Shuteye for the Timebroker (6 page)

After his disappearance, his house had stood vacant for many years. Eventually, new inhabitants dared to move into the desirable property. They didn’t stay long, however; nor did any others who tried over the next two hundred years. Finally no one could be found who would dare dwell in the house. It had been vacant for fifty years.

Now the many-gabled house stood in the center of its weedy lot, surrounded by a picket fence from which the paint had all weathered off and most of the pickets had fallen. Thick woods began at the rear of the property, and it was not far within those trees that Billy had his little plot of special land.

The stranger came to a halt before the shuttered, decaying house. With his back to his neglected audience, he placed his hands on his wide hips and stared for several minutes at the stark building. The crowd waited with its breath held for the next startling actions of this anomalous figure.

He didn’t disappoint them. Throwing up his pudgy hands he shouted, “This is it!”

The crowd jumped as one.

The fat man whirled around and, for the first time, directly addressed the expectant Blackwooders.

“Freddie Cordovan,” he said, pulling a wallet from his rear pants pocket and flashing an official-looking gold badge. “State Film Bureau. Friends, you are in luck.

“We’re gonna make a movie here!”

* * *

Florence Budd was an old maid. An old old maid. She lived alone in a small, one-room house on Nightshade Lane, far from the physical and social center of Blackwood Beach. Her house resembled a pack animal that had been overburdened for too many years: a prospector’s donkey that had ascended the Grand Canyon one time too many; a nomad’s camel that had been mercilessly driven back and forth across the Sahara; a peasant’s water buffalo bent from years beneath the yoke. Her little cottage had slanted walls that were threatening to pop out of their window frames like seeds squeezed from a grape. Her roof of wooden slates, where soil had lodged over the years, was full of weeds and wildflowers. The ivy climbing over the exterior of the shack seemed to be the only thing holding the building together.

Florence had no running water or electricity. Having been born about 1870 (she wasn’t quite sure of her birth date), she considered such things modern affectations. Oil lamps and a well supplied her basic needs. As for luxuries—she had her books.

Besides a bed and a cupboard and a chair, Florence’s house held little except books. Piled high from floor to ceiling, they were the musty ramparts that shielded her from the outside world, which she had never been too fond of anyway. Every day, in the flickering light of her lamps (the books blocked whatever sunlight might have crept in through the dirty windows), Florence read her favorite volumes over and over, finding new pleasures in their familiar faces and voices.

The books Florence read were those of the American authors who had been popular during her youth. She had seldom cracked the spine of a twentieth-century novel. There was enough earlier genius to occupy her for more than a lifetime. Just to recite the names was to tell all: Hawthorne, Howells, Thoreau, Emerson, Alcott, Cooper, Twain, James, Melville, Longfellow.… The list went on and on.

Florence’s favorite author was Melville. Although she greatly admired his writing, her partiality toward him stemmed from personal, rather than critical, reasons.

Melville was the only author she had ever met.

When she was twenty, her father had taken her to New York on business. It was the one and only time she ever left Blackwood Beach. She didn’t care for the city at all. In fact, the noise and stink and filth of New York City just prior to the advent of the twentieth century was probably what fully soured Florence’s already fussy attitude toward life. But one thing she did enjoy was meeting an author. True, the bearded Melville was somewhat crabby and remorseful, due to his lack of critical and financial success, and didn’t pay much attention to his young female visitor (except to comment that she had “an interesting name”). But still, he was a real author, one of those glorious figures who produced the books that Florence even then relished more than life.

Florence’s father lost all his money soon afterward, in the Great Cathay Bubble of 1901 (which involved investors trying to convince the Chinese population to adopt johnnycakes as their dietary mainstay rather than rice). When his creditors came to attach his house, he thwarted them by setting fire to it and perishing in the flames. Florence barely escaped. After that, she took up residence in the shack on Nightshade Lane, the only property left to her by the creditors.

For forty-five years, Florence lived her bookish, solitary existence without any compunctions. She supported herself by selling herbs and simples to the population of Blackwood Beach. There was much call for such things, and Florence made enough to supply her spartan needs.

In her seventies, Florence suddenly and inexplicably became lonely. She felt it would be rather nice to have someone to talk to every day, someone to draw the water when her joints were acting up. But who would ever consent to share her eccentric life?

One day, Florence was studying a plant catalogue. This particular catalogue came from England, and was called the Thompson and Morgan Seed Catalogue. It was a compendium of the strangest plants she had ever seen. From it, Florence had gotten many of her best-selling seeds, which she grew in a small plot behind her shack. She thought she knew the contents of the catalogue from cover to cover. This day, though, her eyes fell on an entry—without an accompanying picture—that she had never noticed before:

Homo sapiens mandragora
: This rare cultivar, commonly called a mandrake, is offered exclusively by Thompson and Morgan to those discerning customers whose orders over the years have shown their interest in the unusual. PLEASE DO NOT SHOW YOUR COPY OF THIS CATALOGUE TO ANYONE ELSE.

The mandrake is a vegetal cousin of humanity, of a commensurate size and intelligence. It should be sown in early April, in slightly alkaline soil. After three months, it may be harvested at that stage of development resembling a human five-year-old. (Certain of our correspondents report achieving an accelerated development by various methods. However, we cannot recommend such forcing.) Upbringing after harvest is the responsibility of the individual.

Germination rate: 100 percent. Price: £1 the packet. (Please specify sex.)

Florence filled out her order at once, and walked out to the Blackwood Beach post office.

The package arrived on the last day of March.

Florence sowed the single big seed with trembling hands, and then settled in for the three months of waiting.

