One by one, the stranger held up book after book, to show the covers, then a page, and yet another title page where printed dates of this novel surfed up, adrift, but to stay forever on some far future shore.
The sick man's eyes lingered over the covers, the tides, the dates, and then fixed to his visitor's bright face. He exhaled, stunned. «My God, you have the look of a traveler. From where?»
«Do the years show?» Harrison Cooper leaned forward. «Well, then-I bring you an Annunciation.»
«Such things come to pass only with virgins,» whispered the old man. «No virgin lies here buried under his unread books.»
«I come to unbury you. I bring tidings from a far place.» The sick man's eyes moved to the books beneath his trembling hands.
«Mine?» he whispered.
The traveler nodded solemnly, but began to smile when the color in the old man's face grew warmer arid the expression in his eyes and on his mouth was suddenly eager.
«Is there hope. then?»
«There is!»
«I believe you.» The old man took a breath and then wondered, «Why?»
«Because,» said the stranger at the foot of the bed, «I love you.»
«I do not know you, sir!»
«But I know you fore and aft, port to starboard, main topgallants to gunnels, every day in your long life to here!»
«Oh, the sweet sound!» cried the old man. «Every word that you say, every light from your eyes, is foundation-of-the-world true! How can it be?» Tears winked from the old man's lids. «Why?»
«Because I am the truth,» said the traveler. «I have come a long way to find and say: you are not lost. Your great Beast has only drowned some little while. In another year, lost ahead, great and glorious, plain and simple men will gather at your grave and shout: he breeches, he rises, he breeches, he rises! and the white shape will surface to the light, the great terror lift into the storm and thunderous St. Elmo's fire and you with him, each bound to each, and no way to tell where he stops and you start or where you stop and he goes off around the world lifting a fleet of libraries in his and your wake through nameless seas of sub-sub-librarians and readers mobbing the docks to chart your far journeyings, alert for your lost cries at three of a wild morn.»
«Christ's wounds!» said the man in his winding-sheet bedclothes. «To the point, man, the point! Do you speak truth!?»
«I give you my hand on it, and pledge my soul and my heart's blood.» The visitor moved to do just this, and the two men's fists fused as one. «Take these gifts to the grave. Count these pages like a rosary in your last hours. Tell no one where they came from. Scoffers would knock the ritual beads from your fingers. So tell this rosary in the dark before dawn, and the rosary is this: you will live forever. You are immortal.»
«No more of this, no more! Be still.»
«I can not. Hear me. Where you have passed a fire path will burn, miraculous in the Bengal Bay, the Indian Seas, Hope's Cape, and around the Horn, past perdition's landfall, as far as living eyes can see.»
He gripped the old man's fist ever more tightly.
«I swear. In the years ahead, a million millions will crowd your grave to sleep you well and warm your bones. Do you hear?»
«Great God, you are a proper priest to sound my Last Rites. And will I enjoy my own funeral? I will.»
His hands, freed, clung to the books at each side, as the ardent visitor raised yet other books and intoned the dates:
«Nineteen twenty-two . . . 1930 . . .1935. . . 1940 . 1955… 1970. Can you read and know what it means?»
He held the last volume close to the old man's face. The fiery eyes moved. The old mouth creaked.
«Nineteen ninety?»
«Yours. One hundred years from tonight.»
«Dear God!»
«I must go, but I would hear. Chapter One. Speak.»
The old man's eyes slid and burned. He licked his lips, traced the words, and at last whispered, beginning to weep:
«'Call me Ishmael.'
There was snow and more snow and more snow after that. In the dissolving whiteness, the silver ribbon twirled in a massive whisper to let forth in an exhalation of Time the journeying librarian and his book bag. As if slicing white bread rinsed by snow, the ribbon, as the traveler ghosted himself to flesh, sifted him through the hospital wall into a room as white as December. There, abandoned, lay a man as pale as the snow and the wind. Almost young, he slept with his mustaches oiled to his lip by fever. He seemed not to know nor care that a messenger had invaded the air near his bed. His eyes did not stir, nor did his mouth increase the passage of breath. His hands at his sides did not open to receive. He seemed already lost in a bomb and only his unexpected visitor's voice caused his eyes to roll behind their shut lids.
