Peculiar Tales (11 page)
Authors: Ron Miller
“I cannot. I won’t be permitted.”
“Will no one come?”
“I couldn’t allow them to. That’s why I asked you to remain silent. The Synod must never know you exist because you are a contradiction and it does not tolerate contradictions; you are a truth and it does not tolerate truth. You do not only
not
exist for the Synod, you
cannot
exist. At best I could hope that knowledge of your existence would be merely suppressed but I fear the Synod would think that too dangerous. No, you would be destroyed. This moon would be eliminated. They can do such things, I assure you.”
“Then you are going.”
“I have no choice. Vanity made me tell the bishop too much already. It’s probably just as well for both of us that he’s no scientist.”
“You could do what you did to the others.”
“No.” He thought for a long moment. “No, that would be impossible.”
The doctor sat at his lab bench and rolled up his sleeve. He quickly sterilized a syringe and slipped the needle into a vein in his forearm. Carefully, he withdrew a vial of blood.
“I will be alone.”
“I’ve thought of that. Your expertise in organic chemistry has always astounded me. Your knowledge and accomplishments are far beyond my own, beyond anyone’s.”
“Thank you. But, as you say, it does come naturally.”
“I have great confidence in that ability. I am going to leave something for you. A kind of blueprint. You will probably—surely—never hear from me again. God willing, you will never hear from humans again. But I do hope that someday they will hear from you.”
There was a steel tube about four inches in diameter protruding from the floor of the laboratory. It had a kind of gate near its upper end, something like that found on the pneumatic tube systems found in banks and large businesses. The doctor opened the gate and slid the blood-filled cylinder inside. He closed the gate and pulled a lever. There was a hiss and a thump.
“Doctor?”
“It’s time.”
The doctor rolled down his sleeve and began assembling the parts of his environment suit.
“Doctor...”
“Yes?”
He waited for several moments, but there was no reply. The room was silent.
Once in his suit, he clambered into the air lock and deliberately did not look at the room behind him as he pulled the door shut.
The bright, icy surface crunched beneath his feet as he crossed the distance to the shuttle, looming before him like a vast, silvery gumdrop and looking even larger than it was because of the deceptively near horizon. He could see the bishop waiting for him by one of the landing struts.
“We have only a few moments to spare, Doctor. What were you doing?”
“I...I wanted to leave a gift.”
The bishop sniffed in displeasure. The doctor could clearly hear it over his radio. “I see I arrived not a day too soon. Heresy, doctor, is one thing, but paganism...I’ll make no mention of this in my report, but I can assure you that I plan to urge the Synod to exert its every resource to your rehabilitation.”
The doctor wordlessly climbed the ladder attached to one of the landing struts, clumsily and awkwardly since he was eight years’ out of practice, and cycled through the spacecraft’s lock. The pilot mechanically showed him his acceleration couch, made sure he was strapped in and climbed back to the cockpit above. The bishop, who was strapped in only a few feet away, said nothing. The doctor saw no reason to say anything either.
There were a lot of strange noises and then the shuttle lifted. It was less traumatic than the doctor had thought it would be. Only a little more than 0.2 kilometers a second. He looked through the large porthole at his right. The surface of Enceladus was rapidly receding. The shuttle was taking off directly away from the south pole and the long, parallel, scar-like fractures once dubbed “tiger stripes” by their discoverers were well displayed. From deep within one a feathery plume of ice rose slowly into the black sky. Then another, and another. Until after a few moments the sky beneath the speeding shuttle was filled with sparkling fans of ice, like shimmering auroras. Sunlight, fracturing itself on the dust mote-sized crystals, made the translucent plumes look like iridescent insect wings. It was indescribably beautiful and for a moment the doctor had a vision of the tiny moon splitting open like a chrysalis, releasing a vast, luminous butterfly into the solar system. The display was as much a gesture of farewell, he realized, as it was a promise. He pressed the palm of his hand to the plastic window and whispered, “
Au revoir
, Enceladus.”
ONE RAINY NIGHT AT THE PUB
M
ary had been for over an hour nursing the only glass of gin she could afford that day when the tall woman came into the pub. Mary hadn’t planned to be there—certainly not this late in the evening when she should have been finding a gentleman to entertain. But it was raining...a bleak, persistent drizzle that penetrated to the bone. A depressing miasma that soaked both clothing and spirit. Mary had perhaps abandoned her prowl sooner than she should have, but the night was too depressing and enervating. Even though the pub was warm and dry, the dreariness and soul-heaviness of the evening seemed to have penetrated even there. The normally rowdy gang from the nearby textile factories, warehouses and shipyards was morose, solemn and wordless. The normally bawdy greetings she’d been accustomed to had been replaced by reluctant grunts of acknowledgment before thoughts turned back to ale, gin and whiskey. Mary had decided to finish her gin and give it up. She would go back to her flat, find something to eat and then get some sleep. Do her good to get in early for a change anyway. But then the strange woman had entered.
The newcomer hovered in the doorway for a moment as though vaguely unsure of where she was, or perhaps surprised. She was very tall—her hat brushed the lintel as she entered—but was made to seem even more so by her excessive thinness. She was dressed entirely in black. The contrast gave a blue cast to her chalk-white face. There was a hard, sparkling sheen to her, as though she were covered in broken glass. It must still be raining, Mary decided. The stranger carried no umbrella—which probably explained her need for shelter wherever she might find it—carried nothing but a black bag not unlike those favored by doctors.
Mary was the only woman sitting at an otherwise empty table and the stranger spotted this immediately. She came over, apparently oblivious to Mary’s curious scrutiny, which the latter made no effort to conceal. Mary made no apologies to herself for her frank gaze. The strange woman was indeed a curiosity. Not because it was unusual for a woman to be in the pub—Mary and many of the others who shared her particular profession were more or less regulars, when they could afford it. What was unusual was to see a woman of the stranger’s station. From her bearing to the quality of her costume it was more than evident that only the bad weather could have driven such a creature to even consider entering a such a place a this one. Yet she seemed neither embarrassed nor nonplused by where she’d found herself. Instead, she’d glided across the room as though she had been on silent wheels...or, better yet, suspended weightlessly by invisible strings, like a marionette. The pale face looked like an alabaster egg balanced atop an ebony column. But it was the woman’s eyes that gave Mary some pause for thought. She’d never seen anything quite so uncanny. They were blue, but a blue as pale as glass. At first she’d thought the woman had no irises at all, but instead only pinpoints of black set in the middle of dead white eyes.
The woman came to a halt a few feet from Mary’s table, the uncanny eyes looking somewhere past Mary’s right shoulder. It was like trying to win a staring contest with a cat. It was obvious what the woman wanted. Mary finally gave in and asked, with a politeness driven by curiosity, “Won’t you have seat, love?”
The stranger bent gracelessly, like a carpenter’s rule folding, and said “Thank you” as she took the chair on the opposite side of the table. She placed the black leather bag she’d been carrying next to the chair, carefully, as though it contained something of value, something fragile. Her voice had been barely above a whisper, but surprisingly youthful and sweet. Mary immediately readjusted her estimate of the woman’s age from forty to thirty. She adjusted it again when the woman unpinned her hat and removed it, carefully setting it on the edge of the table. The woman certainly was not more than thirty years old. She had jet black hair drawn back so tightly and smoothly it looked like ebony lacquer. The forehead beneath was broad, smooth and as translucently white as alabaster. The colorless eyes, pale cheeks and unpainted lips gave her the appearance of something carved from fine marble. It was a beautiful face—the nose straight and slim, the cheekbones strong and slanted, the mouth generous—but one as cold as ice.
“Not a fit night out for a lady,” offered Mary.