The plant shot up with remarkable speed. It resembled a huge cabbage, taller than it was wide, with many dark green leaves wrapped around a hidden core. By May, it was as high as Florence’s knees. That was when a thought occurred to her.

If from the mature plant emerged a five-year-old, would its mental development parallel its physical? How would the poor thing, even granting certain inborn knowledge, be the equal of its human peers, who had interacted with the world on a daily basis? Was there some way, Florence wondered, that she could help her son (for so she already thought of the mandrake) catch up to its peers?

Why not, Florence thought, try reading aloud to it?

And so began a most unusual course of prenatal care. Each day, Florence would sit beside the plant and read her favorite books to it. At first, it seemed to exhibit no response to the tutelage. But in June, when the plant was three feet tall, it began to sway gently whenever the climax of a story was reached. Florence was sure her reading was having some good effect.

And on that long-awaited day when Florence awoke to find the outer leaves of the plant fallen away and her naked son standing with closed eyes, still attached by his soles to his stalk, she received confirmation that her efforts had not been misdirected.

As Florence crouched near her son, his eyes opened and he said, “Call me Billy Budd.”

So she did.

* * *

The knife pierced the table just inches from Billy’s hand—which had been reaching for a dish of scrambled eggs—and vibrated in place like a tuning fork. Billy hastily withdrew his offending member and mumbled his apologies. What had he been thinking of, trying to serve himself before the Skandik twins? This unsettling affair of the stranger, with his talk of movies, combined with Billy’s normal anxiousness about his special project, must be disordering his thoughts more than he realized.

It was the morning after the day the stranger—Freddie Cordovan, was it?—had made his apparently aimless peregrinations through the town. Billy sat at the communal breakfast table in Eva’s Boarding House. He had called this generally amiable residence home ever since his mother had died and he had sold her property so as to raise the money to go into the nursery business. The ancestral homestead had meant little to Billy, since he really preferred the open air to any dwelling, and in any case the ramshackle shack was on the point of almost total collapse.

Eva’s Boarding House was a large Victorian structure not far from the seaside. Its interior was as immaculate as its exterior was weather- beaten and flaking. The individual rooms Eva Breakstone let out to her tenants (whom she tended to regard as irresponsible children, no matter how old) were high-ceilinged repositories of massive pieces of old furniture bearing bric-a-brac as a whale hosts barnacles.

The sunny dining room, with its lace curtains, sideboards, and long oak table, was the center of the house. Here the inhabitants met for two meals a day, over which Eva presided like the matriarch of an exceedingly heterogeneous family.

Thin as a spar, blue-eyed and gray-haired, her skin like leather— from years spent in Montana on a ranch—Eva sat at the head of the cloth-covered table. She had witnessed the assault on Billy and had been ready to step in to settle it. But as it played itself out without her intervention, she said nothing.

The twins Billy had inadvertently run afoul of were Gunnar and Gothard Skandik. They were identical trollish brothers with flaming red hair and beards. One day they had shown up in Blackwood Beach, rusty picks over their brawny shoulders, and demanded of the first passerby, “Where we dig?” They had been directed to the limestone quarry outside of town, where they had been employed ever since, having displaced two bulldozers and a steam shovel. Naturally, their work required that they stoke themselves like furnaces at breakfast, and woe betide those who dared serve themselves before the Skandik brothers took their share.

At the proper time, Billy filled his own plate with eggs, home fries, toast, and ham. (Billy had once tried living on a diet of sunlight and water. Although it was possible for him to subsist on such ethereal food, such a diet reduced his thoughts to an arboreal slowness, and he much preferred normal human fare.) He ate rather absentmindedly this morning, not paying much attention to the talk of his fellow diners. His mind was busy with his own problems.

Toward the end of the meal, as people were shuffling about before departing, a stray phrase seeped into Billy’s awareness and made him take notice.

“—at the town meeting.”

Billy looked up from his half-eaten food. The speaker was Max Myrtlewood, a tall fellow with a paunch that testified to the allure of Eva’s cooking, who washed dishes at Emmett’s Roadhouse.

Billy caught Myrtlewood’s attention and asked, “What’s this about a town meeting, Max?”

“Was in the paper this morning,” said Myrtlewood. “Musselwhite’s called one for noon today.” Milo Mussel white held the post of town coordinator for Blackwood Beach. “Topic’s gonna be this movie business, and what’s to be done about it. Hear that stranger’s gonna give his side of the story, ’fore we vote on anything.”

“Thanks,” Billy said. “I’ll be there.”

Myrtlewood smiled somewhat suggestively. “Well, don’t get so busy with your project up at Mowbray’s that you forget.”

Billy’s tinted blood suffused his face, causing him to blush verdantly. Damn it, that was the trouble with living in such a small town. Everyone knew all your business. This was the first time anyone had mentioned it aloud to him, though, and he felt suddenly like a pervert of some sort, just for finally yielding to his natural urges.

The room had cleared before Billy could compose himself sufficiently to make a retort, and so he got to his feet with words bottled frustratingly up inside him and headed out.

The gibe had made Billy more concerned than ever about his prize plant. He realized that with all the excitement yesterday, he had made only one visit to it, in the evening. On the spur of the moment, he determined to delay opening his shop and visit the month-old growth first thing.

Out on the brick sidewalk, Billy sniffed the delightful spring air. May was such a lovely month! Billy’s pulse quickened with the aura of vegetable entities resurging after the trauma of winter. He inhaled deeply, savoring the loamy green fragrance of the cool air.

Billy’s sensitive nostrils detected a slight tinge of something rotten in the air. Irrationally, he attributed it at first to the presence of the Film Bureau man, until he remembered the whale. Looking in the direction of the hidden beach, Billy shook his head. Something was going to have to be done about that. Perhaps he would bring it up at the town meeting.