The Best of Lucius Shepard (116 page)

“Yeah, I
love you. You know I do. I never stopped. There was a gap....”

“A big gap!”

“The gap
made it more painful, but that’s all it did.”

She played
with dials on the sound board, frowning as if they were refusing to obey her
fingers.

“You’re
messing up my settings,” I said.

“Oh ...
sorry.”

“What’s
wrong?”

“Nothing.
It’s just you don’t lie to me anymore. You used to lie all the time, even about
trivial things. I’m having trouble adjusting.”

I started to
deny it, but recognized that I couldn’t. “I was angry at you. I can’t remember
why, exactly. Lying was probably part of it.”

“I was angry
at you, too.” She put her hands back on the board, but twisted no dials. “But I
didn’t lie to you.”

“You stopped
telling me the truth,” I said.

“Same
difference.”

The phone
rang; in reflex, I picked up and said, “Soul Kiss.”

It was
Stanky. He started babbling, telling me to come downtown quick.

“Whoa!” I
said. “If this is about me giving you a ride...”

“No, I
swear! You gotta see this, man! The stars are back!”

“The stars.”

“Like the
one we saw at the library. The lights. You better come quick. I’m not sure how
long it’ll last.”

“I’m kind of
busy,” I said.

“Dude, you
have got to see this! I’m not kidding!”

I covered
the phone and spoke to Andrea. “Want to ride uptown? Stanky says there’s
something we should see.”

“Maybe
afterward we could stop by my place and I could pick up a few things?”

I got back
on the phone. “Where are you?”

Five minutes
later we were cutting across the park toward the statue of Black William,
beside which Stanky and several people were standing in an island of yellow
light—I had no time to check them out, other than to observe that one was a
woman, because Stanky caught my arm and directed me to look at the library and
what I saw made me unmindful of any other sight. The building had been rendered
insubstantial, a ghost of itself, and I was staring across a dark plain ranged
by a dozen fuzzy white lights, some large, some small, moving toward us at a
slow rate of speed, and yet perhaps it was not slow—the perspective seemed
infinite, as if I were gazing into a depth that, by comparison to which, all
previously glimpsed perspectives were so limited as to be irrelevant. As the
lights approached, they appeared to vanish, passing out of frame, as if the
viewing angle we had been afforded was too narrow to encompass the scope of the
phenomenon. Within seconds, it began to fade, the library to regain its
ordinary solidity, and I thought I heard a distant gabbling, the sound of many
voices speaking at once, an army of voices (though I might have manufactured
this impression from the wind gusting through the boughs); and then, as that
ghostly image winked out of existence, a groaning noise that, in my opinion,
issued from no fleshly throat, but may have been produced by some cosmic
stress, a rip in the continuum sealing itself or something akin.

Andrea had
at some point latched onto my arm, and we stood gaping at the library; Stanky
and the rest began talking excitedly. There were three boys, teenagers, two of
them carrying skateboards. The third was a pale, skinny, haughty kid, bespotted
with acne, wearing a black turtleneck sweater, black jeans, black overcoat.
They displayed a worshipful attitude toward Stanky, hanging on his every word.
The woman might have been the one with whom Stanky had been speaking at the
Crucible before Carol made her move. She was tiny, barely five feet tall,
Italian-looking, with black hair and olive skin, in her twenties, and betrayed
a compete lack of animation until Stanky slipped an arm around her; then she
smiled, an expression that revealed her to be moderately attractive.

The
skateboarders sped off to, they said, “tell everybody,” and this spurred me to
take out my cell phone, but I could not think who to call. Rudy, maybe. But no
one in authority. The cops would laugh at the report. Stanky introduced us to
Liz (the woman lowered her eyes) and Pin (the goth kid looked away and nodded).
I asked how long the phenomenon had been going on before we arrived and Stanky
said, “Maybe fifteen minutes.”

“Have you
seen it before?”

“Just that
time with you.”

I glanced up
at Black William and thought that maybe he
had
intended the statue as a
warning ... though it struck me now that he was turning his head back toward
the town and laughing.

Andrea
hugged herself. “I could use something hot to drink.”

McGuigan’s
was handy, but that would have disincluded Pin, who obviously was underage. I
loaded him, Stanky, and Liz into the back of the van and drove to Szechuan
Palace, a restaurant on the edge of the business district, which sported a
five-foot-tall gilt fiberglass Buddha in the foyer that over the years had come
to resemble an ogre with a skin condition, the fiberglass weave showing through
in patches, and whose dining room (empty but for a bored wait-staff) was lit
like a Macao brothel in lurid shades of red, green, and purple. On the way to
the restaurant, I replayed the incident in my head, attempting to understand
what I had witnessed not in rational terms, but in terms that would make sense
to an ordinary American fool raised on science fiction and horror movies.
Nothing seemed to fit. At the restaurant, Andrea and Pin ordered tea, Liz and
Stanky gobbled moo shu pork and lemon chicken, and I picked at an egg roll. Pin
started talking to Andrea in an adenoidal voice, lecturing her on some matter
regarding Black William, and, annoyed because he was treating her like an
idiot, I said, “What does Black William have to do with this?”