«Are you forgotten?» a voice asked.
«Unborn,» the pale man replied.
«Never remembered?»
«Only. Only in. France.»
«Wrote nothing at all?»
«Not worthy.»
«Feel the weight of what I place on your bed. No, don't look. Feel.»
«Tombstones.»
«With names, yes, but not tombstones. Not marble but paper. Dates, yes, but the day after tomorrow and tomorrow and ten thousand after that. And your name on each.»
«It will not be.»
«Is. Let me speak the names. Listen. Masque?»
«Red Death.»
«The Fall of-« –
«Usher!»
«Pit?»
«Pendulum!»
«Tell-tale?»
«Heart! My heart. Heart!»
«Repeat: for the love of God, Montresor.» «Silly.»
«Repeat: Montresor, for the love of God.» «For the love of God, Montresor'.»
«Do you see this label?»
«I see!»
«Read the date.»
«Nineteen ninety-four. No such date.»
«Again, and the name of the wine.»
«Nineteen ninety-four. Amontillado. And my name!»
«Yes! Now shake your head. Make the fool's-cap bells ring. Here's mortar for the last brick. Quickly. I'm here to bury you alive with books. When death comes, how will you greet him? With a shout and-?»
«Requiescat in pace?»
«Say it again.»
«Requiescat in pace!»
The Time Wind roared, the room emptied. Nurses ran in, summoned by laughter, and tried to seize the books that weighed down his joy.
«What's he saying?» someone cried.
In Paris, an hour, a day, a year, a minute later, there was a run of St. Elmo's fire along a church steeple, a blue glow in a dark alley, a soft tread at a street corner, a turnabout of wind like an invisible carousel, and then footfalls up a stair to a door which opened on a bedroom where a window looked out upon cafes filled with people and far music, and in a bed by the window, a tall man lying, his pale face immobile, until he heard alien breath in his room.
The shadow of a man stood over him and now leaned down so that the light from the window revealed a face and a mouth as it inhaled and then spoke. The single word that the mouth said was:
«Oscar?»
The Other Highway
1996 year
They drove into green Sunday-morning country, away from the hot aluminum city, and watched as the sky was set free and moved over them like a lake they had never known was there, amazingly blue and with white breakers above them as they traveled.
Clarence Travers slowed the car and felt the cool wind move over his face with the smell of cut grass. He reached over to grasp his wife's hand and glanced at his son and daughter in the backseat, not fighting, at least for this moment, as the car moved through one quiet beauty after another in what might be a Sunday so lush and green it would never end.
«Thank God we're doing this,» said Cecelia Travers. «It's been a million years since we got away.» He felt her hand hug his and then relax completely. «when I think of all those ladies dropping dead from the heat at t
he cocktail parry this afternoon, welt»
«Well, indeed,» said Clarence Travers. «Onward!»
He pressed the gas pedal and they moved faster. Their progress out of the city had been mildly hysterical, with cars shrieking and shoving them toward islands of wilderness praying for picnics that might not be found. Seeing that he had put the car in the fast lane, he slowed to gradually move himself and his family through the banshee traffic until they were idling along at an almost reasonable fifty miles an hour. The scents of flowers and trees that blew in the window made his move worthwhile. He laughed at nothing at all and said:
«Sometimes, when I get this far out, I think let's just keep driving, never go back to the damned city.»
«Let's drive a hundred miles,» shouted his son.
«A thousand!» cried his daughter.
«A thousand!» said Clarence Travers. «But one slow mile at a time.» And then said, softly, «Hey!»
