The Live-Forever Machine (12 page)

“I know, I know,” Eric said. “The way he described it, it was like some kind of magic spell.” But once again he remembered Alexander’s description of breathing water into his lungs, the icy chill deep inside his body, devouring him. No, no, it couldn’t be true, Eric told himself fiercely. Things like that just weren’t possible.

“It’s like I said yesterday,” Chris told him.
“This thing sounds like a big con job. I bet all that stuff in the cellar is utterly stolen. He’s probably been swiping it from the museum for years.”

“Probably,” Eric said. “He was just making everything up.”

But why, then, couldn’t Eric stop believing it? He wanted to believe Chris, but he just couldn’t. Alexander’s ancient smell, his creviced face, all the dates, events and names he had effortlessly recited: all that, Eric supposed, and maybe even the massive hoard in the cellar could be explained away. But his guts wouldn’t let him do that. There was a part of him that knew with unshakable certainty that Alexander was telling him the truth. And he’d been trying to shove it out of his mind so he wouldn’t have to feel bad about not taking the scroll. And why the hell should he feel bad anyway?

He began walking around the living room, picking up books from the coffee table and sofas, slamming them back onto the shelves. The heat was like a hard-knuckled fist pushing insistently into the centre of his chest.

“What are you doing?” Chris said.

“Cleaning up. This place is a mess.” He scowled at the dust that had collected around the legs of the furniture and was suddenly
reminded of the cellar, the cobwebs, the clinging moisture, the neglect.

“He just wanted to use me,” he said angrily. “He just wanted me to keep the scroll away from Coyle.” He shot another paperback into the bookcase. “He didn’t even care about how dangerous it might be for me.” He saw th
Museums of the World
book on the floor and kicked it contemptuously under the sofa. “All he cares about is himself and his dusty old things—” He cut himself short. He’d forgotten who he was talking about, his father or Alexander.

“Well, forget it,” Chris said, watching Eric a little uneasily. “It’s finished. You got rid of the locket, so that’s it.”

“Yeah,” Eric said. “Yeah.” He slumped into one of the sofas, looked restlessly around the room, and suddenly wanted to be somewhere else. “Why don’t we go back to your place?” he suggested. “It’s cooler there.”

“Sure. What d’you want to do?”

“Maybe we could play computer games or something.”

“You hate computer games.”

“You could show me that new graphics program your Dad sent you. Or maybe there’s something good on
TV
. This one’s too small.”

“All right, yeah,” Chris said.

“Good.” Eric heaved himself up. Maybe he could shut his mind off and refuse to follow through with any of the thoughts. After a while it would dissolve completely, wouldn’t it? If he fooled Chris, maybe he could even fool himself.

Someone was yelling on the street outside the house. Eric walked over and pushed aside the blind. On the steps of the museum, a street vendor had drawn a large crowd and was demonstrating a new ice-making machine.

But it wasn’t his voice that Eric was hearing.

It was Jonah’s. He’d shambled out onto the street and was standing on the fringes of the crowd, pointing and hollering.

“He’s the one, him, there!” he proclaimed. “That’s him, sure as I’m me.”

Eric followed the line of Jonah’s outstretched arm and index finger. His eyes passed over the people on the museum steps, some looking at Jonah in bewilderment, others turning away, indifferent and impatient. Then Eric’s eyes settled on a man in black jeans and a matching T-shirt at the back of the crowd.

“There, there, there!” Jonah wailed, hurtling his arm forward.

“What’s going on?” Chris asked, coming over to the window.

“Jonah’s yelling,” Eric said softly.

“The crazy guy who fishes? Who’s he screaming at?”

Eric pointed across the road. “Chris, that’s him. Coyle.”

“Him? Really?”

Eric nodded. “I wonder why Jonah’s shouting at him like that.”

“And he’s supposed to be as old as Alexander, huh?” said Chris scathingly. “He only looks about thirty.”

“Doesn’t mean a thing,” Eric said. “That’s not the way it works. You’re just frozen at the same age—”

“I thought you said you didn’t believe any of this!” Chris said.

“I don’t know anymore,” Eric said impatiently, looking out the window.

