End Time (36 page)

Oddly satisfied in his search-engine prowess, Guy looked back to his quiet rodent friend. The sunlight slanted into the car, illuminating a patch of grimy Formica flooring. The flicker of a mosquito emerged from the dead rat fur. The bloodsucker hovered for a moment in the shaft of sunlight, fat and full of rat blood, and then vanished into the vastness of the Metro-North coach.

The conductor's voice over the PA system announced the next stop. The engineer sharply slowed the train, and a discarded soda can rolled from the rear of the car, picking up speed. The empty can bounced over the late Mr. Rat and leapt along the floor with tinny hollow clangs. In her rush to corral her brats the Mamaroneck mommy caught her toe on the rodent and knocked him from under the seat.

People stepped around or over. And no one seemed to care. Typical.

On the hot slog home from the Fairfield Metro-North station, Guy's feet soaked his cordovan loafers, each step harder than the one before. Familiar faces in town came out of the Dunkin' Donuts and the Chocolate Shoppe, but he ignored them. Instead, a curious sensation came over him; the strong scent of orange blossom and heightened expectation you felt right before a thunderstorm, breathing ozone-saturated air.

And Guy began to see things in the street. At first the visions seemed faint as wisps of smoke; then more vivid. As if the old ghosts of the past, the old inhabitants of Fairfield, still roamed the streets. Drawing closer to home it became easier to see them. Men wore frock coats and buckled shoes; women wore long skirts and plain starched tops; others wore fashionable bustles and top hats. The sound of carriages rattled off the storefronts, and the whoops of little boys playing hoop-and-stick. Like Disney's Main Street USA, layers of superimposed memories, mixtures of old styles and present day, women in high button shoes and parasols next to tourists in Trek sandals and boxy yellow disposable Kodak cameras. God, it had to be the heat.

Except for one vision that made his blood run cold.

A number of horse-drawn wagons rolled toward town, followed by farmhands pulling handcarts in from the countryside. Torches stuck on each corner of the buckboards wafted black greasy smoke, smoldering punk sticks that spewed the heavy scent of burning dung—an old-fashioned disinfectant, Guy seemed to recall. Moreover the carts weren't carrying food from the countryside, but the dying. The stricken piled one on top of the other, too weak to move. The moaning filled the air.

One man pulled a dog cart like a coolie, his passenger a shivering skeleton clutching a blanket, the creature's face and arms a bright yellow, terrified yellow eyes staring out of a shrunken skull. The fevered eyes locked on Guy. The wagons clattered onward, finally vanishing into the past where they belonged.

God, he thought, a few hours in the heat and he'd lost his mind. Guy loosened his tie and shrugged off his jacket. The sweat poured off his brow. He grasped the lamppost by the curb for support.
Pull yourself together, buddy.
Then he noticed old Mr. Fenniman taping up windows. The old coot turned and spotted Guy clinging to the lamppost like a drunk.

“What the hell's the matter with you, Poole? You sick or something?”

Guy stood up straight, wiped his sweating palms on his pants, and tried to look as sane as possible.

“I hope not. Thanks for asking though.”

Old Fenniman dismissed Guy as your typical metrosexual pantywaist and nodded admiringly at his wrapped-up house.

“Think I'm nuts, Poole? They say there are mosquitoes everywhere carrying all kinds of disease. I'm not taking this off till the snow flies, and maybe not even then.”

“Who are
they,
Mr. Fenniman?” Guy asked. The old man frowned; everybody knew who
They
were. Guy left his lamppost and stumbled across the street toward home. “No, Mr. Fenniman, I don't think you're nuts. Not today, anyway.”

Across the street, Poole saw the girl from the stairs—Auntie Whitcomb's great-great whatever she was—sitting on the Finn House stoop. Kinda hard to think of her as anybody's grandmama seeing the youngster in pinafore and puffy sleeves. She'd seen the death carts too, but brightened when Guy came up the path. She jumped to her feet and ran toward him, eyes glistening, then shyly took his hand, fingers strangely cool in his sweaty palm. And he looked down at her, the daughter he'd never had.

