City At The End Of Time (19 page)

Too close. Very spooky.

Where was Granger now, the previous occupant of this heap of a body—lost, pushed aside, bumped out of the nest? Just another victim. And what about all those other strands, all the world-lines he must have crossed—the myriad densely bundled fates between Daniel Patrick Iremonk and
here
?

No Daniel in this strand. Only someone living in his aunt’s old house, someone who writes things
down in odd symbols—

The closest I could find.

Just not
me.
Why?

The box was the crucial connection. Had Charles Granger been a jaunter as well?
Charles Granger is
at the end of his rope. The box knows. It brought you here.

He riffled the papers, stuffed them back into the carton, then closed it up again. Outside, the wind picked up.

Daniel stood, joints popping and cracking. Something wasn’t right. Something wasn’t finished. He had found the box—
a box
—but Daniel Iremonk had never kept his sum-runner in a cardboard carton—too obvious.

He had hidden it behind the brick fireplace.

Daniel felt along the bricks and found a loose one near the baseboard. He scraped it back and forth, pulled it out, knelt down with a grimace, and reached into the opening. And found a
second
box.

As if working through instinct, he placed both boxes side by side. They were identical in appearance. He puzzled them open. The stones lay in their velvet-cushioned interiors, sharing the same orientation. He removed them and held them in his hands, inspecting their distant red eyes. They refused to twist—and refused to fit together. Two identical pieces of a puzzle. He returned the duplicate stone to its box, closed it, and dropped it into the cardboard carton, then covered it with Charles Granger’s papers.

Best to keep no more than one on his person, and hide the other—as a backup.

The sounds of traffic on the arterial that ran past the northern corner of the old house—a regular hum and wet swoosh—should have been soothing, like freshets down a watercourse. But Daniel could not find peace. He could not sleep. He lay twitching in the torn sleeping bag on the wooden floor in the middle of the rear bedroom. Little electric flashes raced through him, as if his heart were being tickled by the frayed end of a low-voltage cable. Things kept popping up in memory—impossible things he could never have personally witnessed. Each little jolt came with its own bill of lading, a sense of personal loss that left him weaker and more confused.

Even before he arrived here, Daniel had often felt as if he were a knot tying up all the loose rope-ends of time. Far too much responsibility.

Time does not rush along as a point; it smears out like the passage of a brush a minute or an hour or a week wide, sometimes a month—a brush made of fate-laden fibers, painting different pictures for different people.

Knowing this gave Daniel an advantage—he could
feel
his way across the width of an hour, a week, a month. Anticipate something unpleasant? Make a left turn instead of a right, find a door opened instead of closed, elude bad fortune—and if something came up that seemed unavoidable, jaunt to a very close but slightly skewed, just slightly improved world—a strand without that particular impediment. That had been his method, until now.

He had made his way from fate to fortune to fate, closing his eyes and
squeezing
himself loose…always joining up with alternate versions of himself, so little different that no one could tell there had been a change—a strange cuckoo landing in nests no doubt occupied by other cuckoos. Daniel never spent very long in one strand. He had started his killing early on—sacrificing others to enhance his fortune—desperate, as if he needed many more chances to get where he needed to be and do what he needed to do. It might have been those betrayals—those metaphysical murders—that had brought him low and thrust him into the middle of the Nasty Silent Party—that diseased, broken strand, surrounded by so many other rotting worlds.

An infinite supply of fortune had passed through his hands, and now, apparently, he had sucked the wellspring dry. He sometimes wondered if he had killed the entire universe. But no. There were worse things than Daniel Patrick Iremonk out there, waiting to get in. Perhaps the puzzle boxes had been there all along, unguarded—and Granger had found them, but didn’t know what they were or what they carried.

Poor kind of shepherd.

A pile of bottles had grown in a corner of the kitchen—Night Train, Colt 45, Wild Irish Rose. Even on Daniel’s home strand, those same brands and bottles had lined the shelves in corner markets, leering landmarks of the constancy of human pain and sin. Cheap booze, common to all strands…

His mind raced as much as this mind could race, a sluggish pile of gray matter poisoned by years of alcohol, drugs, and disease. The nipping, coiling snake in his gut. Daniel jerked up from the mattress, batting at his arms. His skin was convinced it was infested with tiny bugs.
Punishment for sin? Bugs in your skin.

He walked into the living room and pulled aside the brown paper taped to the window. Outside, the dark streets were relieved by streetlights, each illuminating a blurred ellipse on the sidewalks and grass. A car drove past—
shush
and
whoosh
of wet pavement—its headlights intensely blue. For two days now, barely able to move, he had been reading—pulling newspapers and magazines out of recycling bins under the kitchen sink, trying to find out how much time he had—how much time they all had in this world before the signs multiplied, the cryptids started proliferating, the books spilled over with nonsense—and the dust and mildew began taking hold.

Brer Rabbit ran so fast

Skip right out o’ his skin,

Had ter push ’nother rabbit out—

And climb—

Back—

In.

He let the shade drop and pulled up a lone dining room chair in the middle of the floor. The chair legs scraped on the uneven boards like the cry of a hoarse old woman.

