«You must not mind her,» Charles said to me. «She is compensating.»
«And who the hell wouldn’t compensate?» she asked. «After months of tracking down and keeping up with Villon in the stews of fifteenth-century Paris …»
«Villon,» I said, not quite making it a question.
«Yes, Francois Villon. You have heard of him?»
«Yes,» I said. «I have heard of him. But why …»
She gestured at Charles. «Ask the mastermind,» she said. «He’s the one who figures it all out. A man out of his time, he said. Find this Villon, a man out of his time. A genius when there were few geniuses. Pluck wisdom from him. Find out who he really was. And so I found him and he was just a filthy poet, a burglar, a chaser after women, a brawler, a jailbird.» She said to me, «The past human race was a bunch of slimy bastards, and the people of your time are no better than the others that have come before you. You’re all a bunch of slimy bastards.»
«Angela,» Charles said, sharply, «Mr. Thornton is our guest.»
She swung on him. «And you,» she said, «while I’m wading through the stench and depravity and obscenity of medieval Paris, where are you? In a little monastery library somewhere in the Balkans, feeling sanctimonious and holy, and no doubt somewhat supercilious, pawing through parchments, searching on slimmest rumor for evidence of something that you damn well know never did exist.»
«But, my dear,» he said, «it does exist.»
He put the cylinder on the table beside the whiskey bottle.
She stared at it, swaying a little. «So you finally found it, you little son of a bitch,» she said. «Now you can go home and lord it over everyone. You can live out your life as the little creep who finally found a capsule. There’s one good thing about it—the team will be rid of you.»
«Shut up,» said Charles. «I didn’t find it. Mr. Thornton found it.»
She looked at me. «How come you knew about it?» she asked.
«I told him about it,» said Charles.
«Oh, great,» she said. «So now he knows about us.»
«He did, anyhow,» said Charles. «So, I suspect, does Mr. Piper. They found one of Stefan’s cubes, and when the plane hit Stefan’s parked saddle, it fell in Mr. Thornton’s yard. These men aren’t stupid, dear.»
I told him, «It is good of you to say so.»
«And the sheriff, too,» she said. «The two of them and the sheriff came snooping yesterday.»
«I don’t think the sheriff knows,» I said. «The sheriff doesn’t know about the saddle or the cube. All he saw was that contraption over there. He thought it might be a game of some sort.»
«But you know it’s not a game.»
«I don’t know what it is,» I said.
«It’s a map,» said Charles. «It shows when and where we are.»
«All the others can look at it,» said Angela, «or another like it and know where all the others are.»
She pointed. «That is us down there,» she said.
It made no sense to me. I could see why they’d need a map like that, but not how it could work.
She moved closer to me and took me by the hand. «Look down,» she said. «Look down into the center of it. Let’s move closer to it and look down into the center of it.»
«Angela,» warned Charles, «you know that’s not allowed.»
«For the love of Christ,» she said, «he has something coming to him. He found that stinking cylinder and gave it to you.»
«Look,» I said, «whatever is going on, leave me out of it.» I tried to pull my hand away, but she hung on to it, her nails cutting into my flesh.
«You’re drunk,» said Charles. «You are drunk again. You don’t know what you’re doing.» There was something in his voice that told me he was afraid of her.
«Sure, I’m drunk,» she said, «but not all that drunk. Just drunk enough to be a little human. Just drunk enough to be a little decent.»
«Down,» she said to me. «Look down into the center of it.» And I did, God help me, look down into the center of that weird contraption. I guess I must have thought that looking down into it might humor her and end the situation. That’s just a guess, however; I don’t honestly remember for what reason, if I had a reason, I looked down into it. Later on—but the point is that it was later on and not at that particular moment—I did some wondering if she might have been a witch, then asked myself what a witch might be, and got so tangled up in trying to figure out a definition that it all came to nothing.
But, anyhow, I looked down and there was nothing I could see except a lot of swirling mist—the mist was dark instead of white. There was something about it that I didn’t like, a certain frightfulness to it, and I went to step away, but before I could take the step the dark mist inside the cubicle seemed to expand rapidly and engulf me.
The world went away from me and I was a consciousness inside a blackness that seemed to hold neither time nor space, a medium that was suspended in a nothingness in which there was no room for anything or anyone but the consciousness—not the body, but the consciousness—of myself and Angela.
For she still was with me in that black nothingness and I still could feel her hand in mine, although even as I felt the pressure of her hand I told myself it could not be her hand, for in this place neither of us had hands; there was no place or room for hands. Once I had said that to myself, I realized that it was not her hand that I seemed to feel so much as the presence of her, the essence of her being, which seemed to be coalescing with my being as if we had ceased to be two personalities, but had in some strange way become a single personality, although not so much a part of one another as to have lost our identities.
I felt a scream rising in my throat, but I had no throat and I had no mouth and there was no way to scream. I wondered, in something close to terror, what had happened to my body and if I’d ever get it back. As I tried to scream I sensed Angela moving closer, as if she might be extending comfort. And there was comfort, certainly, in knowing she was there. I don’t think she spoke to me or actually did anything at all, but I seemed to realize somehow that there were just the two of us in this great nothingness and that there was no room for more than just the two of us; that here there was no place for fear or even for surprise.
Then the dark nothingness drained away, but the draining did not give us back our bodies. We still were disembodied beings, hanging for a moment over a nightmare landscape that was bleak and dark, a barren plain that swept away to jagged mountains notched against the sky. We hung there for a moment only, not really long enough to see where we were—as if a picture had been flashed upon a screen, then suddenly cut off. A glimpse was all I had.
Then we were back in the empty nothingness and Angela had her arms around me—all of her around me—and it was very strange, for she had no arms or body and neither did I, but it seemed to make no difference. The touch of her was comforting, as it had been before, but this time more than comforting, and in that nothingness my soul and mind and the memory of my body cried out to her as another human being and another life.
Instinctively, I reached out for her—and reached out within everything I had or had ever had until the semblance of what we once had been intertwined and meshed and we melted into one another. Our beings came together, our minds, our souls, our bodies. In that moment we knew one another in a way that would have been impossible under other circumstances. We crawled into one another until there were not two of us, but one. It was sexual, in part, but far more than sexual. It was the kind of experience that is sought in a sexual embrace but never quite achieved. It was complete fulfillment and it did not subside. It reached a high and stayed there. It was an ecstasy that kept on and on, and it could have gone on forever, I suppose, if it had not been for that one little dirty corner of my busy brain that somehow stood aside and wondered how it might have been with someone other than a bitch like Angela.