The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (21 page)

“‘He sees life,’ she
says. ‘He sees the world and the people and all the wonder that it holds, all
the promises — all the disappointments, sure, those too, but the air is thick
with possibilities.’ And I turn to my mom and I see her eyes are watery. She
looks away and watches the
wmmgmmm!
man some more. ‘And what you do when
you retire,’ she tells him, ‘is you take the bus just the same, every
afternoon, except you sit in that seat —-’ She nods to where the
wmmgmmm!
man
is sitting ‘— and not that one you’re sitting in right now And maybe
then, when you’re able to look around and drink it all in, maybe then you’ll
see what he sees. And what I’m seeing right now,’ she adds.

“And then the lights
change before the driver gets to say anything back to that, and we make it
around the roadworks and from there on in it’s a clear road back to Forest
Plains.

“I held my mom’s hand
all the way, not able to say a word. And when we get to the Plains and we get
off of the bus, the driver steps down too and shakes our hands, with the
wmmgmmm!
man watching us from his window. ‘I want to thank you, ma’am,’ he tells my
mom. But she waves him never mind. ‘You look after her,’ he says then, turning
to me, and I guess he saw something in my face or my eyes just then . . . and
he pats me on the shoulder and nods, his mouth sad . . . as though, in that
brief exchange, he’d read our minds and knew exactly what the score was. Then
he gets back on the bus and we walk home.

“A couple days later,
mom goes on to morphine and, as the days pass by, she slips further and further
away from me until, at last, she’s gone.

“After the funeral,”
Edgar says, “I settled up my mom’s house and set off back for Manhattan. But I
drove into Branton for one last time before I got on to the Interstate. It was
late in the day, after 5.30, and, on a whim, I drove down to the train depot. I
couldn’t park up but I could see them, the old driver and the
wmmgmmm!
man,
standing in line at the bus stop, one of the
wmmgmmm!
man’s arms going
like a windmill and the driver standing right alongside him, holding on to the
hand of the other. And, you know, the driver? He was grinning like a Cheshire
cat.”

Edgar lifts his glass
and drains it. “End of story,” he says.

Jack Fedogan reaches out
a hand and places it on Edgar’s shoulder, jiggling it once before letting the
arm drop down by his side again.

After a few seconds of
silence, Fortesque speaks. “We’re all on journeys,” he says, “of one kind or
another. Some of them are long — or
seem
long — and some are short. But
they are all journeys. And it’s the journey that matters, never the
destination.”

“Is that why you like
Jules Verne?” Cliff Rhodes asks. “I’m not sure that I follow.”

The black man shuffles
around in his chair and moves his hands around in the air in front of him, as
though he’s manoeuvring a large package that nobody can see. “Well, I overheard
what you were saying earlier — about your being a big fan of Verne’s work — and
it occurs to me that that’s what Verne concentrated on: journeys.”

“Ah, I see,” Fortesque
says. “I hadn’t quite thought of it that way.”

“More drinks?” Cliff
Rhodes asks. When the unanimous response is favourable, he and Jack move across
to the bar.

“So, what brings you
here?” Edgar says, making the question sound unimportant as he tries to regain
his composure. Jim Leafman reaches across the table and pats his friend’s arm
and Edgar smiles at him, taking hold of Jim’s hand for just a second or two. “You
said you’d met up with . . .” He says to Fortesque, looking across at the
Lorre-lookalike and, with a small sad smile, shaking his head. “I’m sorry, I
just don’t seem to be able to remember your name.”

“Meredith Lidenbrook Greenblat,”
says Meredith Lidenbrook Greenblat.

Edgar nods in a kind of
oh
yes, of course it is
way and turns to Fortesque. “You said you’d met him in
a chat room?”

“That is correct,” says
Fortesque, tenting his fingers atop a brightly coloured vest which only partly
covers the swell of his ample stomach.

“A chat room about . . .
Jules Verne, was it?”

Fortesque jiggles his
head from side to side and, giving a knowing smile to his companion, he says, “Indirectly,
yes.”

