"Sure," Oliver heard himself say. "Why not."
Sherri paused, arrested over the dishes. Through the glass he saw her pretty eyes fill suddenly with hope and delight and not a trace of disbelief at all. "Really?" she said. It was like she was getting excited about something. "Really?"
"Sure," said Oliver, and yawned, and laughed. "Sure, why not."
CHAIN HOME, LOW
John M. Ford
John M. Ford is a genius, I think. He knows many things. He wrote about cyberspace before William Gibson; he won the World Fantasy Award for best novel with his alternate history The Dragon Waiting, and for best short story with his poem "Winter Solstice, Camelot Station"; he wrote The Scholars of Night, a modern spy thriller that circles and centers on a lost play by Kit Marlowe; and he wrote the only Star Trek novel without Star Trek characters (in The Final Reflection) and the only Star Trek novel with songs and me (in How Much for Just the Planet?).
Like Gene Wolfe, Ford writes stories that routinely function on a multitude of levels. This story takes place during the first episode of Sandman (in the first Sandman collection, Preludes and Nocturnes). On one level Dream and his family are conspicuous by their absence. On another level, they are all through it: Dream was a captive in Burgess's basement, remember; and here Ford concatenates a chain of events about that captivity, a chain of puppets and of strings.
After all, we each of us begin in desire, and we all end in death.
In 1916, three days before Christmas, Siegfried Sassoon wrote in his soldier's diary: "The year is dying of atrophy as far as I am concerned, bed-fast in its December fogs."
But he was writing about the war.
The town of Wych Cross sits on the Sussex weald, midway between London and the Channel. "Wych" refers to elm trees, and the town, having been rather overlooked by the Industrial Revolution, did not feed its stands of stout elm to the fires of change. Elm was the material that Arthur's knights used for their lances--at least, in legends. Wych is close to other words, of course.
The town was never large, and rates mention in Sir Nikolaus Pevsner's exhaustive Buildings of England only for the manor house nearby. The house, called Fawney Rig, was founded in the late 1500s as a residence for the local magistrate, a comfortable distance from the court hall in Serecombe. Fawney Rig was frequently rebuilt, so that by the twentieth century it was only an architectural oddity, a polyglot house. (Pevsner was dismissive.) On the manor grounds was the only other point of interest in Wych Cross, a raised ring of earth, some three yards high and twenty across. It was known as Wych Dyke, and was said to be Roman, or Druid, or a Roundhead artillery revetment.
In 1904, Fawney Rig was purchased by a man who called himself Roderick Burgess. His original name, his background, and his sources of wealth were all obscure, though he carried himself as an aristocrat and his cheques always proved good. Burgess made further additions to the house: externally, he added Gothic ironwork, gargoyles that vomited rain, coiling dragons along the ridgeline whose iron scales discouraged birds. Interior alterations were made by a firm from the Continent, odd, dark, silent men.
There was a great isolation around Wych Cross; whatever the maps might show, it was a long way from anywhere. So it took a few years for the first scandal to break, and that happened in London, with a police raid on a house in Belgravia. Several socially prominent members of Burgess's "Order of Ancient Mysteries" were involved, as was a naked woman. The papers were full of it for days.
Burgess went back to Wych Cross. That scandal, and those that followed, did not bother him. He swam in scandal, breathing and spouting it like Leviathan in the deeps. Burgess claimed to be a magus, a wizard of indefinably vast powers. People laughed at that. But not in Wych Cross.
In the summer of 1916, in a trench in Belgium, a German soldier named Gotrfried Himmels received a letter from home that filled him with an unidentifiable fear. Himmels had been in the trenches for almost a year, and got frequent letters from his wife; they were mostly about his daughter Magdalen. A few months ago, Himmels had sent home some of his pay--he said, "It is a foolishly large sum, but in mad times one ought to be allowed foolishness"--to buy Magdalen a coveted doll for her eighth birthday. Frau Himmels's next letter had gone on for two full pages about the party, and the doll, and Magdalen's delight.
This letter said, "Magdalen is happy." Not a word more.
