Are You There and Other Stories (22 page)

Tom dropped from the top of the fence and landed with a jarring thud on his back. It jolted him out of his trance. He looked around, shocked. The dry weeds and prickly grass scratched his skin. From where he lay the fence looked high as a fortress wall. Around him silence prevailed.

Tom got to his feet, reached for the top of the fence, and then felt the tree’s pull again, the irresistible tug, and he knew what was going to happen but was helpless to prevent it.

He jumped weakly, caught the top of the fence, and started to haul himself up even as his mind began to cloud. He hooked one arm over the top, pulled. He could see into the backyard but it was like looking through smoked glass. He already belonged to death. Charlie appeared in the kitchen window with a cup of coffee. Tom cried out feebly then dropped back to the ground, unable to hold on.

He stood at the base of the tree, looking up the huge black column of the trunk. He would climb up into the grasping hand of the branches, the place where dead things lay, and it would absorb him,
eat
him. It might leave a shred of his pajama bottoms, maybe a finger, some remnant. Or perhaps it would leave nothing. The tree devoured innocence. It had been the original tool of corruption. Later it had acquired its own crude immortality, and it required the blood of children.

Then Tom was inside the tree, and it was like being inside the beating heart of a demon. The tree had lived ten thousand times, its dark seed had crossed continents, oceans, growing strong and tall, feeding on the blood and spirit of innocents.

Tom lay back, feeling himself pale toward death. The stink of death was around him. He turned his head and saw the opening, began to drag himself toward it. He tried to think of his mother, of her love, but it wasn’t enough. He felt the tree’s eagerness to survive, its hunger. In his mind he saw a pond in a wooded place near a strange city of glass towers, and he saw the pond turn black as ink and the pallid, grasping hand of a child groping out of its surface then disappearing. He saw a dense yellow mist that crept from a marshland and devoured what it had to devour. He saw a hive of imperishable wasps...

Tom managed to reach the edge of the platform but could do no more. He peered over the brink and saw his stepfather. Charlie shouted something at him from the base of the tree, but Tom couldn’t hear him, couldn’t even read the expression on Charlie’s face. He knew Charlie wasn’t seeing the ancient monster. He was seeing an ordinary oak tree, the one Tom had seen his first time, a beautifully leafed giant with a kid’s tree house nestled in its branches.

Charlie started to climb the rungs. A faint nimbus surrounded him. Tom tried to reach out. He was weak, terribly weak. He sensed the tree’s outrage and it gave him a little extra strength, arousing an outrage of his own. He felt strongly allied with the man climbing up to him. In another second the monster would bite him in half. But Charlie was right there now, only a couple of feet below, looking up at him, a troubled expression deepening the lines of his face. Tom made a final great effort, reaching down with the lead weight of his arm, his fingers twitching, and Charlie let go with his own right hand and touched him.

Something like electric current sizzled between their fingertips. Charlie’s expression transformed instantly into shocked incredulity.

He was seeing it now, seeing what was really there. He
knew
.

The walls began to close, shutting like jaws, and Charlie was seeing that, too. He grabbed Tom’s limp arm with both of his strong hands and he yanked, falling back, using his greater weight to pull Tom out and away, and then they were both falling.

Charlie held onto him all the way down.

*

Tom sat on the deck, his leg in a cast, a book tented open in his lap. His mom brought him a tall glass of lemonade with ice.

“I don’t know how you can read with all that racket,” she said.

Beyond the fence lay a flat expanse, cleared and leveled. A backhoe was busy digging a hole that would eventually be somebody’s basement.

“It’s not that bad,” Tom said. “I kind of like it.”

“Weirdo.”

He smiled up at her. “The weirdest.”

“It’s hot. Do you want to come in now?”

Tom sipped his lemonade. “I think I’ll sit out here and wait for Charlie.”

Are You There

D
eatry took the door because he wanted to see the look on The Butcher’s face. That put his partner Raymond Farkas in the alley, where Deatry assumed he was wet and not too happy. The hallway smelled like mildew and Chinese food. There were two light fixtures between 307 and the stairs. The one closer to Deatry was burned out. Muffled television voices spoke from the other rooms but 307 was quiet.

