City at the End of Time

  He turned his head slowly and said, “These are all paperbacks?”

  Ginny noticed for the first time that this was true; she’d been working on autopilot for the last hour, letting her thoughts go as she repeated the mechanics and motions. “So far,” she said.

  Bidewell clasped his hands. “Books produced in quantity seem to enjoy mutation, especially in the great piles that modern publishers stack in their vast warehouses. Packed together, compressed, unread—they reach a critical mass and start to change. A symptom of boredom, don’t you think?”

  “How can books be bored?” Ginny asked. “They’re not alive.”

  “Ah,” Bidewell said.

  She spread the books out on the table in stacks five high. All of them had been printed in English; all were less than twenty years old. Many were in sorry condition; others appeared brand-new, except for browned paper and the occasional chipped or dinged corner or spine. They smelled musty. She was coming to hate the smell of books.

  Bidewell approached. Ginny never felt threatened or afraid in his presence, but all the same, could not help thinking that he needed watching.

  He studied the stacks she had made. Like a dealer of cards, he worked through them, fanning the pages of each book with his thumb, lifting them to his nose to sniff, barely glancing at what was on the aromatic pages. “Once a text is printed, there are no new books, only new readers,” he murmured. “For such a book—for such a text, a long string of symbols—there is no time. Even a new book, freshly printed, stored in a box with its identical compatriots—all the same—even that book can be old.”

  Ginny crossed her arms.

  Bidewell suddenly showed her a toothy smile: wood-colored teeth. George Washington’s choppers, but these are real—and they look strong.

  “Everything old is bored,” he said. “Hidden away in great piles of sameness, lives and histories laid out, unchanging—wouldn’t you play a little game, given the chance?” He stared up the aisles between boxes and shrugged, then blew his nose with a crisp, bubbling hoot. “A letter flipped, a word changed or lost—who will ever know? Who even looks or cares? Has there ever been a scientific survey of such tiny, incremental deviations? What we are looking for is not the trivial, the commonplace, but the product of permuted genius: the book that has rearranged its meaning or added meaning while no one was looking, no one was reading—and most fascinating of all, the book that has altered its string of text across all editions, throughout all time, such that no one can ever know the truth of the original. The variant becomes the standard. And what this new version has to contribute—that must be interesting.”

  “How could you ever find it?”

  “I remember what I read,” Bidewell said. “In my lifetime, I have read a lot. Within that significant sampling, I will know if anything changes.” He waved his long fingers over the table and sniffed. “These are of minor interest. They have varied individually, a letter here, a letter there. Their variations are intriguing, perhaps even significant, but of little use in the time left to us.”

  “Sorry,” Ginny said, petulant.

  “Not your fault,” Bidewell said. “Like me, books can be tedious.” He winked. “Let’s get through this shipment by eventide. Then, we will order in takeaway.”

  With an impenetrable look of severity, Bidewell stalked away through the aisles to the steel door and closed it behind him, leaving Ginny to her endless task of sorting and stacking.

  She opened the next box on the handcart, pulled out a paperback, and lifted the pages to her nose. The odor of rotting pulp made her sneeze.

  CHAPTER 12

  * * *

  The nurse weighed Jack and guided him to the doctor’s cubicle, a small gray and pink space. She took his pulse with expert fingers, then wrapped his wiry arm in an inflatable cuff and pumped it up to measure his blood pressure.

  A few minutes later the doctor entered and closed the door. Miriam Sangloss was in her early forties, slender and strong-jawed, with short brown hair. She wore a white lab coat and a gray wool skirt that fell below her knees. Black socks with pumpkin-colored clocks and sensible black running shoes completed her wardrobe. On her left hand, he noticed, she wore a garnet ring, at least two carats.

  She flashed a knowing flicker of a smile and looked him over with sharply focused brown eyes. “How’s our rat man today?” she asked. He wondered how she knew—perhaps Ellen had told her.