A few days after the terrible letter, there was a trench raid on Himmels's sector. Men carrying bayonets and Mills grenades wired to sticks as crude maces--weapons from half a millennium ago--tumbled through the mines and the wire in the wet dark. They fought in silence for a while, except to gasp or groan when a knife or a rifle butt or the odd bullet struck home, and then they began to shout to one another, because all of them were so covered in mud and slime and each other's blood that only the sound of a voice could separate friends from enemies. They yelled names, or "Kamerad" or "Ami" or "Kommen Sie an" or "A bas les Boches"; the sound counted more than the words. What Gottfried Himmels was shouting, over and over as he beat and stabbed and shot at faceless muddy men, was "Magdalen freut sich"--Magdalen is happy.
Trench fighting is desperate and fierce beyond even the imaginings of war. Of the forty-odd men involved in that particular action, Himmels was one of only three German survivors, and the only man not seriously wounded.
All three survivors received the Iron Cross First Class, and a period of home leave. When Himmels got home, he understood the letter. He understood why he had been afraid. He even understood, faintly, why it had seemed at the height of the battle that something greater than himself guided his hands, that the Angel of Death was standing apart from him and would not come near.
That same summer, with the lights of Europe dark for two years, sleeping people had begun to not quite wake up.
The victims of "sleepy sickness" were not inert. They would eat if fed, and responded, in a disconnected fashion, to voices and noises. They could and did move about by themselves, though the actions had no relation to the actual environment--walking purposefully into walls was common--and even if open-eyed they did not see.
Some people blamed the War; some thought it was a new manifestation of the terrible influenza that was affecting so many. But all the cases were isolated, and it struck in places the Great War had not touched. Missionaries and explorers brought reports of cases in the most isolated parts of the world. Sometimes the sleepers were called holy. Sometimes they were killed, or left to the elements. In the Western world they were kept in spare bedrooms, or hospitals, or nursing homes, or wherever seemed appropriate.
Sigmund Freud saw several cases, and wrote a careful but inconclusive monograph, Beobachtungs des Wahrschlafssperrung. The name was coined by Dr. Simon Rachlin, a young associate of Freud's; with the ungainly precision of German, it meant Suspension of True Sleep. One of the observed patients, identified as "Fraulein H.", was Magdalen Himmels, who had been found slumbering next to her dolls' house in August 1916, one of the very first cases. Once or twice in a month, Magdalen would act out a formal ball, waltzing an invisible doll around her hospital room.
Nine months after Gottfried's visit home, Peter Himmels was born. He slept in his mother's room until he was nearly two, but he slept no more deeply than any other baby, and woke as often and loudly as any of them. Peter would believe himself to be an only child until he was eleven years old.
In 1926 the last confirmed case of the sleepers' disorder was reported in Cape Town. It had been called sleepy sickness, sleepers' flu, Wahrschlafssperrung, midwar hypersomnia, Delambre's Disease (within the circle of Dr. Delambre), and the name that finally stuck, Encephalitis Lethargica. There were phantom reports for years afterward, other comas, other sleeps. None of them was quite E. Lethe, however: victims who could eat, could speak, could move, but were connected to life only by a heartbeat.
There were, at most, twenty thousand of the false sleepers worldwide, and perhaps that number again caught more shallowly, so they were never ful
ly asleep or wakeful, still functional in a cruel way. Against the millions of casualties of the Great War, the influenza pandemic that followed on hard and killed twenty million, what were a quiet few, fading away? There was an entire war footnote to the Great War, an Allied invasion of Siberia to put down the filthy Bolsheviks, and it was entirely forgotten. The sleepers did not rave or suppurate or otherwise offend the wakeful; they needed no large amount of tending (indeed, many got no tending at all); they could hardly organize themselves, and no one in those days organized in their interest. Dopamine drugs were decades away. And so what had briefly been a great medical puzzle, a mysterious visitation, became a curiosity of medicine, a footnote, nothing.
