The Toynbee Convector (27 page)

He swayed. He toppled.

No, he cried silently. Free yourself. Look!
See
!

And at last he turned his head to look up and up at darkness shelved on darkness.

“Thing...?” he whispered. “Are you there?”

The house shifted like an immense scale, under his weight

High in the midnight air a black flag, a dark banner furled, unfurled its funeral skirts, its whispering crepe. Outside, he thought,
remember
! it is a
spring
day. Rain tapped the door behind him, quietly.

“Now,” he whispered.

And balanced between the cold, sweating stairwell walls, he began to climb.

“I’m at the fourth step,” he whispered.

“Now I’m at the fifth…”

“Sixth! You
hear
, up there?”

Silence. Darkness.

Christ! he thought, run, jump, fell out in the rain, the light—!

No!

“Seventh! Eighth.”

The hearts throbbed under his arms, between his legs.

“Tenth—”

His voice trembled. He took a deep breath and—

Laughed! God, yes!
Laughed
!

It was like smashing glass. His fear shattered, fell away.

“Eleven!” he cried. “Twelve!” he shouted. “Thirteen!!” he hooted. “Damn you! Hell, oh God, hell, yes, hell! And fourteen!”

Why hadn’t he thought of this before, age six? Just leap up, shouting laughs, to kill that Thing forever!?

“Fifteen!” he snorted, and almost brayed with delight.

A final wondrous jump.

“Sixteen!”

He landed. He could not stop laughing.

He thrust his fist straight out in the solid dark cold air. The laughter froze, his shout choked in his throat. He sucked in winter night.

Why
? a child’s voice echoed from far off below in another time. Why am I being punished? What have I
done
?

His heart stopped, then let go. His groin convulsed. A gunshot of scalding water burst forth to stream hot and shocking down his legs.

“No!” he shrieked.

For his fingers had touched something…

It was the Thing at the top of the stairs.

It was wondering where he had been.

It had been waiting all these long years....

For him to come home.

Colonel Stonesteel’s Genuine Home-made Truly Egyptian Mummy

That was the autumn they found the genuine Egyptian mummy out past Loon Lake.

How the mummy got there, and how long it had been there, no one knew. But there it was, all wrapped up in its creosote rags, looking a bit spoiled by time, and just waiting to be found.

The day before, it was just another autumn day with the trees blazing and letting down their burnt-looking leaves and a sharp smell of pepper in the air when Charlie Flagstaff, aged twelve, stepped out and stood in the middle of a pretty empty street, hoping for something big and special and exciting to happen.

“Okay,” said Charlie to the sky, the horizon, the whole world. “I’m waiting. Come on!”

Nothing happened. So Charlie kicked the leaves ahead of him across town until he came to the tallest house on the greatest street, the house where everyone in Green Town came with troubles. Charlie scowled and fidgeted. He had troubles, all right, but just couldn’t lay his hand on their shape or size. So he shut his eyes and just yelled at the big house windows:

“Colonel Stonesteel!”

The front door flashed open, as if the old man had been waiting there, like Charlie, for something incredible to happen.

 “Charlie,” called Colonel Stonesteel, “you’re old enough to rap. What is there about boys makes them shout around houses? Try again.”

The door shut.

Charlie sighed, walked up, knocked softly.

“Charlie Flagstaff, is that you?” The door opened again, the colonel squinted out and down. “I thought I told you to
yell
around the house!”

“Heck,” sighed Charlie, in despair.

“Look at that weather. Hell’s bells!” The colonel strode forth to hone his fine hatchet nose on the cool wind. “Don’t you love autumn, boy? Fine, fine day! Bight?”

He turned to look down into the boy’s pale face.

“Why, son, you look as if your last friend left and your dog died. What’s wrong? School starts next week?”

“Yep.”

“Halloween not coming fast enough?”

