The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (Mammoth Books) (40 page)

Nine more serially dated postcards followed, not arriving every day, but near enough. By postmark and internal description they had been launched to me from, in order:

Equatorial Guinea

Turkmenistan

Dayton, Ohio

Lvov City in the Ukraine

The Isle of Eigg

Pinar del Río (in Cuba, where Americans weren’t permitted to travel!)

Hobart, capital of the Australian territory of Tasmania

Shigatse, Tibet

And finally, tantalizingly, from Davis, California. Where I actually lived at the time, though nothing in the card’s text indicated any attempt to visit.

After that the flurry of messages stopped, though not my thoughts about them. Trying to unpuzzle the mystery had me at my wits’ rope (a favorite phrase of Avram’s), until the lazy summer day I came around a corner in the Chelsea district of New York City . . .

. . . and literally ran into a short, stout, bearded, flatfooted person who seemed almost to have been running, though that was as unlikely a prospect as his determining on a career in professional basketball. It was Avram. He was formally dressed, the only man I knew who habitually wore a tie, vest and jacket that all matched; and if he looked a trifle disheveled, that was equally normal for him. He blinked at me briefly, looked around him in all directions; then said thoughtfully, “A bit close, that was.” To me he said, as though we had dined the night before, or even that morning, “I did warn you the crab salad smelled a bit off, didn’t I?”

It took me a moment of gaping to remember that the last time we had been together was at a somewhat questionable dive in San Francisco’s Mission District, and I’d been showing signs of ptomaine poisoning by the time I dropped him off at home. I said meekly, “So you did, but did I listen? What on earth are you doing here?” He had been born in Yonkers, but felt more at home almost anyplace else, and I couldn’t recall ever being east of the Mississippi with him, if you don’t count a lost weekend in Minneapolis.

“Research,” he said briskly: an atypical adverb to apply to his usual rambling, digressive style of speaking. “Can’t talk. Tomorrow, two-twenty-two, Victor’s.” And he was gone, practically scurrying away down the street – an unlikely verb, this time: Avram surely had never scurried in his life. I followed, at an abnormally rapid pace myself, calling to him; but when I rounded the corner he was nowhere in sight. I stood still, scratching my head, while people bumped into me and said irritated things.

The “two-twenty-two” part I understood perfectly well: it was a running joke between us, out of an ancient burlesque routine. That was when we always scheduled our lunch meetings, neither of us ever managing to show up on time. It was an approximation, a deliberate mockery of precision and exactitude. As for Victor’s Café, that was a Cuban restaurant on West 52nd Street, where they did – and still do – remarkable things with unremarkable ingredients. I had no idea that Avram knew of it.

I slept poorly that night, on the cousin’s couch where I always crash in New York. It wasn’t that Avram had looked frightened – I had never seen him afraid, not even of a bad review – but
perturbed,
yes . . . you could have said that he had looked perturbed; even perhaps just a touch
flustered.
It was distinctly out of character, and Avram out of character worried me. Like a cat, I prefer that people remain where I leave them – not only physically, but psychically as well. But Avram was clearly not where he had been.

I wound up rising early on a blue and already hot morning, made breakfast for my cousin and myself, then killed time as best I could until I gave up and got to Victor’s at a little after one
P.M.
There I sat at the bar, nursing a couple of Cuban beers, until Avram arrived. The time was exactly two-twenty-two, both on my wrist, and on the clock over the big mirror, and when I saw that, I knew for certain that Avram was in trouble.

Not that he showed it in any obvious way. He seemed notably more relaxed than he had been at our street encounter, chatting easily, while we waited for a table, about our last California vodka-deepened conversation, in which he had explained to me the real reason why garlic is traditionally regarded as a specific against vampires, and the rather shocking historical misunderstandings that this myth had occasionally led to. Which led to his own translation of Vlad Tepes’s private diaries (I never did learn just how many languages Avram actually knew), and thence to Dracula’s personal comments regarding the original Mina Harker . . . but then the waiter arrived to show us to our table; and by the time we sat down, we were into the whole issue of why certain Nilotic tribes habitually rest standing on one foot. All that was before the
Bartolito
was even ordered.