In 1927 a man known as William B. Goodrich directed Louise Brooks in Still Morning, about an E. Lethe patient finally awakened through the efforts and love of a brilliant young doctor. Photoplay said: "It must have sounded like a natural: Brooks in bed for four reels. Who would have expected her to sleep the whole time?" The picture was quickly withdrawn, before the public found out that Goodrich was actually the disgraced comedian Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle.
Decades later, Louise Brooks said, "The real sleepwalker on that picture was Arbuckle. He'd been dead with his eyes open ever since his friends hung him in public. He said the idea came to him in his sleep. Maybe it did."
A film critic who saw a "rediscovered" print half a century later said, "I know of no other film, even Pandora's Box, that makes such extraordinary use of Brooks's demonic innocence. If anybody but Arbuckle had made it, it would be in every film school in the world."
The management of the Ufa studio near Berlin saw the failure of Still Morning and quietly shelved their halfcompleted Die Traumer, starring Lil Dagover and almost identical to the American picture. Its scenarist had also dreamed the story.
In Serecombe, in 1928, a young couple named Martyn had their first child, a boy they named Theodore after a favorite uncle of the mother's.
Mrs. Martyn confided to her best friend that the couple had intended to wait for a year or two, putting money by, before starting a family. "But it really wasn't carelessness, Rose. It was desire, just plain desire, like neither of us had ever thought on."
Theodore Martyn was of course never told of this circumstance of his birth. He grew up fairly typical, fond of sweets, sports, adventure stories, and things forbidden to him. And since a boy like that couldn't very well be called "Theodore," he became "Tiger" at a very early age.
Of the forbidden things, there were two in particular. Tiger's best friend Willy Bates was the son of the local newsagent, and thus had access to "Yank magazines," the cheap American pulps with brightly colored covers that went to England as ballast in merchant ships. Willy's father sold a few of them and tossed the rest into the bin, whence they were rescued by the boys.
The other thing was Wych Cross, three miles down the Wych Road. Tiger and Willy knew this had something to do with the mysterious manor house--everyone knew about the mysterious manor house--but exactly what put Wych Cross beyond the pale was delightfully vague.
From the second decade of the century onward, Roderick Burgess was perpetually locked in a battle for fame and followers with Aleister Crowley and a Cornishman known as "Mocata," a sorcerers' duel conducted mostly in journals of strictly limited circulation. The received wisdom was that Mocata was the most urbane and by far the handsomest, Crowley the most voluble and spectacularly degenerate, and Burgess the most philosophical and ruthless. (That he was Oxford, while Crowley was Cambridge, delighted the papers.)
Mocata died of apparent heart failure in 1928. Burgess lacked Crowley's bizarre sense of humor (or any other sort) and eventually lost his taste for the spotlight. He was not seen outside of Fawney Rig after 1930, though there was a continual flow of visitors in Rolls-Royces and Bentleys and the occasional aeroplane.
It was said, though not closer than Serecombe, that Burgess had a devil, or the Devil, in the basement of Fawney Rig. It was said he had made a bargain with darkness and could not die. It was said that he had reached that curious state of wealthy old men, of being able to afford any pleasure and to appreciate none of them.
In 1930, James Richard Lee of Liverpool was eleven years old. He lived in a small coal black house with two other families, three couples and eight children all told. All the men were dockers, on different shifts, so that at any given time there was a man out working, one sleeping, one at the local or reading the Daily Worker, all interchangeably. There was the occasional raised voice, the good hiding for a proper infraction, but the three wives formed a unified front against tyranny of all sorts, and the small black house was happy, by the standards of the countless small black houses around it.
So there was nothing obvious that drove Dickie Lee down to the water-side in all his spare moments. He would sit, sometimes for hours, looking empty-eyed at the oily port water. This wasn't something boys did in Liverpool. Anyone disturbing Dickie Lee, however, was met first with a word, then a stone thrown close enough to whistle in the ear, and then another stone to prove that the first was not lucky.
Not that he ignored his extended family. Dickie understood that a family, no matter how odd its structure might be, hung together, helped out when one of the members was in trouble. He helped as he could, and got into remarkably little trouble for a boy of his age.
