“Back off, Sepulcher,” Jack said, rising with fists clenched.
Joe-Jim looked away and inward.
Sepulcher pinned Jack with his sharp, deep eyes—famished, but not for food. “How’s your father, Jeremy?” he asked, his voice as resonant and lost as a bull in a cave.
“Still dead,” Jack said. He had changed his name years ago—everyone knew that.
“I’d forgotten,” Sepulcher said. “Always good to forget unpleasantness. Then—I saw you, and it all came back.”
Sepulcher never seemed to attract much of an audience or make much money. Some on the circuit had speculated he was a rich eccentric with a really bad act, which consisted of standing still for hours on a street corner, his eyes following people as they walked past—and occasionally letting loose with a whistled dirge.
Some buskers—the worst of a generally good lot—were actively creepy. Sepulcher’s real name was Nathan Silverstein.
“I worked with your father, Jack,” he said. That was a fact. Silverstein and Jack’s father had worked as a comedy team fifteen years ago.
“I remember,” Jack said. He turned to say good-bye to Joe-Jim, but Sepulcher grabbed his shoulder in a vise of sharp, bony fingers.
“I didn’t want to come here,” Sepulcher growled. He sucked in his cheeks and dropped his thin white-lined brows. “These people hateme.”
“I wonder why,” Jack said.
“But you, young son of an old friend, youhave something I need.”
Jack looked down. “Let me go, or I’ll break your arm.”
Sepulcher let go, but his white-daubed digits flexed. The index and thumb made a space, three inches.
“This big. Dark, pitted, shiny. Burned by time. A crooked black rock with a red eye. Theywant me to find it.”
Jack stared the man down, his teeth grinding.
“To pay a debt,” Sepulcher added. “You have it, I know you do.”
Jack shook his head. “Haven’t seen it, Nathan,” he said. And that was true, in a way. His father and Silverstein had split up after a few months, despite drawing decent crowds in small comedy theaters across the Midwest. Sepulcher had been different back then, but Jack never liked him.
“That rock…” Sepulcher seemed unable to finish his thought. Jack knew he needed to leave, or there might be a ruckus—so he said goodbye to Joe-Jim, then, giving Sepulcher a wide berth, walked quickly to his bike.
Sepulcher stared after him with forlorn conviction—Jack could actually feel the man’s eyes like little needles in his neck. “That was myrock, Jack! Your father stole it from me! My life has been a misery ever since!”
Other buskers had gathered. Slowly, deliberately, they encircled Sepulcher, whispering, prodding, quietly urging him to move on.
Jack pedaled south.
The whole night was going sour.
Ginny walked in a happy daze. She had always loved circuses, street acts, magicians—had always wanted to have a birthday party on a great, sprawling lawn, with minstrels and dancing dogs and jugglers—and she could almost pretend, here it is, here I am, under the stars—my magic moment. Here I am, finally happy and whole.
And then she noticed the compact young man on the bicycle, riding south along the asphalt path, glancing back over his shoulder. Skinny but well-toned, muscular forearms prominent beneath a striped short-sleeve shirt, swirling black hair, dark eyes intent, not scared but wary. She stood transfixed. Her arms started to shiver. She wanted to run after him, ask who he was—but he stood on his pedals and sped up, leaving behind the long stretch of tents and rings and the banner that announcedLE BOULEVARD DU CRIME .
She knew him.
They had never met.
She ran after, crying, “Wait!”
The bicyclist didn’t stop. He vanished in the lights and shadows along the waterfront, under the star-pricked southern sky.
CHAPTER 20
Queen Anne
Jack’s roommate, Burke, had not returned. After the run-in with Sepulcher, he needed company—someone other than his rats. Outside, seagull cries blew through the open window, discussing an offshore storm.
The weather would soon turn miserable.
Hastily consumed game hen and the glass of red wine rolled like lead in his stomach. He held his hand to his lips for a belch that refused to come, then reached into his pocket for the classified ad. Unfolding and smoothing it, reading the simple question over and over, he wondered what to do. Whom to trust. Everywhere he went, he had the weird feeling he was being followed. Somebody—everybody—thought he was special.Jack did not want to be special. He wanted to continue with the life he had led for years now, since his father’s death.
Since the funeral. Since finding among his father’s few effects the box that sometimes contained the melted, curiously shaped stone with the red eye—and sometimes did not. Harborview. Doctors. Needles. Putting my life in other hands.
In his bedroom, a futon lay bunched up against the wall. A restless night. Most of his nights had been restless lately. He flopped down.
“Not a city, exactly,” Jack muttered in the darkness. “A refuge. A fortress. The last, greatest place on Earth.”
A rat rolled and squeaked, eyes closed, raised front leg twitching.
“And I wouldn’t call it dreaming.”
Brows furrowed, he studied the phone number. Better than a visit to the doctor—if the ad meant anything, but of course it didn’t. It was wrong on all counts. Not a dream, not a city—and what about at the end of time?
Even thinking about calling the number made his head hurt.
One thing was clear. His time of freedom, of avoiding major decisions, was over. As an aid to finding a better fate, he could focus on the western corner where the ceiling met the walls, all those angled lines suddenly bending and coming taut—he could visualize a stranded cord stretching to infinity, or at least a vast distance, vibrating as if alive, singing to him—he could spend days, weeks, trying to unkink the knots formed while he was caught up in a wind of misfortune—
Or he could trump it all and make his decision right now. He covered his eyes with his hands, miserable. Definitely losing the last of his marbles. Dropping them one by one, watching them roll down the sewer grate—out of control. His foot kicked out and hit the old steamer trunk where he stored the fragments of past acts, history—his mother’s and father’s worldly goods.
The stone.
He kicked the trunk again, to offload bad energy.
All the rats watched, awake now, still but for their whiskers. “I know, I kno-o-ow,” he soothed. Time to connect past moments—to see if the rock was in its box. Magic box, magic rock—except that Jack knew magic had nothing to do with it.
Memory is the secret. But I don’t always remember—
He stood and reached for the latch on the trunk lid. To open the trunk all the way, he had to lug it out from the wall. He braced to do so. Something behind the trunk caught his fingers. Distracted, he reached back, trying to remember what he had put there—and pinched out a thin black portfolio. The portfolio measured thirty inches wide and eighteen inches high, and had been secured with a twist of dirty linen. He untied the knot—he was very good with knots.
The portfolio contained nine or ten drawings on thick sketch paper. They somehow looked familiar. At first glance the topmost sketch might have depicted the elongated bows of three ships crossing a wavy black sea, like ocean liners in old posters. But the jutting bows were curvaceous and massive and the sea was really mountains, he decided, so the three objects weren’t ships at all. They had to be huge—dozens, maybe hundreds of miles high.
Someone—not him—had sketched suggestions of detail inside the curves, thin lines and blocks of shadow. A narrow tower or mast rose from the central and most prominent of the three shapes. Definitely architecture, not ships.