Shuteye for the Timebroker (35 page)

And any character could die in a sequel.

Anyone.

Author/editor Chris Roberson asked me to submit an “adventure” story to an anthoiogy that he was compiling. I think he was envisioning Indiana Jones, instead, he got David Lynch.

That will teach him to offer such a broad mandate.

This story belongs to the subgenre I term “bardo fiction.” Bardo is the famous Tibetan term for the period between death and the next reincarnation. I suppose the first prototypical, if not exactly bardo, fiction in English might be Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” I do know that there are not all that many examples of this mode. One outstanding instance, though, is Damon Knight’s
Humpty Dumpty: An Oval
.

Search it out before you leave this world.

Eel Pie Stall

“To die will be an awfully big adventure.”

—J. M. Barrie

Tang of the river: ancient impregnated septic tidal flats exposed to the air; rotting fish; saturated driftwood; tarred pilings; engine exhaust; weeds going to slime.

Sound of the river: slop of wavelets on insensible slippery cement steps; raucous gulls aloft; chugging engines; creak of winches; workmen bantering.

Sight of the river: a cold rippling welcoming pewter grave, with flanking buildings as the only mourners.

Tansy Bynum pauses at a waist-high stone wall along the southern bank of the Thames. Rests her hands on the flat gritted icy top of the wall. Feels nothing. Equilibrium between inner self and outer world. But not in favor of the living.

Tansy turns away momentarily from the sight, sound, and smell of her prospective final home. Polyester scarf printed with cartoon fishes binding moderate mouse-colored hair. No-brand sunglasses contradicting the gray skies. Cheap beige cloth coat down to midthigh. Worn wool skirt. Sensible stockings. Scuffed brown tie shoes.

Wrists crossing twixt her modest breasts, fingers tucked beneath armpits. Unpainted mouth composed in a taut straight line. Shuffling pointlessly farther down the path along the embankment, wall on her left.

People around her with jobs and lovers, chores and duties, children and parents, wants and lusts. Smiles, frowns, musing looks. Just to feel something, anything.

Leave them behind. Shed these mockers like a final molt.

Long slow nowhere trudge. River never out of vision, hearing, or odor-waft. Wall now less well-maintained, crumbling in places, beginning to be marred with rude graffiti. Less of a barrier to what calmly awaits. Inevitable destiny. People dwindling in numbers: going, going, gone. Nebulous empty borderland between what is and what will be. Moisture begins to seep from the lowering clouds in a prelude to a drizzle.

Up ahead, scabbed against the wall like an ungainly limpet: a shack or shed or stall, some kind of slovenly commercial affair. Unpainted boards and timbers blackened with pollution and age. No signage. Grommeted dingy canvas front rolled up and balanced on the slanting gap-shingled roof, exposing dark interior. Chest-high counter projecting like an idiot’s pendulous lower lip.

Abreast of the stall and ready to step past. Unseeing fate-blinded eyes straight front, no interest in what lurks within the shed.

“Tansy Bynum.”

She stops, astounded.

Looks left.

A shadowy artificial shallow cave untainted by any modern conveniences. Medieval. Prehistoric. Lower half of the back wall composed of the stones of the embankment barrier. Faintest of reddish-orange illumination supplied by a smoldering bed of coals in an open-faced brick oven. Large wooden singed paddle for retrieving items from the hearth. On the counter, a squat open-topped wooden canister holding a heterogeneous assortment of bone-handled spoons and forks. Crooked shelves within hosting clay mugs, crockery, spice jars, flour-dusted burlap sacks.

And the proprietor.

Greasy salt-and-pepper beard, disheveled mop of jaundiced silver hair. Coarse features, shabby, cast-off clothes. Fingerless gloves more moth holes than fabric. Awkwardly hunched armature of his short frame. Repellant, but somehow rendered less so by the appropriateness of his environment, like a hermit crab in a particularly apt adopted shell.

The proprietor fixes her with a sly, obsequious wink. A potential customer hooked.