Deatry stood in the hall a long time, too long, his Stunner drawn but pointed at the floor, finger outside the trigger guard. He had the passkey, but he couldn’t move. A memory of plate glass coughing into the atrium. Suburban sunshine, string music, and shredded shoppers. Blood on the terrazzo. White dowel of bone poking through mangled flesh and skin flap.

The hand he used to hold.

Deatry was sweating. The man in 307 shredded his victims one at a time, with some art, but no political considerations, at least none that Deatry was aware of. Why the paralyzing memory association?

Deatry started at the unmistakable
buzzpop
of a stunner burst. It had sounded from beyond the room on the other side of the door.

He fumbled the passkey, dropped it, used his foot. Wood splintering crash, jamb split, the door banged into the wall, and Deatry went through, sweeping the empty room with his weapon.

Curtains billowed. The burst had come from the alley. Deatry clambered onto the fire escape. November rain blew over him, chill on the back of his neck. There were no lights in the alley, unless you counted the checkerboard windows of the other buildings.

Deatry clanged down the zigzag stairs, iron rail cold on his hand, and dropped to the buckled concrete. The garbage smell was wet and ripe, bags of it piled around the dumpster. One of the bags groaned and stood up, a man. Deatry pointed his Stunner.

“It’s me,” the man said, raising an open hand. “Ray.”

“Jesus Christ,” Deatry said. “Did you hit him?”

“Yeah, but he must have been wearing one of those repelling vests.”

“Did you see his face?”

“Nope.”

“Well—”

“Don’t worry, it’s not a total loss. I got to feel his knife. It’s real sharp.”

Farkas’s shirt was wet, but in the bad light who knew it was blood?

Then Raymond Farkas extended his hand, which was holding a flat module made of black metal. Deatry holstered his weapon and took it. Farkas swayed, and Deatry gripped his shoulder with his free hand.

“He dropped that,” Farkas said, and collapsed forward. Deatry dropped the module himself when he tried to catch his partner.

*

Dawn had begun to pale the sky by the time Deatry returned home and climbed the newly installed set of exterior stairs to the second floor. Inside, he stood at the window with a bottle of beer for a few minutes, not thinking. It was as quiet as it ever got in the grid. Deatry knew his ex-wife, who occupied the lower half of the narrow two-story “slot” house would be waking up soon. Sometimes, when she noticed his light on or heard him shuffling around after being awake all night, she came up to the bolted door that separated the two halves of the house, wanting to talk. Deatry hated that. He referred to Barbara as his ex-wife, but the truth was they had never legally divorced. A divorce would automatically have evoked the Space and Occupancy Act and forced them to vacate the relative spaciousness of the home they had legally shared as man and wife. And the other truth was (at least the truth Deatry allowed), they both loved the house more than they had ever loved each other. The Space and Occupancy Act was only one of many laws designed to encourage the sacred tradition of marriage. The SAOA hadn’t existed at the time of Deatry’s previous marriage. So that particular example of sacredness had been allowed to go to hell in its own traditional manner.

Deatry turned off the lamp, unrolled his Apple VI Scroll, and powered it up. White Echo was waiting for him.

“Hi,” he typed.

“I was almost asleep.” Her words appeared rapidly, a quick and flawless keypader.

“That’s okay. I know it’s late. I just wanted to say Hi.”

“And you said it. But don’t go. I—miss you all day.”

“I miss you, too,” Deatry typed, and he meant it. But he was also glad White Echo, a.k.a. Kimberly, was not an entity who could climb a flight of stairs and knock on his door.

“Are you all right?” Kimberly asked.

“Peachy. It’s Farkas. We followed a tip tonight and he got cut, and it was at least partly my fault.”

“How was it your fault?”

Deatry briefly described the situation at the co-op apartment building.

“I don’t see how it was your fault,” Kimberly said.

“I had the door. And I waited too long. The Butcher must have sensed something was up. Anyway, forget it. How was your day?”

“Delightful and lonely.”

“That’s life in the big city. The lonely part, anyway. Delight is a little harder to come by. You have a knack for it.”