And as suddenly as if they had dreamed it up, the lost highway came into view. «Wonderful!» said Mr. Clarence Travers.
«What?» asked the children.
«Look!» said Clarence Travers, leaning over his wife, pointing. «That's the Old road. The one they used a long time ago.»
«That?» said his wife.
«It's awfully small,» said his son.
«Well, there weren't many cars then, they didn't need much.»
«It looks like a big snake,» said his daughter.
«Yeah, the old roads used to twist and turn, all right. Remember?»
Cecelia Travers nodded. The car had slowed and they gazed over at that narrow concrete strip with the green grass buckling it gently here or there and sprays of wildflowers nestling up close to either side and the morning sunlight coming down through the high elms and maples and oaks that led the way toward the forest.
«I know it like the nose on my face,» said Clarence Travers. «How would you like to ride on it?»
«Oh, Clarence, now
«I mean it.»
«Oh, Daddy, could we?»
«All right, we'll do it,» he said decisively.
«We can't!» said Cecelia Travers. «It's probably against the law. It can't be safe.»
But before his wife could finish, he turned off the freeway and let all the swift cars rush on while he drove, smiling at each bump, down over a small ditch, toward the old road.
«Clarence, please! we'll be arrested!»
«For going ten miles an hour on a highway nobody uses anymore? Let's not kick over any beehives, it's too nice a day. I'll buy you all soda pops if you behave.»
They reached the old road.
«See how simple? Now which way, kids?»
«That way, that way!»
«Easy as pie!»
And he let the car take them away on the old highway, the great white-gray boa constrictor that lashed now slowly this way in green moss-velvet meadows, looped over gentle hills, and lowered itself majestically into caves of moist-smelling trees, through the odor of cricks and spring mud and crystal water that rustled like sheets of cellophane over small stone falls. They drove slow enough to see the waterspiders' enigmatic etchings on quiet pools behind dams of last October's leaves.
«Daddy, what are those?»
«What, the water-skaters? No one has ever caught one. You wait and wait and put your hand out and bang! The spider's gone. They're the first things in life you can't grab onto. The list gets bigger as you grow old, so start small. Don't believe in them. They're not really there.»
«It's fun thinking they are.»
«You have just stated a deep philosophical truth. Now, drive on, Mr. Travers.» And obeying his own command with good humor, he drove on.
And they came to a forest that had been like November all through the winter and now, reluctantly, was putting out green flags to welcome the season. Butterflies in great tosses of confetti leaped from the deeps of the forest to ramble drunkenly on the air, their thousand torn shadows following over grass and water.
«Let's go back now,» said Cecelia Travers.
«Aw, Mom,» said the son and daughter.
«Why?» said Clarence Travers. «My God, how many kids back in that damned hot town can say they drove on a road nobody else has used in years? Not one! Not one with a father brave enough to cross a little grass to take the old way. Right?»
Mrs. Travers lapsed into silence.
«Right there,» said Clarence Travers, «over that hill, the highway turns left, then right, then left again, an S curve, and another S. Wait and see.»
«Left.»
«Right.»
«Left.»
«An S curve.»
The car purred.
«Another S!»
«Just like you said!»
«Look.» Clarence Travers pointed. A hundred yards across the way from them, the freeway suddenly appeared for a few yards before it vanished, screaming behind stacks of playing-card billboards. Clarence Travers stared fixedly at it and the grass between it and this shadowed path, this silent place like the bottom of an old stream where tides used to come but came no more, where the wind ran through nights making the old sound of far traffic.
«You know something,» said the wife. «That freeway over there scares me.»
«Can we drive home on this old road instead, Dad?» said the son.
«I wish we could.»
«I've always been scared,» said the wife, watching that other traffic roaring by, gone before it arrived.
«We're all afraid,» said Clarence Travers. «But you pay your money and take your chance. Well?»
His wife sighed. «Damn, get back on that dreadful thing.»
