The Devil's Eye (13 page)

Then Alex was there, holding me upright, asking in a scared voice what had happened?

I'm not sure what I said, but he responded by asking me about Ceily. "Say again: Who is she?" He looked out of focus. "Where is it?" I asked. "Where's
what
?" "The light." He thought I was talking about my lamp, which was lying on the ground, its beam playing across a tangle of thorns and berries. "No," I said. "In the trees." He looked around. "I don't see anything. Who's Ceily?"

In the morning, it only seemed like a bad dream. Alex thought it was another warning that we should back off. But it wasn't like that at all. Something out there had gotten at me and triggered a response that no simple gimmick could have managed. I was still shaky when we called the people at Marquesi's to inquire about Vicki. She'd left her canoe in the hands of the boat-rental outfit until Marquesi's could fly someone out to ride it back. The store manager's lips tightened.
"You're not planning to do the same thing, are you?"
he asked. His voice had turned hostile. "I'll make it worth your while," Alex said.

Alex made the arrangements, and we gave the canoe over to Bessarlik Boating. By the way, did the owner remember somebody else doing this? Her name was Vicki Greene. "The horror lady," she said. "Sure. I'd never forget her." "Why? Did she say anything out of the way?" "Oh, no. Simply that I've read all her books. I loved meeting her." "How'd she seem?" "How do you mean?" "Was she all right? Did she seem upset, or anything like that?" "No. She was really nice. Why? She's okay, isn't she?"

Vicki had mentioned she was headed for Morningdale. It was a town with a history of werewolves. Sounded like Vicki's kind of place. Alex and I arranged transportation, and an hour later we'd leased a skimmer and were on our way again. Below, I noticed one of the beanbags drifting near the edge of the river. And suddenly, while I watched, a long green tentacle whipped out of the trees. A moment later both the tentacle and the beanbag were gone. "Your imagination," said Alex. Maybe. By then, as far as I was concerned, tentacles were minor stuff.

The werewolf was a bust. Something howled in the woods around Morningdale, but there was no reason to believe it was anything other than a
mahar
, the local wolf-equivalent. Besides, I asked the lady at the hotel where we stayed, how could you have a werewolf when you don't get a full moon? Don't have a moon at all? "When Callistra is directly overhead," she said solemnly, "it happens." I laughed. She got annoyed. "It's true," she said. "That star is the Devil's Eye." "Oh," I said. "Stay close to the hotel, and you should be okay." The Devil's Eye. There it was again. The title for Vicki's next novel. The archives revealed there'd been a series of gruesome killings in the Morningdale area forty years earlier. But those had been attributed to an unusually malevolent mahar . The werewolf legend had started because a young man with mental problems had claimed to be the killer. When the authorities decided he needed psychiatric help, he'd resisted. Police had been summoned; the man had fled into the forest. Next day his body was found in the river that runs past the town. The killings stopped. But there were two similar incidents later. Each was accompanied by a string of murders, of people apparently torn apart by a wild animal. Each time, someone came forward, claiming guilt, claiming to be a werewolf. One of the nutcases was a woman. The killings were never resolved. And the confessions were attributed to a psychiatric disorder and the simple need to draw attention to oneself. In each case, according to one psychiatrist described as prominent, the victim had developed a morbid interest in the original werewolf story. "Ordinarily," he said, "mahar s will not attack a human, but there are exceptions. What clearly happened in Morningdale is that there was a string of killings, and an unbalanced person attributed the actions to himself. Or, in this case, three unbalanced people. And I suspect, in future years, the pattern will repeat." It had been eleven years since the last outbreak. But the town kept the story alive with the usual gift shop and several books purporting to reveal "the truth" about the killings, and an HV presentation put together by a group of true believers. I'd have thought that the possibility of running into a werewolf would keep people
out
, but it apparently didn't work that way. In any case, I was relieved to learn that Vicki hadn't spent a night in the woods. She'd rented a room in a house at the edge of the forest and simply made herself comfortable on the porch during the hours when Callistra was overhead. The Devil's Eye. So we followed suit. We sat out there and listened to the sound of the woods. Occasionally, something howled. Presumably a mahar . The owner of the house, who stayed with us for a while, assured us that the creatures rarely came near the town. "They're scared of people," he said. The psychiatrist seemed to me to have a handle on things. Nevertheless, I had my scrambler with me. Alex smiled at that. "It's a good move," he said. "You never know. But-" "But what, Alex?" "We'd probably be safer if you had something that shoots silver bullets."

We followed Vicki around the world. We spent a quiet night in a church supposedly infected by demonic forces. We visited an office building that claimed to have a haunted storage room on the eighth floor. We spent three nights on Fermo Beach, where the only thing that came ashore was a harmless creature with an oversized shell. We visited an archeological site where, seven hundred years earlier, the inhabitants had sacrificed children and virgins. (It was hard to believe that was still going on nine thousand years after the Enlightenment.) We dropped in on several haunted houses. We watched in vain for the appearance of a phantom aircraft that was said to be a relic of an accident that had occurred three thousand years ago. The vehicle developed engine trouble over a populated area, and rather than attempt a landing that endangered people on the ground, the pilot turned out to sea. The plane went down, and the pilot was

lost before rescuers could reach him. According to local legend, the plane reappeared each year on the anniversary of the event. Vicki had planned her trip well, and arranged to be present on the correct night. We couldn't duplicate the date without waiting the better part of a year. Was there anything to the story? There had been sightings of the ghostly aircraft, but it was easy enough to put a plane in the air and do a flyby. One year, as a stunt, the locals were able to persuade the airfields in the area to watch the traffic on that night "to prevent hoaxes." They got a lot of publicity out of it, and of course the plane was sighted anyhow. Some years there have been two or three ghost planes. "The kids," one shopkeeper told us in a moment of unbridled rectitude, "love it."

