Authors: Jeffrey Thomas
He smiled against her white flesh, pressed his lips into it. This was not a tragedy, he realized. It was a revelation.
The spirit lived on. It could escape its cells, live free of them. But he had been wrong in trying to ground it in matter once more.
Now, they would escape those bonds together.
The House on the Plain
The
black ship lay steaming on the plain, more a globe than a ship, like a great spherical meteor which had magnetized to it a thousand odd-matched fragments of machinery, all of it now scorched black by the hurtling speeds which had dropped it here. But the ship was made more of ceramics than metal, and the baroque details of its shell all served their practical functions. Probes extended to sniff the air, to test the temperature, camera eyes panned, skeletal arms unfolded to dig into the bland colorless soil.
For it was a boring enough planet. The sky was a dull heavy platinum. The horizon was as flat as an ocean’s, though there were no oceans on this unnamed world. While in orbit, the ship had scanned no life.
The temperature was moderate and the gravity Earth-like, but the air was thoroughly unbreathable, so the three humans who set out from the globe wore full protective suits and helmets, their suits uniformly black but the helmets individually colored – neon green, orange and yellow – to make the explorers identifiable to each other and to the other two who remained aboard, should communications fail. These three were the most vital instruments the globe had extended.
It was a drab landscape, as stated. There was barely even a breeze to stir the bone dust grit beneath their boots. It was this chilling salt-flat emptiness, in addition to the mind-shaking incongruity itself, that made the old wooden house looming before them all the more startling.
“It’s a Victorian, I think,” said J’nette over her helmet mike. She tipped her head back to gaze up at the third floor, evidently an attic level. The house seemed taller than it might have in a less desolate setting.
“It can’t be Terran,” chuckled Dennis, wagging his head. “It can’t be. Seth, man, let’s go back in and get some guns, huh?”
“No way, I told you.”
“This could be a trap! Who knows what built this place! Somebody wants to entice us inside...”
“They’d fabricate a space craft or at least a contemporary structure.”
“Not if they were observing Earth through a time lapse. Could be they think this
is
contemporary.”
“Could be they built it as a trap back when it was contemporary,” mused J’nette.
“The scans show no life,” Seth, the expedition leader, reminded them both. “Not even inside.”
“No life that our scans can
recognize
,” Dennis advised.
“Whatever it is,” J’nette commented, “it could use a paint job.” She moved forward toward the dilapidated structure but Seth caught her lightly by the elbow. She looked to him puzzledly.
“Denny,” he muttered, “go back in the ship and bring me one hand gun.”
J’nette was running her hand along the clapboards of the house, once apparently painted white but the wood now as bone-bare as the plain the house rested on like some great many-eyed cattle skull. “It isn’t an illusion,” she said. “Or else it’s a better illusion than we thought.”
Dennis was holding a device against the outside of the house, watching the small screen set into it. “My scan isn’t hallucinating. It’s real. And it’s real wood.” He turned his head to Seth. “There are no trees on this planet, boss.”
Seth had been gazing in through a window. The glass of every window seemed intact but the shades were drawn in all the ground-floor windows except for this one. Too gloomy inside to see much; indistinct shadows, presumably furniture. He had been afraid, perhaps irrationally, that he would see one of the hunched shadows suddenly
move
. At Dennis’ words he nodded as if distracted by other thoughts. The pistol was clipped on his belt and now he unsnapped the holster. “Let’s go inside.”
J’nette went about the spacious livingroom raising the shades, letting in the lifeless silvery light, while Dennis lifted a
TV Guide
from the cheap pressed-wood coffee table. Seth had picked up a remote control device and pointed it toward the blank screen of a television set. Nothing happened. Dennis glanced over. “No electricity, chief. They didn’t own individual power cells then, but were all linked up to a municipal utility system.”
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 plucked out volumes at random to check the copyright or printing date in their fronts. 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 book mark. 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 worm holes 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 anymore.”
“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 previously hidden from their sight behind the house, they decided. When the globe had descended, they 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 cryptical 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. “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. But Seth didn’t need to see the face to know that these were the unearthly 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. “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 point 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 an 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 be able.
“He just walked into the roan 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 eyes gazing back at him enigmatically.
“Magic,” he whispered to himself.
The Fourth Utterance
6:33 pm
3/01 Call# 1
– UNAVAILABLE –
Cornelia switched her attention from the caller ID box to the answering machine directly beside it, both on the kitchen table beneath the wall-mounted telephone. A red digital “1" showed in the answering machine’s little window.
She hadn’t thought to look at either device until 1:45, even though she had gotten home from her second shift job before 12:30. Since she had bought a computer and gone online several months ago, she was more concerned with checking and replying to her email, which she had just finished doing. Tonight’s offering: a humorous list of “The Top 10 Things That Women Can Do Better Than Men
,” sent by her mother; a work at home scheme; a story about a little girl with a brain tumor the size of a grapefruit (weren’t
all
scary tumors the size of a grapefruit?), for some reason inoperable, which Cornelia was supposed to pass along to five people or presumably she’d grow a brain tumor as well; an email from her ex-boyfriend, Brian:
Cornelia,
I know you could probably shoot me right about now, but I really do care about you, and I always will. I’m...
DELETE.
She was sorry now she hadn’t read the whole thing. Was it still in her trash can or would her email service have dumped that already? No -- why read it? What was the point? The presence of his words inside that box was a mockery when her apartment rang hollow with the absence of his body. Ghost in the machine. He had deleted her from his life; insincere guilt did not soothe or comfort her, exonerate or redeem him. Would he send her one of those silly little animated email cards next? DELETE.