Jack arrives back at the
table with Cliff Rhodes, the pair of them carrying an array of bottles and
glasses. And Jack sets down a trio of saucers containing nuts and pretzels.
Without any indication of thanks, Edgar picks up a handful of peanuts, throws
them deep into his mouth, and says, “So what was it about, this chat room?”

“It was about one of
Jules Verne’s books . . . certainly, as far as I am concerned, his best work
and perhaps one of the half-dozen best-ever novels.
A Journey To The Centre
Of The Earth,”
says Fortesque. He waits for a few minutes and then says, “It’s
really there.”

“It’s really there?”
Cliff Rhodes says, jamming his billfold into his back pants pocket as he sits
down. “With the dinosaurs and the giant mushrooms and everything? No way.”

Leaning forward across
the table, Greenblat says, in that quiet Peter Lorre voice, “The central
records in Hamburg do have details of one Alec and Gretchen Lidenbrook living
in Bernickstrasse from 1867 to 1877. Number nineteen.”

Edgar frowns. “I’m sorry
but I don’t —”

“It was Axel Lidenbrock
who went with his uncle, Otto, a noted professor, in 1863 to the centre of the
Earth,” Greenblat points out. “And the professor’s God-daughter was named
Grauben.”

“And did they live at
Bernickstrasse?”

“No,” Fortesque answers,
“Konigstrasse. But number nineteen.”

Edgar laughs, glancing
at each of the others’ faces in turn. “Hey, come on, guys . . . Alex and Axel?
Gretchen and Grauben? Brock and brook? Bernickstrasse and — what was it?”

“Konigstrasse,” says
Greenblat.

Edgar settles back in
his seat and raises his hands palms up. “Well, need we say goddam
more.
There’s
not one damn thing that’s consistent.”

“N-n-n-nineteen,” Cliff
Rhodes says, beaming a big smile. When Edgar turns to him in puzzlement, Rhodes
shakes his head. “Sorry, an old ‘song’ by Paul Hardcastle. What I meant was, it
was number nineteen in each case, the house number — that’s consistent.”

“Well, please the fuck
excuse me the hell out of here,” Edgar says, looking for just a few seconds
like he’s going to stand right up and either walk out of the bar or haul off
and smack someone right where they sit. “It’s one thing for Jaunty Jim here
thinking he’s seeing ghosts staring through bar windows wishing they could get
a drink and quite a-fucking-nother to tell me, based on the fact that two couples
— one real and one fictional, all with different names — living at the same
house number in completely differently named streets, albeit in the same town,
that there’s an underground sea and a bunch of monsters right below our feet. I
mean, come
on,
guys!”

Greenblat says, “They
married in 1864.”

“Who
did?” shouts Edgar.

“Take it easy, Ed,” says
Jack Fedogan.

“Alex and Gretchen. They’d
been off on a long trip with Alex’s uncle for much of the previous year and,
when they returned, they were changed.”

Edgar shrugs his
shoulders. “Hell, we’ve all had vacations like that, right?”

Greenblat pulls a piece
of paper from the inside pocket of his jacket. “Married in 1864,” he says,
reading from the paper. “Son Henri born 1869, daughter Eloise appeared in 1871.
Eloise died in ‘77. Henri married an English girl, Heather Dalston, in 1904
when he was over there at Cambridge University. Henri and Heath —”

“Look, where the hell is
—”

“Drink your beer, Ed,”
says Jack, “and settle down.”

“Henri and Heather moved
to Lewes near Brighton in 1908, twin sons Alain and James born in 1910. Heather
didn’t survive the birth.”

He pauses for a minute
or so to let that sink in and the others remain silent.

“Alain married
Jacqueline Hay in 1938, no children. James married a Welsh girl, Johanna, in
1942 and they had two children: a son, Robin, in 1948, and, in 1952, Martha —”

“Martha was the name of
Lidenbrock’s housekeeper,” Fortesque interjects.

Edgar almost chokes on
the beer he’s drinking. “Jesus Christ,” he says, fending off Jack’s glare with
an outstretched arm. “Jack, give me a break here. Did you
hear
that?
That’s like saying —” Edgar affects a deep and mysterious voice. “—`And they
each had four fingers and a thumb on each hand’. I mean, come on, guys — why is
that
significant?
The baby being called Martha? How many Marthas are
there flying around this country?”

