"Darwinia" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Robert Charles)

Chapter Two

Eleanor Sanders-Moss was everything Elias Vale had expected: a buxom Southern aristocrat past her prime, spine stiff, chin high, rain streaming from a silk umbrella, dignity colonizing the ruins of youth. She left a hansom standing at the curb: apparently the renaissance of the automobile had passed Mrs. Sanders-Moss by. The years had not. She suffered from crow’s feet and doubt. The wrinkles were past hiding; the doubt she was transparently working to conceal.

She said, “Elias Vale?”

He smiled, matching her reserve, dueling for advantage. Every pause a weapon. He was good at this. “Mrs. Sanders-Moss,” he said. “Please, come in.”

She stepped inside the doorway, folded her umbrella and dropped it without ceremony into the elephant’s-foot holder. She blinked as he closed the door. Vale preferred to keep the lights turned low. On gloomy days like this the eye was slow to adjust. It was a hazard to navigation, but atmosphere was paramount: he dealt, after all, in the commerce of the invisible.

And the atmosphere was working its effect on Mrs. Sanders-Moss. Vale tried to imagine the scene from her perspective, the faded splendor of this rented town house on the wrong side of the Potomac. Side-boards furnished with Victorian bronzes. Greek wrestlers, Romulus and Remus suckling at the teats of a wolf. Japanese prints obscured by shadows. And Vale himself, prematurely white-haired (an asset, really), stout, his coat trimmed in velvet, homely face redeemed by fierce and focused eyes. Green eyes. He had been born lucky: the hair and eyes made him plausible, he often thought.

He spun out silence into the room. Mrs. Sanders-Moss fidgeted and said at last, “We have an appointment… ?”

“Of course.”

“Mrs. Fowler recommended—”

“I know. Please come into my study.”

He smiled again. What they wanted, these women, was someone outré, unworldly… a monster, but their monster, a monster domesticated but not quite tame. He took Mrs. Sanders-Moss past velvet curtains into a smaller room lined with books. The books were old, ponderous, impressive unless you troubled to decipher the faded gilt on their threadbare spines: collections of nineteenth-century sermons, which Vale had bought for pennies at a farm auction. The arcanum, people assumed.

He steered Mrs. Sanders-Moss into a chair, then sat opposite her across a burnished tabletop. She mustn’t know that he was nervous, too. Mrs. Sanders-Moss was no ordinary client. She was the prey he had been stalking for more than a year now. She was well-connected. She hosted a monthly salon at her Virginia estate which was attended by many of the city’s intellectual lights — and their wives.

He wanted very much to impress Mrs. Sanders-Moss.

She folded her hands in her lap and fixed him with an earnest gaze. “Mrs. Fowler recommended you quite highly, Mr. Vale.”

“Doctor,” he corrected.

“Dr. Vale.” She was still wary. “I’m not a gullible woman. I don’t consult spiritualists, as a rule. But Mrs. Fowler was very impressed by your readings.”

“I don’t read, Mrs. Sanders-Moss. There are no tea leaves here. I won’t look at your palm. No crystal ball. No tarot cards.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“I’m not offended.”

“Well, she spoke very highly of you. Mrs. Fowler, I mean.”

“I recall the lady.”

“What you told her about her husband—”

“I’m happy she was pleased. Now. Why are you here?”

She put her hands in her lap. Restraining, perhaps, the urge to run.

“I’ve lost something,” she whispered.

He waited.

“A lock of hair…”

“Whose hair?”

Dignity fled. Now the confession. “My daughter’s. My first daughter. Emily. She died at two years. Diphtheria, you see. She was a perfect little girl. When she was ill I took a lock of her hair and kept it with a few of her things. A rattle, a christening dress…”

“All missing?”

“Yes! But it’s the hair that seems… the most terrible loss. It’s all I have of her, really.”

“And you want my help finding these items?”

“If it’s not too trivial.”

He softened his voice. “It’s not trivial at all.”

She looked at him with a gush of relief: she had made herself vulnerable and he had done nothing to hurt her; he had understood. That was what it was all about, Vale thought, this roundelay of shame and redemption. He wondered if doctors who treated venereal diseases felt the same way.

“Can you help me?”