Jonah was still raising hell on the sidewalk, and the crowd was getting nervous, breaking up. The ice-cube salesman tried to shoo him away, but Jonah held fast. No one appeared to care about Coyle; no one was looking at him. All eyes were on Jonah. They knew he was crazy. People were laughing at him now. Coyle left the museum steps and started down the street.

“Why’d you keep on agreeing with me?” Chris demanded. “If you believed it all along?”

“Let’s follow him,” Eric said, letting the blind swing back into place.

“Eric, he’s not immortal—”

“Well, maybe we can find out who he really is, then.” Eric walked out into the hall, towards the front door. “You don’t have to come.” Knowing that Chris would, though. He always did.

“Utterly stupid,” Chris muttered.

Dazed by the late-afternoon heat, Eric paused outside the house, shielding his eyes.

“Let’s stay on this side at least,” Chris said, as Eric made to cross the busy road.

They kept well back, following Coyle down the scalding street. From across the road, Eric watched as Coyle gazed intently all around—at the cars and trucks that growled past, the streetlights, the billboards flanking the street. He tilted his head back to look up at the peaks of the skyscrapers. He paused to press all the crosswalk buttons, examine the instant-banking machines. He paused in front of a computer shop, looking at the machinery on display, then went inside.

The street noise swirled in vicious eddies around Eric’s ears. For the first time he could remember, he felt overwhelmed by the frenzied movement and colour of the city. It didn’t make any sense to him, the billboard signs flashing
the latest news, the lurid window displays. And where did all these people come from, hurtling down the sidewalks with their briefcases?

What on earth did they
do?

Coyle had reappeared, holding a plastic bag. Further up the street he stopped to peer at a new highrise through the sidewalk hoardings around the construction site. He watched, fascinated, as the huge crane swung round and round, lifting girders and concrete blocks. His hands, Eric noticed, were twitching by his sides. Then he raised his arms and, like the conductor of a symphony, seemed to be urging the construction onwards, hastening the building’s rise.

“He’s crazy,” Chris mumbled. “He’s a freaking maniac!”

Suddenly conscious of people watching him, Coyle began walking again. He lingered for a moment in front of a fast-food restaurant, watching the people on the other side of the glass devour their plastic-foam meals.

“Alexander wasn’t lying,” Eric said. “He’s telling the truth, Chris.”

Chris groaned. “How do you know?”

“Look at him. He’s acting like some kind of tourist. This is all new to him!”

“So?”

“Remember, Alexander said he trapped
Coyle in the Louvre, and locked him up for more than a hundred years?”

“Yeah, right,” said Chris expectantly.

“He only got out recently—I don’t know, say a year or two ago, something like that. So imagine closing your eyes in 1900, and then opening them again to this! All this new machinery and technology! You’d be completely amazed. No wonder Coyle’s gawking at everything. Look at him!”

He’d paused in front of a window display of televisions, stacked in a square five across and five high. He stared, riveted, at the glowing screens. Each
TV
was tuned to the same station, and Eric felt a little dizzy watching the twenty-five identical images move in uncanny unison. A wrecking ball was swinging, slow and heavy, into the side of an old stone building. A section of the wall crumbled and fell, was crumbling and falling, had crumbled and fallen—twenty-five times. A news reporter appeared in the foreground of the picture, talking into the camera.

Eric could hear Coyle’s laughter rise above the sound of the traffic. He was laughing at the swirl of dust, the crumbled masonry, the power of the wrecking ball. The way of the future, Eric thought, with a hot chill running along his back.

“I don’t know,” Chris was saying slowly. “I don’t know about this at all.” But Eric could tell he was thinking about it, wondering if it could be true.

Coyle suddenly turned and quickened his pace, disappearing into the subway entrance.

“Let’s keep up,” Eric said, and they dashed across the street, swerving around honking cars. Eric led the way down the subway steps, along the gleaming tiled corridor to the turnstiles, then down again on the dizzyingly steep escalators to the long platform. The heat seemed even more palpable here, with steam rising in broad swaths from the tracks and the darkened tunnel openings. People stood fanning themselves with newspapers and paperback books.

“Where the hell is he?” Chris whispered as they made their way slowly along the platform.

“Nowhere, nowhere,” muttered Eric on their second pass. He could feel the column of stifling air being pushed through the tunnel ahead of the oncoming train. He felt the familiar vibration through his feet, heard the growing rumble; then the subway exploded into the station. Out of habit, Eric glanced at the conductor’s window, but his father wasn’t there.

They stood back to watch as people got on or off the train. No sign of Coyle. The doors
snapped shut, the whistle sounded twice, and the train lurched on into the tunnel, leaving in its wake the smell of oil and machinery.

“Lost him,” Chris said.

The grit from the tracks swirled up and stung Eric’s eyes. He turned away. A drunk teetered perilously at the edge of the platform, and then staggered back. Eric suddenly thought of his mother. Had it happened here, at this very station; had she stood right at the edge of this platform, waiting, waiting? How could you make yourself do it? He watched as the train’s rear lights disappeared into the darkness.

Eric watched from his window as the street filled with cruisers and fire trucks.

Red lights swirled in the mid-morning heat. The wail of sirens had given way to the crackle of static from police radios and walkie-talkies. Police officers were cordoning off the sidewalks with thick yellow tape. They started turning back traffic, clearing away the street vendors from the museum steps. An officer was trying to dispatch the hotdog seller, gesturing with his arm. The other man just shrugged and offered him a hot dog. The officer hesitated and then took it.

Two black trucks with
C.E.S
. stencilled across their sides were allowed through the barricade at the intersection. The trucks’ back doors shot up and people in leather armour jumped out.

“City Emergency Services,” Eric muttered. What was going on?

They began rolling out heavy equipment,
electric generators and pumps, pushing them up to the manhole covers in the middle of the road.

“Okay, let’s open ‘em up!” one of the men shouted.

The manhole covers were levered up with crowbars and metal ladders were hooked into place. Men wearing oxygen masks climbed down, and machinery was lowered after them.

There was a sharp knock at the front door. Eric started. It was one of the Emergency Services workers, sweat glistening on his broad face. An oxygen mask dangled around his neck, hissing faintly.

“Are you the only person here?” he asked.

Eric nodded. “My Dad’s at work.”

“We’ll have to ask you to leave the premises temporarily,” the man said. “There’s a gas leak in the vicinity. It’s nothing serious. You don’t need to take anything with you.”

“Right now?”

“Yes.”

Eric stepped out onto the street, locking the door behind him. Across the road he could see an arrowhead of uniformed personnel moving up the museum steps against the tide of evacuating visitors and staff. The fire marshal stood at the top, speaking into a walkie-talkie.

“Where’s the leak?” Eric asked, but the Emergency Services man was gone.

They were evacuating the highrises on either side of Eric’s house, and the sidewalk was now teeming with men and women in business suits, people in dressing gowns with small children, listless teenagers. Eric had never seen any of them before.

A woman with a megaphone was giving directions, but Eric hesitated, watching the museum steps, wondering if he’d catch sight of Alexander. People jostled around him impatiently.

“It’s the heat,” he heard someone say.

“There was one like this just yesterday,” another man said. “Gas line rupturing from the heat.”

“I can smell it,” a woman said anxiously. “I’m sure I can smell it.”

“I can, too,” said someone else.

“They say it’s coming from the new mall.”

“The whole block’s going to blow if they don’t shut it off.”

“I can smell it now, too!”

A ripple of hysteria went through the crowd.

“Cover your face!” someone shouted.

“Is it poisonous?” a worried voice wanted to know.

“Why do you think those guys are wearing masks?”

Eric sniffed the hot air. He couldn’t smell a thing. Behind him, a woman screamed and the crowd surged ahead in a spasm of alarm. People were starting to push, and he was swept along in the current, hemmed in on both sides, shoved up against the person in front of him.

“Stay calm,” the woman with the megaphone said. “There is no cause for alarm.”

“I can’t breathe!” someone shouted up ahead.

“It’s choking me!”

“Hurry! Run!”

“Please continue to evacuate in an orderly fashion,” the woman instructed them.

The crowd wasn’t listening. It suddenly occurred to Eric that someone was going to get crushed, and it was probably going to be him.
Skinny Geek Snapped in Two
—he could just see the headlines in tomorrow’s papers. Someone grabbed his arm. He yanked it free, an obscenity on the tip of his tongue. It was Chris.