A Dark Matter (42 page)

“Yes,” Boats said, “I have. But … so this is me now, where I am, and you’re the you and Dill of 1966, which would flip me out if I already weren’t so flipped out, and to tell you the truth … Jeez, I’m sorry I’m bleeding like this, I hit my head on a branch back there … well, what I was going to say is, I always hoped I would see you again, because I thought you could explain everything to me.”

“Just you wait,” said Dill, bored and hostile.

“You want to stop bleeding? No problem.” Mallon thrust his index finger at Boats’s forehead. The wound stopped pulsing. “All better now. Throw that disgusting hankie thing away, will you?”

Boats felt funny about doing it, but what the hell, it was 1966. Pollution had not yet been invented. He took the handkerchief from his forehead and tossed it behind him.

“Feel better now?”

“Not really. What’s going on?”

“Jesus, kid. You finally see us again after all these years, and that’s all you can say? All right. I’ll explain again.”

He stepped forward and thrust his right arm out straight before him. “Think of this as a highway. In time. A big highway, running through all of time. Okay?”

He thrust his left arm out sideways and held it rigid, making himself look like a demented traffic cop. “And this is a smaller, narrower road, a state highway, not an interstate. They intersect at me, I’m the crossroads here. When you get to me, you can turn off, you can go anywhere you like, because these intersections are all over the place.”

“And that’s how I got to you?”

Mallon lowered his arms and smiled in a way that looked neither warm nor friendly. “Well, it’s more like how we got to you, Boats.”

He turned away and made an actorish flourish with his right arm. “The blood ran down over the dog’s jaw. Stained his muzzle red. Blood ran across the entire surface of the bar. You don’t think that was a
message?”

“You’re giving me a message?” Boats asked.

The party noises exploded all around him, very near, jeering, insane, and hostile. The unseen crowd bellowed and giggled, the invisible woman screamed her laughter. As if commanded to his score by the din, Dilly scrambled upright, opened his mouth freakishly wide, and in a dense, insistent tenor voice that drilled through the surrounding cacophony, blared,
I NEED WHAT YOU NEED I NEED WHAT YOU NEED I NEED WHAT YOU NEED
…

Mallon faced Boats again, flapping his hand in dismissal. In a quiet voice half suffocated by the din, he said, “Weren’t you listening? Go back and start over.”

The deafening noise ceased; the blue light dimmed. The world went dark for the space of three frames: a moment only, almost not noticeable, yet nonetheless a cessation, a total, if however brief, erasure.

The last of the maple trees interrupted Boats’s view of the clearing, yet he still had the feeling it was empty. At this distance, he should have been able to glimpse the figures whose voices had led him this far, but all he could make out through the trunks of the maples was a sunlit oval of tall grasses backed by another thick grouping of trees.

“SPENCER!” he shouted. “DILLY! WHERE ARE YOU?”

… picked up that severed hand and threw it into the corner
, spoke Mallon’s voice
…. dog … carried the hand outside, the wounded mans wrist … having a drink from a glass …

“Sticky with his own blood,” Boats whispered. “The glass was sticky with his own blood.”

How did he know those words?

From the ground beside a large exposed root like an imperfectly buried fire hose, a red and white rag caught his eye, and he bent over and picked it up. Impossibly, it much resembled one of his own unusually large and exceptionally soft handkerchiefs, for which he had a variety of uses. Boats would almost have sworn the handkerchief was his, but it had been left here, wet and discolored with blood, by someone else. He had never been on this island—this shore?—before in his life. Boats dropped the sodden handkerchief next to the bulge of the root, and it folded down into itself, like an origami replica of a duck hiding its head beneath an outspread wing.

Then he remembered where he had heard Mallon’s words. “You said that at La Bella Capri, in …”

Dilly’s voice silenced him before he could say
the basement there
.

… what he needs, what he needs, that’s all he knows, it’s all he thinks about, he’s been like that since he was a teenager … I need, I need, I need, it’s enough already, other people have needs, too, and they don’t go around stealing for a living …

Mallon’s voice broke in, canceling Dill’s:
… the dog tore that hand to shreds … knuckle and gristle … blood dripped over that goddam black muzzle …

Boatman stepped through the last of the trees and looked wildly around, though he knew the clearing was empty. When the illusion that he might glimpse his tormentors snickering at him from behind the trees on the other side of the open patch faded, there swept through him a bitter disappointment that was both specific and familiar. Boatman felt as though he had been wearing it around him like an old coat most of his life. Now, Spencer Mallon’s voice sounded from some invisible source, but that source was not Mallon.