It wasn’t until the entrée had arrived that Avram squinted across the table and pronounced, through a mouthful of sweet plantain and black bean sauce, “Perhaps you are wondering why I have called you all here today.” He was doing his mad-scientist voice, which always sounded like Peter Lorre on nitrous oxide.

“Us all were indeed wondering, Big Bwana, sir,” I answered him, making a show of looking left and right at the crowded restaurant. “Not a single dissenting voice.”

“Good. Can’t abide dissension in the ranks.” Avram sipped his wine and focused on me with an absolute intensity that was undiluted by his wild beard and his slightly bemused manner. “You are aware, of course, that I could not possibly have been writing to you from all the destinations that my recent missives indicated.”

I nodded.

Avram said, “And yet I was. I did.”

“Um.” I had to say something, so I mumbled, “Anything’s possible. You know, the French rabbi Rashi – tenth, eleventh century – he was supposed—”

“To be able to walk between the raindrops,” Avram interrupted impatiently. “Yes, well, maybe he did the same thing I’ve done. Maybe he found his way into the Overneath, like me.”

We looked at each other: him waiting calmly for my reaction, me too bewildered to react at all. Finally I said, “The Overneath. Where’s that?” Don’t tell
me
I can’t come up with a swift zinger when I need to.

“It’s all around us.” Avram made a sweeping semi-circle with his right arm, almost knocking over the next table’s excellent Pinot Grigio – Victor’s does tend to pack them in – and inflicting a minor flesh wound on the nearer diner, since Avram was still holding his fork. Apologies were offered and accepted, along with a somewhat lower-end bottle of wine, which I had sent over. Only then did Avram continue. “In this particular location, it’s about forty-five degrees to your left, and a bit up – I could take you there this minute.”

I said
um
again. I said, “You
are
aware that this does sound, as directions go, just a bit like ‘Second star to the right, and straight on till morning.’ No dissent intended.”

“No stars involved.” Avram was waving his fork again. “More like turning left at this or that manhole cover – climbing this stair in this old building – peeing in one particular urinal in Grand Central Station.” He chuckled suddenly, one corner of his mouth twitching sharply upward. “Funny . . . if I hadn’t taken a piss in Grand Central . . . hah! Try some of the
vaca frita,
it’s really good.”

“Stick to pissing, and watch it with that fork. What happened in Grand Central?”

“Well. I shouldn’t have been there, to begin with.” Avram, it could have been said of him, lived to digress, both as artist and companion. “But I had to go – you know how it is – and the toilet in the diner upstairs was broken. So I went on down, into the
kishkas
of the beast, you could say. . . .” His eyes had turned thoughtful and distant, looking past me. “That’s really an astonishing place, Grand Central, you know? You ought to think about setting a novel there – you set one in a graveyard, after all—”

“So you were in the Grand Central men’s room –
and?”
I may have raised my voice a little; people were glancing over at us, but with tolerant amusement, which has not always been the case.
“And, maître?”

“Yes. And.” The eyes were suddenly intent again, completely present and focused; his own voice lower, even, deliberate. “And I walked out of that men’s room through that same door where in I went—” he could quote the
Rubáiyát
in the damnedest contexts—“and walked into another place. I wasn’t in Grand Central Station at all.”

I’d seen a little too much, and known him far too long, not to know when he was serious. I said simply, “Where were you?”

“Another country,” Avram repeated. “I call it
the Overneath,
because it’s above us and around us and below us, all at the same time. I wrote you about it.”

I stared at him.

“I
did.
Remember the Universal International Brotherhood of Sewer Persons and Plumbing Contractors? The sub-basement of reality—all those pipes and valves and tunnels and couplings, sewers and tubes . . . the everything other than everything? That’s the Overneath, only I wasn’t calling it that then – I was just finding my way around, I didn’t know
what
to call it.
Got
to make a map. . . .” He paused, my bafflement and increasing anxiety obviously having become obvious. “No, no, stop that. I’m testy and peremptory, and sometimes I can be downright fussy – I’ll go that far – but I’m no crazier than I ever was. The Overneath is real, and by gadfrey I
will
take you there when we’re done here. You having dessert?”

