City At The End Of Time (29 page)

The owner wrinkled her nose, shrugged, lifted the lace shawl from her shoulder, and slid open the back of the case. Stooping with an expressive grunt, she drew out the book and straightened, clutching it to her bosom.

Daniel had never seen Bandle’s volume so thick. The gray stratum of plates was as wide as a finger. Lifting her glasses, the woman opened the cover with plump, dry fingers. “Fifteen dollars,” she said.

“I have nine. I’ll pay you nine.”

“I don’t bargain,” she repeated with a sniff.

Daniel afforded the woman an apologetic, tight-lipped smile. “It’s dusty. Looks like it’s been there awhile.”

She squinted at the date penciled below the price. Something relented—a little stiffness went out of her.

“Do you
really
want this book?”

He nodded. “A childhood favorite. Takes me back to better days.”

“This book has resided in my special case for precisely three years,” she said. “It’s dusty, but I’ve never seen another copy. I’ll let you have it for fifteen.”

“Nine is all I have,” Daniel said. “Honest.”

She leaned back. Her eyes wizened to piggish slits. “You’re the fellow begs up by the freeway, aren’t you?”

It seemed that everyone knew Charles Granger. Daniel smiled wide, showing all his teeth—uneven, brown, and cracked—and coughed out a fetor.

The owner’s moment of compassion instantly faded, but to get him out of the store, she sold him the book. And all it cost was all the money he had in the world.

Back in the dark house, he carried the book into the living room, where he sat with a groan on the broken cane chair, every bone grinding, and studied the spine. Such a fat edition, larger by far than any he had owned before. Sitting hurt too much, so he stretched out on the floor to read by the light of a candle—then pushed up to elbows and knees, and finally, crouched and rocked slowly on a cushion in the corner.

Now he had
the
book, rich and full of detail—bloated, he thought as he thumbed the pages—and he could examine it in his own good time, if he dared. If there was any time left. This was progress of a sort, if learning bad news,
very
bad news, could be considered progress. And the news was awful indeed. Inch-long fleas. Prehistoric mammals found in New Guinea. Real Bigfoot scat and Bigfoot hair found in Canada and analyzed—DNA proof that the old gentleman was real, a distant offshoot of human beings.

He studied the listing index, skipping to the middle.

Flying nightmare in New Jersey Pine Barrens; wingspan of two meters, species unknown,
perhaps dragonfly.

Garden of Eden, in New Guinea; three hundred new species found there, fifteen new species of
lemur, including fist-sized Gliding lemur.

Giant true rats, weighing fifty kilograms, found in Borneo.

Gigantopithecus, skull located in museum collection in Vienna; ten-foot-tall gorilla. Living
specimens sighted in Cambodia?

Hairy fishes, found with mammal-like hair follicles…

Homo floresiensis, human relative one meter tall; used fire, tools. Hunted pygmy elephants with
tiny spears.

Human-faced crabs in Thailand and Sri Lanka, back of shells bear remarkable likenesses of faces
of drowning victims.

Hymenoptera: bees learn to use sign language in their dance.

Indigo bat (size of eagle) found in Mexico.

Kua-Nyu, squirrel-rat species extinct for eleven million years, discovered in Laos.
Quran frogs, Iraqi marshes, croak “God is Great” in Arabic, with abbreviated suras readable in
dorsal skin markings.

Sea scorpions (eurypterids) found off Madagascar; length, three meters; allegedly extinct for
hundreds of millions of years, largest invertebrate ever. Natives prize their flesh, sweet and
fragrant; claim to have hunted them “since time began.”

He flipped to the beginning of the list.

Aepyornis captured in Tasmania; flightless bird twenty feet tall, eats goats, sheep, lays eggs size
of two basketballs.

Then down:

Cathedral termites; exported around nation with woodchip debris from hurricane-ravaged Gulf
Coast; build nests shaped like Chartres, Notre Dame.

He let the book flop shut, his hands trembling. Cryptids and Lazarids—hidden beasts, and beasts suddenly and unexpectedly resurrected by the thousands from the distant past. The listing index by itself ran for a hundred pages. Given his past reckoning that roughly half of the reports in Bandle were substantially incorrect or falsified, he estimated that there were still over a thousand reliable listings, twice

as many as before, when the darkness and dust closed in and he had been forced to flee. Unlikely things were gathering like shadows around a guttering campfire, ringing in the bright, rational, scientific world he had always valued—and doubted. He would need to find allies. Allies…and if at all possible, another host. A new body, stronger, healthier. Younger. He thumped his head against the wall, feeling the snake in his guts coil as if angry at this disrespect.

He could not do it alone; he doubted he had the focus and strength of will to leap so far again, and what was coming would be worse than before.

He opened the book to the introduction. Bandle wrote:

This latest edition incorporates well over five hundred new listings, a greater increase than any
past edition, gathered in a period of just three years. This brings up a very nonscientific question:
Has someone opened a door to the past, jamming us all together—extinct beasts, impossible
beasts, unlikely and yet too real?

Soaked and racked by fever, Daniel reached the physics building on the University of Washington campus at three the next afternoon. He searched the ground-floor directories, then began his hunt through the hallways, peering at nameplates outside office doors, looking for the one fellow who might understand, the most vulnerable fellow he knew—and the most curious. An old friend.