“No...no it is not,” agreed the other.
“Chill you to the bone it will.”
“Yes. It is very unpleasant indeed.”
“I just popped in to get a little warmth in me. Wouldn’t normally patronize such an establishment, you understand.”
“I understand perfectly,” she agreed, gesturing for the publican. When that gentleman arrived, she ordered a Madeira. “May I offer you something in exchange for your kindness in allowing me to share your table?”
“It was nothing! My pleasure and glad of the company I am! But I wouldn’t turn away another glass, I wouldn’t.”
The stranger dismissed the publican with a disdainful wave of her long, gloved fingers, a gesture Mary would have given anything to ever be able to get away with.
“Even if it weren’t so wet,” Mary said after her freshened glass of gin arrived, “it wouldn’t be safe for a lady to be out at night, not in this part of London.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the Ripper, of course! Oh, it fair makes me shiver to me bones to even think of such a monster!”
“It is terrible...a terrible thing.”
“Terrible indeed! Gut’s ‘em like fish, he does! And I hear he does even worse, things even the coppers don’t like to talk about.”
“A man like that would be a monster.”
“And not a clue no one has! The Ripper’s like ghost he is. No one knows if he’s tall or fat or thin or short or old or young. Got the coppers chasing spooks up and down every street and what good have they done? Didn’t save poor Kate Conway from being all torn up, God save her poor soul.”
“I know. Everyone has their own theory about who it might be.”
“Sure and they do. You know what I think? I think it’s one of them mad do-gooders, them what comes around trying to save all the fallen souls in Whitechapel. Someone who figures if he can’t save ‘em he’ll just wipe ‘em out. Thinks anyone not as good as him is no better than a dog.”
“You might be right. Some of those reformers do have very superior ideas about themselves. For myself, I think a professional man was...is involved.”
“Oh, you have your own idea do you?”
“As you said, who hasn’t? I think there was a professional man, a man of very high standing in society, a man respected in his field and loved by friends, family and colleagues, a man who was led astray by one of these...one of these women. He contracted a loathsome, terrible disease, a disease that destroyed him physically, destroyed his family and reputation. Think of the man’s poor little children! And think of his wife, her life and good name ruined, as she had to watch what was once the finest man in all England destroyed first morally, then physically and, finally, mentally.”
“Oho! He went crazy did he! So you think it’s revenge, do you?”
“I do. Revenge is a very good reason for murder, don’t you think?”
The publican called time and his patrons reluctantly began to file out into the street. Mary stood and tucked her threadbare wrap around her shoulders.
“Fair gives me the creeps going out in the dark, after what we been talking about.”
“Do you live far?”
“No, dearie, not far at all. Just a few blocks, but...”
“I’d be glad to walk with you. There’s safety in numbers, you know. The Ripper’s never been known to accost a lady who was not alone. I can take a cab home once we reach yours. I’ll be perfectly safe.”
“That’s very kind of you, I’m sure. And I won’t say I’m not grateful. But your husband, surely...”
The stranger didn’t answer for a long moment, but only stared at Mary through her uncanny eyes, with that same unfocussed, distant gaze one sees in the blind. She clutched her black bag to her chest like a mother protecting a child from some unexpected threat and said:
“I am widow.”
“Oh, dear! I
am
sorry...”
Outside, the rain had stopped but the street was glistening like oil under the flickering gaslights. Mist was rising from the pavement, joining the fog that was rolling down the empty lane. Mary was thankful for the company of her new friend: the fog would be impenetrable long before they reached her rooms.
They walked in silence until the lights from the pub had been swallowed by the gloom behind them. They were like two dark fish moving slowly through the sunless abyss.
“You must think me awful rude,” said Mary, “but I never told you me name. It’s Mary, Mary Kelly. Me friends call me Ginger, you know, because of me hair.”
“My name is Jacqueline,” said the other.
“Jacqueline! Why, I bet all
your
friends call you Jackie!”
“Something like that.”
THE TERMINATOR
C
arl Skittle murdered, in cold blood and with malice aforethought, three people on the evening of August 14, 2032. The first was his wife, Mona, whom he had found (as he had long expected he would) in the passionate embrace of his erstwhile best friend, Harry. With an expression of only deep regret on his long, lugubrious face and surprise on hers he dispatched her with a single shot from his double-barreled shotgun. The remaining barrel he used on Harry. That would have been the end of it so far as Carl had been concerned, but some busy body had called the cops and, wouldn’t you know it, after everything was said and done there was a policeman dead, too. Carl was sorry about that, but it couldn’t have been helped and, besides, the busy body neighbor was just as much at fault as he was, to his way of thinking. But they can only hang you once, he figured, so it really didn’t matter too much in the long run.
The trial was short and to the point since Carl didn’t see any reason to deny what should have been as clear as water to anyone. He’d murdered Mona and Harry in cold blood and with malice aforethought and that was pretty much all there was to it. He knew what he’d be in for when he did it and was man enough to take his medicine. Besides, what would be the point to living without Mona, even if she was a faithless slut?
So Carl drifted through the trial, only half listening to the prosecutor trying to make a cut-and-dried case sound a lot more dramatic than it really was, but elections were coming up so that was perfectly understandable, and not listening at all to his defense attorney, who had been appointed by the court and for whom Carl had only contempt. He knew the man couldn’t care less whether he lived or died. He’d get his fee from the county either way.
The prosecution rested its case, the jury went off to deliberate, which it did only just long enough to justify sending out for a free lunch, and returned with a verdict of guilty on all counts in hand. The judge thanked the jury for doing their civic duty and, after asking Carl to rise to face his twelve peers, sentenced him to death. Carl shrugged his shoulders and wondered what was going to be for dinner that night.
It was ham, sweet potatoes and green beans. The next morning, Carl was taken from his cell by one of the warders and led through a maze of green corridors to small room with big wooden door in one wall and a window with a counter in another, like a ticket booth.
The officer in the window said, “Number one five oh six, Carl Skittle?”
Carl said that was him all right and the officer said to come over and sign this paper. Carl came over and signed the paper that was pushed toward him without even glancing at it. The officer didn’t glance at it, either, as he tossed it into a wire basket labeled “Condemned”. Muttering “One five oh six, one five oh six” under his breath, the officer finally located a brown paper bundle among several similar bundles. He put this on the counter and shoved it at Carl.
“It’s your stuff,” he said. “Sign this receipt—right there on the line—and you can take it.”
Carl reached for the ball-point pen and the officer said “You can check to make sure you got everything first if you want” in a tone of voice that suggested that he’d much rather Carl didn’t. To his relief, Carl didn’t want to.
“Okay,” said the officer, handing Carl an envelope. “Here’s your death sentence. You gotta sign a receipt for that, too. Right here, on that line. Okay. You better read it soon’s you can, you only got a week you know.”
Carl nodded, tucked the bundle under his arm and the envelope in his back pocket. The warder took a big ring of keys from his belt, found one and unlocked the heavy wooden door. It swung open and Carl blinked for a moment in the flood of brilliant sunlight that poured into the dingy room. It must still be morning, he thought.
Once out on the sidewalk he turned to the right—for no particular reason, one direction being as good as another—and walked until he found a little coffee shop on a corner. He went in, found an empty booth and threw himself onto the cracked vinyl seat. He tore open the envelope and fished out the ten dollar bill it contained. There was also a folded sheet of paper but he set that aside on the table as the waitress came over to take his order. She was a pretty girl but Carl hardly noticed her. He’d had eyes only for Mona and now that she was gone every other woman was like a pale ghost to him.