  “Fine. Losing bits of my day,” he said. He hated to admit to being sick. Being sick meant he was losing his touch. Soon he would become slow and wrinkled and stooped-shouldered and no one would want to watch him perform. “Going blank,” he added.

  “For how long?” Sangloss asked.

  “How long am I blacking out?”

  “How long have you been losing bits of your day?”

  “Two months.”

  “And you’re how old—twenty-five, twenty-six?” She turned the page of the chart on her clipboard. He wondered how she had put together so many notes.

  “Twenty-four,” Jack said.

  “Much too old. Stop it right now.”

  “Too old for what?”

  Look at you. Handsome as a young devil. Strong and agile. Fit. You don’t get sick. You live life on your own terms. You always will—we expect that of you. So what’s really wrong with you?

  He could almost see Dr. Sangloss’s lips moving, telling him that, but she hadn’t spoken aloud, of course. It was all contained in the long look she gave him. Over a brief sigh, she bent her gaze to the tablet and said, “Tell me what you experience.”

  “It’s probably nothing. I drop out for a few minutes or as long as an hour. Two or three times a day. Sometimes I’m fine for a week, but then it happens again. Last week I rode my bike on autopilot all afternoon. Ended up near the loading docks.”

  “No bumps or bruises?”

  Jack shook his head.

  “Any recent trauma, lapses of judgment, odd behavior—hallucinations?”

  Again, no.

  “You’re sure?”

  He looked at a poster on the far wall—a medical artist’s rendering of a male head in profile, cut in half, framed and mounted beside a corkboard. The poster reminded him of learning how to swallow and disgorge Ping-Pong balls and small oranges. “A kind of dream. A place. A mood.”

  “Any smells or tastes or sounds before or after these episodes?”

  “No. Well—sometimes. Bad tastes.”

  “Mostly just the lingering sensation of a forgotten dream. Is that it?”

  “I don’t know.” To her skeptical gaze, “Really.”

  “No drugs? Marijuana?”

  He solemnly denied this. “Cuts back on my timing.”

  “Right.” She inspected his left hand, spread the fingers, stared curiously at the calluses. “Any family history of epilepsy? Narcolepsy? Schizophrenia?”

  “No. I don’t think so. I don’t know much about my mother’s side of the family. She died when I was twelve.”

  “Did your father smoke like a chimney?”

  “No. He was large—fat, really. He wanted to be a stand-up comedian.” Jack gave her a squint.

  Sangloss waved that aside. “We should do a follow-up. No insurance, correct?”

  “Zero.”

  “Street entertainer’s union? Teamsters?”

  Jack smiled.

  “Maybe we can get you a pro bono appointment at Harborview. Would you show up if, if I arranged that?”

  He looked uncertain. “What, like a biopsy?”

  “MRI. Brain scan. Petit mal epilepsy usually occurs in children, drops off at puberty. Kids can have dozens of small seizures each day, sometimes hundreds, but rarely lasting more than a few seconds. That diagnosis doesn’t quite fit, does it? Narcolepsy—possible, but that doesn’t fit, either. Has anyone seen you black out?”

  “I just did, in the waiting room. I kept turning pages. Nobody seemed to notice.” He pointed to the chair, where the Weekly poked out of his jacke
t pocket.

  “Ah.” She shined a small bright light into each of his eyes. “Phone number?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Your phone number, for the appointment.”

  He gave her Burke’s phone number. Dr. Sangloss wrote it down on his chart. “I’ll ask Dr. Lindblom to get you into Harborview. Do this—for my sake, if not for yours, okay?”

  Jack nodded solemnly, but his eyes were elusive.

  Sangloss brandished a tongue depressor. “Open wide,” she said. When he could not talk, merely issue round vowels, she said, “I saw you downtown three weeks ago. Does anyone complain when you juggle rats?”

  “Awm,” Jack said. She lifted the wooden stick. He poked his mouth square between two fingers, then released it, letting it flop loose, and smiled. “Some. They pet the rats. I show them how I handle them.”

