“The drawings on the shake cloth.”
“They never make sense.”
“Maybe your visitor has met hervisitor, and that’s how she knows so much about you.”
“You’ve talked with him. You know him better than I do,” Jebrassy said, slumping deeper into the cushions.
“You—he—could barely talk at all,” Khren said. “He looked in my mirror and made sounds. He said something like, ‘They got it all wrong!’—except slurred. Then he—you, your visitor—just stumbled over and sat right where you are now, and closed his eyes—your eyes—until he went away.”
Khren waggled his finger. “If that’s what straying is all about—better you than me, mate.”
TEN ZEROS
CHAPTER 9
Seattle, South Downtown
To pass the long gray time, as the rain patted and blew against the skylight over the shadowy, high-ceilinged room, Virginia Carol—Ginny to her friends—paged through a thick, sturdy volume called The Gargoyles of Oxford, by Professor J. G. Goyle, published in 1934. And was Professor Goyle’s middle name Garth, or just plain Gar?
The remains of a half-eaten sandwich, still in its waxy wrapper, awaited her attention on the bare brass table beside a high-backed reading chair. She had been hiding in the green warehouse for two weeks, waiting for an explanation that never seemed to come. Her fright had faded, but now she was growing bored—something that two weeks ago she would never have thought possible. The pictures in the gargoyle book were amusing—leering, perverse figures designed, scholars said, to scare off evil spirits—but what caught her eye was a grainy photo embedded in a chapter on the university town’s older buildings. On the inside of a stone parapet high in a clock tower, someone had clearly incised, in proper schoolboy Roman majuscule, cutting through a centuries-old black crust of grime and soot:
DREAMEST THOU OF A CITIE AT THE END OF TYME?
And beneath that, 1685. Another inscription below the date, presumably a name or address, had been vigorously scratched out, leaving a pale brown blotch.
Conan Arthur Bidewell pushed through the door at the far end of the room, carrying more books to be returned to the high wooden shelves. He observed her choice of reading. “That’s a real one—not one of my oddities, Miss Carol,” he said. “But it does reflect unpleasant truths.” His cheeks were sunken and thin wisps of hair covered a leathery, shiny pate. He resembled a well-preserved mummy, or one of those people found in bogs. That’s it, Ginny thought. And yet—he’s not exactly ugly. She showed him the picture. “It’s like the ad in the newspaper.”
“So it is,” Bidewell said.
“This has been going on for centuries,” she said.
He peered through his tiny glasses. “Far longer than that.” Under his arm he carried two folded newspapers— The Strangerand The Seattle Weekly. He laid them out on the reading table. One paper was a week old, the other from the day before. Sticky tabs marked ads in the classifieds. The ads were almost identical.
Do you dream of a city at the end of time?
There are answers. Call—
Only the phone numbers were different.
“Same people?” she asked.
“Not to be known. Though in our neighborhood, I believe where once there were two, there is now only one. But soon there will be more.” Bidewell stretched and cracked the knuckles of his free hand, then ascended a tall ladder that rolled along a high, horizontal track fastened to the cases. The track extended over doors and a boarded-up window, all the way around the room. Bidewell replaced the books he had been studying, his thick corduroy pants hissing as he bent and straightened his spindly legs.
“They’ve been looking for people like me, all this time? They would have to be very old,” Ginny said.
“Some still survive and do their work, if we should call it that. There are so many foul currents in these young, deep waters. Were you followed here?”
Perhaps deliberately, he had not asked this question until now. Whatever his peculiarities, Bidewell seemed sensitive to her fears.
Ginny still did not want to remember the Mercedes, the coin-tossing man, the burning woman. “I think so,” she said quietly. “Maybe.”
“Mmm.” Bidewell finished fitting the books back into their gaps and descended the ladder, making small chuck-chuck sounds with lips and cheeks. From the last rung, he glanced over his shoulder and squinted at the broad milk-glass globe light hanging from a bronze ceiling fixture. “I should be changing out those bulbs, shouldn’t I?”
“The ones who place the ads, who scratched this…” She tapped the picture from Oxford. “Are they human?”
Bidewell nodded quickly, like a bird. “That particular inscription was carved by a schoolboy, on the dare of another schoolboy…who was paid by an older man. But to answer your question, most are human—yes.”
“Why don’t they die?”
“They have been touched,” he said. “Their lives improbably extended. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be obscure.”
Ginny was still not clear on these details—not even clear on whether she would just leave Bidewell’s warehouse, abandon any hope of explanations—in due time, in due time—and take her chances outside. At the age of sixteen, Ginny had begun to experience periods of abstraction. When walking, riding on a bus, or just before sleep, she would lose a snip of time and memory. After these lapses, she sometimes experienced a lightness of heart, a sense of returned affection not otherwise found in her erratic adolescence. Other times she felt a suffocating sense of dread, of loss—along with a bad smell of something beyond burning, and a gritty, dusty, bitter taste of something beyond decay. At the same time, she became aware that she could will herself into different situations—though her efforts often seemed to backfire. Since losing her family, Ginny had persisted in making wrong moves—as if determined, at any fork in the road, to take the wrong path. Never quite certain how she accomplished any of this, she began to read books about parallel worlds—and found them fascinating but unsatisfying. She did what she did, but still without explanation as to why and how she could do it.
She had told no one about her ability—until Bidewell took her in. Only last week, listening to her story, for once the old man had opened up enough to render an opinion. “Sounds very like someone lost, enslaved, in the Chaos. Whatever that may be, not to be known, not to be known.”
He had pinched his lips between two thin fingers and reiterated several times that he could only guess, he was no expert.
Exasperating man.
“What doyou know, Mr. Bidewell?” Ginny blurted, slamming shut the heavy book. The clap echoed from the ceiling.
“Call me Conan, please,” Bidewell encouraged. “My fatherwas Mr. Bidewell.”
“And how old was hewhen you were born?”
“Two hundred and fifty-one,” Bidewell said.
“And how old are you?”
“One thousand two hundred and fifty-three.”
“Years?”
“Of course.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Improbable,” Bidewell corrected, pushing up his small glasses and lifting the spine of another book close to his pale blue eyes. “Many things are conceivable, but impossible. Many more are conceivable, yet not probable. A very few are inconceivable—to us—yet still possible.” He hummed to himself.
“Moving stacks does wonders. Look what we have found, dear Ginny—volume twelve of the complete works of David Copperfield. The Dickens character, you see—who was actually a writer. Not the magician—though it would be interesting to meet him, sometime. I wonder what his dreams are like? A few choice questions…My dear, if you have time, could you check for a small fault on Chapter 103?