Inside, big wags from Corky and Peaches made him kneel to give the dogs their pettings. When he looked again the little girl had vanished. She did that a lot. But it felt nice to see her even so briefly, as though all the “kids” were there to greet him when he came home. “Let's go find Mommy,” he told the dogs.

They found Lauren cutting lengths of plastic from his painting roll on the kitchen table, as though working bolts of cloth. She had taped up the French doors in the den, and the air conditioner was working overtime. Lauren placed plastic over one of the kitchen windows and taped the edges. She paused and looked at her husband, a hot dripping rag.

“You're a mess,” Lauren chuckled. “How'd it go?”

Guy threw his damp jacket over the back of a kitchen chair. Shrugged, and did an impression of Quiche Lorraine, “Thanks for coming. We'll be in touch.”

“Like that, eh?” Lauren nodded to herself and smoothly cut a broad length of plastic. She glanced at Guy, suddenly a little worried he thought her crazy. “Did you see what Fenniman's doing to his house?”

“Yeah. But he's doing it a little different.”

Lauren nodded. “I know—on the outside.”

“Well, the town's going to have something to say about it, won't they?”

Lauren cut another perfectly measured patch of window plastic. “Do you think I'm nuts?”

Define nuts. Brother Rat in the aisle of the New Haven train? Visions of yellow fever death carts in the street? Great girl-granny Whitcomb waiting on the stoop? Guy just shook his head and laughed.

“You know what they say: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. What about the dogs? We have to let them out in the backyard once in a while, don't we?” Guy paused, considering the problem. “What if we screen in the backyard like a big outdoor pavilion?” he suggested. “I can probably buy a used party tent and do the rest myself with extra netting.”

Lauren sealed the last kitchen window, a glint of admiration in her eyes. “You're so smart. That's why I married you. Just don't change your name to Fenniman.”

 

19

House of Stairs

Something had gone terribly wrong at Connecticut Valley Hospital. Eleanor could feel it in her bones. First her good friend, Mrs. Miniver—Kay—looked a little green around the gills at lunch. Instead of Kay's perky self, she seemed lethargic, playing with her food in the plastic trays and not even coveting Eleanor's tapioca.

“You sure?” Eleanor asked Kay, offering her friend the little blue cup. But Kay simply shook her head and grimaced at the thought.

“Have you told anyone you don't feel well? Maybe it's the medications, maybe a stomach virus.”

Kay nodded yes; she'd told someone. Then shrugged at the other part of the question. The medications, a virus? Who knew?

“They gave me some Pepcid for my tummy. And some Rolaids soft chews. I wish they had Jell-O today. I'm in the mood for Jell-O. Lime green Jell-O.”

“I like cherry better,” Eleanor told her friend. And Kay smiled.

Then conspiratorially under hushed breath, “Did the light people come to you too? They didn't come back to me. So they must have come to you. Did you see them?”

For a few seconds Eleanor wasn't sure how to reply; as she mulled over an answer she stared at the other patients in the cafeteria. Nobody in a nuthouse acts normal to begin with, but almost every loosey-goosey in the cafeteria had undergone a subtle change, behaving oddly. Patients did a kind of spastic hand-dance, waving imaginary no-see-ums from their faces, scratching an itch on exposed skin, a chin or forearm, then staring sharply at an invisible bug.
Slap! Got 'em!
One man a few tables off was unable to sit up straight, and actually gripped his chair to keep from sliding off. His eyes sloshed in his head. Vertigo.

“I can hear the mosquitoes talking to him,” Kay whispered at Eleanor. “I think he can hear them too.”

Suddenly two female patients eating lunch under the broad windows made some clattering noise. A very large woman with tightly controlled hair erupted in a bit of inappropriate laughter; the other, a mousy librarian, gasped in scandalous dismay as if assaulted by a pervert. Eleanor saw why:

The head orderly, Mr. Washington, was getting sick in public. A very sweet Uncle Remus of a gentleman, Mr. Washington stood a pace or two away from a patient's lunch table, one hand on the wall, the other across his belly. He had quietly retched onto the floor. You could tell poor Mr. Washington was taken totally by surprise. Completely ashamed, he pressed a handkerchief to his lips and told his two charges, “I'm terribly sorry to disturb your lunch. I'll clean that up right away.”