  “What else do you juggle? That’s alive, I mean.”

  “I used to juggle a kitten.”

  “Really? Why did you stop?”

  “Got big. I gave him to a friend. Not many cats like to be juggled—that one was special. And I had a snake, once. Snakes are tricky.”

  “I bet.” Sangloss made more notes.

  Jack clamped his jaw. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Nothing obvious,” she said. “Keep a little notebook handy. Record each episode—frequency, sensations, aura, whatever you can remember. They’ll ask at Harborview.”

  “All right.”

  “And stop tossing your rats, okay? Until we figure this out.”

  Dr. Sangloss finished her clinic hours, said good-bye to the receptionist and the nurses, then locked the doors, turned down the heat, checked the taps in the bathrooms and the lab, briefly inventoried all the locks and security cameras in the pharmacy, and stood for a moment, looking around the front office. The clinic served many different kinds of patient. Not all were responsible.

  The office was quiet, the street outside the half-shuttered window deserted. A light wind sent a whistling note through a crack somewhere. An old, drafty building.

  She walked down the hall to her small rear office, where she filed a few folders and unlocked the lower desk drawer. As she plucked out her cell phone, she felt a chill—strange, since the old furnace had just finished its final blast of heat for the evening.

  Almost strange enough to make her open the book that Conan Arthur Bidewell had given her, with instructions never to read it, or even to carry it in her hands for very long. Bidewell was an odd man but a compelling one—and he paid the clinic’s bills.

  Five years’ worth.

  Tonight was the fourth anniversary of their first meeting at the green warehouse down in Sodo. Green warehouse, green leather binding on her small old book, half hidden by textbooks and journals on a metal shelf.

  She stared at its short, cracked leather spine, imprinted only with a number on the nub—1298. A number, or a date.

  What would she learn if she did read it?

  Dr. Sangloss jerked loose from the book’s spell and punched in a number on her phone. A woman answered. “Ellen? Miriam. I’ve examined your young man. No doubts. You have his address, don’t you?…Not implying a thing, dear. I’m sure we’ll all feel motherly. Say hello to the Witches. I don’t think I’ll make it tonight. Might spook the poor fellow. Let me know what they think.”

  CHAPTER 13

  * * *

  Wallingford

  The living room windows were covered in plastic. Someone—perhaps the real owner, years before—had tried to remodel and given up. Lath and plaster had been pulled out, old paper-wrapped wiring lay in bent, ragged coils. The roof leaked and water warped the wooden floor, seeping down to flood the basement.

  The house had been deserted long enough for a homeless beggar to find his way in and set himself up in crude comfort—no heat, no power, nothing but running water left on for the gardeners who no longer came. The beggar had added a few sticks of furniture and a mattress, probably snuck in with exhausting effort during the night.

  When he could stand up without retching—for the first time in days—Daniel searched the house all over again.

  And this time…

  In a hole just behind the upstairs bathroom sink, he found a carton tied with string. He cut the string and poured out the contents. A battered wallet flopped on the cracked tile floor, driver’s license visible behind a yellowed plastic window. The photo confirmed that this body had once belonged to a man named Charles Granger, age 32 at the time the license was issued. Another shake tossed out sheets of typing paper, a black marker, and a blunted pencil.

  A small, dense gray box, taped to the bottom, fell out last—and he knew this was what he’d been looking for all along.

  His sum-runner. The sometime stone.

  The box was the same, with the same sigil carved in bas-relief on the lid: a circular design with interlinked bands or hoops wrapped around a cross. How likely was that? Another connection between Daniel and Charles Granger. He did not try to open it—not yet. With a low whistle, he put it in his pocket, then flipped through the papers. Random scrawls, odd symbols—terrible handwriting, yet familiar, in its way.

  Too close. Very spooky.

