Dave grabbed me by the collar. “No, I can’t allow that. You can’t bring her back until we’re sure she’s done the job.”
In one quick motion I stood up and smacked him in the left temple with the flat of the wrench. His head jerked sideways, and he fell over backwards with a thump that swirled snow up around him. I bent back down to Jody.
Five compressions of the chest, breath, five compressions of the chest, breath, over and over again. Sometime between forever and an eternity later, she shuddered, gasped a breath on her own, and moaned.
I whooped with joy, lifted her up in my arms, and carried her over to Dave’s car, where I set her in the passenger seat and turned the heater up all the way.
I ran around to the other side and climbed in. She woke with a scream when I slammed the door, then she saw it was me and slumped back in the seat. “Christ you scared me,” she said. “I had a hell of a crazy dre…. wait a minute.” She looked around at the car, a much bigger one than what we’d been flying.
“This is Dave’s car,” she said after a moment. “He did come.”
“That’s right, and he dragged you outside to die, too.” I looked out to make sure he was still lying where he’d dropped. I had just enough time to realize he wasn’t when the door beside me popped open and he stood there with my wrench in his hand.
I lunged for the lift controls, but he reached across me and rapped my hand with the wrench before the car even began to move. “No you don’t,” he said. “Get out. We’re going to finish this experiment one way or another.”
I cradled my suddenly numb right hand in my left, wondering if I could clench it into a fist, and whether I could do any good with it if I could.
Jody leaned over so he could see her. “It’s already finished,” she said.
“What do you mean? It can’t be. You’re still alive.”
She laughed. “I’m alive again, idiot. I was dead. I was there. I saw your precious gates to Heaven, and they’re slammed tight.”
“You did?” I asked.
“They are?” asked Dave.
“Yup.” Jody’s eyes held a spark of elemental fire as she looked at him.
In a subdued voice, he said, “Let me in. It’s cold out here.”
I thought about it a moment, much preferring the idea of leaving him outside a while longer, but Jody said, “Go ahead, I’ve got something I want to tell him,” so I tilted my seat forward and let him climb in back. The moment he sat down I pulled on the lift control and took us straight up a hundred meters or so.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“High enough to make you think twice about trying something cute,” I replied.
“He won’t try anything,” Jody said. “Not now or ever again.”
“What makes you so sure?” I asked.
She grinned like a whole pack of wolves surrounding a deer. “Because if he does, he might get hurt, and if you think it’s lonely on this side of the great divide, wait ’til you see what’s waiting for us over there.”
“What?” Dave asked, leaning forward between the seats. “What did you find?”
She got a faraway look in her eyes. “I found the place where Heaven used to be. At the end of a long tunnel of light. There weren’t gates really; it was more of a… a place. It’s hard to describe physically. But I could tell that was where I was supposed to go, and I could tell it was closed.”
“Permanently?” Dave asked.
“It felt that way. There was just the memory of a doorway, no promise of one to come. So I turned around to come back, but I couldn’t find the way at first. I wandered around quite a while before I stumbled across it. If Gregor hadn’t kept my body going, I don’t think I would have found it.”
“Wandered around where?” Dave demanded. “What was it like?”
“Like fog,” Jody said. Her voice picked up a tremor as she added, “I was just a viewpoint in a formless, shapeless, gray fog. There wasn’t any sound, any smell; I didn’t even have a body to hear or smell or feel with. I don’t even know if I was actually seeing anything. There was nothing there to see.”
“Then how did you know where your body was?”
“How do you know where your chin is? It was just there.” Jody turned away from him and leaned back in her seat. “Look, I’m tired and my head hurts and I’ve been dead once too often today. I just want to get some rest. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.”
I took the hint and flew us away in search of a hospital.
Later, after we’d bandaged her head and made sure she had no other injuries, we took the bridal suite at the top of the Fort Collins Hilton. Dave was in one of the rooms down below. I’d wanted to put him in the city jail, but Jody wouldn’t let me.
“His teeth are pulled,” she told me as we lay in the enormous bed, a dozen blankets pulled over us for warmth and as many candles providing light. “He’ll believe anything I tell him now. Besides, we need him. The best thing we can do is treat him like a recovering alcoholic or something and just integrate him back into our lives as fast as we can.”
“Integrate him back into our lives?” I asked incredulously. “After what he did to you? He murdered you. You were dead!”
She giggled. “Well, I’m not so sure about that.”
“Huh? What about the tunnel of light, and the gates to Heaven and all that?”
She lowered her voice to a whisper. “That was all total vacuum. I told him what he wanted to hear. Well, what I wanted him to hear, anyway.”
I stared at her in the flickering candlelight, dumbfounded.
She shrugged. “I don’t remember a thing from the moment Dave knocked me out until the moment I woke up with you next to me.”
“You don’t?”
“No.”
“You’re one hell of an actress, then.”
“Good, because I want him convinced.”
I thought about that. “Even if we aren’t?” I asked after a while.
“What?”
“You want Dave convinced, but we’re still in the same shape we were before. We don’t know anything at all about what’s waiting for us after we die.”
She giggled again and snuggled up closer to me under the covers. “Then God is just, if He exists,” she said. “After all, I’m agnostic. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
MUTE
by Gene Wolfe
Gene Wolfe—who is perhaps best known for his multi-volume epic, The Book of the New Sun—is the author of more than 200 short stories and 30 novels, is a two-time winner of both the Nebula and World Fantasy Award, and was once praised as “the greatest writer in the English Language alive today” by author Michael Swanwick. His most recent novels are The Wizard-Knight, Soldier of Sidon, and Pirate Freedom.
This story is about two children who return home, find an empty house, and are forced to grow up in a hurry. It first appeared in the program book for the 2002 World Horror Convention, where Wolfe was guest of honor.
In that same program book, Neil Gaiman offered up some advice on how to read Gene Wolfe. The first two points of his essay were:
(1) Trust the text implicitly. The answers are in there.
(2) Do not trust the text farther than you can throw it, if that far. It’s tricksy and desperate stuff, and it may go off in your hand at any time.
Keep that in mind when you’re reading this story. And when you’re done, you might want to heed Gaiman’s third point as welclass="underline" “Reread. It’s better the second time.”
Jill was not certain it was a bus at all, although it was shaped like a bus and of a bus-like color. To begin with (she said to herself) Jimmy and I are the only people. If it’s a school bus, why aren’t there other kids? And if it’s a pay-when-you-get-on bus, why doesn’t anybody get on? Besides there was a sign that said BUS STOP, and it didn’t.