City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis (11 page)

It was less than an hour past dawn when finally he finished. The dew was still thick on the grass, the air was still sweet with the early morning chill.

Phil walked slowly backwards to examine his handiwork. The monument was shaped like an obelisk, a slim, straight fang of gold-white metal, glinting in the cherry light of the newborn sun like a rosy icicle. On every face of the monument were swirled and curvilinear glyphs, surrounding simple diagrams of circles and lines.

A sudden stabbing pressure shot through Philopater’s head, a sense of tension and release.

Philopater thought:
The special cells in my brain must be detecting the shockwave of the destiny crystal opening. They have entered this phase of reality…
Then he laughed and lightly slapped himself on the cheek. He rubbed his eyes. “You never get over what your parents tell you, do you?”

Phil’s phone was in his pocket. He drew it out and took a snapshot of the monument, thinking to show his father what he had done. Then, since the phone was already in his hand, he decided to call the hospital room and share the news.

The phone rang longer than he expected without answer. He had the sense that something was wrong. The front desk finally picked up the call, but his fears only grew when the front desk transferred the call to the station nurse. The nurse was a young man who explained, in professionally calm, sympathetic tones, that Mr. Hyperion was now in the ER. His father's condition was very serious, but the doctors were doing everything they could possibly do…

Phil did not remember at what point he ended the call and slipped the phone back into his pocket. He had started running before the nurse had even finished speaking. But the path lead down the hill, and curved along the sea cliffs, where the larches and tall, slim beeches were dropping their colorful leaves into the waters.

There was a man in white standing on the path.

Phil slowed abruptly. The man looked familiar, but Phil did not recognize him. His eyes were large and dark, his head was bald, and the white garment, constructed from a metallic fabric, fell from broad shoulder boards in smooth drapes, leaving the man's arms and legs free.

The man spoke. “The one you seek is not dead.”

In a voice hoarse with hope and wonder, Phil said: “Father?”

His father looked so young, so new. He shone with vitality. “But, I thought, in order to see the evidence of time… I thought I had to believe!”

“You believed enough to complete the monument.”

“And that was enough?”

“It was a seed. In the first projection of these events, you will find my old notebooks in the attic, translate the inscription on the monument, and discover that I knew the exact hour and minute of my death. That, in turn, will convince you to study the notebooks and complete your childhood training: you will develop your probability-energy control to a point where your past skepticism is no longer feasible. Your belief will be complete then, and a visitation then would have no time-effect. This meeting, while premature, is merely a shortcut, and hence will not change the recorded future.”

“Father, thank you for being so… so patient with me.”

“Once you become accustomed to knowing the outcome of events, you will find the virtue an easy one to practice.”

“What happens now?”

His father smiled at him. “Life! Life, Philopater! You will live out your span as history reports, without change, except that now you will know, rather than suppose, that the end of life is not as it seems. And, yes, before you ask, my daughter-in-law, my grandchildren, and all of us together shall enter the shining city beyond the reach of time and death. I leave you now, but only for a time.”

The man in white was gone. The moment he vanished, there was a gust of wind, as if a sudden vacuum had appeared in the spot where he stood, and this wind carried some of the colored leaves dancing in the air up away from the sea, up the cliff, over the edge and onto the path.

There was one leaf, a long, slender thing of pale gold color, swirled up from where it had been falling into the dark sea, and landed gently at Phil's feet.

Phil bent down and picked it up.

Later, after the funeral, Phil tried to explain to his wife why his grief was not so painful.

To his infinite surprise, she believed him.

The first principle of telepathic consumption is this: any two thoughts, sufficiently similar, are one. It is by the faculty of understanding that the first link is made.

The second principle is this: every thought grows out of the thought before it. Thus, once even a single thought of the victim is apprehended by the Psychophage, the rest of the victim's thoughts, no matter where they turn, are all linked as if in a chain. The chain of thought, being ethereal, is unbreakable, and the victim cannot escape.