What else was different about this world? Besides the desperate minus of Daniel Patrick Iremonk…

You tell me what’s different, Brer Rabbit.

Whar you fum?

Daniel’s home had also been called Seattle.

Classic Seattle. Wetter and grayer than this one, if that was possible—less populated, not nearly as much concentrated wealth. A friendlier city—more face-to-face communication, neighborhoods sticking together—kids didn’t spend endless hours glued to computer screens, locked in artificial worlds—more grounded; a world he remembered as more suitable, more right, yet he had never fit in. Always looking for a way out, an excuse to leave, and finally he had found both, to his infinite and probably short-lived regret.

Right out o’ yo’ skin.

Finally, in his teens, he had put that name to what he was doing: jaunting. Crossing the strands of varied fates—traveling in the fifth dimension for advantage. Playing Monopoly without moving around all the squares: squiggling around the game board, or digging down
through
stacked boards. The rich got richer because they were rich, but the poor got poorer because they had to stick to the rules, they could not burrow through the game like a Monopoly mole, or jump sideways—like a rabbit.
Now, dat rabbit, some rabbit,

Brer Rabbit, my, how he could jump!

Also in his teens, he had decided it was time to study up on what he was actually doing, and that eventually led him across the freeway to an old Carnegie library on the corner of Fiftieth and Roosevelt—still there. In the soft glow of great hanging saucer lamps of bronze and milky glass, listening to rain patter against the high windows, Daniel had studied popular science books by Gamow, Weinberg, and Hawking, and finally came across P.C.W. Davies, who had taught him about special relativity, singularities, and universal constants.

A man named Hugh Everett had created the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and two Davids—Bohm and Deutsch, very different in their thinking—had taught him about the possibility of multiverses. Daniel had then conceived of branching realities, four-dimensional cosmoses arranged side by side, in a way, across a fifth dimension…a thick rope of world-strands. John Cramer, a professor at the University of Washington, had speculated about retrocausality—particles reaching back to reconcile their present with the past—which Daniel could feel happening inside his gray box—though he had no idea what it meant.

As he got older and acquired a little savvy (you couldn’t jump backward and stay young, and you certainly couldn’t jump forward—just “sideways,” “up,” or “down”), he imagined himself a kind of athlete. How
often
could he jump—and how far, with how much sense of direction or accuracy?

How could he improve his situation the most?

Where would he finally land, measured on the Money-Love spectrum?

That got him into a frustrating tangle. Trying to end up with more money, he soon learned that improved circumstance required more personal effort, not less—and his base personality was not good at
keeping
lots of money.

And so he tried improving his life at the expense of another’s—predatory jumping. (And wasn’t that where his talent had been all along? He had seen it so often—Daniel doing better, Joe Blow not so good, whereas Joe Blow had been doing okay before the jump—but he could never
prove
it, not with any rigor—and maybe he didn’t want to know for sure.)

Daniel was never deliberately cruel. He didn’t enjoy hurting people. He was just a man with a nervous tic for fortune—but no knack for ultimate design, no fashion sense for fate.
Maybe I’m a lot more
screwed up than poor, sick, scrawny Charles Granger. After all, I pushed him out.
Right out o’ his skin.

He would need to make another move soon—and how could he do that? He didn’t even know how he’d ended up in Granger, except that they shared versions of the same house, proximal to the same stones.

Standing on the corner, staring at drivers—even in his worst times, those last days when the shadows began closing in—he had never been so isolated. He had to start reaching out, checking the pulse and mood of real people with real emotions.

The night was lonely—scary lonely. Being alone seemed less attractive than it had ever been before—because now Daniel was certain of two things.

This world was nearing its end. And this body was dying.

CHAPTER 14

Capitol Hill

Ellen Crowe had company when Jack returned. The clink of wineglasses and female voices in the dining room revealed that Ellen’s book group was in session. They called themselves the Witches of Eastlake. He looked at the invitation on the card. He had forgotten it was tonight. Jack opened the garage door as quietly as possible and was up on the stepladder bringing down the cage when Ellen called from the rear porch. “Hey, stranger. Don’t be shy. Are you hungry?”

Jack walked back. His rats sniffed the air, fragrant with cooking. “I don’t think your friends would like me barging in,” he said.

“It’s my house,” Ellen said.

He gave her a weak smile. He
was
hungry—he had not eaten since breakfast, and Ellen was a fine cook.

Jack sat on a stool in the kitchen as Ellen pulled a tray of game hens from the ornate black and chrome gas oven. The roasted birds smelled delicious. The rats clustered at the front of their cage, noses twitching.

She forked one of the birds onto a plate on the counter. Mushroom stuffing, Jack noted. “We’ve already eaten. Help yourself to salad. There’s wine in the fridge.”

“Am I going to sing for my supper?” he asked.

“Anything but that,” Ellen said.

Shoving a napkin into the collar of his black T-shirt and floofing it out like an ascot, he struck a pose with upraised knife and fork. Baggy pants held up by red suspenders, hair wild and black and face thin,