“In all honesty, I don’t know. I can try. But you have to help me. Will you take my hand?”

Mrs. Sanders-Moss reached tentatively across the table. Her hand was small and cool and he folded it into his own larger, firmer grip.

Their eyes met.

“Try not to be startled by anything you might see or hear.”

“Speaking trumpets? That sort of thing?”

“Nothing as vulgar. This isn’t a tent show.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Never mind. Also, remember you may have to be patient. Often it takes time, contacting the other world.”

“I have nowhere to go, Mr. Vale.”

So the preliminaries were over and all that remained was to focus his concentration and wait for the god to rise from his inner depths — from what the Hindu mystics called “the lower chakras.” He didn’t relish it. It was always a painful, humiliating experience.

There was a price to be paid for everything, Vale thought.

The god: only he could hear it speak (unless he lent it his own, merely corporeal tongue); and when it spoke, he could hear nothing else. He had heard it for the first time in August of 1914.

Before the Miracle he had made a marginal living with a traveling show. Vale and two partners had trawled the hinterlands with a mummified body they purchased through the back door of a mortuary in Racine and billed as the corpse of John Wilkes Booth. The show played best in ditch towns where the circus never came, away from the rail lines, deep in cotton country, wheat country, Kentucky hemp country. Vale did all right, delivering the pitch and priming the crowds. He had a talent for talk. But it was a dying trade even before the Miracle, and the Miracle killed it. Rural income plummeted; the rare few with spending money wouldn’t part with their pennies just for a glimpse of an assassin’s leathery carcass. The Civil War was another generation’s apocalypse. This generation had its own. His partners abandoned Mr. Booth in an Iowa cornfield.

By the blistering August of that year Vale was on his own, peddling Bibles from a frayed sample case and traveling, often as not, by boxcar. Twice he was attacked by thieves. He had fought back: saved his Bibles but lost a supply of clean collars and partial vision in one eye, the green of the iris faintly and permanently clouded (but that played well, too).

He had walked a lot that day. A hot Ohio Valley day. The air was humid, the sky flat white, commerce listless. In the Olympia Diner (in some town, name forgotten, where the river coiled west like lazy smoke), the waitress claimed to hear thunder in the air. Vale spent his last money on a chicken-and-gravy sandwich and went off in search of a place to sleep.

Past sunset he found an empty brickworks at the edge of town. The air inside the enormous building was close and wet and stank of mildew and machine oil. Abandoned Furnaces loomed like scabrous idols in the darkness. He made a sort of bed high up in the scaffolding where he imagined he would be safe, sleeping on a stained mattress he dragged in from a hillside dump. But sleep didn’t come easily. A night wind guttered through the empty flames of the factory windows, but the air remained close and hot. Rain began falling, deep in the night. He listened to it trickle down a thousand crevices to pool on the muddy floor. Erosion, he thought, pricking at iron and stone.

The voice — not yet a voice but a premonitory, echoing thunder — came to him without warning, well past midnight.

It pinned him flat. Literally, he could not move. It was as if he was held in place by a tremendous weight, but the weight was electric, pulsing through him, sparking from his fingertips. He wondered if he had been struck by lightning. He thought he was about to die.

Then the voice spoke, and it spoke not words but, somehow, meanings; the equivalent words, when he attempted to frame them, were a lifeless approximation. It knows my name, Vale thought. No, not my name, my secret idea of myself.

The electricity forced open his eyelids. Unwilling and afraid, he saw the god standing above him. The god was monstrous. It was ugly, ancient, its beetle-like body a translucent green, rain falling right through it. The god reeked, an obscure smell that reminded Vale of paint thinner and creosote.

How could he sum up what he learned that night? It was ineffable, unspeakable; he could hardly bring himself to sully it with language.

Yet, forced, he might say:

I learned that I have a purpose in life.

I learned that I have a destiny.

I learned that I have been chosen.

I learned that the gods are several and that they know my name.

I learned that there is a world under the world.

I learned that I have friends among the powerful.

I learned that I need to be patient.

I learned that I will be rewarded for my patience.

And I learned — this above all — that I might not need to die.

“You have a servant,” Vale said. “A Negress.”

