Shuteye for the Timebroker

SHUTEYE FOR THE TIMEBROKER

Stories

Paul Di Filippo

Collection copyright © 2006 by Paul Di Filippo

Copyright acknowledgments: “Captain Jill” has not previously been published. “Billy Budd” has not previously been published. “Slowhand and Little Sister” first appeared in
Miami Metropolis
, 1990. “Underground” first appeared in
bOING-bOING
, 1991. “Going Abo” first appeared in
Aberrations
, 1996. “Distances” first appeared in
Pirate Writings
, 1997. “We’re All in This Alone” first appeared in
Interzone
, 2002. “Walking the Great Road” first appeared as a chapbook accompanying the novel
Harp, Pipe and Symphony
, Prime Press, 2004. “The Mysterious Iowans” first appeared in
The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Stories
, 2004. “Shadowboxer” first appeared in
Amazing Stories
, 2004. “Shut-eye for the Timebroker” first appeared in
Future Shocks
, 2005. “The Days of Other Light” first appeared in
In the House of Poe
, 2005. “The Secret Sutras of Sally Strumpet” first appeared in the
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, 2005. “Eel Pie Stall” first appeared in
Adventure
, 2005. “The Furthest Schorr” first appeared in
Interzone
, 2006.

For Deborah, who never, ever, ever gets enough shuteye.

And to the memory of Ginger Newton, 1990—2005:

“A little dog would get tired living so long.”

Readers of my
Neutrino Drag
collection will perhaps recall the presence there of two early stories of mine: “Rescuing Andy” and “Yellowing Bowers.” As I explained in those pages, these stories were the start of an abortive series set in the mysterious New England seaside town of Blackwood Beach. Two other installments were written but never sold.

On a whim recently, I went into my cave of memories (a large closet in my office full of moldering boxes) and dug out the manuscripts of those two tales, which I had not looked at in nearly twenty years. I was amazed to see they were at least as readable as the two that saw print, and so I determined, rather nostalgically, to give them a long-delayed life.

Following the seasonal motif established by “Rescuing Andy” (summer) and “Yellowing Bowers” (autumn), the third story, “Captain Jill,” illustrates the events of a typically atypical Blackwoodian winter. The knitting motif herein traces its origin to the vocation of my mate, Deborah Newton, who at the time I was embarking on my career with this story was starting her own as a knitwear designer.

Captain Jill

Someone was singing in the cellar.

T. Clayton Little, sitting stiffly in his ornately carved canopy bed, the still-strange room around him darkly full of the accumulation of two hundred years of other peoples lives, wondered if he should investigate.

Perhaps
, he thought,
if I simply lie here, Granny will go and checks it out. And if she doesn’t get up, then it can’t be anything serious.

For a moment, that train of reasoning reassured him. Its derailment, however, was almost immediate. Granny Little was partially deaf and suffered from arthritis in several crucial joints. Additionally, she would never see the blithe side of ninety again. Weren’t these very facts the reason why Clayton had let his father convince him to come live with her and manage her affairs, not the least of which was the Little Mistletoe Farm of Blackwood Beach?
Have to drive out there early tomorrow and show some extra attention to Ethel
, thought Clayton with absurd irrelevance, before dragging his mind back to the problem at hand. What was he thinking of, hoping the frail old woman would save him the unpleasant task of venturing out of his warm bed at four in the morning, padding down three flights of steep stairs into a cold, damp basement, and finding out just who—or what—was making that cacophony?

Ashamed of his selfish trepidation, Clayton tossed back the thick comforters and swung his long, gangly legs over the side of the bed. Midwinter moonlight shafting through a leaded-glass window revealed one of Clayton’s best-kept secrets: a fondness for old-fashioned nightshirts most unfashionable in a young man of thirty-two. Catching sight of the dim ghost of his reflection in a mirror, he winced, recalling the derision Marianne had heaped upon him back in Asheville when she had discovered this gaucherie. Her insensitive laughter had been one of the prime causes of their breakup, freeing Clayton from his last tie to the town of his birth.

He shook his head in wonder at the inexplicable twists and turns of life. Had he not been so enamored of being unromantically comfortable while sleeping, he might never have broken up with Marianne. Consequently, he would not have been inclined to move north, to this strange New England town of his ancestors. And therefore, he would not, at this instant, have been shuffling from one frozen foot to another, postponing the inevitable moment when he would have to descend to locate the source of the mysterious singing.

Chafing his big, rawboned hands together nervously, Clayton left his bedroom. Out in the long third-floor hall, he turned left and proceeded cautiously past Granny Little’s room—whence gentle old-lady snores issued—to the head of the stairs. The noise was more easily heard here, drifting up from the depths of the large house like the notes of an infernal symphony. Although Clayton could not make out any words, the lusty soprano seemed to convey unpleasant intimations of villainy and unholy glee.

Down the stairs, with their threadbare woven runner, to the second floor, Clayton slowly made his way. Pausing, he sought to discern at least the refrain of the song, hoping to recognize a pop tune and thereby draw the reassuring conclusion that the radio had somehow shorted itself into activity. No luck.

On the ground floor of Claytons new home, tiny fragments of the song became recognizable. Standing in the kitchen, with its massive wood-gas stove and cantankerous icebox, Clayton thought to make out the words “dead man,” “treasure,” and “rum.” Not exactly the components of any current Top 40 hit he could recall. And anyway, the innocent radio sat quiescent on its shelf.