  Where was Granger now, the previous occupant of this heap of a body—lost, pushed aside, bumped out of the nest? Just another victim. And what about all those other strands, all the world-lines he must have crossed—the myriad densely bundled fates between Daniel Patrick Iremonk and here?

  No Daniel in this strand. Only someone living in his aunt’s old house, someone who writes things down in odd symbols—

  The closest I could find.

  Just not me. Why?

  The box was the crucial connection. Had Charles Granger been a jaunter as well? Charles Granger is at the end of his rope. The box knows. It brought you here.

  He riffled the papers, stuffed them back into the carton, then closed it up again.

  Outside, the wind picked up.

  Daniel stood, joints popping and cracking. Something wasn’t right. Something wasn’t finished. He had found the box—a box—but Daniel Iremonk had never kept his sum-runner in a cardboard carton—too obvious.

  He had hidden it behind the brick fireplace.

  Daniel felt along the bricks and found a loose one near the baseboard. He scraped it back and forth, pulled it out, knelt down with a grimace, and reached into the opening.

  And found a second box.

  As if working through instinct, he placed both boxes side by side. They were identical in appearance. He puzzled them open. The stones lay in their velvet-cushioned interiors, sharing the same orientation.

  He removed them and held them in his hands, inspecting their distant red eyes. They refused to twist—and refused to fit together. Two identical pieces of a puzzle.

  He returned the duplicate stone to its box, closed it, and dropped it into the cardboard carton, then covered it with Charles Granger’s papers.

  Best to keep no more than one on his person, and hide the other—as a backup.

  The sounds of traffic on the arterial that ran past the northern corner of the old house—a regular hum and wet swoosh—should have been soothing, like freshets down a watercourse. But Daniel could not find peace. He could not sleep. He lay twitching in the torn sleeping bag on the wooden floor in the middle of the rear bedroom. Little electric flashes raced through him, as if his heart were being tickled by the frayed end of a low-voltage cable. Things kept popping up in memory—impossible things he could never have personally witnessed. Each little jolt came with its own bill of lading, a sense of personal loss that left him weaker and more confused.

  Even before he arrived here, Daniel had often felt as if he were a knot tying up all the loose rope-ends of time. Far too much responsibility.

  Time does not rush along as a point; it smears out like the passage of a brush a minute or an hour or a week wide, sometimes a month—a brush made of fate-laden fibers, painting different pictures for different
people.

  Knowing this gave Daniel an advantage—he could feel his way across the width of an hour, a week, a month. Anticipate something unpleasant? Make a left turn instead of a right, find a door opened instead of closed, elude bad fortune—and if something came up that seemed unavoidable, jaunt to a very close but slightly skewed, just slightly improved world—a strand without that particular impediment.

  That had been his method, until now.

  He had made his way from fate to fortune to fate, closing his eyes and squeezing himself loose…always joining up with alternate versions of himself, so little different that no one could tell there had been a change—a strange cuckoo landing in nests no doubt occupied by other cuckoos.

  Daniel never spent very long in one strand. He had started his killing early on—sacrificing others to enhance his fortune—desperate, as if he needed many more chances to get where he needed to be and do what he needed to do. It might have been those betrayals—those metaphysical murders—that had brought him low and thrust him into the middle of the Nasty Silent Party—that diseased, broken strand, surrounded by so many other rotting worlds.

  An infinite supply of fortune had passed through his hands, and now, apparently, he had sucked the wellspring dry. He sometimes wondered if he had killed the entire universe.

  But no. There were worse things than Daniel Patrick Iremonk out there, waiting to get in.

  Perhaps the puzzle boxes had been there all along, unguarded—and Granger had found them, but didn’t know what they were or what they carried.

  Poor kind of shepherd.

  A pile of bottles had grown in a corner of the kitchen—Night Train, Colt 45, Wild Irish Rose. Even on Daniel’s home strand, those same brands and bottles had lined the shelves in corner markets, leering landmarks of the constancy of human pain and sin. Cheap booze, common to all strands…