By the fall of 1930, when Dickie was eleven, this had been going on for nearly two years, and he was largely let alone. When someone came up, quietly, behind him this time, he turned, the stone invisible in his palm.
It was his father. Dickie waited a moment, then turned back to the sea.
His father crouched beside him in the gray air, great muscles poised without tension. At some length the man said, "Do you see that seagull yonder, on the post?"
Dickie nodded.
"Can you scare'm off, without 'urting'm?"
The boy's hand flicked back and out, as if it were the only living part of him. The flat rock skipped off the top of the post not half an inch from the seagull's feet, and it screamed and fluttered off.
"Someone you ought to meet," Dickie's father said, and they went off together.
The someone to be met was Davy Cale, who ran a corner shop. Every boy in the neighborhood, except Dickie Lee, knew that Cale had been a footballer of some note, and every boy but Dickie knew he was trying to put together a club for boys.
"He dun't seem to understand what a team's for," Dickie's father said, very mildly. "But trying Mm as goalie might bring him halfway out."
Dickie was asked again to show what he could do with a rock. Handed a football, he looked at it with vague interest, but demonstrated that he could put it anywhere it needed to go. So did the least likely boy in England become the starting goalkeeper for the Liverpool Junior Racers.
As a movement in James Richard Lee's life, it worked, as his father had said, halfway. He never became one of the lads, still didn't play with them, club football excepted, still did his time alone defended against all comers.
But he was supernatural on the field. He seemed to begin an interception before the goal attempt was fairly begun, and once blocked, the ball would infallibly go to the boy best placed to return it. The Racers were champions; and Deadeye Dick Lee was champion of champions. So, for a while at least, the rest of it didn't matter.
In 1933, the man who had designed the fastest aircraft on earth went to visit Germany. R. J. Mitchell was not a well man; he had undergone a lung operation during the testing of his latest plane, and the trip was supposed to be part of his convalescence.
Mitchell met with a number of young German pilots. They spoke about what airplanes could do, what they might do. Something happened inside the Englishman's mind.
Mitchell went back to England deeply troubled, with a vision of something to come. The design he had been working on was flying, awkwardly, by the end of the year. Mitchell saw that it would not do, and began to work at it obsessively, continuously, with no
thought of his physical condition, possessed by a dream of shapely wings and destruction.
In 1934, when Peter Himmels was sixteen, he was aware that his sister existed and had a terrible sickness. It did not frighten him. He began to visit the hospital regularly, got to know the nurses and Simon Rachlin. Dr. Rachlin was delighted by Peter's visits; the other Wahrschlafssperrung patients seemed as forgotten by their families as the disorder had been by the world at large.
"Why do you think she dances?" Peter said.
Dr. Rachlin said, "I do not know, though I hope to someday. I have asked her, when she seems aware, but as I have told you, the Schlafssperr' patients almost never answer."
"Do you think I could dance with her?"
Dr. Rachlin smiled. "I cannot imagine any harm in it. Would you object to my watching you?"
Peter and the doctor cleared a space in the dining room. One of the nurses got some waltz music on the radio, and Dr. Rachlin sat by with a notebook as the young people danced.
Peter tried to look as if he were leading, but in fact Magdalen was pulling him around the floor. Nor, though it kept vaguely to the radio's waltz time, was the dance much of anything formal--perhaps, Rachlin wrote, an eight-year-old's imagining of a waltz.
"Do they not look lovely?" one of the nurses said.
When the dancers finished, Peter stepped back from his sister and bowed from the waist.
Magdalen curtsied in reply. She had never done that in her solo dancing.
"She wakes!" a nurse said.
"If she does, we shall all take dancing lessons," Dr. Rachlin said, and his hand was shaking as he scribbled the description; but a moment later Magdalen was standing still, unseeing, as ever.
At eighteen, James Richard Lee got a docker's button as his father and the other men in the black house wore. In an attempt to get the best out of his talents, he was made a crane operator, and after the first weeks' training, never dropped a pallet or missed a hold. His fellow dockers felt safe with Dick on the crane; management liked that, while he was certainly a union man, he didn't seem too Bolshie about it.