Doyle After Death (15 page)

I got up, a glance at the window telling me it was near dawn. I pulled on my pants and hurried downstairs.

In the lobby of the Ossuary I found Randy and Mohammed in a face-­off with Ruby and Bertram. Ruby was wearing a bathrobe, slippers, and had her hair up in curlers. Bertram, standing protectively a little in front of Ruby, had only his pants on—­just like me. On his belly he had a tattoo of a poker hand with four aces being flashed by a skeleton that I would probably never have known about if this hadn't happened. It seemed you bring your tattoos here with you.

I looked at Bertram and Ruby standing together, both half dressed, and realized he'd been shacking up with her, at least tonight.

“Randy, maybe we should fuck off and leave,” Mohammed was saying, in a low voice.

“Now that sombitch there says something sensible at last,” Bertram said, combing his hair back with his fingers and glaring at Randy.

Randy was wobbling, his lips dribbling frip juice. He seemed to have chewed up a lot of the stuff. So it was possible to get really thoroughly intoxicated here, after all. But it seemed you had to work at it.

“I . . . you have lots of ­people staying here for hardly any
Fi
's,” he said. “I just wanta crib to stay in. Sometimes you get ­people in here and you don't charge them at all. I just need a . . . but I got no Fee . . . feee . . . feeeee . . . onas . . .”

“Seems he's got no Fionas,” I said.

“That's not the damn problem,” Ruby snapped, shooting me a look of irritation. “He jacks folks up for their money and all in front of my inn! I won't have no one living here behaving like . . .”

She broke off as Randy ducked his head and started to sob. “I don't care, fine, cool, what I care, whatever, fuck . . .”

He turned and wobbled out the front door.

Mohammed started to follow him, sighing. I grabbed Mohammed's arm, held him back. “Hey man. He got issues with Ruby? That why you guys hang out in front, here—­and why he's trying to get in here?”

He looked at me in surprise. “How you know that?”

“Just guessing. Way he looked at her.”

Mohammed glanced at the door to see if Randy was listening. Randy was nowhere to be seen. “He's . . . his moms left him when he was nine and he was raised by a neighbor lady. She was nice to him. Black lady, looked a lot like Ruby.”

I turned to look at Ruby. “Maybe if he had some, uh, oversight or . . .”

She groaned. “Goddammit. I did not know why he was hanging around. And now I'm stuck with him.”

Bertram shook his head. “Oh no, girl, don't do it.”

Ruby waved at Mohammed impatiently. “Just go get him, bring him back in.”

Mohammed hurried out, calling Randy.

“Oh, Ruby, girl, come on, don't do it,” Bertram said, grimacing. “Don't let that Randy in here.”

“I got to. Maybe he'll settle down if we give him a home . . .”

“
We?
Lord, woman . . .”

“You do what you want, Bertram. You keep on, you can get your rest on the beach tonight. That what you want?”

“No ma'am, it's not.” Bertram rolled his eyes at me then went up the stairs, to their room.

It was just me and Ruby. She went around behind the counter and picked out a key from the rack.

Then Mohammed came back in, dragging Randy, who was weaving and rubbing his eyes. Randy had frip juice, brown and green, all down the front of his shirt, and he said, “I didn't know you could throw up in this dead place, here, but by God you sure as fuck can.”

Ruby snorted in irritation but slid a key across the counter to Mohammed. “Take him up there, to room fourteen. It's got two beds. You two get some damn rest. He can stay here long as he don't throw up on anything. Got to modify his behavior, too.”

Mohammed nodded eagerly. “Sure, yeah, that's . . . fine, thanks, ma'am . . .”

Mohammed pulled Randy to the stairs—­but Randy broke loose and staggered back to Ruby. It was her turn to roll her eyes as she let him embrace her. She gave him a hug back.

“I love you, Ruby, you're the best, you're the only one who ever . . .”

“Go on, get some rest, kid.”

“Yes ma'am.”

Randy disengaged, and allowed Mohammed to guide him up the stairs.

I turned to Ruby. “Is that you he remembers from the Before?”