She brought him coffee and a promise that his cheeseburger and fries would be following soon. He sipped the hot java while reading the paper that had been in the envelope. It was mostly a bunch of legalese he couldn’t have figured out even if he wanted to, but the main thing was the address at the bottom:
Arthur Polyp
118 Elm Street, Apartment 5
Borough of Baltimore
Northeast Corridor
He knew where Elm Street was. Then his cheeseburger and fries showed up so he wadded the paper into his shirt pocket and concentrated on eating.
Afterward he stood on the corner outside the diner and thought about what he wanted to do. There was no special hurry: he had a week, after all, that was the law. But there was really very little point to putting things off. Besides, he had only the change from the ten bucks and there was little enough he could do with that even if he wanted to. He went back into the diner and asked the short order cook behind the counter if he knew a barber shop nearby and the man said, sure, there was one at the end of the block. Carl thanked him and walked to the end of the block where, sure enough, there was a striped pole rotating in the sunshine. It was a grimy little hole in the wall, but Carl was nothing if not particularly fastidious. It was something Mona had always been on him about and maybe, he thought, he should have listened to her. Harry was a pretty clean guy.
The barber, who recognized an ex-con when he saw one, gave him a decent-enough shave and haircut for three bucks. He tried to get Carl to talk about what he might have done since the barber’s clients knew that he always got lots of good stories from the ex-cons who discovered a barber shop only two blocks from the prison, but Carl replied in grunts and the barber gave up after a few minutes, though with not very good grace. He charged Carl an extra dollar for the annoyance.
Elm Street was too far to walk and there wasn’t enough money left to take a cab so Carl searched out the nearest subway entrance, which turned out to be a pretty good hike away. It was good to sit down for the fifteen minutes it would take to get to the Elm Street station. He knew that most of the people sharing the crowded car with him were staring, but if he didn’t like that it was his own fault for not bothering to change from his prison denims. But in fact he couldn’t have cared less.
He got off at the Elm Street Station and walked up the stairs to the sidewalk. A glance at the numbers on the buildings revealed that 118 was only a few doors down from the subway exit. It was a pretty nice neighborhood, he thought, a lot better than where he and Mona’d had to live. That had been no fault of his own, of course, everyone was having a hard time holding a job these days and, besides, bosses always found something to hold against him. Harry had had a steady job, though, but then he was always a lot more willing to kiss ass than Carl was.
One hundred and eighteen was an old, three-story apartment building. Carl glanced at the mailboxes and was annoyed to see that apartment 5 was on the third floor because like most dumps of this vintage there was no elevator.
The Polyp apartment was at the end of the corridor. Carl knocked. There was a long moment and then the door opened about an inch. There was a chain and just above the chain a pale blue eye.
“Yes?”
Carl didn’t say anything but took the wadded sheet of paper from his shirt pocked and shoved it through the space in the door.
“What is it, honey?” came a woman’s voice from somewhere further in the apartment.
“I dunno, baby, just a—”
Even though the door was still ajar, the owner of the blue eye had stepped out of sight. Carl could hear the paper rustling.
“‘Greetings...’ Oh Jesus...”
“What is it, honey?”
The door closed, there was the sound of the chain rattling, and then the door opened again, this time far enough to let Carl see not only the whole apartment but the two people who occupied it. One was a chubby little gink about fifty years old, Carl figured, with a round red face and a receding hairline. An accountant or shoe salesman, Carl decided. Behind him was a little woman, just as chubby, red-faced and uninteresting-looking as her husband.
“You may as well come on in,” said Arthur Polyp, for of course this is who it was.
“Who is this gentleman?” asked his wife.
“Here, read this. Looks like we won the lottery this week.”
She didn’t move for a moment, but simply stared uncomprehendingly. Then, as the meaning of his words sank in, she snatched the paper from his fingers and read it through. She hadn’t finished before her hands started to shake.
“It was the Smiths just last week,” she whined, “right down the block. This same neighborhood. That just doesn’t seem fair.”
