The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (23 page)

“I need to pee.”

“Let’s go back,” Jack
announces. “We can’t do anything here.”

On the way back, Edgar
taps Cliff Rhodes on the shoulder. “So, okay, tell me about faith.”

“Faith can be
interpreted as positive thinking,” Cliff begins. “You heard all those stories
about people lifting autos off of injured relatives? How you think that
happens?”

Edgar sniggers. “That’s
strength, bud,” he says.

“Okay, so how come those
same people were unable to lift anything like what they did lift when the need
wasn’t as great?”

The light of Jack’s outer corridor can now be seen in front of
them and tensions ease . . . not to mention the strain on Jim Leafman’s
bladder.

“Those two guys had faith in abundance,” Cliff continues. “The
stories about Verne’s book, the heritage of the little guy —”

“Meredith,” says Jim.

“— Right, Meredith.
Maybe he was the descendant of the guy who went in Verne’s story — which calls
for an earlier maybe, of course . . . that the story was real. And maybe the
parchment was real which means that maybe the second entrance was real.”

“If it was, it ain’t no more!” Edgar says.

Cliff stops at the doorway back into the main corridor and,
placing one foot on top of a crate of Budweisers, he says, “You know, Edgar,
you’re a downer.”

“What the hell’s a downer?”

“It’s someone who has to poo poo everything that someone else
says, or thinks or believes.”

“Poo poo’?”

“See?”

Edgar’s mouth clamps shut.

He waits a few seconds, staring at Edgar, and then Cliff Rhodes
says, “I think it’s my turn to tell a story.”

“Can I pee first?” Jim asks.

“I’ll get more beers,” Jack announces.

Sitting back around the
table, fresh beers in front of them, the four men listen intently as Cliff
Rhodes begins.

“This is probably
apocryphal.”

“A pock of what?” a now
calm Jim Leafman asks.

“An urban legend, Jim.
Like the story about the escaped maniac with just one hand and a metal hook for
the other . . . and he tries to get into a car while two youngsters are making
out —”

“And they think they
heard something so they drive off and when they get to the girl’s house, the
guy finds a hook hanging from her door handle.”

“That’s the one,” says
Cliff. “So, years and years ago, the story goes, a hard-bitten journalist is
driving through the back of beyond, somewhere in the Appalachians. You know,
duelling banjos country.

“And he sees a young boy
walking towards the road from the field on his right. It’s only as he gets
closer that he sees that the boy isn’t walking through the field, he’s walking
towards him on water. They’re right next to a small lake.

“So, the guy stops his
car and gets out, calls for the boy to come over to him — which he does. Then
he asks him how he did that. The boy says, ‘Did what?’ And the guy says, `Walk
across that lake?’ The boy looks back at the way he’s just come, frowns and
shrugs. ‘Just put one foot in front of the other, sir,’ comes the response.

“So the guy asks the boy
if he does it often. ‘Every day,’ the boy says. ‘You gonna do it tomorrow, too?’
he asks. And the boy nods. ‘I do it every day,’ he says — because it’s the
fastest way for the boy to travel from his house to the tiny village down the
hillside.

“So the guy tells the
boy to be here tomorrow at the same time, because he’s going to bring some
people to take his picture and put it in a newspaper. The boy is taken aback
and he asks the man why he would want to do that. The man’s reply is thus: ‘Because,’
he says, putting an arm around the boy’s shoulders, ‘what you just did isn’t
possible. There isn’t another person in this whole world can do what you just
did. This makes you special. Makes you different.’

“The boy frowns and
looks out at the lake. And the man tells him to be here the next day. Then he
drives off.”

Cliff takes a drink and
carries on.

“The next day, sure
enough, the man arrives at the same spot and this time he has a camera crew
with him plus his assistant editor. The boy is there as well, sitting on the
grass at the far side of the lake looking nervous as hell.

“The man shouts for the
boy to come over and he gets the camera crew pointing in the right direction,
film running. The boy starts towards them and . . . he wades out into the
water. The journalist shouts for him to stop, tells him to go back and try it
again. Which the boy does. Same thing.

“This happens a couple
more times, during which everyone is getting pissed at the journalist. So the
journalist, he goes over to the boy and he grabs a hold of his shoulder, shakes
him a little. ‘What you doing?’ he asks the boy. ‘You told me to come over,’
the boy answers. ‘Boy whyn’t you walking on the water instead of through it?’
And the boy says, ‘You said it was impossible.’“

As Cliff settles back in
his chair, his hands still raised up on each side of him, Jack nods, smiling. “That’s
a nice story,” he says.

“Is it true?” Jim asks.

Edgar snorts.

“Maybe it is, maybe it
isn’t,” Cliff Rhodes tells Jim. “It’s a story, just like
Around the World in
Eighty Days
or
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.”

“Or
Journey to the
Centre of the Earth,”
adds Jack Fedogan.

“Absolutely. And all the
stories in
The Bible,
too. Some are true and some aren’t. And a lot of
others have just become exaggerated over the years. But what they all do is
they give hope and , they provide answers and encouragement. And that’s what
journeys do.”

“Journeys? Why journeys?”

“Well, Edgar himself
said that all stories about journeys are good stories. They reach a part inside
us all that other stories don’t quite reach. And that’s because we’re each of
us on our own journey.