Which made Kay forget all about visitations from Light People or whispering mosquitoes.

“See?” Kay said. “Mr. Washington could use some Jell-O too.”

After lunch the two friends walked across the carefully mowed lawns back to their rooms. The more benign patients were allowed to stay in one of the nicer residences on the grounds. Eleanor and Kay had dubbed theirs the Gabled House. This time of day patients would often lounge around the downstairs parlor, what the hospital called “comfort rooms,” to play cards or Chinese checkers or watch TV before dinner.

Kay had been working on a jigsaw puzzle at the parlor coffee table—M. C. Escher's
House of Stairs
. Eleanor always felt drawn to the crazy black-and-white picture; the stairs going up and down and slanting side to side while the imaginary segmented lizaroids crawled along one after another on their tiny human feet.

“They're called Rolpens, after a kind of Dutch meat-wrap,” Kay had told Eleanor. “Escher made the creatures up, as there are no wheel-shaped animals in nature that can roll themselves along.”

Eleanor considered that a moment. “I saw a kitten do that once, roll over and over, chasing a ball of yarn. I'll bet a puppy or a monkey could too,” which made Kay laugh.

But this afternoon no one was playing cards in the parlor, and Kay didn't feel like working on her puzzle. The two women went straight to their rooms, opting for naptime instead. Eleanor could hear sighs of relaxation as her housemates knocked off their shoes and stretched out. But what she heard next alarmed her. First, squeaky crepe soles marched along the hall outside: staff shoes. One dead bolt thrown, and then another. A brief pause outside her door; the orderly threw the dead bolt on her room too, locking Eleanor in like all the rest.

“Hello?”

But no one answered; the crepe-soled feet marched away. Other patients softly protested from behind their locked doors. Eleanor stared for a few moments at the locked door. She wanted to call out to Kay, but her friend lived in another part of the gable-front house. A break in routine meant bad things coming. Gingerly Eleanor jiggled the door handle. Yep, locked.

She went over to the window, opening it as wide as it would go; a few inches before it hit a restraining block. God, where the hell did they think anyone would go? What about fire? Oh yeah, every bloody room had a sprinkler in the middle of the ceiling. But what if the sprinkler didn't work?

A muffled shout from the mousy librarian came through the wall: “Eleanor, shut up! Shut up!”

She clapped a hand over her mouth. Talking to herself again? Eleanor looked to the pretty flower stencils at the top border of her room; no, no dancing flowers there, no dancing men. Something far worse this time. The Rolpens from Kay's M. C. Escher puzzle: bug-eyed lizaroids tramping the upper border of the walls, then tucking their heads into their segmented tails and wheeling along like runaway tires. Eleanor's feet began to tingle, losing sensation. Oh, a bad, bad, bad lapse.… Time to look away.

The Light Tesla had come again, but this time not floating outside her window, no—this time inside the laptop,
inside
the machine. The benevolent pulse of light stared out at her. It wanted her to remember, starting from the time she could suddenly walk in Van Horn right up till she crashed through Guy and Lauren's picket fence. Eleanor recalled the road trip with the women from the subdivision, but once she arrived at the ant colony everything became broken and confused.… How had she finally escaped and come to Connecticut? The pulsing glow was asking her to pay attention. To watch what it showed. The Light Tesla was asking her to fix her memory. Okay, if that's what it wanted. If it was that important …

The mousy librarian in the next room pounded on the wall:

“Eleanor, stop talking to yourself!”

She crawled on the bed and put the computer on her lap. The Light Tesla told her to close her eyes. Close your eyes, take another nap, go sleepy sleep.… She closed her eyes and went back in time, back to when she and the ladies from Van Horn went down the tunnel. Marching down, down, down like marching little Rolpens in the crazy Dutchman M. C. Escher's
House of Stairs
.

Yes, she remembered now.…

Two months ago probably, just after she left Van Horn; this is how it began.…

She lay in another bed behind a glass wall. She'd been some weeks in the Ant Colony; long enough to lose track of time, dreamy weeks luxuriating on nice crisp cool sheets, clean air softly blowing on her face, almost like a spa. In a room called: