QQ-42 in Bin 119.
She bathed him and he slept. She thought he slept, but he only rested with his eyes closed. He watched her move around the conapt’s misty interior, pruning and watering her bushes; watched her through slitted eyes. And when he was certain she was not in contact with anyone else, he sat up.
Her back was to him. She was waxing the leaves of an Alocacia amazonica. He sat up, naked in the misty pool of warm water, and he said, “You caused it.”
She did not turn. Her movements were precise and graceful. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said. But he knew she had caused it, and he said, “Yes, you do.”
The mist settled on her hairless body and sparkled like frost. She ceased her activity and turned to him.
“How could you do that?” He heard his voice; it sounded immature and bewildered.
She sighed and shook her head very faintly, as though what he was saying was infinitely saddening to her.
Then the old paladin emerged from the mist and the shadows where he had been waiting, silently hoping this most sensitive of the sensitive children had not stumbled on the truth through the ineptitude of a judas on her first time out, knowing it was a futile hope, and prepared to do what had to be done. He was a very old paladin, who had been promised his freedom when he had prepared this woman to take over for him, and he was both furious at her misjudgment and desolate that his rest was that much further denied him.
He stepped out of the shadows, slaughtered her with a thought, and turned to the young paladin in the mist pool.
Alan Pryor looked into his face and saw what awaited him. He held up a hand. “At least let me understand why!”
The old paladin sighed. Why not.
“There are no attacks. It’s all contrived.”
“No, that isn’t so. I—I feel the pain… I see the darkness coming through, the things, the spiracle…”
He shook his head. “All contrived. By sensitives like her, and me. We buy our lives. Judas sensitives. To keep you and others like you busy, for a cause. So we don’t breed. So we don’t multiply and take over. The ones who don’t have the power, the nonsensitives, they knew from the first that we were the next step. They wouldn’t let go; they’ll never let go. So they contrived it all.”
Alan made a sudden lurch toward the edge of the mist pool. The old paladin burned him out; there was a wisp of dark, thin smoke from the ash-filled sockets that had been Alan Pryor’s eyes; and the old paladin sighed once more before he began cataloging the parts of Alan Pryor’s body that could be recycled in expectation of the next child born with the power.
In that lonely place where Alan Pryor gave his life, there were no observers. The attack came in an isolated, empty place where he was burned defending us. Now we lay his body to rest, with honor, swearing that he did not go unmourned. With honor, to your final rest, Alan Pryor. Humanity will not forget.
G-64 in Bin 487.
Shatterday
Everything that is appropriate to say about this final entry of the current grimoire has been said in the general introduction, “Mortal Dreads,” with the possible exception of this:
There is a curse over the door to my tomb. It says, Beware all ye who enter here—because herein lie the proofs of observation that we are all as one, living in the same skin, each of us condemned to handle the responsibility of our past, our memories, our destiny as elements in the great congeries of life. And if you find these dark dreams troubling, perhaps it is because they are your dreams.
It’s been nice visiting with you.
And when next the full moon rises, and the sounds from beyond the campfire are ominously semihuman, we will gather again and I’ll listen to your tales and then write them up in my way, and give them back to you.
Until that time.
Not much later, but later nonetheless, he thought back on the sequence of what had happened, and knew he had missed nothing. How it had gone, was this:
He had been abstracted, thinking about something else. It didn’t matter what. He had gone to the telephone in the restaurant, to call Jamie, to find out where the hell she was already, to find out why she’d kept him sitting in the bloody bar for thirty-five minutes. He had been thinking about something else, nothing deep, just woolgathering, and it wasn’t till the number was ringing that he realized he’d dialed his own apartment, He had done it other times, not often, but as many as anyone else, dialed a number by rote and not thought about it, and occasionally it was his own number, everyone does it (he thought later), everyone does it, it’s a simple mistake.
He was about to hang up, get back his dime and dial Jamie, when the receiver was lifted at the other end.
He answered.
Himself.
He recognized his own voice at once. But didn’t let it penetrate.
He had no little machine to take messages after the bleep, he had had his answering service temporarily disconnected (unsatisfactory service, they weren’t catching his calls on the third ring as he’d insisted), there was no one guesting at his apartment, nothing. He was not at home, he was here, in the restaurant, calling his apartment, and he answered.
“Hello?”
He waited a moment. Then said, “Who’s this?”
He answered, “Who’re you calling?”
“Hold it,” he said. “Who is this?”
His own voice, on the other end, getting annoyed, said, “Look, friend, what number do you want?”
“This is BEacon 3-6189, right?”
Warily: “Yeah… ?”
“Peter Novins’s apartment?”
There was silence for a moment, then: “That’s right.”
He listened to the sounds from the restaurant’s kitchen. “If this is Novins’s apartment, who’re you?”
On the other end, in his apartment, there was a deep breath. “This is Novins.”
He stood in the phone booth, in the restaurant, in the night, the receiver to his ear, and listened to his own voice. He had dialed his own number by mistake, dialed an empty apartment… and he had answered.,
Finally, he said, very tightly, “This is Novins.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m at The High Tide, waiting for Jamie.”
Across the line, with a terrible softness, he heard himself asking, “Is that you?”
A surge of fear pulsed through him and he tried to get out of it with one last possibility. “If this is a gag… Freddy… is that you, man? Morrie? Art?”
Silence. Then, slowly, “I’m Novins. Honest to God.”
His mouth was dry. “I’m out here. You can’t be, I can’t be in the apartment.”
“Oh yeah? Well, I am.”
‘‘I’ll have to call you back.” Peter Novins hung up.
He went back to the bar and ordered a double Scotch, no ice, straight up, and threw it back in two swallows, letting it burn. He sat and stared at his hands, turning them over and over, studying them to make sure they were his own, not alien meat grafted onto his wrists when he was not looking.
Then he went back to the phone booth, closed the door and sat down, and dialed his own number. Very carefully.
It rang six times before he picked it up.
He knew why the voice on the other end had let it ring six times; he didn’t want to pick up the snake and hear his own voice coming at him.