The Dinosaur Chronicles (12 page)

To which, of course, all answers were tautological.

He wondered if others saw colors the same way he did. He wondered if others saw colors he could not. And Rupert questioned everything—from plot errors in
Romeo and Juliet
to the applicability of the Cause/Effect Paradox to superluminal signaling.

And Rupert wondered if the world in which he existed was the real Real World—or whether there wasn’t a greater existence just out of reach—just around the next corner—that would explain the mysteries of the present All.

Most persons, of course, had moments like that—moments of sudden awareness where the self is juxtaposed against a bizarre reality—but moments which never led to any satisfying revelation, each such moment an epiphany denied.

But where most would shrug off such episodes and go on with life, Rupert would seek out such moments and savor them, and he trained his mind to sift for these “cracks” in the fresco of existence.

After several near-accidents in his car, he ordered his mind to suspend the search while driving.

But at other times, his mind was always busy at the task.

So it was with no surprise that, after shutting the window and turning back toward his desk, the feeling of unreality struck once more.

Rupert relished the feeling. At these times he felt more alive than at any other, and this time the feeling was stronger than usual.

He wallowed in the sensation, let it run the length of his body. And his mind, in its peculiar way, resonated with the feeling, and Rupert DeNeuve took his hand and parted the curtain of existence and stepped through—

 —into a sparely-furnished office housing an old wooden desk on which a feeble yellow lamp stood and glowed, and behind which a man in a gray burnoose sat gazing at a stack of printed forms.

Rupert stepped forward and harrumphed.

The hood of the man’s cloak fell back, revealing white hair, deep-set eyes and a tangle of bushy brows.

“What!” the old man gasped. “Who are you?”

Rupert told him.

“Rupert DeNeuve ... Rupert DeNeuve ...” The man shuffled through his printed forms.

“Confound it!” The man drew himself back. “Must be an error at Central. Doesn’t usually happen. Wait. I have some old blank registration forms, I think ...”

The man opened a bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out a single sheet. He put it on his blotter and dipped a quill into an inkwell—only the second inkwell Rupert had ever seen; the other had been in a museum.

“Rupert ... DeNeuve ...” the man repeated, writing the name on the form. “Middle name?”

“Alexander. Who are you?”

The man wrote down the name but ignored the question. Instead, he pulled out a watch. “12:43 local time. Less the two minutes you’ve been here makes 12:41.” He wrote that down as well.

“Now,” the man looked at Rupert, “I need the place of death.”

“What?” Rupert’s reaction fell somewhere between amusement, annoyance and apprehension.

“Place of death. Surely you know where you died.”

“But I’m not dead!”

“Of course you are. Transitional amnesia is not unheard of, but it is hardly common. What’s the last thing you remember?”

Rupert folded his arms. “I was in my study. I had just thrown a cricket from the window when the feeling of unreality—the feeling that what most people perceive as reality is just a sliver of the whole—hit me. And when my mind figured out what to do, I reached out and separated the curtain between my world and yours.”

The man’s features, yellow under the lamplight, paled to match his ashen brows. “You jest!” he spat. “You take advantage of an old man’s humor!”

Rupert shook his head.

“Oh-my-God!” The man put down his pen and tore up the paper with Rupert’s name and time of arrival. And as he tore each bit, he stuffed it into his mouth, chewed and swallowed. “Must be—dimensional leakage—had the contractors here—just last week—incompetents!”

Done with his roughage, the old man rose from his chair and limped rapidly to Rupert’s side.

“You must understand,” the man began. “You mustn’t be here—yet. If this becomes known, there’ll be an inquiry, maybe even a visit by Central, and in the meantime I can kiss my job good-bye.”

Rupert prodded the old man. “Is this Heaven?”

“Yes! No! Dammit, don’t ask questions! You must go back, now!”

“But I don’t know how.”

The man spun him about, pushed him toward a faded, flower-printed wall and raised a bony finger. And as the old man lowered the finger, the office unzipped into the familiar world Rupert knew.

“That’s my bathroom,” Rupert said, “not my study.”

“Close enough,” the old man said. He put his hand against Rupert’s back and, with a force disproportionate to his ancient frame, popped Rupert through.

