City At The End Of Time (2 page)

A few moments later, as she was about to leave, the gate buzzed open. No voice, no welcome. Her shoulders slumped in relief—so tired.

But after all she had been through, no hope could go unchallenged. Quickly, she probed with all her strength and talent for a better way through the confused tangles of outcome and effect. None appeared. This was the only good path. Every other led her back to the spinning, blue-white storm in the woods. For months now she had felt her remaining options pinch down. She had never pictured this warehouse, never known she would end up in Seattle, never clearly foreseen the free clinic and the helpful doctor. Ginny pulled the gate open and walked up the ramp. The gate swung back with a rasping squeak and locked behind her.

Today was her eighteenth birthday.

CHAPTER 2

Jack Rohmer’s body was thirsty. Jack Rohmer’s body was tired.

Up one street and down another, the bicycle carried the slender, dark-haired young man with hardly any guidance. An occasional push on the handlebars, an uncaring flex of the shoulders, tongue poked through slack lips, brown eyes staring ahead—all that and the steady, monotonous pedaling told both the world and the bike that Jack Rohmer had gone blank.

Slung over the back fender, a saddlebag full of hammers rattled in the dips. By itself, even a young body is interested not in adventure or novelty, but in continuity. It prefers not to make important decisions. A casual turn, leaning into a curve, the slightly startled avoidance of cars and other obstacles—these form the sum of the body’s abilities, given the absence of its owner. It is the wakeful brain that is restless.

In an hour, Jack’s body had traveled miles from his intended destination. Had there been hills, no doubt by now the body would have slowed and taken a breather. But along the level streets in this harbor district of warehouses and factories, rolling over rough asphalt and brick paving, it was more trouble to stop than to go on.

The bike swerved around a rut.

A truck came out of nowhere and bellowed. Jack’s right eye twitched. The driver waved a ham-sized fist out the window. Jack rode on, oblivious. The truck roared through the intersection, missing him by inches.

Streetlights buzzed pinkish-yellow beneath gathering clouds. Jack’s feet pumped arched cycloids at a reduced rate through the shadows. Three miles per hour. Then two. One. The bicycle became unstable. The body dropped a leg. The leg landed early and he hopped and snagged the toe of his shoe, bending it back.

“Ow!”

The body had had enough.

Jack returned—above the neck. Panic crossed his face. He slid off the slim leather seat and jammed his groin down on the bar. That reunited body and soul in a painful instant. He tumbled and lurched up on both legs before the bicycle collapsed.

One foot plunged through the spokes of the front wheel.

“Ow! Damn!”

His voice echoed from corrugated doors and high, flat gray walls. Stunned, he caught his breath and looked around—he was alone, nobody had witnessed his predicament. Gingerly, he rubbed his aching crotch, then gave his watch a confused glance. He had been absent for an hour and five minutes. He remembered almost nothing.

There had been a high window and darkness; the most extraordinary darkness, filled with a blinding, knife-edged gray light and
something
watching.

Over the roof of a warehouse he saw tall stacks of empty blue, brown, and white steel containers marked with the names of shipping companies. Somehow, he had pedaled deep into Sodo—south downtown—almost in sight of the docks and their huge red-painted cranes. Something skittered under a row of big Dumpsters.

Jack pulled his foot from the spokes and inspected the old running shoe and torn sock. The wheel was ruined but his leg was barely scratched. He lifted the bike and turned it around, ready to roll it back the way he had come.

A soft chirrup in the shadows—another scrape—and something long and low scuttled between strapped bales of cardboard boxes. Jack’s eyes went wide. For a moment he thought he had seen a snake—a snake with pliers on its tail. Curious, he walked toward the piles, bent over, and lifted a soggy layer from the concrete.

A staccato tapping vibrated a wide, flat bale on his left. With a grimace, he jerked the bale aside and let it flop over—just in time to see something long and shiny black, with many legs, and tail pincers the size of a lobster claw, scurry into a hole in some metal siding.

Jack leaped back with a yelp.

He thought he had seen an earwig as big as his forearm.

In the next hour, as he pushed the wobbling bike beneath the high-arching free way, as the sky turned dark and drizzle soaked him to the skin, he half convinced himself that what he had seen near the docks was the shadow of a rat, not a giant bug.

He returned to the third-floor apartment, replaced the bike’s wheel, stowed it in the storage locker, changed out of his wet clothes, and ate a quick supper of canned chili. Burke, his roommate, had brought up a stack of mail before going to work. Burke was a sous chef at a fancy steak house. He worked six days a week until midnight and came home smelling of steaks, wine, and brandy: the perfect roommate—seldom there, and Burke left him alone.

Jack moved stuff around the apartment to keep Burke’s memory fresh—if he rearranged things, Burke did not try to rent out his room. He sorted through the stack. Nothing but bills, all in Burke’s name. With returning confidence, Jack stood in the middle of his small bedroom and practiced juggling three of his four rats, along with two hammers. The rats took this with accustomed patience, and when he returned them to their cage, they squeaked happily. He fed them. They were bright-eyed. Their whiskers twitched.

Satisfied his reflexes had not been affected, he packed the hammers back in a lower dresser drawer, blinked to adjust his eyes, and watched the drawer fill in with bowling pins, Bocce and billiard balls, bricks, and rubber chickens.

With some difficulty, he managed to push the drawer shut.