Cornelia had shut off the computer and now, dressed in comfortable much-laundered pajamas, barefoot, her lank hair released from the tight ponytail that had constrained it all evening, she had gone to fix herself a late snack of microwave popcorn. A CD played softly in the other room (Sade’s
Love Deluxe
; sad, dreamy post-midnight music). And while pouring herself a glass of soda, she had let her eyes drift to the two devices patiently, silently awaiting her attentions atop the kitchen table.
The one and only call, she saw, had been received at 6:33 – when she’d been at work. UNAVAILABLE, the lead display read, in lieu of the caller’s number. A bill collector? They were often listed that way, or as ANONYMOUS CALL, and so when she was home Cornelia never picked up a call bearing either of those labels until she heard the message come over the answering machine (and if it was a bill collector, they usually didn’t leave a message, anyway). She reached out and touched the PLAY button on the answering machine, expecting the few seconds of dead silence that would prove her theory correct.
But instead of silence, there was a voice. A youngish man, speaking softly and intimately so that the first image that sprang to Cornelia’s mind was of lips brushing a mouthpiece:
“It’s me. I’m sorry...I know I promised not to call...”
For one beat, Cornelia thought it was Brian, even though it sounded nothing like him. Her chest constricted.
“...I know you don’t want to see me. I can’t blame you for being afraid of what I’m doing. I don’t fault you for getting out. It was probably stupid of me not to stop...to just go on with it. Yeah – that’s right: I finished it. Last night I put the stones in the four corners of the room. I drew the sign on each stone. I gave the fourth utterance of ascent. And...and...yeah. And it worked. It happened...”
Cornelia didn’t know this voice. She didn’t know what he was discussing. It was a wrong number. He had dialed a number similar to the one he wanted, no doubt...
“...I looked all over the house for it. I thought it would be in the cellar, or the attic, for some reason. It was in the bathroom, of all places. In the corner behind the hamper. I could only see...fog. But it felt cold, when I moved the hamper and got close. And I thought I heard a sound in there, way back, far off – like monkeys, maybe. A sound like monkeys calling. But, sort of like...electronic sounding...”
Cornelia shot an angry look at the microwave, where her popcorn was noisily popping, the appliance annoyingly humming. She leaned her head down over the answering machine, holding her long hair away from her ear.
“...It’s still there now. But you know – after all my reading. After all this work. After losing you to get this far – I just can’t bring myself to go into...”
“END OF – MESSAGES”, a robotic voice suddenly announced, cutting in. The intense young man was gone. The switch in voices, from emotional to mechanical, startled Cornelia, and she drew back.
The microwave stopped, and only one or two last kernels popped, the bag now swollen like some inoperable tumor.
What had the stranger been going on about? What had he been looking for in his house or apartment? What was it he had found in the bathroom (of all places)?
Cornelia played the message back again. It made no more sense to her the second time.
UNAVAILABLE. He had called from someplace where they didn’t have caller ID, then. Without his number being displayed, she couldn’t call him back to inform him that he’d whispered so intently to someone other than this person he had promised he would never call again.
Wasn’t there some kind of feature called Call Trace? Yes...punch star, then a number. But what was the number? It was two-digit, right? She couldn’t recall it; and anyway, would it be able to trace an “unavailable” call?
What did it matter? He was a stranger. But she had been drawn in, she had to admit, by his earnest-sounding emotion. The touch of bitter, regretful humor in his words. By the warm, dark sound of his voice. Here was a man who still loved the person he was calling. It was the woman who had broken off with him. He still wanted to be with her. How lucky she was, Cornelia thought. And what a fool she was.
Cornelia’s eyes were growing moist. As if it were the young man’s pain that moved her.
She touched a button. The robotic voice intoned, “MESSAGES – DELETED.”
What a long night it had been.
A new Brazilian coworker had flirted with her. He wasn’t bad looking, but at the end of the shift Judi had told her he was married, with kids.
A long, long night, Cornelia thought, letting herself into her apartment. Not popcorn tonight, with its low dietary points. Ice cream. Ice cream for sure.
But before she went to the refrigerator. Before she checked her email. Before, even, she removed her coat, Cornelia glanced over at the kitchen table.
A red digital “1" on her answering machine. She stepped nearer to see the caller ID’s display. It read:
8:43 pm
3/02 Call# 1
– UNAVAILABLE –
Without even removing her woolen gloves, Cornelia depressed the button labeled PLAY on her answering machine.
Tonight, she recognized the voice. As if it were someone she knew.
“I didn’t think you’d call me back. Then again, I hope I have the right number. I copied it out of your brother’s book, very quickly, when he was out of the room. I’m sure that’s enough to make you furious in itself...
“But I wish you’d talk to me. I wish...”
He sighed. Trailed off. A few seconds of silence. Hurry, Cornelia wordlessly urged him, before your time runs out.
“I still haven’t gone through. I’m -- just plain afraid. Those sounds in there. And it’s so dark. And cold. Last night I could barely sleep, knowing it was in the house, just a few rooms away from me. I’m keeping the bathroom door shut, but I can’t lock it from the outside. I should at least screw in an eye-hook latch or something. Hmph -- like that would stop anything that wanted to come through...”
Cornelia found herself unaccountably glancing up at her own bathroom, which opened off the kitchen. Unlit, murky inside. Since childhood she had had a fear of looking in the mirror and seeing someone standing behind her shoulder, only in the glass. A ghost. Something worse, perhaps...