Her daughter's future had instantly gone from bleak to posh, and that more than anything eased her. If only Carl didn't smell so strange.
At night, exhausted from Jheir busy day Carl, Sheelagh, and Caitlin were sitting in the penthouse sprawl of the two-story apartment, watching the sprinkle of lights on the East River. They were sipping fine Irish whiskey, and Caitlin's eyes had cleared to a shining glow. "What I don't understand, Carl, is the mirror."
"What mirror?" The whiskey had made him feel limber, and the company of his two friends over the last couple of days had unshackled him from his concerns about Evoe and the zotl.. He had to wait out the two months before he could leave, and this was a lot more comfortable than a polar aerie.
"Zeke, the friend of yours who found your burnedout apartment, also found an image of you in the bathroom mirror,"
Caitlin said.
"He used a computer to make it clearer," Sheelagh added, "and it looks like you-that is, like you used to look."
"Zeke." The sound of his old friend's name felt unfamiliar in his mouth. What had the eld skyle said about Zeke? Carl couldn't recall. "What is the image?"
"It's a picture of you," Sheelagh said. "Somehow the fire captured it."
"But you say you were in Bolivia," Caitlin put in, her voice dark with doubt. "I don't see how. You worked in the Blue Apple that night."
They waited for Carl to answer, but he had sunk backward into himself, remembering that night a soul ago. He had been stepping out of the shower when he caught fire. His last memory of earth-one came back-.
the black kicking him into an orgasmic blackout. The ice rattled in his drink.
"What really happened that night?" Caitlin wanted to know. "The police never figured it out."
"I couldn't possibly tell you about that night," he replied softly. "The fire..." He stalled.
- "The bathroom was a burnedout hole," the old lady said. "Not even the fire department could make sense of it."
"It's something I can't explain now" Carl stared up at the ceiling, fighting the impulse to tell them everything. The armor's inspiriting reminded him of the three that had died in Ridgefield, and the urge to explain himself dissipated. "The night was a strange one. It began a new life for me. You're my past. My dear and treasured past. I wanted to share the bounty of my fortune with you before I burdened you with the pain of it all."
"That sounds understandable to me," Sheelagh said.
"It sounds satanic to me," Caitlin flared. "LookI've talked with the police and the fire officials.. They're baffled. I've seen the mirror-held image of you. And it is you. Or it was." She sipped her drink. "Zeke, at first,
thought you had combusted by yourself. Then he started getting these ideas about ghost holes. Either way, he says that for part of a second, your bathroom was hotter than the skin of the sun. That's supernatural.". "Mom." Sheelagh glared at her mother.
"Don't look at me like that," she said to her daughter; then to Carclass="underline" "An unexplainable fire, a locked mirror, a long absence, and then you return with fabulous wealth and the looks to rival Dorian Gray. Carl, tell us the truth. Have you made some kind of satanic pact?"
"Mother!" Sheelagh was at the edge of her crushed-leather chair.
"There's nothing supernatural about this," Carl said, affecting an amused smile. "What's happened to me is mysterious but not occult. It'll all make sense someday when I can talk about it. But now, I want to know about Zeke. How is he?"
Caitlin's response was sharp as a whip: "He went mad."
Carl shifted in his seat, alarmed by the old woman's antagonism: The eld skyle had known Zeke had suffered. The confirmation of it burned. "Where is he?"
"At the Cornelius Psychiatric Hostel. It's an asylum on Long Island," Sheelagh told him. She reached over and put a hand on his arm. The solid muscle banding his wrist amazed her. "He's pretty bad now. But for a while, just before his breakdown, he went through a brief creative spell. Painting, plasticine models. He even wrote a novel."
"You have a copy?" he asked.
"Somewhere. It'd be easier to get one at a book-store. I see it around. It's called Shards of Time. It's science fiction."
Carl uncoiled from his seat. "Want to come with me?" he asked.
"It's eleven oclock, " Sheelagh answered, getting up anyway. "All the stores are closed."
"We'll break in. Come on." He motioned for Caitlin to join them, but she just stared at him across her drink, cold with suspicion.
Carl got a copy that night by paying a ludicrous sum to a night watchman at Brentano's. He and Sheelagh went back to the Sutton Place suite. Caitlin was asleep where they had left her. Sheelagh put her to bed, and when she came back, Carl was immersed in the book, his face stony and pale. She waited around to see if he might show some interest in her, and when he didn't, she went to bed.
A rage of disbelief mounted in him the more he read. The monotonous fear that had inhabited him since Evoe had been taken away blew off in a cold blast of horror. The book he was reading was an account of his life in the Werld!
The names were different: The eld skyle was called an urg, skyles were skylands, the Foke were the People, zotl were spider people, and the Werld was Timesend. It was a story in the bold, often bloated style of science fiction:
The flyer landed on a skyland cliff among spires of fir. The,pod went black.
"We'll send the flyer back," Eve's alto voice said in the darkness. "`They'll only be able to trace us to here-and by the time they do we'll be long gone."
The canopy bolts hissed open, and sharp alpine air flushed in. I rolled out of the flyer, and stood up among bleached grass drooping over a whispering plunge. My eyes must have looked like raisins, for Eve sang with laughter.
At dawn, he was reading the book through for the second time, terrified by the parallel reality of its words. Only the ending was different, for it depicted Eve and Ken, the narrator, going off together blissfully into Timesend.
His eyes were red, tear-torn, and his whole body hollowed, a bubble of silence. He dropped the book and shuffled out of the apartment, needing air. He walked down Fifty-seventh Street to Central Park.
Madness is lonely, he thought at the edge of the pond, dawn spreading on the water like a tree of light.
The city of his mind was frenzied with the commerce of implications and ideas. "How could Zeke have known?"
was the question that enjambed "What is .real, anyway?" This was earthtwo. This was a place as alien as the Werld. Nothing was real. Everything was possible.
Not even Evoe's song was his in this place.
Madnesses mingled in him, and he may very well have lost all perspective then and there, but the wild shout that was gathering sound in him was interrupted by the slice of a sharply pitched whistle. It was the furious sound of his mind cracking. Until he recognized whaf it must be: The whistle was coiling from his left breast pocket.
He reached into his chamois jacket and withdrew the imp card in a hand that went cold with realization.
The sound was the warning tone, announcing that something sizable had come through his lynk to the Werld. He looked about him-but, of course, there was nothing Werldlike here: In his amazed stupor he had left his lance back at the apartment!
He sprinted across Fifty-ninth, caroming off brak-ing cars and bounding around pedestrians. Whatever it VMS, it was back at the suite.
Sheelagh was asleep, but the sound from where Carl had dropped his gear woke her. It was not a recognizable noise. It sounded like oil sizzling in a pan, only louder and with a crackle that was almost electrical.
Sheelagh had left her door open in case Carl wanted to be with her, and she could see Caitlin asleep in her open room. She got out of bed, and the noise crisped sharper. She didn't bother putting a robe over her negligee but went directly to Carl's room.
The hot noise was definitely fuming from there. She knocked, and the weird sound went on heedlessly.