After a long pause, during which Deatry began to think she had been disconnected, Kimberly typed: “It doesn’t HAVE to be lonely.”

Deatry’s fingers hovered over the keypad like hummingbirds assessing the possibility of nectar. He didn’t want to get into it again.

“Brian?”

He gave it another few beats then typed: “Damn it, I’m sorry. Barbara’s at the door.”

“Play dead.”

“Ha! I can’t do that. She knows I’m in here. She was already awake when I got home. The lights were on. She must have heard me come in.”

Lord of the Lies. They floated him above a nasty splinter of his personality.

“Okay,” Kimberly typed.

“I’m really sorry.”

“Yes.” Then: “It’s okay. I have to sleep anyway. Alone as usual.”

Usually he could redirect her mood, but he was bone tired this morning. So even though he knew it was lame, Deatry replied, “I’m REALLY sorry.” And: “Gotta go now.” And: “G’nite.”

He sighed and turned off the Scroll and let it roll back into a tube. Then God played a mean trick on him. There was a tentative knock on the interior door, followed by a slightly more aggressive knock, and Barbara’s voice:

“Brian? I’ve got coffee.”

Deatry turned in his chair and stared wearily at the door. He waited, imagining her on the other side. She didn’t knock again, and after a while her footsteps retreated down the stairs.

*

Deatry and Raymond Farkas were parapolice detectives working a dumpy quarter grid of the Seattle-Tacoma sprawl. The local inhabitants paid their salaries. They didn’t
have
to pay, of course. It was a free country. And the paradetectives were free to ignore the non-paying enclaves, though Deatry had never done that and wouldn’t. The real murder police worked the tonier grids and had the terror watch, which sucked resources like a starving baby.

Deatry slipped down to the crime lab of the real police department, where he had a few friends from the old days. He showed the module to a man who looked like a cross between a boiled egg and a vulture in a white lab coat.

“It’s a Loved One,” the man, who’s name was Stuhring, said.

An old memory stirred briefly in the refuse at the back of Deatry’s mind.

“Those dead person things?”

“Right. Guy’s dying but still coherent enough, got all his marbles rattling around, or it’s a living will thing. They hook him up and make one of these gizmos from his engramatic template. Fries his brain, but he’s not going to live anyway. End of the day, dear old Uncle Ned can still talk to you, respond just like the original, all that. Parlor trick. There was a vogue, then the creep factor killed it.”

“Will this one work?”

Stuhring rummaged around in a junk box, tried a couple of adapters, found one that fit, and plugged the module into a computer.

After a moment,
Hello?
appeared on the screen.

“It works,” Stuhring said.

“No voice?”

He shrugged. “You’d have to noodle around with it. Take the adapter. You can plug it into your Scroll, you want.”

Hello?
appeared under the first Hello.

“Why’s it keep saying that?” Deatry asked. “Is it broken?”

“How do I know? Ask it.”

Deatry typed: “Are you broken?”

They waited, but no more words appeared.

“There’s your answer,” Stuhring said.

“Maybe.”

Deatry had a weird feeling. He unplugged the Loved One and pocketed the adapter.

*

Deatry met Raymond Farkas at a bar on Second Avenue called The Scarlet Tree, though its patrons referred to it affectionately as The Bloody Stump.

Farkas eased into a chair, holding his right hand lightly over his ribs where the blade had gone in, scoring bone. He was older than Deatry, about thirty pounds overweight, and had a walrus mustache, which was going gray.

“Hurt?” Deatry asked.

“What do you think?”

“I think it probably hurts.”

“You’re probably right,” Farkas said. “The doc said it was a razor or The Butcher’s usual scalpel. Guess he’d know.”

It was the middle of the day and they were drinking pints of amber Ale. It didn’t matter, since they were private employees. It was kind of a perk. Deatry drank deep then put his glass down and said:

“I’m sorry, Ray.”

“What about?” There was foam in his mustache.

“Sorry I forgot your birthday, what else? Jesus Christ. I’m sorry I almost got you killed.”

Farkas shrugged. “I had the alley. You flushed him, then it was on me. I blew it.”

“I didn’t exactly flush him.”

Farkas shrugged again. “What else you want to talk about?”