Jack turns to Fortesque
and, seemingly with profound regret, says, “He’s right. How
is
that
significant?”

Fortesque nods to his
companion.

“Robin Lidenbrook was
killed in Belfast in 1976. He was in the British Army and was stationed over in
Northern Ireland — a land mine blew him and three others to tiny pieces.
Martha, the last in the line, married Michael Greenblat, here in New York, in
the October of 1976. Their one son, Meredith, was born the following year. In
April.” Greenblat looks up from the paper at the faces around the table. Then,
very slowly, he reaches into his jacket pocket once again.

“My mother was not a
well woman,” Greenblat continues as he produces a dog-eared and well-thumbed
brown envelope. “She died last year after a sickly life that culminated in a
long and wasting illness. She was not a wealthy woman, not by any means. But
she did have one possession which had been passed down to her over the years. And
which she passed on to me.”

He stops and opens the
envelope, from which he pulls a folded sheet of notepaper.

Edgar Nornhoevan, for
whom life comprises the solitary certainty of death — possibly from
complications of an enlarged prostate — leans forward.

Jack Fedogan, jazz
aficionado and one-time husband of his beloved Phyllis, leans forward.

His disastrous financial
situation completely forgotten, Cliff Rhodes also leans forward.

And Jim Leafman,
garbage-collecting friend of ghosts and one-time almost wife-killer, shifts
sideways in his chair and stares.

With all eyes upon him,
Meredith Lidenbrook Greenblat very carefully unfolds the piece of notepaper
and, turning it around, holds it up for all to see.

“What is it?” is all
Jack, suddenly realizing that Dave Brubeck has long since stopped playing, can
think of to say.

“Is it stick figures?”
Edgar offers. “Hieroglyphics?”

“That, gentlemen,” says
Horatio Fortesque, “is a replica of the contents of a second piece of parchment
prepared by Arne Saknussemm, a sixteenth-century scholar who worked out — with
the help of a book written by Snorro Turleson, a twelfth-century Icelandic
writer — the way to get to the centre of the Earth. It was copied thus by
either Alec or Gretchen Lidenbrook in the late eighteen-sixties.”

Jim shakes his head. “You’re
losing me here. A
second
piece of parchment? Did we hear about the first
and I missed it?”

Jack looks across at
Fortesque and raises his eyebrows. Fortesque nods.

“In his book, Verne
talks about a piece of parchment falling out of a copy of Turleson’s book —” He
looks at Fortesque. “What was it called?”

“Helms Kringla.”

“Right,” Jack says,
reluctant to attempt a pronunciation.

“Anyway, the Professor
finds this book in an old junkshop and when he looks at it with Axel, a piece
of parchment falls out. It’s this parchment — with its runic symbols — that
tells of a hidden entrance to the centre of the earth, and that’s what sets off
the whole adventure.”

“The symbols — runes,”
he adds, with a complimentary nod to Jack, “tell of a secret passageway to the
depths of the Earth. The parchment itself was prepared by Saknussemm who made
the trip first.”

“I remember the movie,”
says Cliff Rhodes.

Jack chuckles. “Right, I’d
forgotten that.” He shakes his head. “Pat Boone. Whatever happened to Pat
Boone?”

“Yes,” says Fortesque
with obvious disdain. “There was some serious artistic licence involved in that
adaptation as I recall.”

“That’s show-biz,” Cliff
Rhodes says, and he raises his glass in silent toast before taking a drink. The
others follow suit.

“The first parchment —
the one in Verne’s book,” says Fortesque excitedly, “tells of the crater of
Sneffells Yokul in Iceland and how, when the shadow of the mountainous peak of
Scartaris falls across it at a certain time of July, the way is revealed. This
was the route taken by Saknussemm after he had written the parchment.”

“But what wasn’t in
Verne’s book —”

“Probably because he
didn’t know anything about it,” Fortesque interjects.