“Well, it’s just the luck of the draw.”
“‘Luck’! Some luck...”
“There’s nothing we can do about it, dear. You saw the paper. It’s all legal. We don’t really have any choice.”
“All right, all right, I know.”
“You got a nice place here, mister,” offered Carl who thought he ought to say something.
“Well, we might as well get this over with. I got a Rotary meeting in a hour and I haven’t been late in seventeen years.”
“Never mind that. The Rotary meets down at the hotel. My bridge club will be here this afternoon and I still have to get the cookies baked.”
“Sooner the better so far’s I’m concerned,” said Carl.
“Just stay out of my kitchen, that’s all I say.”
“Well, we got to do it someplace, dear.”
“What’s wrong with the bathroom?”
“Bathroom sound okay to you, Mister, ah, Skittle?”
“Whatever you say is fine.”
Carl and Mr. Polyp went into the bathroom. It was all sky blue tile and there was a fake fur cover on the toilet seat. Carl thought it was pretty nice. Mona would’ve liked a bathroom like this.
“I don’t have a gun or anything,” said Polyp. “Is that the usual thing? This is all pretty new to me. I only know what I’ve seen in the papers.”
“It don’t make no difference,” said Carl. “I guess it’s up to you.”
“The Whistles used a gun.”
“Well, we don’t have one. You know that.”
“Fred Whistle was prepared. He knew that his turn would come around and he was prepared. Fred Whistle is very organized.”
“Yes, I know he is, dear. I suppose we could strangle the gentleman?”
“Phooey. You can’t even wring water out of dish cloth. Hold on a moment.” Mrs. Polyp disappeared for a moment, then reappeared in the doorway. “Here,” she said, handing her husband a large knife, “this ought to do. It’s the old one so make sure you put it in the trash when you’re done. I don’t want it back in the drawer.”
“Yes, dear,” said Mr. Polyp. Then, turning to Carl, he said, “Maybe you’d better lie down in the tub.
Carl said sure and climbed in and sat down. He was a pretty tall man and couldn’t stretch out. So he just leaned back as far as he could.
“This okay?”
“I guess so. Are you sure you’re comfortable?”
“I can’t say it really matters too much.”
“Yes, I suppose you’re right. Can you lean your head back just a little?”
“This enough?”
Mr. Polyp placed one hand on Carl’s forehead and with the other drew the knife across his neck. A thin line of blood immediately appeared.
“That hurt?” he asked.
“Hell yes, it hurt. What do you think you’re doing?”
“I told you this was new to me.”
“Well, put some muscle into it, for God’s sake.”
Mr. Polyp put some muscle into it this time. He thought it was like cutting a chicken gizzard. All gristle. A gaping hole, like a toothless smile, appeared in the man’s neck and there was a lot of blood and a whistling, gurgling sound and the man’s eyes grew very round and he gritted his teeth so hard that Mr. Polyp could hear the enamel chipping. Polyp really gave it his all the third time, though the old knife was very dull so he had to keep sawing until he finally hit what must have been one of the big arteries that run up the sides of the neck. This time there was an awful lot of blood. He leaped back, but it was too late. The fountain caught him square in the chest, splattering everywhere, bright red on sky blue.
The man in the bathtub flopped around for a moment, then shuddered, then grew still, sinking into the contours of the tub as though all his bones were dissolving and running down the drain along with the blood.
“Well, that’s that, I suppose,” said Mr. Polyp.
“Just look at this mess. You’ll never be able to wear that shirt again and it’s practically new.”
“I haven’t had much experience at this sort of thing, dear, and, besides, there’s never any warning. I mean, if I’d only had a gun...”
“If, if, if. Just don’t stand there gawping. Call the authorities and tell them you’ve done your duty. I want them to get this cleaned up before the bridge club arrives. Well,” she added, as her husband went to the phone, “at least I’ll finally have something to talk to them about besides my African violets.”