Just two weeks ago an attractive older woman, Ellen Crowe, had invited him to her house on Capitol Hill. Food—conversation—sympathy. Jack was used to the attention of older women. He felt the stiffness of her note in his shirt pocket, pulled it out, and rubbed his finger over the silver curlicue design on fancy cream board. The card carried a second invitation to dinner, no date specified.
When you’re ready
, Ellen had written. On the back, she had neatly penned the phone number of a free clinic.

Perhaps he had told her too much over the shrimp risotto. He rubbed the card again, feeling for misfortune and feeling none—not from the card, not from Ellen.

Sitting on the back porch, he tracked a receding V of identical gray and brown porches under low, rapid black clouds, sipped a cup of chamomile tea steeped from a thrice-used bag, and listened to the steady rain. Jack had come to think he was finally happy. Poor, but that didn’t matter. Now a real worry clouded his cheer. He was blanking out too often. He had even mentioned it to Ellen Crowe. And he was seeing things. Giant earwigs.

He balanced the second hammer on one finger, tossed it, and caught the flat of its handle on the tip of his thumb, where it stayed with hardly a wiggle.

Jack laid the hammer on his lap and sighed.

“Tomorrow I will visit a doctor,” he announced, and pulled up a woolen blanket. When the wind wasn’t blowing, he liked to sleep on the porch. For a moment he stared at the blanket’s felted fibers, magnified them in his mind’s eye, saw them hooked to each other every which way, packing off in all directions. Life was less like the felt and more like a bundle of cables, crammed up against other bundles with hardly any distance between. Some cables were short. Some ran on for ages. All hooked up with others in ways few could predict. But Jack could feel those hookups, those points of crossing, long before they arrived.

His eyes grew heavy. As the sky darkened, he napped right there on the porch, cradling the hammer in his lap, under the blanket. His sleep was deep and normal. He snored. For once, oblivion. His legs slumped, but the hammer did not fall.

Jack never dropped anything.

CHAPTER 3

Wallingford

Something huge slammed the beggar into the low, wet gray brush. He rolled on his side and stared up at the flat steel panel of a big green garbage truck. The truck’s diesel grumbled and belched black smoke. The driver poked his bald head out of the cab. “Hey, freeloader! Get a job!”

The blow had left the beggar with a knuckling throb in his gut. His head hurt, too. He couldn’t remember his name, only that he’d been running from something painful and ugly. That much sang like a tuning fork in the middle of tangled thoughts—

He had stretched, reached out too far.

Trying to escape.

The beggar decided that the garbage truck driver wouldn’t act so cocky if he had actually struck a pedestrian—even a freeloader. Nothing had hit him. He was just
here
, lying unexpectedly by the side of a road, one booted foot stretched to the curb, the other bent almost to his butt—owlishly observing a line of traffic backed up at an intersection.

His thoughts came together like a puzzle—but something rose up and tried to blow them apart again, something sharing the tight volume behind his eyes…another mind, scared, resentful. The beggar expertly crushed this companion as he would an insect, and focused on important details. First, where was he? A thick branch snapped and he crunched deeper into the brush. He felt a bundle dig into his back—knapsack, coat, sweatshirt, plastic bottle. Part of him—the part he was trying to suppress—still remembered stashing them there. He felt like a half sweater, somehow mated to another half, the yarns two different colors and everything in the middle—in between—unraveling. What would he be doing in any better world, stashing clothes and water in the bushes?

His left arm came into view, the dirty green coat sleeve crusted with what looked like snot. The garbage truck turned left and rumbled on. He knew the area—a street fed by an off-ramp from Interstate 5, near Forty-fifth. Once, he had driven it every day to get home, turning at this very corner. But these cars looked wrong.

He got to his feet, stiff and sore. His stomach throbbed with a snaky, coiling pain—something this body was used to. That shook him.
This
body.
Chronic pain.

Two names circled like prize fighters, until one punched the other down—sheer experience and stubbornness winning out over dismay and indignation. A whimpering inside, then—silence. None of it felt right. Something had gone wrong.

I am Daniel.

I am Daniel Patrick Iremonk.

The snake did flip-flops. He whirled and was sick in the bushes. He refused to look at what came up. Other cars whizzed past, their designs sleek, bubbled, chopped—slick magazine parodies of the cars he knew. Their drivers stared in disgust or did not see him at all—eyes on the upcoming turn. This was scary—
Daniel
was frightened. The other fellow was beyond caring. Not too strong to begin with, he had quickly been beaten down into a set of mud-colored memories. It had never been this way before. Of course, Daniel had never tried to jump so far.
Look around. Maybe you haven’t left the
Bad Place after all.

Daniel—Daniel Patrick Iremonk—had always escaped—jaunted, that was the word he used—long before the situation went totally sour. That was his talent. He had never before waited for things to get so awful.
Make sure it isn’t still after you—the dust, slime, scrambled books, the hundreds of
cryptids—all the impossible things happening at once, and everyone staring at you, like you’ve
walked into a horrible, hushed surprise party.

They drag you in, lock the door, start with the nasties…fun and games…

I
need
to remember, I really do—but I don’t
want
to.
Daniel wiped his mouth and rotated slowly, orienting himself. Sunshine, clouds, mud from recent rain. Across the street stood a wide, blocky beige building, three stories tall—condos on top, shops on the bottom. He knew it well. Minutes ago, it had been a run-down hotel. Cars burped and jerked to a stop again as the traffic light changed. Usually, when he jaunted—willed himself from one strand to another—only one thing or a few subtle things were different: the circumstances that he wished to change. Daniel had never moved into a version of himself that had gone so far downhill.