City At The End Of Time (20 page)

high cheekbones and large liquid eyes, Jack flaunted his formidable lack of dignity. “What are you reading this month?”

“An Oprah book. You wouldn’t like it.”

He sniffed.

Ellen sniffed back. “Enjoy. There’s canned dog food for the rats in the fridge. I’ll introduce you during dessert.”

Jack pruned up his face. He did not know what she was up to. Some sort of test—or bizarre revenge?

“
Relax
,” she whispered, her expression fierce, and pushed through the door into the dining room. The door swung back with a light breeze.

Jack found the dog food, spooned some into a dish, and delivered it with a flourish to the cage. “Fill your bellies, my sweet little rodents. No more flying. And maybe no more food for a long, long time.”

The rats considered the likelihood of game hen and the food actually at paw, then, resigned, fell to nibbling.

He sat at the counter and opened the newspaper he’d filched from the waiting room. He paged through the classifieds, seeking something—he could not remember what. But there it was in the middle of the last page: the message his eyes had read and remembered while the rest of Jack’s mind was elsewhere. Frowning, he touched the short ad—very short.

Then he stopped eating and shifted uncomfortably on the stool. Glanced at the screen door leading to the back porch. Something outside, waiting? No…

When he resumed eating—the food was too good to ignore—he kept glancing at the ad, until he tore it out and stuffed it in his pocket.

The rest of the paper he stuffed into Ellen’s recycle bin, under the sink. The talk through the kitchen door sounded cheerful, raucous in a feminine way, and after several glasses of wine, more directly truthful. The postprandial effects of good warm food had loosened Ellen’s guests. Ellen thought they were ready. She served dessert. Then she pushed Jack through the door and stood beside him, one hand high and bent at the wrist, the other at waist-level, like a couturier showing off her new line.

Across the long oak dining table, the two older women fell silent.

“I’ve told you about Jack,” Ellen said. “He works the streets. He’s a
busker
.”

Her guests stared, then exchanged veiled glances, as if there was so much to say but no way they would ever be caught saying it—not in front of their hostess. In their forties or early fifties, both looked as if more exercise and sun might do them good. Granny glasses, silk pantsuits—the redhead wore rhinestone-studded denim—fine manicures, and fashionable hairdos. Jack quickly sized them up: wealthy street marks, incomes over a hundred K per annum. One perhaps a lesbian—did she know? Under normal circumstances, he would happily separate them from as much money as he could get away with. For their part, Ellen’s guests regarded Jack with stiff civility—a too-young male of suspicious dark good looks in their female fastness, invited, to be sure, but
why
?

Jack groaned deep in his throat, then bowed. “Ladies,” he said, “thanks for the wonderful food. I don’t want to interrupt.” He tried to retreat through the kitchen door but Ellen jerked him back by his elbow. The women looked to her for guidance. She lowered her hands and folded them, demure. “Jack’s a friend,” she said.

“What sort of friend?” asked the eldest, older than Ellen by at least ten years.

“What does Ellen mean, ‘work the streets’?” asked the other, the redhead, pleasing enough in her plumpness. “What’s a
‘busker’
?”

“It’s from the French,
busquer
, to seek, like a ship trying to find its course,” said the eldest. To her, Jack was a sand grain, a small sharp point of irritation.

Ellen gestured like a teacher,
Tell the girls.
For a hot instant he did not like her at all.

“I’m a showman,” Jack said. “I do magic and juggle.”

“Does it pay?” the redhead asked.

“Sometimes,” he said. “I get to keep bankers’ hours.”

They did not return his smile—though the redhead’s lips twitched. And what was
he
to Ellen,
really
?

she seemed to ask. Such a skinny young man!

The eldest glanced around the table with wide eyes behind thick glasses. “Can you show us a trick?”

Jack instantly assumed a dancer’s restful pose. Bowed his head as if in prayer. Lifted his hands, fingers to thumbs, as if to snap castanets. The ladies watched for some seconds. Tension built. The (probable) lesbian scraped her chair and coughed.

Jack raised his chin and met Ellen’s eyes.

“I don’t do tricks,” he said. “I invite the world to dance.”

“Tell us how you do that, Jack,” Ellen murmured.

All three women looked around the room with nostrils flared, like lionesses smelling blood. He did not like this kind of attention. His patience reached an end.

“That’s it,” he said. “Thanks again, but I’m done. Here’s my
trick.
”

For a tenth of a second—no time at all—the dining room fell under a muffled blankness, like stuffing your ears with waxed cotton. The crystals on the chandelier quivered. All six of the flame lights behind the crystals sizzled out.

“I’d like to ask—” the redhead began, but Jack pointed and lifted his eyebrow, and she looked out the window. Simultaneously, on the narrow street in front of Ellen’s house, two cars mated with a grating slam.

The walls shuddered.

All three ladies jumped and exclaimed.

“Was that thunder?” the redhead asked.

Ellen hurried to the front door. For the moment, they had forgotten about Jack. He shoved through the kitchen door, lifted his rats with a swoop—they flattened on their haunches—and fled down the porch. As he pedaled along the back alley, he could feel a familiar stiffness creep up his shoulder blades. Ellen shouldn’t have done that. That went beyond pixie—it was cruel, like introducing Peter Pan to Wendy when she could no longer hope to fly. Worse, he had moved so far off his line of good consequence just to arrange an exit that it might take days to jump back.

And who knew what could happen during that time?

As he coasted down a hill, Jack felt totally exposed.

CHAPTER 15

First Avenue South

That night, Ginny and Bidewell dined on take-out Thai food—what Bidewell insisted on calling

“takeaway.” He rarely cooked. There was no kitchen, only a hot plate and the iron stove where he kept a teakettle. The refrigerator held only white wine, cat food, and milk for tea. Bidewell expertly wielded chopsticks. They had already discussed his years in China, searching for certain Buddhist texts and trying to escape from Japanese soldiers in some war or another; Ginny had not listened closely.