“Still six weeks off. Might as well be a year. You ever notice, colonel....” The boy heaved an even greater sigh, staring out at the autumn town. “Not much ever happens around here?”

“Why, it’s Labor Day tomorrow, big parade, seven cars, the mayor, maybe fireworks—er.” The colonel came to a dead stop, not impressed with his grocery list. “How old are you, Charlie?”

“Thirteen, almost.”

“Things do tend to run down, come thirteen.” The colonel rolled his eyes inward on the rickety data inside his skull. “Come to a dead halt when you’re fourteen. Might as well die, sixteen. End of the world, seventeen. Things only start up again, come twenty or beyond. Meanwhile, Charlie, what do we do to survive until noon this very morn before Labor Day?”

“If anyone knows, it’s you, colonel,” said Charlie.

“Charlie,” said the old man, flinching from the boy’s clear stare, “I can move politicians big as prize hogs, shake the Town Hall skeletons, make locomotives run backward uphill. But small boys on long autumn weekends, glue in their head, and a bad case of Desperate Empties? Well…”

Colonel Stonesteel eyed the clouds, gauged the future.

“Charlie,” he said, at last. “I am moved by your condition, touched by your lying there on the railroad tracks waiting for a train that will never come. How’s this? I’ll bet you six Baby Ruth candy bars against your mowing my lawn, that Green Town, upper Illinois, population five thousand sixty-two people, one thousand dogs, will be changed forever, changed for the best, by God, sometime in the next miraculous twenty-four hours. That sound good? A bet?”

“Gosh!” Charlie, riven, seized the old man’s hand and pumped it. “A bet! Colonel Stonesteel, I knew you could do it!”

“It ain’t done yet, son. But look there. The town’s the Bed Sea. I order it to
part
. Gangway!”

The colonel marched, Charlie ran, into the house. “Here we are, Charles, the junkyard or the grave yard. Which?” The colonel sniffed at one door leading down to raw basement earth, another leading up to dry timber attic.

“Well—”

The attic ached with a sudden flood of wind, like an old man dying in his sleep. The colonel yanked the door wide on autumn whispers, high storms trapped and shivering in the beams.

“Hear that, Charlie? What’s it say?”

“Well—”

A gust of wind blew the colonel up the dark stairs like so much flimsy chaff.

“Time, mostly, it says, and oldness and memory, lots of things. Dust, and maybe pain. Listen to those beams! Let the wind shift the timber skeleton on a fine fell day, and you truly got time-talk. Burnings and ashes, Bombay snuffs, tomb-yard flowers gone to ghost—”

“Boy, colonel,” gasped Charlie, climbing, “you oughta write for
Top Notch Story Magazine
!”

“Did once! Got rejected. Here we are!”

And there indeed they were, in a place with no calendar, no month, no days, no year, but only vast spider shadows and glints of tight from collapsed chandeliers lying about like great tears in the dust.

“Boy!” cried Charlie, scared, and glad of it.

“Chuck!” said the colonel. “You ready for me to birth you a real, live, half-dead sockdolager, on-the-spot mystery?”

“Ready!”

The colonel swept charts, maps, agate marbles, glass eyes, cobwebs, and sneezes of dust off a table, then rolled up his sleeves.

“Great thing about midwifing mysteries is, you don’t have to boil water or wash up. Hand me that papyrus scroll over there, boy, that darning needle just beyond, that old diploma on the shelf, that wad of cannonball cotton on the floor. Jump!”

“I’m jumping.” Charlie ran and fetched, fetched and ran.

Bundles of dry twigs, clutches of pussy willow and cattails flew. The colonel’s sixteen hands were wild in the air, holding sixteen bright needles, flakes of leather, rustlings of meadow grass, flickers of owl feather, glares of bright yellow fox-eye. The colonel hummed and snorted as his miraculous eight sets of arms and hands swooped and prowled, stitched and danced.

“There!” he cried, and pointed with a chop of his nose. “Half-done. Shaping up. Peel an eye, boy. What’s it commence to start to resemble?”