I didn’t have dessert. We settled up, complimented the chef, tipped the waiter, and strolled outside into an afternoon turned strangely . . . not foggy, exactly, but
indefinite,
as though all outlines had become just a trifle uncertain, willing to debate their own existence. I stopped where I was, shaking my head, taking off my glasses to blow on them and put them back on. Beside me, Avram gripped my arm hard. He said, quietly but intensely, “Now. Take two steps to the right, and turn around.”

I looked at him. His fingers bit into my arm hard enough to hurt. “Do it!”

I did as he asked, and when I turned around, the restaurant was gone.

I never learned where we were then. Avram would never tell me. My vision had cleared, but my eyes stung from the cold, dust-laden twilight wind blowing down an empty dirt road. All of New York – sounds, smells, voices, texture – had vanished with Victor’s Café. I didn’t know where we were, nor how we’d gotten there; but I suppose it’s a good thing to have that depth of terror over with, because I have never been that frightened, not before and not since. There wasn’t a living thing in sight, nor any suggestion that there ever had been. I can’t even tell you to this day how I managed to speak, to make sounds, to whisper a dry-throated
“Where are we?”
to Avram. Just writing about it brings it all back – I’m honestly trembling as I set these words down.

Avram said mildly, “Shit. Must have been
three
steps right. Namporte,” which was always his all-purpose reassurance in uneasy moments. “Just walk
exactly
in my footsteps and do me after me.” He started on along the road – which, as far as I could see, led nowhere but to more road and more wind – and I, terrified of doing something wrong and being left behind in this dreadful place, mimicked every step, every abrupt turn of the head or arthritic leap to the side, like a child playing hopscotch. At one point, Avram even tucked up his right leg behind him and made the hop on one foot; so did I.

I don’t recall how long we kept this up. What I
do
recall, and wish I didn’t, was the moment when Avram suddenly stood very still – as, of course, did I – and we both heard, very faintly, a kind of soft, scratchy padding behind us. Every now and then the padding was broken by a clicking sound, as though claws had crossed a patch of stone.

Avram said, “Shit” again. He didn’t move any faster – indeed, he put a hand out to check me when I came almost even with him – but he kept looking more and more urgently to the left, and I could see the anxiety in his eyes. I remember distracting myself by trying to discern, from the rhythm of the sound, whether our pursuer was following on two legs or four. I’ve no idea today why it seemed to matter so much, but it did then.

“Keep moving,” Avram said. He was already stepping out ahead of me, walking more slowly now, so that I, constantly looking back – as he never did – kept stepping on the backs of his shoes. He held his elbows tightly against his body and reached out ahead of him with hands and forearms alone, like a recently blinded man. I did what he did.

Even now . . . even now, when I dream about that terrible dirt road, it’s never the part about stumbling over things that I somehow knew not to look at too closely, nor the unvarying soft
clicking
just out of sight behind us . . . no, it’s always Avram marching ahead of me, making funny movements with his head and shoulders, his arms prodding and twisting the air ahead of him like bread dough. And it’s always me tailing along, doing my best to keep up, while monitoring every slightest gesture, or what even
looks
like a gesture, intentional or not. In the dream, we go on and on, apparently without any goal, without any future.

Suddenly Avram cried out, strangely shrilly, in a language I didn’t know – which I imitated as best I could – then did a complete hopscotch spin-around, and actually flung himself down on the hard ground to the left. I did the same, jarring the breath out of myself and closing my eyes for an instant. When I opened them again, he was already up, standing on tiptoe – I remember thinking,
Oh, that’s got to hurt, with his gout
– and reaching up as high as he could with his left hand. I did the same . . . felt something hard and rough under my fingers . . . pulled myself up, as he did . . .