It should occur to you now, O Reader, that you yourself are exactly just such a victim. Your thought, as you read this sentence, by following this sentence, follows the thought of the August Being which dictates me to write it. The two thoughts are one. If you have read these words, then the Psychophage has infected your mind and knows your thought.

Your choice at this point, O Reader, should be clear, as the thoughts of Soul Eater enter you. Either you must help the Great Race find new victims on which to feed, or else…

I snapped the slim black book shut and straightened up. It was chilly on the park bench where I sat, and I could see, in the light of the streetlamp above me, my breath making faint plumes of vapor. I wondered why my breath was coming so rapidly. Why did I believe any of this? Why was I scared?

Why? It was the look on the face of Mr. Hobbes, the bookseller. “A mind-reader, a real one, could know everybody's secrets, learn their hearts, eat their souls. He could rule the world. No one could run from him or hide from him or plot against him. It's all in the book. Take it. But you never come back in my shop to get warm, and you never beg for change out in front here again. That's the deal.”

And Mr. Hobbes smiled a smile as cold as poison as he passed the little leather-bound book across the counter to me. I remembered the anticipatory look in his eye. It was as if he meant for me to die.

But it was only a book that he had handed me, and not even a fat one at that. It was about the size of those prayer-books the old ladies at the Salvation Army give out at the soup kitchen, small enough to fit in your pocket or in the palm of your hand. It wasn't big enough to hold a bomb or anything dangerous.

Maybe I could pawn it. There were fancy little brass snaps at the corners, after all, and tiny brass hinges along the slender spine. Or maybe I could read it and learn to rule the world.

Maybe I don't know what I was thinking.

I took it and I fled. Running is what I do when I'm scared.

Remembering that deadly look on Mr. Hobbes's face, I climbed to my feet. He wanted me dead, I suppose, not because he hated me, but because my face was unshaven, my coat was torn and stained, my gloves were ripped, my hair was untrimmed and unwashed. Because I was like a cockroach to him, something ugly and insignificant.

But a soothing thought came to me: why should I bother to run? The Slayer of Souls knows everything I'm thinking, and I know where I am. I am two blocks down from Mr. Hobbes's Used and Curious Book Shoppe, and one block to the right, in St. Jude's Park. It should only take the Simulacrum a moment to climb from the icebox in Hobbes's basement, to pull on the bulky trenchcoat which allowed it to pass, at night, for a human being, another moment to adhere the mask, and another ten minutes to walk here.

I was penniless, homeless, jobless, friendless. No one would miss me. So I should stay right where I was. Better to rest here and wait.

I actually sat there for about two or three of those ten minutes. It was not until I noticed my eyes were stinging that I thought to wonder what was wrong with me. I was panting and my throat ached from the huge, ragged breaths I was taking. Hyperventilation. When I put my hand to my face, I felt the warmth of my tears on my cold cheeks. I was panicked. I was so scared that I was crying.

Why the hell wasn't I running?

I jumped to my feet. I ran.

It was a gloomy night, with infrequent streetlamps making blobs of light on the pavement. The people on the street looked like hunched shadows, staring sidelong and moving aside as I ran, glancing fearfully back over their shoulders. They were probably wondering what I had stolen. But no one moved toward a pay phone to call the police. This wasn't the kind of neighborhood where people called the police.

I didn't count how many times I turned. I just ran. I crossed a deserted parking lot, then a more brightly-lit street, then a darker one. Then an alley. It dead-ended at a chain-link fence. I scaled the links, which rattled under my frantic grasp, and the top scraped me as I fell. There I found myself, in the dark, next to the smell and bulk of a trash dumpster. Eggshells, greasy garbage, and wet newspapers were under my feet, and there was a smell of food, as if there were a restaurant kitchen nearby.

A sense of amused and patient anger crossed my mind. I had run blindly, so I didn't know where I was. It couldn't find me.

I leaned against the dumpster, panting till I caught my breath. It had been a long time since I had been in good condition. A long time since I had a job, a future.

A wife.