And as the Other World zipped shut behind him, the last Rupert heard from the old man was a terse, “Don’t come back!”

—

Rupert stood still in his bathroom for a long time. The adventure had confirmed several guesses of his about the afterlife but had also spawned many more questions. Perhaps, if he unzipped this reality at a different spot, he would arrive at a different place in the other.

Rupert took off his shirt. He was suddenly hot, as his experience had charged him with adrenalin and had pushed his metabolism into overdrive.

He started the shower and dropped his pants and shorts. But as he twisted to pull off his T-shirt, he caught a glimpse of something in the bathroom mirror. He turned his neck and looked, and an ironic laugh escaped his lips.

There, between his shoulder blades, lay the ghostly-white imprint of the old man’s hand.

Afterword

“Eliza’s Quick-Drying Polar White” first appeared in
Talebones
(#29, Winter 2004), as by T. Rex.
Talebones
, a digest-sized semiprozine, had a run of 39 issues, its last being Winter 2009. Although a semiprozine, it was a target market of every speculative fiction writer of the day. Slick, well edited (by Patrick & Honna Swenson) and well-respected,
Talebones
was a bright spot in darkish fiction.

Harry Snowden approached the darkened entrance of Jefferson Primary School with a stutter in his step and a brown paper bag gripped tightly in his right hand.

Clouds, heavy with the promise of life, blanketed the heavens. But Snowden carried no umbrella and cared nothing for the weather. Instead, he fixed on the school’s security lamps and forced himself to walk in their direction.

Halfway between the road and the entrance to the building, Snowden stopped. He could turn back, drive off, and the secret of what had happened would never be revealed. But he knew he couldn’t live with that. He had barely survived the last three days without going crazy.

His large, sweaty hand clutched even tighter on the brown paper bag, and he moved on.

At the entrance to the school, he tugged on the long metal latch, but a dull click told him the doors were locked. From inside, a muffled voice asked, “What do you want?”

Snowden cleared his throat. “AA meeting.” He got the words out on the third try.

One of the double doors opened, and a silhouetted figure waved him in. The hall of the school was illuminated with emergency lighting, but yellow light poured from an open classroom midway down the passage.

The man who let him in looked him up and down. “We don’t allow drinks in the meeting.” He reached for Snowden’s bag but Snowden yanked it back.

“It’s not booze!”

Dark eyes met Snowden’s. For a moment, neither spoke. Then the man said, “I’m Jack. I run the meeting. Behave, and don’t bullshit the members, and you’ll be welcome. Now I need a name. A first name will do.”

Snowden gulped. “H-Harry.”

“Follow the light, Harry. The meeting’s already underway, and I’ll join you in a minute.”

Snowden plodded down the the hallway. It had been many years since he last walked a hall like this, and the passageway seemed a fraction of the size that he remembered. In the gloom of the emergency lights he saw decorations taped to the walls. Flowers cut from green and yellow construction paper. Drawings of bulbous trees in full bloom. Happy stick-animals with too many toes celebrating spring.

At the door to the classroom, he wavered once more. A dozen men sat, squeezed into the tiny student chairs, and listened as a man at the front gave his testimony.

“My name’s Charlie,” he said. “And I’m an alcoholic. I haven’t had a drink in six years, but I’m still an alcoholic. I fight the urge every day, and every day that I win, somebody else doesn’t lose.”

Several men in the back of the room applauded.

Snowden felt a hand on his shoulder. Jack said, “Go on in. They don’t bite—usually.”

Snowden felt himself pushed into the classroom. He looked dubiously at the small student chairs and planted his large frame instead on a work table at the back of the room.

Jack said, “Our new member’s name is Harry. This is his first time at Tuesday Night AA, so let’s make him feel welcome.”

Scattered hellos greeted Snowden.

Jack said, “I know Charlie’s speaking right now. Who else is speaking tonight?”

Several hands went up.

Jack nodded and turned the floor back over to Charlie.

Snowden gripped his paper bag with both hands as he sat and listened to the man’s story. It was an old story, of squandering paychecks on booze and abusing his spouse and finally losing the mortgage on his home before he hit bottom and straightened himself out.