Mrs. Sanders-Moss sat erect, eyes wide, like a schoolgirl called on by an intimidating teacher. “Yes. Olivia… her name is Olivia.”

He wasn’t conscious of speaking. He had given himself over to another presence. He felt the rubbery peristalsis of his lips and tongue as something foreign and revolting, as if a slug had crawled into his mouth.

“She’s been with you a long time — this Olivia.”

“Yes; a very long time.”

“She was with you when your daughter was born.”

“Yes.”

“And she cared for the girl.”

“Yes.”

“Wept when the girl died.”

“We all did. The household.”

“But Olivia harbored deeper feelings.”

“Did she?”

“She knows about the box. The lock of hair, the christening dress.”

“I suppose she must. But—”

“You kept them under the bed.”

“Yes!”

“Olivia dusts under the bed. She knows when you’ve looked at the box. She knows because the dust is disturbed. She pays attention to dust.”

“That’s possible, but—”

“You haven’t opened the box for a long time. More than a year.”

Mrs. Sanders-Moss lowered her eyes. “But I’ve thought of it. I didn’t forget.”

“Olivia treats the box as a shrine. She worships it. She opens it when you’re out of the house. She’s careful not to disturb the dust. She thinks of it as her own.”

“Olivia…”

“She thinks you don’t do justice to the memory of your daughter.”

“That’s not true!”

“But it’s what she believes.”

“Olivia took the box?”

“Not a theft, by her lights.”

“Please — Dr. Vale — where is it? Is it safe?”

“Quite safe.”

“Where?”

“In the maid’s quarters, at the back of a closet.” (For a moment Vale saw it in his mind’s eye, the wooden box like a tiny coffin swathed in ancient linens; he smelled camphor and dust and cloistered grief.)

“I trusted her!”

“She loved the girl, too, Mrs. Sanders-Moss. Very much.” Vale took a deep, shuddering breath; began to reclaim himself, felt the god leaving him, subsiding into the hidden world again. The relief was exquisite. “Take back what belongs to you. But please, don’t be too hard on Olivia.”

Mrs. Sanders-Moss looked at him with a very gratifying expression of awe.

She thanked him effusively. He turned down the offer of money. Both her tentative smile and her shaken demeanor were encouraging, very promising indeed. But, of course, only time would tell.

When she had taken her umbrella and gone he opened a bottle of brandy and retreated to an upstairs room where the rain rattled down a frosted window, the gaslights were turned high, and the only book in sight was a tattered pulp-paper volume entitled His Mistress’s Petticoat.

To outward appearance, the change worked in him by the manifestation of the god was subtle. Inwardly, he felt exhausted, almost wounded. There was a rawness, not quite pain, which extended to every limb. His eyes burned. The liquor helped, but it would be another day until he was completely himself.

With luck the brandy would moderate the dreams that followed a manifestation. In the dreams he found himself inevitably in some cold wilderness, some borderless vast gray desert, and when out of a misplaced curiosity or simply mischief he lifted up a random stone he uncovered a hole from which poured countless insects of some unknown and hideous kind, many-legged, pincered, venomous, swarming up his arm and invading his skull.

He wasn’t a religious man. He had never believed in spirits, table-rapping, astrology, or the Resurrected Christ. He wasn’t sure he believed in any of those things now; the sum of his belief resided in this single god, the one that had touched him with such awful, irresistible intimacy.

He had the skills of a confidence man and he was certainly not averse to a profitable larceny, but there had been no collusion in the case of, for instance, Mrs. Sanders-Moss; she was a mystery to him, and so was the servant girl Olivia and the memento mori in the shoe box. His own prophecies took him by surprise. The words, not his own, had fallen from his lips like ripe fruit from a tree.

The words served him well enough, mind you. But they served another purpose, too.

Larceny, by comparison, would have been infinitely more simple.

But he took another glass of brandy and consoled himself: You don’t come to immortality by the low road.

A week passed. Nothing. He began to worry.

Then a note in the afternoon mail:

Dr. Vale,

The treasures have been recovered. You have my most boundless gratitude.

I am entertaining guests this coming Thursday at six o’clock for dinner and conversation. If you happen to be free to attend, you would be most welcome.

RSVP

Mrs. Edward Sanders-Moss

She had signed it, Eleanor.