A stab of sorrow passed through me. The thought of her, and the thought of the filthy thing I had become, of what a shambles I had made of my life, made me realize what my old self, me the way I had been before, would have thought of me now. I was a delusional self-pitying drunk, running in a panic because some words in an inane book spooked him. I was a man who couldn't tell fantasy from reality.

Why do I believe this nonsense? Why do I believe the Soul Slayer is after me?

I shuffled to the end of the alley, feeling tired. My head was down, my chin was on my chest. There was a big neon sign to my left, burning brightly and steadily, bright enough to cast my shadow across the cracked pavement at my feet. Idly, I pulled out the little slim book again and looked at it.

There was an ugly design tooled into the leather of the cover, a screaming face with horns or lines of something-or-other squirming out from its eyes and mouth. A medusa? The title was stamped in a half-circle above that:
DE ANIMUS OCCISOR et Dominus Natura Occultum.

On the Slayer of Souls and Hidden Master of the World.

I knew what it said. But how? I hadn't taken Latin in school. I knew the words because The Master had dictated the book to Dr. John Dee during the time of Queen Elizabeth. Aleister Crowley had stolen it and given it to Mr. Hobbes's great-grandfather…

Some impulse made me look up. I saw the street sign across the way. Lexington Avenue. And I saw the big neon sign next to me:
Florintino's Fine Italian Dining
.

Lexington was only a block north of St. Jude's Park. The Simulacrum was moving with lumbering, limping steps down Duke Street, but now it knew where I was. It turned. It could not run quickly, true, but it did not need to. The Soul Slayer knew what I was thinking, and knew where I was whenever I did.

I only had a minute or two before it arrived. There were three cabs waiting out in front of the restaurant. I ran up to the last one in line.

I put my hand on the door handle, but the driver, squinting at me warily through the glass, had thrown the little switch which let him lock the back doors.

“Hey, buddy!” I yanked on the handle. The door didn't budge. “You've got to help me–I can pay, really, I can!” He took one look at my tattered coat and ratty gloves, and put his hand on the baseball bat on the seat next to him. Then he stared at me. Silently. He didn't need to say anything. Everybody knew how you were supposed to treat homeless bums who ask you for favors.

I stepped back. The eater of souls was only about a minute away. There was no doorman at the door to the hotel, and, when I stepped into its warm and gloomy interior, the maître d'hôtel had his back to me. He was laughing and flattering a richly dressed couple, both of whom were overweight.

There was plush carpeting underfoot (my footsteps made no noise) and dim candle-flame shaped bulbs overhead (no one saw me in the gloom). The door to the cloakroom was immediately to my left. I was inside it before anyone noticed.

There was an expensive buff-colored overcoat, with fine soft fur along its collar and lapels, hanging on the same hook as a homburg. I shrugged on the coat in an instant and hid my unkept hair beneath the felt hat. My rotten gloves I stuffed in a pocket; there was nothing I could do about my pants and shoes, or about my stubbled face, but I could pretend the rough, unshaven look was simply a question of style.

Then I strolled grandly out of the restaurant, backbone straight and shoulders squared, the way people with money walk. The way I used to walk. No one stopped me.

I went to the first cab in line. I hoped the driver had not seen the commotion I'd made two cabs behind him. Maybe he hadn't, or maybe he was fooled by my disguise. Either way, the cab door opened for me. Then I was inside.

“Where to, pal?” the cabbie said over his shoulder.

At that moment, through the front windshield, I saw a tall figure step out from a cross street barely a stone's throw away.

It moved with slow and ponderous deliberation, as if it had all the time in the world. It wore a bulky, ankle-length trenchcoat to hide its inhuman features, a wide-brimmed hat, and it walked with its collar up and its head bowed.

Slowly it turned, and began lurching with heavy-footed, solemn steps that painfully impersonated a human gait, lumbering toward the cab. Toward me.

“Drive!” I shouted. “Just drive!”

As the cab pulled away from the curb, the Simulacrum stepped sideways off the sidewalk onto the street in front of the cab, and hoisted one arm aloft with a jerk, manipulating the prosthetic inside its glove to spread its manikin fingers wide.