“Did you—did you call my name?”

“’Fraid not. Couldn’t very well, could I? Strangers, you and me. No, just asked, Taney a pie, mum?’“

“Oh.”

Tansy makes to move on. Eating. A pointless activity now.

The gnomish proprietor reaches below Tansy’s sight to bring up a small pie in a tin plate. Crust still uncooked white. Edges neatly crimped. Two slits in the top like nostrils.

“No. I have to go—”

A friendly leer. “Ah, now, why off so fast? You’ll never have another pie like this. Best in all of London. No one else makes them like old Murk.”

Senselessly, irrationally rooted to the spot somehow. First time anyone’s talked to her in days. Stomach suddenly awakes noisily. A macabre thought arises, born from tawdry television viewing: won’t the coroner have an easier time dating her demise if there are remnants of a meal in her gut ? Her last selfless contribution to the ease of others, after a life devoted to such one-way gestures.

“What—what kind of pie?”

“Ah, mum, best to show you.”

Pie in gnarled hand set down on shelf. Murk’s face prideful beneath warty brow. Bending forward like a broken toy. Hoisting strongly two-handed an antique wooden bucket chest-high. Sets it on the counter, where it slops a scant rill of water over its rim. Bucket obscures the dwarfish man.

“Have a dekko then, child. C’mon, naught’ll happen to you.”

On tiptoes to peer into the bucket.

Tansy’s first impression: a single braided whip in constant coiling motion, a flux of silver and black. Then: separation into component parts: heads, eyes, bodies, flukes, gills.

A bucket of writhing eels, sinuous, muscled, constrained.

Their weavings seem to scribe watery ideograms in perpetual flicker, transiting from one half-perceived meaning to another.

And at random moments, as their serpentine bodies open a clear view to the bottom of the bucket, millisecond impressions of something piebald, gold and blue, beneath them. Like a queen or king guarded by courtiers. A sport or mutant brother to the mundane sea-snakes …?

Tansy expects to feel revulsion. But does not. The anticipated antipathy fails to arise. No gorge in her throat. Instead, a penultimate hunger increases, ironically supplanting for a moment the ultimate hunger for extinction.

Around the side of the bucket, Murk’s face appears, all huckster-eager. “Freshest of the fresh, mum. Caught right here in the river. Clean as a whistle these days, the water is. Heads and tails make a fine stock. Rest diced up bite-sized. Lemon, parsley, shallot, pinch of nutmeg, that’s all it takes. Real butter in the crust. You won’t be sorry.”

“Well … why not?”

Quick as an eel himself, Murk hoists the bucket off the counter, paddles the pie onto the live coals. Almost immediately, a sweet wholesome fishy scent pervades the booth, sending out tendrils to capture Tansy’s senses.

“How—how much?”

“Fifty pence.”

Tansy fumbles out some coins, among her last, and lays them on the counter. Murk scrapes them off the surface with the edge of one hand and pockets them.

The ceiling of leaden sky seems to sink lower while the pie bakes, as if the box of her life is compressing even further.

Pie in the oven, Murk has no more attention for his customer. Serious as a jeweler faceting a gem. All is reserved for his creation. Fusses with the coals. Spins the pie at intervals for even baking. Anoints its top with a clear glaze from a misshapen mug, employing a crude animal-bristle brush.

Finished at last. By what sign or omen or chef s intuition, unknown. Delved from the oven’s depths and deposited on the countertop.

“Grab a utensil, mum. Careful, now, it’ll be hot.”

Bone-shafted spoon in hand. Bending forward to catch up-gust of victual-richness. Arc of spoon biting into layered flaking crust, bubbling upwelling of rich broth along the narrow trench. Scooping a heaping serving onto the spoon. Raised to lips, invited in.

Ambrosial pastry. Oniony, herby savor. Warmth coating her throat. Lemon. Sweet ichthyous flesh melting, melding into taste buds. No bones? Rendered into intangibility? A second spoon, a third—

Within scant minutes, Tansy has gulped down the whole pie, scraped the tin shell clean.