CHAPTER 25

Capitol Hill

Penelope seldom emerged from her bedroom, and Glaucous never intruded unless it was strictly necessary. The low, constant buzz and his partner’s gentle murmurs of control and consolation told him all he needed to know. What lay beyond that closed and locked door was not safe, even for him. Perhaps the hardest task he faced most days was keeping his partner happy. The changes within Glaucous were subtle, but Penelope had lost so much over the past thirty years, not just the lure of her femininity—her beauty and her youth—but the last feeble spark of her intellect, as Glaucous had shaped her into the wondrous, compliant tool she now was.

Glaucous flipped out the
London Times
he had bought at the newsstand on University Way, sucked his cigar with slit-eyed satisfaction, and read through the headlines. A large black leather lounge chair supported his relaxed, chunky torso, one short, thick leg bent at the knee, slippered foot on the floor, the other leg propped on the ottoman—small, precise toes twitching slowly as he read. In over a century and a half, he had acquired an eye for many sorts of patterns—economic, political, philosophical, even scientific. The instincts he had learned as a Chancer and companion to the rich and ambitious still served him; over the decades, he’d laid up riches. One had to be prudent. All employers failed in the end—failed their employees and usually failed in their manifold endeavors, leaving one without means. Unless one was prudent. Unless one recognized patterns and knew what to do with them. Ashes dropped to his silk jacket. He flicked and smeared and brushed them with thick fingers thatched with curly gray hairs to the first knuckle and beyond and around that hair, calluses of varying size, density, and shape, which no doubt Mr. Sherlock Holmes would have enjoyed analyzing. Glaucous had in his long life earned a living in so many different ways—accumulating scars from cock spurs, dog bites, rat bites, the nicks and marks and slams of human teeth. Bites—and strikes. Fighting had also cocked his nose and thickened his ears.

Perhaps most interesting to a consulting detective: layered on the tips and sides of his fingers like tree rings were the calluses of a mortal man’s lifetime of the concealing, switching, rotating, and rolling of coins and cards. And he no longer possessed fingerprints; had lost them before the turn of the previous century.

Decades of waiting in the half-dark had added fat all the way up his pink and pale olive arms, across his rolled back and thickened hips and legs. So many reminders of use and abuse, scars never quite fading. How much longer could it go on? Still wheezing along, his body an engine blessed with incredible fortitude, but his breath shallow, conserved; he might live forever, but he had been smoking for decades and his lungs were not happy, no, quite clogged, in fact.

There might soon come a time of purging and revival—no more vices, long weeks of hiking and exercise, eating little, smoking not at all, clearing his tissues of the dross of the last fifty years—a monkish process which he loathed on general principle.

Might, but he doubted it.

Glaucous’s life had been extended by misdirection and cheat—and of course by the Mistress’s touch. So much history, so much insight, and for what? He saw himself as the ugly main exhibit in a museum of oddities. When would Maxwell Glaucous be cut loose, his fortitude excised, gift withdrawn as a condition of unemployment?

The room was dark but for the light that shined directly on the creamy paper now creased over his lap. The phone had been silent all day, and before that there was nothing but crank calls from the curious and the rude, the drunken, the bored, and the unsound of mind—his usual correspondents. Still, he knew the patterns. There was a reason Maxwell Glaucous had come to the Northwest and settled in Seattle. He could feel all the ripples in the local human ocean, like the passages of tiny, sharp-prowed boats through the general swirl and stir of mismanaged destinies. Seven years of travel across the continent, driving endless miles beside his solitary and unlovely partner…

His eyelids slumped. He was slipping into his morning nap. He would awaken in a few minutes, refreshed and alert…but for now, there was only the drowse, an overwhelming need for a brief swim across Lethe. The buzzing in the bedroom, the silence of his own stuffy room, the soft comfort of a leather chair. He stared vaguely at the black phone on its stand, watery gray eyes turning in toward the bulbous nose, vision blurring…

Both eyes suddenly shot wide and his spine stiffened. Someone had brushed the front door to their apartment.

He could see or imagine knuckles lifted, poised—and then a sharp rap, followed by a quick, deep voice, like gravel rolling at the bottom of a muddy stream, “I know you’re in there, Max Glaucous! Open to me. Old times and old rules.”

Glaucous expected no visitors.

“Coming,” he said, and rose swiftly to his feet. Before answering, he rapped lightly on Penelope’s door. The buzzing stopped.

“Someone’s here, my darling,” he said. “Are we proper?”

CHAPTER 26

University District

“I don’t know you. I don’t know anyone by that name,” Fred Johnson said to the wasted, sick-looking man leaning on his porch.

“I understand,” Daniel said. “I know
you
, though—or someone a lot like you.” His voice was rough and shallow. He was exhausted after his hike from the university.

The former Charles Granger rose two inches taller than Fred Johnson, who stood about five-ten, including a shock of black hair arching back from a high forehead. Johnson looked up at his unexpected visitor with as much patience as Daniel could have expected from any man, under the circumstances.

“I need a few minutes to explain,” Daniel said. “You probably won’t believe me, so I’ll leave after I’m done, but I thought if anyone might understand, it would be you. I’m glad you’re still here. That’s pretty amazing, actually.”