From the main storage room in the warehouse, they heard a bump and cascading thumps—a stack of books falling over. Ginny pointed with her chopsticks. “Your cats?”

“Minimus is the only one who pays attention to my books.”

“Other than me,” Ginny said, then added, “They seem to go wherever they want.”

“All my fine Sminthians stay
here
,” Bidewell insisted. “Like me. The warehouse is all they need.”

“
Sminthians?
”

Bidewell pushed a classical dictionary her way. “Homer. Look it up.”

Bidewell was cleaning away the paper plates and boxes when Ginny asked, “Why do you let the cat—why do you let Minimus—knock things over? He might hurt the books.”

“He doesn’t
hurt
them,” Bidewell said. “Some cats are sensitive to the spiders between the lines.” He slid shut the flue on the stove to stifle the fire inside.

“What the hell does that mean?” she asked to Bidewell’s retreating back. He smiled over his shoulder, then vanished into his sleeping quarters, beyond the library and the warm stove. That evening, Ginny found a small, thin brown book on her table. It told a peculiar story. THE SCRIBES’ TALE

Near the end of the eighth century, on the island of Iona in the Western Hebrides, off the coast of Scotland, a monastery protected many of the great manuscripts of antiquity from waves of intemperate history breaking over Europe and Britain.

In the abbey, monks copied and illuminated manuscripts and prepared for the day when the classics would again be spread to other abbeys, castles, and towns—and to the universities which were even then being dreamed of, centers of text and learning that would shine light from the past on a world buried in darkness.

Within these stone walls, copy rooms had been set up, dimly lit by tallow candles and on occasion by oil lamps, where apprentices were taught the craft of faithful reproduction of old manuscripts gathered by monks and collectors from around the ancient world.

Books were being invented to replace the antique scrolls, bound volumes being more easily read and carried, and more durable.

It was claimed that this copy room was the most faithful and accurate of any in Europe, and the apprentices—as they grew older and more expert—were celebrated beyond their station, and thus acquired pride. And this pride took the form, so the legend tells us, of a spider that plagued the copyists one cold winter, as they wielded with gloved hands their pens and brushes. Candles warmed the gelid ink in its tanks, and the monks’ meticulous strokes froze upon the paper before they could dry. (Indeed, to this day, some of these manuscripts bear letters with a special inky sheen—freeze-dried.) There was not fuel enough, neither brush nor wood nor dried seaweed, charcoal from the mainland, nor dung from the island’s cattle, to warm the abbey.

Despite the cold, the spider—so the copyists informed the abbot—became visible first as a moving spot in the corner of ink-weary eyes, a blur that zipped across the pages, leaving delicate, inky trails. Errors began to creep into the copies, as these apparitions distracted the monks. And no sweeping or blessing improved the situation.

The spider soon became bold and lingered upon the vellum, lifting its forelegs and spreading its palps in defense as it was brushed aside or hit with a pounce-bag. It always disappeared without a trace—only to reappear on another page, at another copy-stand.

For weeks this apparition—or natural nuisance, none could say which—haunted and befuddled the monks. Some claimed it was a pagan spirit sent to devil them and increase error in our sin-stricken world. Others, usually skeptical, still found it hard to believe so tiny a creature could survive the chill without infernal assistance, the fires of hell being almost a tempting prospect through early spring. And so it went until the heather lost its sere and budding leaves poked forth green and red from bush and tree. It was February, and the island’s hard winter was passing early with rain and storm into glorious days of golden sun. Monks took a break from their work and gathered seaweed from the white beaches to fertilize their gardens and small farms. Balmy breezes danced through the abbey, coaxing the chill out of old stone and dank earth. Grass pushed high and green, and the making of vellum and fine parchment resumed as the calves and lambs were born.

The winter’s copies were brought out and displayed to the air, to dry away mildew, and the abbot examined them in the brightness of the abbey garden, his weak but loving eyes vigilant for errors, blemishes, anything that might make them unacceptable to clients present or future. (For many books were stored in the abbey’s stone tower library, against the future demand of a world reborn.) And so the abbot was the first to discover that one copy in an entire run of manuscripts bore in its margins a scrawled, clumsy, and unsanctioned poem, thus:

Between the lines

A bogey walks

Eight legs, eight eyes.

Letters will flee

Ink will be smeared

Till it be born

In ash and dread,

Wolf ’s eye red,

Seen by the Three;

Who spare the mite

That words make flesh

Five lost, reborn.

The abbot ordered this abomination pumiced, and yet within hours the ink on the offending page returned, stubborn and bold. The master of copyists stripped the page, carried it to the trash heap outside the stone walls, and burned the offending vellum, intoning prayers of exorcism before spreading its ashes over the bones and offal.

But neither spider nor poem would die. Someone had copied those lines, with subtle variations, on scraps of vellum and wood and even on shards of pottery, no one knew how many times, and pressed them into the chinks between the abbey stones and elsewhere. In old structures and homes across the island the copies would continue to be found, now and again, until the Vikings arrived. But before the Vikings, manuscripts from Iona became less and less trustworthy, until copying was stopped and all newer copies were either burned or stored under lock and key, for none could be sure that
all
copies back to the beginning were not tainted, the minds of even expert readers being imperfect to the task of total recall of so many pages.

The abbey was closed and the most valuable and beautiful books transported elsewhere. No one knew what the poem meant, yet for years, scholars claimed the spider and its errors could be removed for good, if that secret were to be discovered. Who were the three, and why did they live in ash and dread, and what apocalypse would resurrect just five corpses from their graves? (For some versions had as the final line, “Raising five dead.”)