The most interesting site, for me, was the Time Lab at Jesperson. It's out in the woods, not much more than a ruin now. It was originally built and operated eight centuries ago. The government funded it for a while, but there was no success, and eventually, according to the story, they gave up and abandoned the place. The townspeople insist that there was a breakthrough, though, but that the program directors, confronted with the ability to move through the ages, decided it was too dangerous. So they hid the truth. The lab was officially abandoned. Some of the researchers, however, had disappeared into the past and the future. People there claimed they still showed up on occasion. It's been eight hundred years, and, if you believe the story, they're still young. "Why," a waitress at the Copper Club told us, "Gene Korashevski was here just last week." "Who's Gene Korashevski?" "One of the researchers. He lives in the Carassa Age." "Lives? You mean he's still alive? After eight hundred years?" "In the Carassa Age, he is." Alex couldn't resist himself. "Never heard of the Carassa Age," he said. "When was that?" "It hasn't happened yet." She was good. She was talking as if this was matter-of-fact stuff. The way you might tell somebody you collect cats. Later, when we were alone at the table eating lunch, Alex speculated on how nice it would be to have the capability to travel in time. "What would you do with it?" I asked him. "Where would you go?" He loved the idea. "Imagine what we could do. How about going back and securing the cup that held Socrates' poison? Can you even begin to imagine what that would be worth?" "Alex, is that really the best thing you can think of to do with a time machine? How about going back a few years earlier and actually
talking
to Socrates? Maybe take him to lunch?" "I don't speak classical Greek." "Well," I said, "I guess you have a point." "And it would be nice to get an early draft of
First Light
."
First Light
. The masterpiece by Saija Brant, the greatest dramatist of all time. "I think I'd still settle," I said, "for a chance to say hello to Saija Brant." Our salads came. He studied his for a moment, then looked up. "Chase, you have no imagination."

Eventually, we tracked her to Livingstone, the two-hundred-year-old estate of Borgas Cleev, where the dictator had delighted in personally running drills and lasers into anyone who displeased him, and where, according to legend, the cries of his victims could still be heard on windswept nights, when Callistra commanded the heavens. But the trail went cold there. Vicki had arranged to spend a night
inside
the mansion, talked the next day with a few of the townspeople, then gone away. We could find no sign of her after that. We roamed the area, questioning book dealers, librarians, police officers, journalists, anyone we found in the streets. Several reported having seen her, and a few said they'd talked with her. She'd seemed in good spirits, they'd said. But there was no indication of her destination after she'd left Livingstone. So we sat frustrated in a hotel suite. Alex had been tracking the time line, and Vicki's appearance in Livingstone had come near the end of her stay on Salud Afar. Ten days after she'd left here, she would board the
Arbison
and return to Rimway. "I wonder," Alex said, "when she decided to leave." He made a couple of calls, got the StarFlight ticket office, and identified himself. He asked when the
Arbison
would have had to leave Salud Afar. They gave him the date. It was eleven days after she'd left Livingstone. "I'm trying to find an old friend," he said. "She was on that flight. I wonder if you could tell me when she bought her ticket?"

Alex ran the original transmission, Vicki Greene with fear in her eyes and her hands rolled into fists.
"I know this will strike you as odd, but I don't know who else can help me."
The white-and-gold blouse lifted and fell. HASSAN GOLDMAN, the blouse read. Who the hell was Hassan Goldman?
"Since you're not here, I'm asking your AI to forward this message. I'm assuming the cost."
And the arc of six stars.
"I'm in over my head, Mr. Benedict. God help me, they're all dead."
He ran it again.

"Chase," he said, "who or what is Hassan Goldman?" He ran a search. Hassan Goldmans were more numerous on Salud Afar than they had been on Rimway. One did medical enhancements. Another Hassan Goldman was a noted law firm in the capital. Hassan Goldman specialized in caring for pets. He was an actor, dead these twenty years, who'd performed comedy, and was still beloved by a substantial portion of the population. Another Goldman did landscaping in a place neither of us had ever heard of. He had been the captain years ago of the tour ship
Leesa
, who'd sacrificed himself, after his engines had blown, in a largely successful effort to save his passengers. Three Hassan Goldmans had lived in various places and apparently never done anything except reproduce. He'd been a major sports figure. He'd been one of seven people killed in an avalanche while skiing in a cordoned-off area that skiers weren't supposed to use. He prepared special lotions to help aching backs. There were more. Was there any connection between any of these Hassan Goldmans and Vicki Greene? None that we could find. Were any of the Hassan Goldmans connected with claims of paranormal events?

Alex kept the image of Vicki frozen over a coffee table while we looked. The name on the blouse was inscribed in black above an arc of six black stars. Six stars. "Six people," said Alex, "died on the
Leesa
. Five other than himself." The heroic captain had saved seventeen. "Coincidence?" "So where," I asked, "does that leave us?"

Alex sank into his chair. I asked the AI if any of the five passengers had been connected with claims of paranormal events.

"We're asking the wrong questions," said Alex. "What's the right one?" "The obvious one. Who sells shirts with Hassan Goldman imprints?"

"Somebody's making his own," I said. "Probably a church, a charity, some sort of special event." He asked the AI to connect him with the space station. "The general information desk," he added. A young woman in a dark green uniform appeared.
"Orbital Center,"
she said.
"How may I assist you?"

"Can you tell me," said Alex, "if the name Hassan Goldman is used by any of the businesses on the station?"
"No, sir,"
she said.
"However, there
is
a tour ship here by that name."
"Do they give out shirts to passengers?"