Terror Incognita (6 page)

Seth noticed the electrical cords snaking from the TV and ancient videotape recorder into a wall outlet. A lamp was plugged into this outlet also but nothing happened when he tried its switch. He wasn’t surprised.

“Well, the house was already old before these things were added,” J’nette observed, her pretty brown face pinched with intensity. She moved to a built-in bookcase, and checked the copyright or printing date in the front of each. The most recent book she found was one from 1992, and most of them were older. Some
much
 older. Titles in English, Latin and German. There were books on non-Euclidean geometry, “rubber-sheet” geometry, Klein bottles and Moebius strips and the studies that had made possible at last the traversal warpage that had brought their ship here through compressed folds of space, crossing distances that otherwise would be impossible for them to cover in mortal life spans.

But in addition to these scientific volumes there were those quite old books with odd titles, all of them apparently studies of mysticism and magic, witchcraft or something much darker. J’nette hefted one heavy tome and it fell open to a page where a sheet had been inserted as a bookmark. Seth drew closer to look over her shoulder.

“Weird,” he said, reading the scribbled incantations the owner of the book, of this house, had copied from the discolored pages. The incantations were modified, however, on the notebook sheet – altered and with new sections inserted. Geometric figures had also been inserted as illustrations, and some resembled the simplified diagrams of Klein bottles and wormholes Seth had studied in his academy days.

The book was replaced, the three drifted on into other rooms, pointing their flashlights and lifting shades. In the kitchen, J’nette knelt by a dog dish and a water bowl, the water long since evaporated.

Dennis gestured to the two doors in here. One, with lacy curtains over a window, obviously was a back way leading outside. The other probably led into the basement.  He moved toward this one.

J’nette rose, approached Seth to show him something she had gathered from the floor. “Dog hairs, sir. We could make up a clone when we get back to base.”

“We’d have a dog, all right, J’nette. But I don’t think it could tell us much. Even if we find a hair from a human...we can’t clone its memories.”

“We could at least prove that he or she was a human. A human being from Earth.”

“J’nette,” Seth said, “I don’t think that needs to be proven any more.”

“Look,” called Dennis, and the other two rushed to his side at the tone of his voice.

The cellar stairs seemed to disappear into the ash-like dirt of the plain after only several steps. As if the basement had flooded in sand.

“This house was displaced here,” Seth breathed. “Transplanted here intact. Without so much as a window cracked or a cup knocked over in a cabinet.”

“How?” Dennis chuckled, wagging his head again. “By whom? I don’t see a traversal warp engine under the kitchen sink.”

“Another way, but the same result. This house came from Earth before us. Before we’d even invented warp travel.”

“You think the owner did it? Come on. Do you see any machines he might have built? Unless they were in the basement and got left back in the foundation on Earth a hundred years ago.”

“Maybe he didn’t use a machine,” Seth half whispered.

“What?” Dennis had scrunched his face.

“The books in the parlor...”

“Oh. Right. He used magic...”

“One generation’s magic is the science of the next.”

“Hey,” J’nette said. She had moved to the back door and opened it. The two men went to her.

“What are those?” Dennis asked. “Tree stumps?”

The trio stepped back onto the vast plain. The objects of their attention must have been hidden from their sight behind the house, before. When the globe had descended, its occupants must have been too shocked at the house itself to take notice. Now they approached the tree stumps, as Dennis had called them.

They stood around the closest of the three. Dennis said, “No life here, huh?”

“They don’t register as life,” J’nette observed, pressing her hand scanner to the thing. “It must have been alive once.” It did indeed resemble a tree stump even this close up, the stump of a very large tree, with a star-shaped deep opening in the top. The roots were thick and forked, trailing away into the dirt, the bark a glossy black and wrinkled, grooved, hard. Her scanner bit into the tough bark and collected a sample for more detailed study.

Dennis sighed, sat on the table-like top of the stump to gaze out across the plain. It taunted him with its mysterious emptiness, a mood so persuasive that the cryptic house seemed a crystallized personification of it. “Well, boss, maybe you’re right. But I think some other force or intelligence reached out to Earth and dragged this house here.”