“Jim, your story about
the ghost who’d gotten himself into some kind of loop — that was a journey he
undertook every night of his life, and the back-story was that he was doing it
because he was so sad at the loss of his wife. And Edgar’s story about the boy
— and, later, the man — on the bus, that was a wonderful story, but it’s the
way it brought a sense of closure to Edgar’s mom that makes it all the more
poignant.”

Cliff pauses and looks
around the table. “And that’s what Jules Verne was all about. He was about
feeding people’s need for adventure . . . making sense — and entertainment — on
the journey we all make to its inevitable conclusion.

“The two men we met
tonight — two adventurers in search of new experiences . . . two men who
believed in what they were doing. The worst thing in the world,” Cliff says,
looking straight across at Edgar, “is for someone to come up to them, or to any
of us, and
have
those hopes, beliefs and dreams flattened.”

“Should we call the
cops?” Jack asks.

“He didn’t mean anything
by it,” Jim Leafman protests.

“He means for the two
guys,” Edgar says, slapping Jim’s arm and trying to cover up his smile.

Cliff shakes his head. “I found their footprints,” he says. Edgar
leans over the table. “What?”

“I found their
footprints around the steps. They went out on to the street that way.” He
shrugs.

Everyone stares at Cliff in silence.

“Why didn’t you tell us right away?” Jack asks.

“Because we made a story
out of it. We made an adventure. We imagined that Fortesque and little Lorre
were already high-tailing it down narrow ledges, striding through fields of
giant mushrooms, discovering endless sandy beaches by the side of an azure sea
and beneath the rocky dome of a gloriously high cavern before negotiating
turbulent waters and watching to-the-death battles between creatures we only
know about in old nature books and Steven Spielberg movies.

“We wanted them to be
doing that. We wanted them to have gone through the hole. Isn’t that right,
Jack?”

Wide-eyed, Jack nods.

“Jim?”

Jim Leafman doesn’t hesitate in saying “Yes.”

And finally, “Edgar?”

Up to that point, Edgar
has been staring at his beer. When he looks up, there’s moisture in his eyes.

“Ed, you okay?” Jim asks.

Edgar nods. “Thinking
about my mom,” he says. And then, nodding, “Yeah, I wanted those two looney
tunes to have gone through the hole, sure.”

“Well,” says Cliff
Rhodes, lifting his glass to his mouth and taking a long drink, “maybe they
did.”

“Huh?”

“What?”

“But you —”

Cliff stands up. “I told
you a story. I told you a story so’s I could get your real reaction. I wouldn’t
have gotten it if I’d done it any other way. Truth is, I don’t know which way
they went. Don’t know if they were who they said they were and I don’t know if
anything Jules Verne wrote was based on truth. But I do know this,” he adds as
he places his empty glass on the table. “It’s been a great night. Telling
stories — that’s the most important journey of all.”

And as Cliff walks up
the stairs towards the waiting streets, the bank problem he had when he came in
seems a whole lot smaller.

They’re still sitting
there, the three caballeros, when Cliff Rhodes shouts down, “Jack, there’s a
guy says his name is. McCoy banging on your door. You want me to let him in?”

They exchange glances.

And smiles.

“Sure,” Jack calls out, “let
him in.” Turning to Edgar and Jim, first one and then the other, he says, “Beers?”

“Well,” Jim says, “this
is a bar, ain’t it? And what’s a bar any good for if not beer?”

“And stories,” adds
Edgar.

“Guys,” McCoy shouts
from the stairs, “you wouldn’t believe the journey I had across town.”

Their laughter is so
loud it blends in with that of Cliff Rhodes, striding the street, his coat
collar pulled up against the Manhattan rain.

— For Hugh Lamb, Brubeck fan extraordinaire

By 1864 Verne was on a
roll. Having completed
Voyage au centre de la terre,
and
the next Captain Hatteras novel,
Le Désert de glace,
he turned his eyes
to the heavens and wrote the first genuine scientific novel to explore the
complex subject of getting a man to the Moon. No one had done this before.
There had been plenty of fanciful stories taking man to the moon, as far back
as the
True History
by Lucian of Samosata in the second century AD. His
travellers are whisked to the Moon by a whirlwind. The noted French swordsman,
Cyrano de Bergerac, had several ideas of space travel in
The Government of
the World in the Moon
(1659), the one that worked involving a plentiful
supply of firework rockets. In
A Voyage to the Moon
(1827) George Tucker
(writing as Joseph Atterley) uses a newly discovered element, lunarium, which
is repulsed by the Earth and attracted by the Moon, whilst in 1835 Edgar Allan
Poe took his adventurer, Hans Pfal, all the way to the Moon by balloon. None of
these or other writers had considered the implications of the lack of air or
the forces needed to escape the Earth’s gravity. Verne, though, went into
immense detail, so much so that he took up most of one novel,
De la terre a
la lune,
describing the plans of the Baltimore Gun Club in designing and
building their giant gun and the projectile and needed a second novel,
Autour
de la lune,
to record the adventures of the company in their trip round the
Moon. We are introduced to the characters Impey Barbicane, President of the Gun
Club, who originally conceived the idea of an unmanned shot to the moon, the
Frenchman Michel Ardan (an anagram of Verne’s friend Nadar), who pushes for a
manned expedition, Barbican’s adversary, Captain Nicholl, who opposes the
experiment but is literally brought on board, and the mathematician J.T.
Maston.