The next speaker told how he had wrecked his car several times and had once put a woman into the hospital for three weeks. He was lucky he hadn’t killed her.

Other speakers rose and spoke. Snowden heard but didn’t hear. He held his paper bag and dripped sweat from his temple into his shirt collar and wondered what he would say when it was his turn.

“Harry!”

Snowden jumped. Jack was staring him in the eyes and Snowden hadn’t even seen him approach.

“Are you back with us?”

Snowden nodded.

A man asked, “He’s not sittin’ there snookered, is he?”

Jack shook his head. “There’s no booze on his breath.”

Another asked, “What’s in the bag?”

Snowden gritted his teeth. Jack said, “Take it easy, Tom. Give him time. Now Harry, if you don’t want to say anything, that’s just fine. Nobody forces anyone to do anything here.”

Snowden said, “I’ve got to talk about it!”

Jack nodded. “It’s gutting your insides, isn’t it? So talk. We’ll listen.”

Snowden transferred the bag from his right hand to his left. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face. “I’m not sure this is the right place for me after all—I don’t think I’m an alcoholic—”

Someone in the room hooted. Another asked, “Then why are you here?”

“I thought of all people, you might understand—”

“Sure we understand,” a voice chimed in. “You got yourself pasty an’ did somethin’ terrible.”

Jack turned around and drew a finger across his throat. He turned back to Snowden and said, “Tell it your own way.”

“I—I live by myself,” Snowden said. “Holidays always depress me. Ever since the wife moved away, it’s been—well—not good.” Snowden squirmed on the hard table surface and drew in a breath. “Sunday morning, I was driving home—”

“From where?” someone asked.

“Halloran’s. I’m not sure about the time.”

“I am,” another voice cut in. “Try: ‘a little after two a.m.’ The bars close at two.”

Jack turned to the members once more. “Will you please
shut up?
Harry, go on with your story.”

Snowden said, “Well, maybe it was around two at that. Even the bar seemed lonely, so I didn’t stay until it closed. I didn’t even have much to drink—”

“Not a word out of you, Tom!” Jack snapped, pointing at one of the members.

“Just three beers,” Snowden went on, “over about three hours. I didn’t even feel a buzz.”

Jack said, “So what happened?”

“Just outside the city limits, I had an accident.”

This time, the room kept quiet.

“I was coming around this curve, not even doing the speed limit. I mean, what did I have to rush home for? But as I came around the corner, he just jumped out in front of me and I hit him. There’s no way I could have avoided it.”

“You ran over some drifter?” Jack’s voice was steady but cold.

“A-An animal. Big animal. Shook the pickup and I nearly lost control.”

For a time, no one spoke. Then Tom said, “He turned somebody’s Great Dane into a hood ornament an’ claims it wasn’t his fault. He wants us to justify his actions.”

Snowden said softly, “It didn’t belong to anyone.”

Jack said, “Even if there was no collar, did you check to see if anybody reported their dog missing? Even if it was an accident, the owner would still want to know what happened.”

Snowden shook his head. “It’s not like that ...”

Someone asked, “What did you do after you hit it?”

Snowden cleared his throat. “I—I dragged it into the woods and came back the next day and buried it. I came here tonight because—because I thought you of all people—you here in AA—where tragedy is something you deal with—every day—you could help me with the feeling that’s left over—the feeling that what’s done is done and that nothing can ever undo it.”

“You’re talking guilt,” Jack said. “It’s a feeling all of us share, and we just have to live with it. Call it punishment if you like, but there’s no getting around it.”

“Guilt?” Snowden gazed into the distance and thought for a long moment. “No,” he said softly. “Not guilt.
Sorrow
.” He looked at the assembly and at the walls of the classroom, cheerful with the pasted and hand-drawn symbols of the season. “It’s the sorrow that’s killing me. I see that now. The sorrow.”

Jack said, “Can you show us what’s in the bag?”

Tears welled in his eyes, and Snowden unrolled the top of his crinkled paper bag.

He reached in and pulled out a basket.

A gleaming, golden basket.

Filled with brightly-colored eggs.

Afterword