned around again, completely around, knowing that I would not see the Queen again until I had spun twice. Does that make sense?”

  Jack closed his eyes and realized he could see the sense that it did make. “In that place, you have to turn twice to rotate a full circle,” he said.

  “I thought you’d understand.”

  “It’s got a different logic, like the jumps we make. Did you see her?” Jack asked.

  “I don’t call it s
eeing. But yes, I suppose I did. She was at the center of the jade lake. She wasn’t dressed in white, she didn’t wear anything. At first I didn’t know why the man called her the Queen in White. Maybe he saw her differently, or knew something else about her. She was very tall. If I came from somewhere else, saw with different eyes, I suppose she might have been beautiful. She had limbs or arms or things coming out of her that I didn’t recognize, but they looked right—they fit. Even so, I knew that if I came near her, she would suck my eyes right out of my head. I felt like a piece of bloody ice. She just stood at the center of her knot, watching, infinitely curious, curious like a hunger, curious like fear—she wanted to know everything about me. And so angry, so disappointed. I wanted to tell her what she needed to know, just to end her disappointment, her rage—but I couldn’t explain it in words. Instead, what I had to give her would shoot up out of my skin, all the places I had been and things I had done or would do—past and future, all my selves, just a big, chewed-up mess flowing into her knot. She’d end up wearing me like a dress or a scarf. I didn’t think I was going to die—but I knew that what was about to happen would be worse than dying.”

  Jack sat stiff on the cot, hands trembling under his thighs. “Umhmm,” he murmured.

  She smiled. “But I’m here, right? So relax.”

  “That’s not easy,” he said with a nervous grin.

  “Well, deal. I had been holding something back—didn’t even know it, lucky for me, because I might have told her. Maybe you know what I’m talking about.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Tell me what I did.” Ginny looked straight at him.

  Jack made a circular scissors motion with his fingers.

  “Yeah. When I was finished—and it took just an instant—I was flat on my face, covered with leaves. Trees had fallen all around and water was everywhere—steaming but cold. Duckweed hung on all the trees. The lake had flung itself up out of the hollow, and I didn’t see the man again—I don’t know where he went. The whole forest was flattened.”