“I thought it was the devil talking, at first,” the man told her. “Who else would speak out of the ashes? It was a cold night, but I had no fire going, so the voice came out of the blackness. It said, Listen to me, creature. I am an angel of the Lord. He has decreed a work for you.”
Jemma had not asked him to explain anything; he had just started talking as soon as they’d met. He was coming up the stairs to the first floor just as she was entering the stairwell. They stood and regarded each other for a moment. She saw a haggard-looking man in a green suit and terribly ugly shoes, little slippers of woven leather afflicted with beaded tassels on either front.
“Is it… flooded down there?” she had asked him, looking over the railing at the stairs going down; she counted ten flights before they disappeared into darkness. She had taken the stairs to the nursery a hundred times; there hadn’t used to be a basement.
“Certainly not,” he said. He stared at her, not creepily. There was not much creepy about him, for all that he looked like a hospital administrator or a mortician. His stare was merely frank and curious, open and honest.
“I’m going up to the roof,” she told him, when he kept staring at her. It was all over the hospital, announced by rumor and by the voice of the telephone lady who claimed to be an angel, that the roof was off limits, that the stairs were locked and the windows blacked for a very important reason — that what lay outside was so awful that to look at it would cost a person her sanity. “It is not yet time,” the lady said. “It is forbidden.” But Jemma had sneaked away from the new, expanded duties with which Rob kept himself busy to go and look. She had searched on three different floors for an open door to the stairwell, bumping shoulders with people going about frantic hospital business on the big ramp that ran in a spiral up the center of the hospital and led to every floor, and was the only way to get from one ward to another while the elevators were off-line. She walked around the lobby, stopping before the place where the main doors had been, pausing under the big toy, a giant perpetual-motion machine built to amuse visitors. She tried to appear innocent, looking up into the wires and beams and struts and gears and parachutes, watching the bowling balls leap from basket to basket, the water running in the sluices and the iron sailboats racing in the high courses — the thing had changed with the rest of the hospital, getting twice as complex as it had been before, and twice as stupid, and now it gave Jemma twice as bad a headache to stare at it, but she feigned interest until she was sure no one was looking before she darted to the doors. Every door in the lobby was locked, but she found a way into the stairwell in the now empty ER, suddenly the quietest place in the hospital since every child there had been admitted upstairs. There was no one there to hear her kicking the door and rattling the handle. “There you go,” said the mechanical lady, when the handle finally turned. “I thought it was forbidden,” Jemma said, looking around for the source of the voice — sometimes she spoke out of speakers but sometimes the voice just came out of a blank wall. “Hello?” Jemma said, but the lady didn’t answer.
“That’s where the stairs go,” said the man. “Up.”
“I want to see what it looks like.”
“I can tell you what it looks like,” he said. “It looks like a lot of water.”
“I want to see.”
He shrugged.
“How do you know, anyway? I thought nobody was allowed to look.”
“I haven’t,” he said. “I don’t need to. I just know, like I know the windows will go transparent again in about fifteen minutes. You may as well stay down here and wait. It’s a lot of stairs.”
“If you know so much, tell me why the elevators don’t work.” She tried to look skeptical, but knew she probably just looked confused.
“Oh, they will. In about an hour.” He looked at his watch and counted past hours on his fingers, his lips moving silently. “Sorry, hour and a half. More or less.”
“Right,” she said, not convinced. “Who the hell are you, anyway, that you know all this shit?”
“I’m the person who built this place. Well, maybe not built it. But I designed it.” He struck a pose, throwing his hands up to the right of his face and splaying his fingers, as if to say, See? Jemma recognized the gesture, and suddenly thought she recognized the man.
“Do I know you? I think I know you.”
“I’ve never seen you before in my life,” he said.
But she did know him, because she subscribed to a silly architecture magazine, and had spent idle moments, when she ought to have been studying, gazing at all the marvelous residences, imagining herself sprawled out in every one of the over-appointed rooms, without a care in the world. It was only three or four issues since she had seen this man and his buildings, and remembered especially a giant seaside house he’d built for an eccentric cat-food magnate. Who could forget the many vast rooms — the long hall containing a little forest of rare-wood scratching posts, the thousand square-foot cat-condominium, the long troughs of litter in the chambre de toilette, scented, the captions said, with cardamom and myrrh — all of it as empty of cats as the other fantastic houses always were of people? Jemma hated cats, and remembered the house partly because it seemed so egregious and stupid, and because she remembered the picture of this man, standing outside the cat-palace, striking that very same pose that said, See what I did?
“What’s your name?”
“John Grampus,” he said, starting up the stairs. Jemma followed him.
“I’m Jemma.”
“Who cares? You could be anybody. It doesn’t matter, as long as you have ears to listen. I used to be forbidden to tell about it. I used to get my ass kicked every time I tried.”
“Forbidden?”
“Uh huh. But not anymore. I thought I was going crazy, of course. There are… were… a lot of crazies in my family. Everyone was crazy — two of my sisters, my uncle and my aunt and creepy Cousin Alex, my grandfather, my great grandfather, my great-great grandfather — there’s a fine tradition of suicide there. And my mother — she lost her mind one day in the supermarket. She heard the bread talking. It kept saying, Save me, Oh please save me from this life, and Mama always said it had a voice like an angel, so you can imagine how I worried when that voice came from beneath the ashes.
“She told me that seven miles of water were coming to drown all flesh, and that I had been chosen to build what would be the vessel of salvation for a chosen few. Even after I started to believe it, I wanted nothing to do with the idea, let alone the… commission. What sort of fucking lunatic would want to deal with that kind of shit? Not me. I was never even a very religious person, not in the way you think. I was a treeist, really, you know? I met every Saturday with a group of people who had found very spiritual connections with trees. Some people could go all over the place, any old species would do, but I only felt it with an aspen. I’d put my hands on it and rest my head against the bark and then it always happened. Wham! A great peace.
“I did not want the world to end, and I wanted no part of any plan that would bury all the nice people of the earth, not to mention every last aspen, under seven miles of water. Not everybody’s a moron, after all, or a cruel motherfucker, though there are a lot of those out there, and I’ve dated enough of them. But you can’t blame me for hesitating, can you?”