“Why, though, a house that just happened to have books anticipating traversal warpage?”

Dennis had no further replies ready.

They returned to the interior of the house, moved upstairs. There was a bedroom. Framed photographs on a bureau. Seth lifted one. A man with an intense face and thinning hair with his arm around the shoulders of a plain but warmly-smiling woman. From a drawer, J’nette removed a scrapbook. The two men flanked her to peer at it also.

“James Ward,” J’nette said. “That was his name.”

School pictures. As a boy, Ward had looked no less intense. He had done well in school; pasted honor rolls cut from newspapers. Later pictures showed Ward enrolled in a university. Still later, photos of the woman from the framed picture in Seth’s hand. Then, toward the end, an obituary for Margaret Ward, aged 42, dead from cancer back before they had a cure for it, obviously.

“This must have been their dog,” J’nette noted, tapping a photo of a German Shepherd. “The one whose hairs I found.”

“If Ward and the dog were teleported here with the house,” Dennis observed, “they both would have died within minutes at the most. They wouldn’t be able to breathe. Right?”

“Right...” said Seth.

“So where are the bodies?”

Now it was Seth who had no reply at hand.

Across the landing was another bedroom, and they passed into this. There was no bed, however, the room having obviously been used by Ward as a study. Book shelves overflowing, stacks piled on the floor. On the desk blotter was a notebook filled with more of the indecipherable nonsense that had filled the sheet in the old book on magic. Seth lifted an odd paper weight and turned it over in his gloved hands; black crystal with striations of red streaked through it. Symbols had been carved into its many faces.

“Check this,” J’nette told him. He joined her and Dennis at the center of the room, where a pentagram or some such geometric figure had been burned into the otherwise lovely golden boards of the hardwood floor. Between the arms of the star were reproduced some of the symbols Seth recognized from the black crystal.

“I’m not much on twentieth century religion,” Dennis said, “but I’d say Mr. Ward was into some very unorthodox practices.”

“Maybe he was just an explorer,” Seth said softly. “Just like us.”

A ghostly white movement in the corner of his eye, and Seth was spinning about, his hand slapping to the gun holstered on his hip.

It was only the gauzy window curtains stirring subtly in a very mild breeze. This one window at the back of the house was open. He went to it idly to look down on the tree stumps.

“Jesus!” Seth gasped, as soon as he had parted the curtains with his hands.

The mummy was suspended in air just a few feet beyond the window. Its attitude suggested that this being had dove suicidally from the window, only to be frozen in mid-air. It was impossibly suspended. It faced away from him, but the hands and back of the head, with its scant hair, suggested mummification. Seth didn’t need to see the face to know that these were the earthly remains of their host, James Ward.

Dennis and J’nette had crowded in beside him. J’nette said, “This is just too much! What the hell happened to this guy?”

“I don’t think I wanna know,” said Dennis.

“Hey,” said Seth.

“What?”

“The tree stumps are gone.”

Dennis leaned his head out the window, incredulous. The tree stumps were indeed gone, as if they had never been there. No depressions or covered mounds where they had been. There did appear to be, however, three broad trails all leading in to one center point...as if the three stumps had been dragged together to that central point. But then what? At that spot there was nothing but the featureless flatness of the plain.

“Let’s get back on the ship!” Dennis hissed, pulling inside hurriedly.

J’nette had found a folding measuring stick, perhaps having been used to map out the figure on the floor, and unfolded it so as to prod Ward’s body. She could stir his clothing with it, but when she pushed at one of his hands it was so unyielding that the stick bowed.

Dennis yanked her away from the window. “Don’t do that!”

“This could be a dangerous situation,” Seth had to agree. “We’d better get back on the ship until we can run further tests and scans. We’ll call station. They might even advise us to go orbital until further notice.”

“I think we should do that anyway!”

They turned from the window, descended the creaking stairs, left the old house through the front door. All of them walked very briskly back to the globe...as if the very earth beneath their feet might open up and swallow them. Just before they had reached the ship, there came a beep in their headsets. Seth answered it. “Yes?”

