Wherever he was, he was sure he had eluded Glaucous and his giant, doughy partner. But that did not encourage him. He had had a knack lately of going too far afield, of shifting not just his immediate fate, but the qualityof his intended world.
He had, for example, fled from Ellen—and ended up on the line where he felt compelled to dial the phone number in the newspaper ad, without sensing the downside. Not a good plan, not a good circumstance.
And now his fate had just turned much worse.
One requirement of his crazy ability—or symptom of his neurotic imaginings of power and control—had always been the conviction that he could tellwhen things were going to get worse, before they did. Without that precognition, his jumps would be random—of no value at all. Yet now he could detect nothing worse than where he already was—except what lay in wait behind the hard, translucent barricade: corruption itself, a festering discontent mixed with…what?
Emptiness?
“Anybody home?” he called, his voice a croak. “Burke?”
Small things scuttled in what had once been his bedroom. His rats? He crossed gingerly over the warped floor, scuffing through a tinkling scatter, crunching and breaking needles with a sound like falling icicles. Peered around the corner.
In the small room squatted the trunk that had been with him since the death of his father. The trunk where he kept his most valued possessions. Behind which he had found the folio. He touched his torn pocket. The box—still there.
Checking the solidity of the floor with a tapping boot, applying half his weight, then full pressure, he crossed the bedroom. The trunk’s boards had warped. He lifted the lid. The trunk was empty except for a gray, slushy film.
He let the lid fall and backed out of the room. On the back porch, Jack pushed open the sliding door—broken glass lined the frame—and stepped out. Across the street, all the buildings had collapsed into piles of gray and brown rubble from which beams and boards pointed up like dead fingers. Muddy water streamed down the gutters and over the cracked and heaved asphalt, pooling and swirling in the dips as if there had been a heavy rain and the drains were clogged. A dead-end place in a dead-end time. No hope as far as he could see, no life…and for how long? How long had this world been dead? Hours?
Years?
By the looks, the smell, it had never been truly alive.
Wherever and whatever it touches, it takes hold. You’ve seen it before. You will see it again…
Everywhere he stepped, in every room, needles had been carelessly cast aside. He pulled up the sleeve of the filthy jacket and stared again at the puncture marks. A fresh one oozed a serum-yellow drop. Jack could feel the drugs cloud his mind. He fought the lethargy, the hateful, bitter satisfaction of having just scored—and listened to the noises outside: wind, rain, water, the underlying rasp of falling dust and debris. The very air smelled sour as old vomit. How could anything live here? He needed to find a way down the stairs, away from this comatose neighborhood, across the city—maybe this was just a local phenomenon, an unfortunate slum.
But he knew the blight wasn’t local. It was everywhere.He had landed in an awful trap. He had managed to jump to a perverse line of least opportunity, surrounded by an infinity of purgatories—all of them bordering on hell. All adjacent paths were dark—a fecund void smeared across any jumpable distance, tainting vast bundles of world-lines, a metaphysical disease that could not be measured except in billions, trillions, of corroded, corrupted lives.
The joy of matter is gone.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, something moved—and when he jerked around to look, this time, it was still there.
CHAPTER 36
Penelope slung the limp, heavy sack over her bare shoulder, then stooped to grab her coat. Huge and still naked, she tugged coat and sack through the door with several hard, bruising bumps, then humped the sack into a better carrying position and hauled it down the steps, dropping it near the yawning rear doors of the old van.
Rain fell in sheets. Lightning flashed like the blink of a huge eyelid. Glaucous stood in the empty apartment, chin in scarred hand, thinking over the folded piece of paper pinched lightly between his fingers like a captured butterfly. Best not to meddle, though he had long been curious about how such things were folded and what they actually contained. He slipped it into his coat pocket. Something key was missing. Yes, they had the call number, they had their boy. They even had the box; but not the final part his employer was willing to pay for, in money and dispensation. Despite the wasps, the boy had made his leap, leaving behind a dangerous vacancy. Delivering other than a complete subject could be painful—even fatal.
Glaucous leaned over the walkway’s iron railing. “Penelope!” he shouted into the rain. “We’ve bagged a shill. He’s gone.”
“Here he is—he’s here!” his partner wailed.
“We can’t take any chances. We’ll have to stay and hope the boy returns—or cut him loose.”
Penelope let out a hollow curse. Then, like a little girl about to cry, “Why didn’t you tell me beforeI carried him all this way?”
A balding man with a mustache, in his mid-thirties and tired, was climbing the stairs, raincoat flapping over his white kitchen work coat. He paused at the top and tracked the busted-in door, then turned at the sound of that infantile voice rising through the rain—and caught sight of Glaucous. Slower, more cautious, he tried to sidle around the strong-looking gnome.
“Begging your pardon,” Glaucous said, leaning in toward the rail.
“What the hell is this?” the man asked.
Glaucous pitched him a bizarre smile, then slipped aside and glided down the stairs, feet a blur, using his thick hands as runners. “Sorry!” he called.
Jack’s roommate poked his head through the broken door. Wasps filled the apartment. Swearing, he swatted about his face.
Glaucous joined Penelope. “No matter about the boy—I’ll snag him. Let’s move on.”
She had propped the loose, bagged form against a retaining wall, dripping and still. Face expressionless, she drew up her coat and covered her massive nakedness.
Jack Rohmer had fled so far that at first Glaucous could not even smell his spoor. Glaucous was certain that Jack would rejoin their path soon, in sheer desperation. There were now so many moribund pathways, so many diseased lines that led nowhere.
Oh yes, he, Glaucous would fling his sweet net across the black shimmer of broken fates, and with another deft snap, Jack would fly straight back, frightened out of his wits. All would be well. The roommate shouted threats from the third floor.
Glaucous waved his hand at the bag. “Lift. Carry. Bring him along, my dear.”
CHAPTER 37
The apartment’s other occupant took color and texture from the needle-littered floor, the scabbed walls and caved ceiling. It made a sound like hard snow falling on a black evening—never ending, never changing. This was its only voice. It had been waiting, trapped in this room, forever, and now it complained to anyone who could listen. Jack had simply not noticed it until now. Looking at it, he was paralyzed.
The occupant took the initiative and moved—without moving. It changed position, Jack was sure of that—but not convinced he couldbe sure. As he turned to track the flaw, the blur, where it now stood between him and the door, he saw that it had been thereall the time, and nowhere else. He had been mistaken.
He was noticing it again for the first time.
Jack’s eyelids twitched and tried to close. Drugged sleep wanted to drape him like funeral laundry. He needed to stop seeing, get away from the impossible thing between him and the door. His mind was not able to process and remember. His engines of memory were shutting down. Soon he would be stuck here just like the other. He would protect himself in the only way left to inhabitants of this purgatory: by gathering up floor, wall, and ceiling, and hiding in plain sight.