Now Clayton began to grow intrigued, despite his fears. Who could be responsible for this bellowed chantey? Some drunk who had wandered into their cellar to escape the cold, no doubt. Emboldened, Clayton took a long-handled flashlight from its resting place and moved to the locked door leading to the stone-walled cellar.

The rickety stairs leading down were lined with old galoshes, empty Ball jars, broken crockery, and other relics of life led by generations of Littles. Clayton descended cautiously, reaching the dirt floor without barking his bony ankles, a minor triumph.

Here the song welled up in its full glory, only slightly muted. Clayton recognized it now for a version of that beloved boyhood favorite, “Fifteen Men on a Dead Man’s Chest.” Odd, he hadn’t thought of that song for decades. He wondered that anyone still sang it. And the voice! Was it that of a throaty woman, or of a high-voiced man?

The familiarity and innocent connotations of the song lifted Clayton’s spirits even further. Some teenager it had to be, bent on mischief.

Flashing the beam of his light around the web-shrouded, unpartitioned space, cluttered with generations of offcast miscellany, Clayton looked for an open window that could have granted the intruder access. But as far as he could see, the small, dusty casements were all fastened securely with rusty hooks and eyes. Perhaps elsewhere, out of sight, a window had been breached. Clayton pictured the inconsiderate singer, supine and drunk, lying facedown on the damp earthen floor, bellowing in his muffled manner. Not wanting even an annoying vagrant to catch a cold, Clayton moved away from the foot of the stairs and walked down irregular aisles of cartons and loose junk, furniture and Flexible Flyers.

A thorough investigation of the capacious cellar, however, revealed no open window or supine drunk, but only more assorted trunks and boxes, a gigantic furnace with its pile of coal boxed by three wooden walls, and a dilapidated sleigh covered with cobwebs and smelling of musty leather.

The unseen singer had switched tunes by the time Clayton had completed his search. The new song was unfamiliar, but of the same genre, detailing unsavory depradations and plunderings, accompanied by graphic bloodshed.

Clayton returned to the foot of the stairs and stood there, baffled. Where the hell was this intruder who had disturbed his sleep?

He cocked his head. Was the sound issuing from below?

Suddenly he was ten years old again. Gran’pa Little, long dead, stood beside him. “Yup, Clay, this town is wormier than Swiss cheese. Laced with tunnels dug by the old freebooters and smugglers. Why, one of them surfaces right here.”

Perhaps the old man hadn’t been joshing. Clayton went to the southwest corner of the cellar. There, shifting a box or two, he uncovered the trapdoor set in its wooden frame. He pried up the rusty ring set in its top and heaved. The door opened with a ghastly creak, and surprisingly fresh, sea-scented air rushed out in a puff. A set of rungs led straight down into the black hole.

Flashlight in one hand, its lonely beam directed uselessly upward, Clayton took the first step downward.

His return to Blackwood Beach was proving a bit more arduous than he had anticipated.

* * *

Once upon a time, Blackwood Beach had been, for young Clayton, a place of no responsibilities. In those days he had never had to contend with late-night caterwauling; nor had he had to manage family businesses.

Every summer for thirteen years, from the age of six to eighteen, Clayton had left behind the mundane for the miraculous by means of a simple sixteen-hour drive north with his parents. Departing hilly Asheville, North Carolina, where his father was the curator of the Vanderbilt mansion, Clayton always felt as if his soul were being freed from the bondage of his school work and his paper route and reformed into a purer, more marvelous thing.

The feeling would persist until his father would yell at Clayton and his sister, “Get your goddamn feet off the back of my seat, you two depraved young monsters, and count out-of-state license plates!” Reality reasserted itself then, informing Clayton that he was not entirely free. Still, something of the sense of emancipation would remain with him through the long months of June, July, and August, spent amid the straggling, elm-shaded streets of Blackwood Beach.

For the first few trips, Clayton was never quite sure of how they arrived at the old seaside town. Pestering his father to tell him the precise directions, he got back such instructions as “follow a dark star” or “turn left where normality turns right.” By the age of ten, though, he knew the route as well as Mr. Little, though he could not put it into phrases any less opaque than his fathers.

Although it took some getting used to, Blackwood Beach eventually became Clayton’s favorite place. (What child could fail to fall in love with a village where, for instance, the town coordinator possessed scales, webbed fingers, and a penchant for raw herring?) When, in his teens, he came to read the works of Asheville’s most famous native son, Thomas Wolfe, he found a sentiment that tallied with his feelings for Blackwood Beach:

“America is the only place where miracles not only happen, but happen daily.”

Throughout his teens, Clayton continued to enjoy his yearly stays with Granny and Gran’pa Little, especially the visits to the Little Mistletoe Farm, which lay a few miles out of town. As the years passed, however, other interests naturally grew to assume equal importance. When it came time for him to enter college, he regretted that having to work during the summers would mean that he could not keep up his visits. After a time, the town and its weird doings shrank to relative insignificance, a parcel of happy, youthful memories wistfully untied and examined during the more stressful moments of adult life.

At the age of thirty, Clayton had returned to Asheville to live with his parents. His own business—a video-rental store specializing in recordings of various elderly actors reading the works of Romantic poets—had gone bankrupt, thanks to an appalling lack of taste on the part of the general public, and he needed some time to recoup his inner resources.