“Chief,” came the voice of Louise, aboard their craft, “you’d better get back in here quick.”

“We’re on our way now...what is it?”

“Just come look, please. Hurry.”

The trio of explorers boarded, felt automatically safer sealed back inside this shelter of their own period. Removing only their garish helmets, they hastened to central command...and as they entered, froze in the doorway as if whatever force had seized hold of the body of James Ward had locked onto them as well.

Scan technician Louise, Sam their pilot and a panting German Shepherd looked up at the paralyzed trio. The dog, beautiful and healthy, was smiling black-lipped in the way dogs seemed to smile.

“He just walked into the room with us,” said Sam. “like he’d been on the ship with us the whole time.”

“Friendly,” Louise added, her hands stroking the animal.

Seth turned to gaze at the banks of monitor screens above the scan stations. The old house was there. Looming. In need of paint and some repair. Black glass eyes gazing back at him enigmatically.

“Magic,” he whispered to himself.

THROUGH OBSCURE GLASS

— For Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire

She plummeted...

...into a black well of space, a wormhole to other dimensions. She plunged into the abyss like an angel struck down by an arrow shot from that netherworld. Hurtled...and in her terror, wished that she would strike the bottom of the pit at last, and find the relief of death...for it wasn’t death she feared, but the falling...

Judith opened her eyes with a snap, just as the bus cleared the tunnel in the wooded mountain side. Again, the interior of the bus was flooded with sunlight. She was embarrassed, thinking she had let out a scream in waking, but she could tell from the lulled, quiet aspect of those around her that she hadn’t. Sitting up in her seat, she glanced at the passenger seated beside her, a pretty teenager headed for Seattle, she had told Judith a few hours earlier. She was blissfully asleep, her head resting against the window and her thick dark hair fallen into her face like a blanket.

Judith smiled faintly and looked away from the girl, but something made her look back. The girl’s shroud of hair covered all of her face except for her mouth and chin, and Judith had had the weird idea that if she were to part the girl’s hair, the eyes she would uncover would be horrible. Inhuman. Though she knew the girl had friendly hazel eyes, in her mind she had thought that eyes of glowing pink, lurid and bright as a sunset, lay hiding behind those curtains of hair, glaring out at her secretly through the strands. Further, the way the girl’s head was tilted, and her mouth hung open in sleep, it appeared as if her mouth were a vertical opening in her head. Like a vagina, Judith thought...with teeth.

Flotsam and jetsam of dream, she told herself, looking away from the girl. And yet, her presence so near to her unnerved Judith, and after a few minutes she stealthily gathered up her purse and magazine and stole to another seat closer to the rear of the bus.

*     *     *

Judith was the only passenger to disembark from the bus in front of a combination gas station/general store, and from its derelict aspect she couldn’t decide whether this was deserted or still saw customers. Age-bleached letters on a sign announced to no one but her: SESQUA DEPOT.

But she wasn’t alone. As she set her bags at her feet in order to dig a cigarette from her purse, Judith noticed that a figure stood framed in the threshold of the store, shadowed from the sun. It was an elderly man, wearing dark glasses, and apparently watching her through their lenses.

“Hello,” Judith offered, unsettled at his presence. A too-cool burst of breeze ruffled her short dark hair, and a nervous smile flicked one corner of her mouth. “I guess I shouldn’t be smoking with a long walk ahead of me, but they wouldn’t let me smoke on that bloody damn bus.”

The old man obviously took note of her British accent. “You’re a stranger here,” he stated.

“I’ve been here once before...very briefly. My husband and I stayed one night at his mother’s house. We weren’t married then, actually. I hope I remember the way...it was six years ago.”

“Who is your husband?”

Judith didn’t feel she needed to tell the man that it was her ex-husband. After all, she had said “husband” herself, hadn’t she?

“Robert Fuseli,” she told the man, and then hopefully: “Do you know him?” Perhaps this man could tell her if she might indeed find Robert living in his mother’s house. She had recently learned that Robert’s mother had passed way five months ago. Robert was to have inherited her house in such an event, he had told her. It was the most obvious place to look for him...for she had also recently learned that Robert had disappeared five months ago...