“That module thing he dropped. It was a Loved One. You know what that is?”

“No shit? Yeah, I know what they are.”

Farkas had already finished his amber. He waved at the bartender and she brought over another one. Deatry still had a ways to go on his first.

“Pair a beers for the paradicks,” the bartender said, in a friendly way. She was fortyish, attractive in a twice-around-the-block kind of way. Deatry had once seen the inside of her bedroom and other things.

Farkas grabbed up his fresh pint and drained it by a third.

“You get anything off the Loved One?”

“No.”

“Could be a good break.”

“It won’t talk.”

“Get a techie to cannibalize it. That way you at least get the basics. If it was a relative of our guy then maybe we have a name.”

Deatry drank his ale.

“What’s the matter, you don’t want to take it apart?”

Deatry shrugged. His shrugs weren’t as eloquent as Farkas’s and he knew it.

“Why not?” Farkas said.

“Next time,” Deatry said, “I’m on the alley.”

“Whatever.”

They drank a couple more pints and watched the ball game, which was a disaster. When they left The Scarlet Tree Deatry waited while his partner eased into a cab. Farkas was on his first marriage and had a fourteen-year-old daughter. Deatry once attended a Patriot’s of July party at the Farkas apartment. It had been boozy but not overboard, plenty of kids, loud and friendly, the whole building population joining in, spilling out into the street. Farkas had a
life
. Deatry wanted to keep it that way.

*

Two a.m. Deatry was staring at the chatwindow center screen of his Scroll.

“I miss you,” White Echo, a.k.a. Kimberly, said. “But I don’t want to keep you here on this dumb THING. I need a real flesh and blood man. Brian? Can you understand?”

Deatry finished another bottle of beer and set the dead soldier on the floor next to the rest of the empty platoon.

After a while he typed:

“I understand.”

“We’ve been talking for months,” Kimberly said.

“Yes.”

“We don’t even use the chat enhancements.”

“I thought you liked the writing part.”

“I do. It’s old fashioned and sweet.”

“But?” Deatry typed.

“But I want to meet you.”

Deatry didn’t type anything. Then, being funny, he typed: “I’m married.”

“No kidding? Oh my Gawd!!”

Deatry smiled, but Kimberly wasn’t going to be diverted.

“Listen to me,” she typed.

“I’m listening.” He twisted the cap off another beer.

“We’re the walking wounded. We’ve talked all about that. What happened with my first husband. Your mother and the bomb. The way your father checked out. The way things have gone with your relationships. All that stuff.”

Deatry shifted on his chair, drank, held the cold bottle in his lap.

“But we’re cowards if we don’t try to love again.”

Deatry put the bottle down and typed: “I do love you.”

“Love behind a firewall isn’t real,” Kimberly typed.

“It’s real.”

“Brian. I want to take the next step now. I want to meet you. I want to go for a walk with you. I want to feel your hand in my hand. I want to kiss you. For real. Not just in my head. I want to have a relationship with you. I HAVE to try again.”

“I know.”

“It’s scary.”

“True.” Deatry typed.

“But in a way this is scarier.”

Deatry drank his beer.

“This is . . . too remote,” Kimberly typed. “It’s okay at first then it’s kind of sick. I think.”

Deatry drank his beer.

“So what I’m saying is let’s meet. Like for a cup of coffee. It’s a simple first step. It doesn’t have to be perfect. I think you’re afraid it won’t be perfect, or that your heart will get broken. Heart’s DO get broken. But you still have to take a risk. There’s no life without the risk.”

Deatry put his bottle down, almost typed something, then didn’t.

“So,” Kimberly typed. “Next Monday at ten a.m. I’m going to be at the Still Life Café. You know where that is? I’ll be there.”

Deatry typed: “Will you be wearing a red carnation in your lapel?”

“Sure.”

A long beat. Then, “Brian? If you’re not there, I don’t think I can come back online with you. I mean I won’t. I love you, but this keeps me from what I need. A relationship. In real life. I don’t want to hurt you, but I have to protect my heart, too.”

“It’s okay.”

“You’re not going to be there, are you.”

Deatry stared at the screen.

“Goodbye,” Kimberly typed.