Just as she had been stopped dead in his tracks.
Jerry saw Forsythe loom in, look at the words written not in black, as on Tammy’s cross, but in red—words that said, “Our sins testify against us.”
Forsythe began to run ahead, panicking, and Jerry pressed down a little more on the accelerator, keeping up. All those years of Sunday school were coming in handy.
Forsythe came to another tree. In its lee, he surely could see the second wooden cross, with its letters as crimson as blood: “He shall make amends for the harm he hath done.”
Forsythe was swinging his head left and right, clearly terrified. But he continued running forward.
A third tree. A third cross. And a third red message, the simplest of alclass="underline"
“Thou shalt not kill.”
Finally, Forsythe turned around and caught sight of Jerry.
Jerry sped up, coming alongside him. Forsythe’s face was a mask of terror. Jerry rolled down his window, leaned an elbow out, and said, as nonchalantly as he could manage, “Going my way?”
Forsythe clearly didn’t know what to say. He looked up ahead, apparently wondering if there were more crosses to come. Then he turned and looked back the other way, off into the distance.
“There’s just one down the other way,” said Jerry. “If you’d prefer to walk by it …”
Forsythe swore at Jerry, but without much force. “What’s this to you?” he snapped.
“I want her to let my car go. I worked my tail off for these wheels.”
Forsythe stared at him, the way you’d look at somebody who might be crazy.
“So,” said Jerry, again trying for an offhand tone, “going my way?”
Forsythe was quiet for a long moment. “Depends where you’re going,” he said at last.
“Oh, I thought I’d take a swing by the police station,” Jerry said.
Forsythe looked up Thurlbeck once more, then down it, then at last back at Jerry. He shrugged, but it wasn’t as if he was unsure. Rather, it was as if he were shucking a giant weight from his shoulders.
“Yeah,” he said to Jerry. “Yeah, I could use a lift.”
Flashes
Lou Anders edits some of the best anthologies out there. He’d invited me to contribute to his Live Without a Net, but other commitments prevented me from doing so. Undaunted, Lou invited me into his next anthology, FutureShocks. This is another of those books that it seems odd for me to be part of I’m optimistic about “all the bright tomorrows yet to come” (as I once called them in an essay), but Lou wanted downbeat stories about the hidden dark sides of new technologies, discoveries, and breakthroughs. Here’s what I came up with …
My heart pounded as I surveyed the scene. It was a horrific, but oddly appropriate, image: a bright light pulsing on and off. The light was the setting sun, visible through the window, and the pulsing was caused by the rhythmic swaying of the corpse, dangling from a makeshift noose, as it passed in front of the blood-red disk.
“Another one, eh, Detective?” said Chiu, the campus security guard, from behind me. His tone was soft.
I looked around the office. The computer monitor was showing a virtual desktop with a panoramic view of a spiral galaxy as the wallpaper; no files were open. Nor was there any sheet of e-paper prominently displayed on the real desktop. The poor bastards didn’t even bother to leave suicide notes anymore. There was no point; it had all already been said.
“Yeah,” I said quietly, responding to Chiu. “Another one.”
The dead man was maybe sixty, scrawny, mostly bald. He was wearing black denim jeans and a black turtleneck sweater, the standard professorial look these days. His noose was fashioned out of fiber-optic cabling, giving it a pearlescent sheen in the sunlight. His eyes had bugged out, and his mouth was hanging open.
“I knew him a bit,” said Chiu. “Ethan McCharles. Nice guy—he always remembered my name. So many of the profs, they think they’re too important to say hi to a security guard. But not him.”
I nodded. It was as good a eulogy as one could hope for—honest, spontaneous, heartfelt.
Chiu went on. “He was married,” he said, pointing to the gold band on the corpse’s left hand. “I think his wife works here, too.”
I felt my stomach tightening, and I let out a sigh. My favorite thing: informing the spouse.
Cytosine Methylation: All lifeforms are based on self-replicating nucleic acids, commonly triphosphoparacarbolicnucleic acid or, less often, deoxyribonucleic acid; in either case, a secondary stream of hereditary information is encoded based on the methylation state of cytosine, allowing acquired characteristics to be passed on to the next generation …
The departmental secretary confirmed what Chiu had said: Professor Ethan McCharles’s wife did indeed also work at the University of Toronto; she was a tenured prof, too, but in a different faculty.
Walking down a corridor, I remembered my own days as a student here. Class of 1998—“9T8,” as they styled it on the school jackets. It’d been— what?—seventeen years since I’d graduated, but I still woke up from time to time in a cold sweat, after having one of those recurring student nightmares: the exam I hadn’t studied for, the class I’d forgotten I’d enrolled in. Crazy dreams, left over from an age when little bits of human knowledge mattered; when facts and figures we’d discovered made a difference.
I continued along the corridor. One thing had changed since my day. Back then, the hallways had been packed between classes. Now, you could actually negotiate your way easily; enrollment was way down. This corridor was long, with fluorescent lights overhead, and was lined with wooden doors that had frosted floor-to-ceiling glass panels next to them.
I shook my head. The halls of academe.
The halls of death.
I finally found Marilyn Maslankowski’s classroom; the arcane room-numbering system had come back to me. She’d just finished a lecture, apparently, and was standing next to the lectern, speaking with a redheaded male student; no one else was in the room. I entered.
Marilyn was perhaps ten years younger than her husband had been, and had light brown hair and a round, moonlike face. The student wanted more time to finish an essay on the novels of Robert Charles Wilson; Marilyn capitulated after a few wheedling arguments.
The kid left, and Marilyn turned to me, her smile thanking me for waiting. “The humanities,” she said. “Aptly named, no? At least English literature is something that we’re the foremost authorities on. It’s nice that there are a couple of areas left like that.”
“I suppose,” I said. I was always after my own son to do his homework on time; didn’t teachers know that if they weren’t firm in their deadlines they were just making a parent’s job more difficult? Ah, well. At least this kid had gone to university; I doubted my boy ever would.
“Are you Professor Marilyn Maslankowski?” I asked.
She nodded. “What can I do for you?”
I didn’t extend my hand; we weren’t allowed to make any sort of overture to physical contact anymore. “Professor Maslankowski, my name is Andrew Walker. I’m a detective with the Toronto Police.” I showed her my badge.
Her brown eyes narrowed. “Yes? What is it?”
I looked behind me to make sure we were still alone. “It’s about your husband.”
Her voice quavered slightly. “Ethan? My God, has something happened?”