«Not quite yet,» said Clarence Travers and drove to reach a small, very small village, all quite unexpected, a settlement no more than a dozen white clapboard houses mossed under giant trees, dreaming in a green tide of water and leaf-shadow, with wind shaking the rocking chairs on weathered porches and dogs sleeping in the cool nap of grass-carpeting at noon, and a small general store with a dirty red gas pump out front.
They drew up there and got out and stood, unreal in the sudden lack of motion, not quite accepting these houses lost in the wilderness.
The door to the general store squealed open and an old man stepped out, blinked at them, and said, «Say, did you folks just come down that old road?»
Clarence Travers avoided his wife's accusing eyes. «Yes, sir.
«No one on that road in twenty years.»
«We were out for a lark,» said Mr. Travers. «And found a peacock,» he added.
«A sparrow,» said his wife.
«The freeway passed us by, a mile over there, if you want it,» said the old man. «When the new road opened, this town just died on the vine. We got nothing here now but people like me. That is: old.»
«Looks like there'd be places here to rent.»
«Mister, just walk in, knock out the bats, stomp the spiders, and any place is yours for thirty bucks a month. I own the whole town.»
«Oh, we're not really interested,» said Cecelia Travers.
«Didn't think you would be,» said the old man. «Too far out from the city, too far off the freeway. And that dirt road there slops over when it rains, all muck and mud. And, heck, it's against the law to use that path. Not that they ever patrol it.» The old man snorted, shaking his head. «And not that I'll turn you in. But it gave me a nice start just now to see you coming down that rut. J had to give a quick look at my calendar, by God, and make sure it wasn't 1929!»
Lord, I remember, thought Clarence Travers. This is Fox Hill. A thousand people lived here. I was a kid, we passed through on summer nights. We used to stop here late late, and me sleeping in the backseat in the moonlight. My grandmother and grandfather in back with me. It's nice to sleep in a car driving late and the road all white, watching the stars turn as you take the curves, listening to the grown-ups' voices underwater, remote, talking, talking, laughing, murmuring, whispering. My father driving, so stolid. Just to be drivi
ng in the summer dark, up along the lake to the Dunes, where the poison ivy grew out on the lonely beach and the wind stayed all the time and never went away. And us driving by that lonely graveyard place of sand and moonlight and poison ivy and the waves tumbling in like dusty ash on the shore, the lake pounding like a locomotive on the sand, coming and going. And me crumpled down and smelling Grandmother's wind-cooled coat and the voices comforting and blanketing me with their solidity and their always-will-be-here sounds that would go on forever, myself always young and us always riding on a summer night in our old Kissel with the side flaps down. And stopping here at nine or ten for Pistachio and Tutti-frutti ice cream that tasted, faintly, beautifully, of gasoline. All of us licking and biting the cones and smelling the gasoline and driving on, sleepy and snug, toward home, Green Town, thirty years ago.
He caught himself and said:
«About these houses, would it be much trouble fixing them up?» He squinted at the old man.
«Well, yes and no, most of 'em over fifty years old, lots of dust. You could buy one off me for ten thousand, a real bargain now, you'll admit. If you were an artist, now, a painter, or something like that.»
«I write copy in an advertising firm.»
«Write stories, too, no doubt? Well, now, you get a writer out here, quiet, no neighbors, you'd do lots of writing.»
Cecelia Travers stood silently between the old man and her husband. Clarence Travers did not look at her, but looked at the cinders around the porch of the general store. «I imagine I could work here.»
«Sure,» said the old man.
«I've often thought,» said Mr. Travers, «it's time we got away from the city and took it a little easy.»
«Sure,» said the old man.
Mrs. Travers said nothing but searched in her purse and took out a minor.
«Would you like some drinks?» asked Clarence Travers with exaggerated concern. «Three Orange Crushes, make it four,» he told the old man. The old man moved inside the store, which smelled of nails and crackers and dust.