“Hell no. 'Course not.”

“What time's it anyway?”

She considered. “Feels like it's about right before dawn.”

­People here tended to think of time of day in terms of how it felt.

“Café open now?”

“Will be in a minute . . . I'm gonna go try and get a little rest and . . .” She turned away. I didn't ask what the
and
represented. I just went up to my room to get dressed.

As it happened, the current shopkeeper of the Avalon Coffee Shop was just opening up, from inside, having put the coffee on and taken the chairs from the tables. She waved me through the door. “Come in if you're coming, hon.”
Dessie
was sewed in green on the breast pocket of her white, rather short-­cut waitress's uniform. She was a good-­sized, solid woman with large brown eyes, a sweep of chestnut hair, a round but sexy face, powerful-­looking thighs. Dessie was the first shopkeeper I ever saw who went barefoot. Her feet seemed almost too small for her body.

“Mornin',” she said, glancing past me toward the horizon where the sun was edging into view. “Come on in.” She pronounced
on
like
own
. I figured her to be from somewhere southern USA. Her lipstick was orange; she had some sort of mascara on. Where do women get that, here?

I took a seat by the steamy window where I could watch the dawn rise.

“Coffee, please,” I said. Enjoying saying it. It was good to be ordering coffee, even after having died.

“You hungry?” she asked, as she brought me a cup of coffee.

“Um . . . got any pie?”

“Silkenberry. Heat it up for you.”

“Sounds good.”

I was thinking, some, about the dream I'd had—­or about the memory I'd had, reenacted in a dream. It had been disturbing.
Marissa.
But I felt, today, that I was having those memories for a reason. It meant something. That helped.

I wondered about my ex, too. Bettie Black. Her real name was Sally something. But she'd been a Vegas performance artist I'd known. Done her
Spirit of Bettie Page
act in Vegas, Detroit, San Francisco, and Burning Man. For a while, we'd lived in her appropriated house, a suburban squat, with its dry swimming pool and pirated electricity, in East Vegas. There were whole blocks of deserted houses seized by the banks, over there.

She looked almost exactly like Bettie Page but a bit heavier. I was the jealous type, at least with her. Exactly the wrong person to be jealous of . . . since she was into “polyamory.”
Good choice in women, Nick.

Probably she was still doing the underground art circuit back in the Before. Back on the planet Earth.

I drank the coffee black. It tasted almost . . . nearly . . .
mostly
. . . just like coffee. And it was stimulating. I was conscious of feeling good as I wiped some steam off the window so I could look at ­people in the square, several men and a woman coming out to gaze rapturously at the morning sun. They were having the other sort of breakfast. I remembered I was to get together with Doyle and his wife this morning. I was truly going to have tea with Arthur Conan Doyle in the afterlife. Death was good. And so was the silkenberry pie. It melted in my mouth. It incorporated the flavor of every berry I'd ever tasted.

Dessie came over to refill my coffee cup. “How's that pie, darlin'?”

“Just . . . amazing. Where you get the, uh, silkenberries?”

“Where we get the coffee beans. Off to the east, in those warm hills over there.”

“How about that perfume of yours that smells like gardenias?”

“Well aren't you alert! Make it myself from gardenias that grow in my garden. Show you how sometime. I crush it up real good.”

Brummigen came in then, and I gestured toward the other chair. He sat down with me, rubbing his eyes. “Might be a storm coming.”

“Yeah? Like, a lightning storm?”

“Not exactly. You'll see.”

“You guys have to be so mysterious all the time?”

“We just let the afterworld do the explaining, when we can.”

I watched Dessie pour him coffee. She went to serve the young woman who'd been wearing a hospital gown the day before. The woman now wore blue jeans and a brown plaid shirt, and she was smiling. She looked more oriented. I waved at her, and she waved cheerily back.

“Brummigen,” I said softly, as Dessie bustled by, “why do ­people here have, you know, a steady job? Doyle was trying to explain it to me, but . . . I mean, waitress isn't all that easy a job. Who'd want to do that in the afterlife if they don't have to? Someone make them?”

