«I believe you.» The old man took a breath and then wondered, «Why?»
«Because,» said the stranger at the foot of the bed, «I love you.»
«I do not know you, sir!»
«But I know you fore and aft, port to starboard, main topgallants to gunnels, every day in your long life to here!»
«Oh, the sweet sound!» cried the old man. «Every word that you say, every light from your eyes, is foundation-of-the-world true! How can it be?» Tears winked from the old man's lids. «Why?»
«Because I am the truth,» said the traveler. «I have come a long way to find and say: you are not lost. Your great Beast has only drowned some little while. In another year, lost ahead, great and glorious, plain and simple men will gather at your grave and shout: he breeches, he rises, he breeches, he rises! and the white shape will surface to the light, the great terror lift into the storm and thunderous St. Elmo's fire and you with him, each bound to each, and no way to tell where he stops and you start or where you stop and he goes off around the world lifting a fleet of libraries in his and your wake through nameless seas of sub-sub-librarians and readers mobbing the docks to chart your far journeyings, alert for your lost cries at three of a wild morn.»
«Christ's wounds!» said the man in his winding-sheet bedclothes. «To the point, man, the point! Do you speak truth!?»
«I give you my hand on it, and pledge my soul and my heart's blood.» The visitor moved to do just this, and the two men's fists fused as one. «Take these gifts to the grave. Count these pages like a rosary in your last hours. Tell no one where they came from. Scoffers would knock the ritual beads from your fingers. So tell this rosary in the dark before dawn, and the rosary is this: you will live forever. You are immortal.»
«No more of this, no more! Be still.»
«I can not. Hear me. Where you have passed a fire path will burn, miraculous in the Bengal Bay, the Indian Seas, Hope's Cape, and around the Horn, past perdition's landfall, as far as living eyes can see.»
He gripped the old man's fist ever more tightly.
«I swear. In the years ahead, a million millions will crowd your grave to sleep you well and warm your bones. Do you hear?»
«Great God, you are a proper priest to sound my Last Rites. And will I enjoy my own funeral? I will.»
His hands, freed, clung to the books at each side, as the ardent visitor raised yet other books and intoned the dates:
«Nineteen twenty-two . . . 1930 . . .1935. . . 1940 . 1955… 1970. Can you read and know what it means?»
He held the last volume close to the old man's face. The fiery eyes moved. The old mouth creaked.
«Nineteen ninety?»
«Yours. One hundred years from tonight.»
«Dear God!»
«I must go, but I would hear. Chapter One. Speak.»
The old man's eyes slid and burned. He licked his lips, traced the words, and at last whispered, beginning to weep:
«'Call me Ishmael.'
There was snow and more snow and more snow after that. In the dissolving whiteness, the silver ribbon twirled in a massive whisper to let forth in an exhalation of Time the journeying librarian and his book bag. As if slicing white bread rinsed by snow, the ribbon, as the traveler ghosted himself to flesh, sifted him through the hospital wall into a room as white as December. There, abandoned, lay a man as pale as the snow and the wind. Almost young, he slept with his mustaches oiled to his lip by fever. He seemed not to know nor care that a messenger had invaded the air near his bed. His eyes did not stir, nor did his mouth increase the passage of breath. His hands at his sides did not open to receive. He seemed already lost in a bomb and only his unexpected visitor's voice caused his eyes to roll behind their shut lids.
«Are you forgotten?» a voice asked.
«Unborn,» the pale man replied.
«Never remembered?»
«Only. Only in. France.»
«Wrote nothing at all?»
«Not worthy.»
«Feel the weight of what I place on your bed. No, don't look. Feel.»
«Tombstones.»
«With names, yes, but not tombstones. Not marble but paper. Dates, yes, but the day after tomorrow and tomorrow and ten thousand after that. And your name on each.»
«It will not be.»
«Is. Let me speak the names. Listen. Masque?»
«Red Death.»
«The Fall of-« –
«Usher!»
«Pit?»
«Pendulum!»
«Tell-tale?»
«Heart! My heart. Heart!»
«Repeat: for the love of God, Montresor.» «Silly.»
«Repeat: Montresor, for the love of God.» «For the love of God, Montresor'.»
«Do you see this label?»
«I see!»
«Read the date.»
«Nineteen ninety-four. No such date.»
«Again, and the name of the wine.»
«Nineteen ninety-four. Amontillado. And my name!»
«Yes! Now shake your head. Make the fool's-cap bells ring. Here's mortar for the last brick. Quickly. I'm here to bury you alive with books. When death comes, how will you greet him? With a shout and-?»
«Requiescat in pace?»
«Say it again.»
«Requiescat in pace!»
The Time Wind roared, the room emptied. Nurses ran in, summoned by laughter, and tried to seize the books that weighed down his joy.
«What's he saying?» someone cried.
In Paris, an hour, a day, a year, a minute later, there was a run of St. Elmo's fire along a church steeple, a blue glow in a dark alley, a soft tread at a street corner, a turnabout of wind like an invisible carousel, and then footfalls up a stair to a door which opened on a bedroom where a window looked out upon cafes filled with people and far music, and in a bed by the window, a tall man lying, his pale face immobile, until he heard alien breath in his room.
The shadow of a man stood over him and now leaned down so that the light from the window revealed a face and a mouth as it inhaled and then spoke. The single word that the mouth said was:
«Oscar?»
The Other Highway
1996 year
They drove into green Sunday-morning country, away from the hot aluminum city, and watched as the sky was set free and moved over them like a lake they had never known was there, amazingly blue and with white breakers above them as they traveled.
Clarence Travers slowed the car and felt the cool wind move over his face with the smell of cut grass. He reached over to grasp his wife's hand and glanced at his son and daughter in the backseat, not fighting, at least for this moment, as the car moved through one quiet beauty after another in what might be a Sunday so lush and green it would never end.
«Thank God we're doing this,» said Cecelia Travers. «It's been a million years since we got away.» He felt her hand hug his and then relax completely. «when I think of all those ladies dropping dead from the heat at the cocktail parry this afternoon, welt»
«Well, indeed,» said Clarence Travers. «Onward!»
He pressed the gas pedal and they moved faster. Their progress out of the city had been mildly hysterical, with cars shrieking and shoving them toward islands of wilderness praying for picnics that might not be found. Seeing that he had put the car in the fast lane, he slowed to gradually move himself and his family through the banshee traffic until they were idling along at an almost reasonable fifty miles an hour. The scents of flowers and trees that blew in the window made his move worthwhile. He laughed at nothing at all and said:
«Sometimes, when I get this far out, I think let's just keep driving, never go back to the damned city.»