Mallon was not present, Mallon was the absence that turns itself inside out.

Mallon’s voice said,
Violence is woven right into the fabric of our time …

“So you keep saying, but what
good
is that?” Boats asked, moving closer to the place the voice seemed to be coming from.

The tall, mustard-colored grasses thinned out, creating almost a mini-clearing within the clearing. From this hole in the yellow grasses came the voice of Spencer Mallon, saying,
this foolhardy young idiot … wisdom, some of it just came through
.

Boats leaned over the circular parting in the grasses and looked down. Seven or eight inches beneath the fuzzy tops of the grasses sat an irregular tree stump with a ragged edge where the trunk had snapped off. A small black tape recorder was propped against the raised part of the edge. The voice of Spencer Mallon emerged from the little machine, telling him,
Instead of going backward and forward, time goes
sideways.

Boats reached down and picked up the tape recorder. It had been made in Germany, and it worked perfectly. Long before it would fail to perform its function, it was going to be obsolete, a historical novelty, a toy no one any longer would want to use for the purpose of transporting sounds through time.

Throw away that disgusting hankie, will you?
Mallon asked.

“I already did,” Boats said. He looked around the stump and spotted a good-sized rock nestled in the grass about four feet away. Flecks of mica speckled on its sharp angles. Boats took a single stride and raised the black machine over his head.

Before he could smash the German recorder into the rock and forever destroy its useless perfection, Mallon’s voice said,
Last chance, you dope
.

Another cessation; another erasure into absolute darkness.

This time, he emerged from the darkness in utter confusion, addled, feeling as if he had just been shot from a rifle and flown, like a bullet, a great distance at incredible speed. His entire body ached, especially his legs and his chest. His arms felt like noodles, and his head throbbed. Only gradually, he became aware that he was using a wire hanger to drag a thin triangle of polished wood, roughly five feet long at its base, across a dusty concrete floor that had recently been painted a hard, dark blue. The hook of the hanger fit into a hole drilled into the triangular thing, and his fingers were hooked into one of the hanger’s corners. Baffled and weary, Boats stopped dragging the wooden triangle and tried to figure out where he was.

A great deal of the concrete floor had been painted the dark blue he stood upon. Where the blue ended, the floor had been painted a light, khaki brown that extended perhaps ten feet before yielding to a long section painted a dark, forest green. Of the three painted areas, the blue was by far the largest, and the khaki brown the smallest. Boats didn’t get it. He had been on some kind of island, he was almost certain of that, and Spencer Mallon had sent him away to … a huge basement? An abandoned factory?

Boats dropped the wire hanger, and the heavy wooden triangle clattered to the floor. At the center of the polished wood, he saw a familiar set of letters and a symbol he knew well. His father’s trademark, the joined C and B. A short distance away was a sheet torn from one of the notebooks he had used in high school. He walked away and picked it up from the blue floor. On it was written
Lake Michigan
.

“Lake Michigan,” he said, and dropped the paper.

Boats turned around and looked at the broad tan stripe perhaps twenty yards distant. He had been trying to pull the wooden triangle out of the blue and onto the brown. A second sheet of notebook paper lay on the brown paint, and another, far distant, on the green. He trudged onto the brown paint and leaned over the limp sheet of notebook paper. Printed on it in large block letters were the words
Beach or Shore
.

“Okay,” he said. “I sort of get it.”

It took him only moments to move across the painted beach and enter the green sector, and after a little more limping along he picked up another sheet of notebook paper. It said, of course,
Woods or Forest
. He straightened up and saw that the room, already enormous, had enlarged. A long way ahead of him three folding chairs formed a rough circle around some small object he could not distinguish. Previously, he had registered the presence of walls, probably of cement blocks, off to the sides and at the front and back of the basement; now, he saw no walls, nothing that defined the space he was in.

Actually, it was nothing at all, he understood. It was the place where nothing was anything, and everything was everything.

Jason Boatman had a sudden flash of Keith Hayward’s face out in the agronomy meadow, appearing and disappearing, looking sick with anticipation in the flicker of candlelight. Had he noticed that, back then? Boats didn’t think so, but there it had been, the image of Hayward staring at something, sick with hunger, starved, waiting for this dreadful moment. Boats thought he knew who it was Hayward had been staring at, wearing that expression on his face. And it wasn’t who you thought it was, no it was not.