“No one makes them. They just step into the job when it's there, or they create their own. Dessie is not just the waitress, she runs the place. Lot of ­people have run the Avalon Coffee Shop. She's the third since I've been here. One of them married someone from another settlement and left. The other one got the Summons and wandered off. ­People do what they enjoy here. She probably likes the job. But it's all about giving you a feeling of home, of connectedness. I was a military man in the Before but I always wanted to own a bar. Spent a lot of time in them. Makes me feel at home. So I took over the bar, after I got here . . .” He drank his coffee, then squinted out through the opening I'd made in the steam on the window. “Yeah,” he muttered. “Storm. I'd better batten the hatches. See you later . . .”

A
fter I finished my pie and coffee I went out to the square, pausing for a minute to absorb some sunlight. It tasted like excellent buckwheat pancakes with maple syrup and peaches. And then it tasted like fresh orange juice and the melt water from a glacier.

Feeling refreshed, I went to the beach and walked around, gazing at the Concord-­grape-­colored sea, till it felt like time to head to Doyle's. I was disappointed when I didn't run into Fiona out there. I was thinking of asking her for a date.

As I headed for Doyle's, I peered at the sky, wondering what Major Brummigen had seen that told him a storm was coming. I saw some skirling, restless clouds, but they didn't seem black or stormy.

I did
hear
something different, though. It sounded like a warped, off-­key choir, singing from the sky . . .

I got to Doyle's, let myself in through the gate, and paused to look at that big stone monument behind the rosebushes.

It was a large tombstone, neatly etched with

S
TEEL
T
RUE

B
LADE
S
TRAIGHT

A
RTHUR
C
ONAN
D
OYLE

~
K
NIGHT
~

P
ATRIOT,
P
HYSICIAN
&
M
AN OF
L
ETTERS

“Ha ha, what do you think of my gravestone?” Doyle asked, as he opened the front door. “Saw you through the window. Jolly old thing, ain't it?”

“Lot of ­people around here have their own gravestones in their yards?” I asked, walking up to the front door.

“There
are
a few in Garden Rest—­some ­people enjoy gazing at their own tombstones in a kind of triumph. A
‘You couldn't keep me down, you lump of granite'
sort of thing, don't you know. But do you not think this one is splendidly etched? It's my pride and joy! My old friend Barrie arranged it for me, when he lived here. That's the exact inscription that was placed on my tombstone after I died in 1930! I do miss Barrie, but the lucky fellow got the Summons and went on walkabout. Haven't heard much from him since. Pity.”

“Barrie?” I remembered reading in his biography about his friendship with the author of Peter Pan. “James Barrie? The Neverland guy?”

“Yes. Fine fellow, though peculiar. And peculiarly fine! But come in and meet Touie. Oh . . .” He suddenly pointed at something behind me. “Is that a black butterfly?”

I turned, and saw that, in fact, a black butterfly was settling on the top of his tombstone. It was a little bigger than a monarch butterfly, wings and body jet-­black.

“Excuse me, old chap,” Doyle said, slipping past me to hurry to the butterfly. He approached it carefully, as if unwilling to frighten the creature away.

Licking his lips in concentration, Doyle bent near the tombstone, and held out his hand. The black butterfly fluttered onto his finger.

“Ah!” Doyle said. “It
is
for me, then!”

I went over to have a look. “For you?”

He held it up to the light. “You see? Someone's used a delicate touch, just the tip of a little finger, to write on its wings! The black butterflies get quite annoyed and deliberately disintegrate if you're not gentle in putting the message on their wings.”

“A message on its wings . . . ?” I could see the light coming through the creature's wings, illuminating the message, gray against black; hard to see but legible. I made out just four letters and a word on one wing, and two words on the other plus a single letter.

ACDI hear

Your Dreams J

“A,
c
,
d
,
i
?” I said. “Oh—­Arthur Conan Doyle, and . . .”

“My initials and
I
,” Doyle prompted, nodding, lifting his hand to encourage the black butterfly to flitter away.

“Oh sure!
ACD I hear your dreams
. That the message?”