Murk proudly attentive and approving throughout. Upon completion, still solicitous.

“Had enough then? Knew you’d appreciate this. Had you pegged, Murk did.”

“I—thank you. But now I have to go. Good-bye.”

“Never good-bye, mum. Just see you later.”

Yards beyond the stall, the meal seems a dream. Pleasantly inconsequential, but fading, one of the few typically minor bright spots in a wearisome life, now replaced by the dreary reality of her situation. Except for the weight in her stomach, a greasy film on her lips and palate. Not enough to tip the scales in favor of existence.

Night arrives. Gaps between the isolated streetlights dark as the abyss. Warehouses, abattoirs. Solitary, unobserved. Easy to find an adequate spot. Straight drop of a dozen yards from the top of the wall to the plane of the river below. Never learned to swim. No one to teach, no one to care.

Stones from the weather-shattered wall ballasting her pockets. Scramble atop the wall. Scraped knees and palms irrelevant. Stand up, swaying.

Push off without a twinge of hesitation, falling forward into the embrace of the air.

Smash the water, more a solid interface than a liquid curtain.

Stunned. Sinking so easily. Sensation confused with flying upward. Vision limited to the end of her nose. Chill stabs coreward. No need to inhale yet. Further down will do fine. Drop, drop. Lazy currents finger all her surfaces and holes. Bubbles ascend, a Morse code message to the world left behind. Then the released airstream stops at the empty source.

Now. Breathe deep …

No pain in her chest, just an overwhelming heaviness.

Consciousness persists long enough for Tansy to feel the face-first embrace of the muck bottoming the Thames. Silken silty scarves caressing her cheeks, pillowing her thighs, clasping her ankles. Gone from sight now, totally mired. Still plummeting in slow motion. Yet soon the expected terminal solidity of the riverbed beneath the silt, a final bier …?

But no. Still ever downward. Still retreating from the world above.

Still conscious.

Still alive?

How?

Resignation gives way to a minor consternation. Is even death to be robbed from her?

Still sinking, Tansy awaits extinction, a final solidity.

Time elongates, accumulates uncountably.

Her slow serene fall through the accumulated miles of powdery snowed-down organic debris continues. Like a flake herself, a cast-off diatomaceous shell, she drifts ever deeper.

Tansy’s mind dissolves into a kind of banked nescience. A spark heaped with char.

A tugging at her feet. No strange entity with claws, but just a new, reorienting gravity. If she has been descending like a skydiver with ventral surface presented flat to the earth, now she is rotating slowly through ninety degrees, so that the soles of her stockinged feet—shoes lost in the first impact with the river—are presented to whatever draws her onward.

The absence of enfolding silt was felt first around her feet and ankles, as if they had broken through a crust, were protruding through a sky crust of muck into a less curdled atmosphere. The sensation of being disencumbered moved slowly up her legs, to her groin, then waist, then sternum, then chest—

Her face came free, and she could see.

Within a small compass. Dimly. As if in an opalescent terrestrial fog at dusk.

Standing now at rest on a gritty featureless plain, as if in some bubbled environment. Tansy emptied her lungs and breathed. But what? More water? Air? Some more subtle ether? She moved her arm through the medium that surrounded her, attempting to feel its nature. Nothing familiar. Yet she drew in lungfuls of an invisible, weightless substance, expelled same, but could assign it no name.

Tansy took two steps forward in the random direction she found herself facing. The curved surface of the bubble in front of her receded equally. A glance behind told her that the rear wall had come forward with her steps. Experiment soon proved that no matter which direction she stepped in, her volume of space remained constant, centered around her.

Pointless to discriminate. Tansy strode forward.

The plain extended for miles and miles. So it seemed. Hours upon intuited indistinguishable hours she walked, without sustenance or refreshment or need for same. Nothing varied.