“Not a
thing,” Pin said, turning on me a look of disdain that aspired to be the kind
of look Truman Capote once fixed upon a reporter from the
Lincoln
Journal-Star
who had asked if he was a homosexual. “Not unless you count
the fact that he saw something similar two hundred years ago and it probably
killed him.”

“Pin’s an
expert on Black William,” Stanky said, wiping a shred of pork from his chin.

“What little
there is to know,” said Pin grandly, “I know.”

It figured
that a Goth townie would have developed a crush on the local bogeyman. I asked
him to enlighten me.

“Well,” Pin
said, “when Joey told me he’d seen a star floating in front of the library, I
knew it
had
to be one of BW’s stars. Where the library stands today used
to be the edge of Stockton Wood, which had an evil reputation. As did many
woods in those days, of course. Stockton Wood is where he saw the stars.”

“What did he
say about them?”

“He didn’t
say a thing. Nothing that he committed to paper, anyway. It’s his younger
cousin, Samuel Garnant, we can thank for the story. He wrote a memoir about
BW’s escapades under the
nom de plume
Jonathan Venture. According to
Samuel, BW was in the habit of riding in the woods at twilight. ‘Tempting the
Devil,’ he called it. His first sight of the stars was a few mysterious
lights—like with you and Joey. He rode out into the wood the next night and
many nights thereafter. Samuel’s a bit vague on how long it was before BW saw
the stars again. I’m guessing a couple of weeks, going by clues in the
narrative. But eventually he did see them, and what he saw was a lot like what
we just saw.” Pin put his hands together, fingertips touching, like a priest
preparing to address the Ladies Auxiliary. “In those days, people feared God
and the Devil. When they saw something amazing, they didn’t stand around like a
bunch of doofuses saying, ‘All right!’ and taking pictures. BW was terrified.
He said he’d seen the Star Wormwood and heard the Holy Ghost moan. He set about
changing his life.”

Stanky shot
me one of his wincing, cutesy, embarrassed smiles—he had told me the song was
completely original.

“For almost
a year,” Pin went on, “BW tried to be a good Christian. He performed charitable
works, attended church regularly, but his heart wasn’t in it. He lapsed back
into his old ways and before long he took to riding in Stockton Woods again,
with his manservant Nero walking at his side. He thought that he had missed an
opportunity and told Samuel if he was fortunate enough to see the stars again,
he would ride straight for them. He’d embrace their evil purpose.”

“What you
said about standing around like doofuses, taking pictures,” Andrea said. “I
don’t suppose anyone got a picture?”

Pin produced
a cell phone and punched up a photograph of the library and the stars. Andrea
and I leaned in to see.

“Can you
e-mail that to me?” I asked.

Pin said he
could and I wrote my address on a napkin.

“So,” Pin
said. “The next time BW saw the stars was in eighteen-oh-eight. He saw them
twice, exactly like the first time. A single star, then an interval of week or
two and a more complex sighting. A month after that, he disappeared while
riding with Nero in Stockon Wood and they were never seen again.”

Stanky
hailed our waitress and asked for more pancakes for his moo shu.

“So you
think the stars appeared three times?” said Andrea. “And Black William missed
the third appearance on the first go-round, but not on the second?”

“That’s what
Samuel thought,” said Pin.

Stanky fed
Liz a bite of lemon chicken.

“You’re
assuming Black William was killed by the stars, but that doesn’t make sense,”
said Andrea. “For instance, why would there be a longer interval between the
second and third sightings? If there
was
a third sighting. It’s more
likely someone who knew the story killed him and blamed it on the stars.”

“Maybe Nero
capped him,” said Stanky. “So he could gain his freedom.”

Pin
shrugged. “I only know what I read.”

“It might be
a wavefront,” I said.

On another
napkin, I drew a straight line with a small bump in it, then an interval in
which the line flattened out, then a bigger bump, then a longer interval and an
even bigger bump.

“Like that,
maybe,” I said. “Some kind of wavefront passing through Black William from God
knows where. It’s always passing through town, but we get this series of bumps
that make it accessible every two hundred years. Or less. Maybe the stars
appeared at other times.”

“There’s no
record of it,” said Pin. “And I’ve searched.”

The waitress
brought Stanky’s pancakes and asked if we needed more napkins.

Andrea
studied the napkin I’d drawn on. “But what about the first series of sightings?
When were they?”

“Seventeen-eighty-nine,”
said Pin.

“It could be
an erratic cycle,” I said. “Or could be the cycle consists of two sequences
close together, then a lapse of two hundred years. Don’t expect a deeper
explanation. I cut class a bunch in high school physics.”

“The Holy
Ghost doesn’t obey physical principles,” said Stanky pompously.

“I doubt
Black William really heard the Holy Ghost,” Andrea said. “If he heard what we
heard tonight. It sounded more like a door closing to me.”

“Whatever,”
he said. “It’ll be cool to see what happens a month from now. Maybe Black
William will return from the grave.”

“Yeah.” I
crumpled the napkin and tossed it to the center of the table. “Maybe he’ll
bring Doctor Doom and the Lone Ranger with him.”

Pin affected
a shudder and said, “I think I’m busy that day.”