Charlie circled the table, eyes stretched so wide it gaped his mouth. “Why—why—” he gasped.

“Yes?”

“It looks like—”

“Yes, yes?”

“A mummy!
Can’t
be!”

“Is! Bull’s-eye on, boy!
Is
!”

The colonel leaned down on the long-strewn object. Wrist deep in his creation, he listened to its reeds and thistles and dry flowers whisper.

“Now, you may well ask, why would anyone build a mummy in the first place? You, you inspired this, Charlie. You put me up to it. Go look out the attic window there.”

Charlie spat on the dusty window, wiped a clear viewing spot, peered out.

“Well,” said the colonel. “What do you see? Anything happening out there in the town, boy? Any murders being transacted?”

“Heck,

“Anyone felling off church steeples or being run down by a maniac lawnmower?”

“Nope.”

“Any
Monitors
or
Merrimacs
sailing up the lake, dirigibles felling on the Masonic Temple and squashing six thousand Masons at a time?”

“Heck, colonel, there’s only five, thousand people in Green Town!”

“Spy, boy. Look. Stare. Report!”

Charlie stared out at a very flat town.

“No dirigibles. No squashed Masonic Temples.”

“Right!” The colonel ran over to join Charlie, surveying the territory. He pointed with his hand, he pointed with his nose. “In all Green Town, in all your life, not one murder, one orphanage fire, one mad fiend carving his name on librarian ladies’ wooden legs! Face it, boy, Green Town, Upper Illinois, is the most common mean ordinary plain old bore of a town in the eternal history of the Roman, German, Russian, English, American empires! If Napoleon had been born here, he would’ve committed hara-kiri by the age of nine. Boredom. If Julius Caesar had been raised here, he’d have got himself in the Roman Forum, aged ten, and shoved in his own dagger—”

“Boredom,” said Charlie.

“Kee-rect! Keep staring out that window while I work, son.” Colonel Stonesteel went back to flailing and shoving and pushing a strange growing shape around on the creaking table. “Boredom by the pound and ton. Boredom by the doomsday yard and the funeral mile. Lawns, homes, fur on the dogs, hair on the people, suits in the dusty store windows, all cut from the same cloth....”

“Boredom,” said Charlie, on cue.

“And what do you do when you’re bored, son?”

“Er—break a window in a haunted house?”

“Good grief, we got no haunted houses in Green Town, boy!”

“Used to be. Old Higley place. Torn down.”

“See my
point
? Now what else do we do so’s not to be bored?”

“Hold a massacre?”

“No massacres here in dogs’ years. Lord, even our police chiefs honest! Mayor—not corrupt! Madness. Whole town faced with stark staring ennuis and lulls! Last chance, Charlie, what do we do?”

“Build a mummy?” Charlie smiled.

“Bulldogs in the belfry! Watch my dust!”

The old man, cackling, grabbed bits of stuffed owl and bent lizard tail and old nicotine bandages left over from a skiing fell that had busted his ankle and broken a romance in 1885, and some patches from a 1922 Kissel Kar inner tube, and some burnt-out sparklers from the last peaceful summer of 1913, and all of it weaving, shuttling together under his brittle insect-jumping fingers.

“
Voila
! There, Charlie! Finished!”

“Oh, colonel.” The boy stared and gasped. “Can I make him a crown?”

“Make him a crown, boy. Make him a crown.”

The sun was going down when the colonel and Charlie and their Egyptian friend came down the dusky backstairs of the old man’s house, two of them walking iron-heavy, the third floating light as toasted cornflakes on the autumn air.

“Colonel,” wondered Charlie. “What we going to do with this mummy, now we got him? It ain’t as if he could talk much, or walk around—”

“No need, boy. Let folks talk, let folks run. Look there!” They cracked the door and peered out at a town smothered in peace and ruined with nothing-to-do.

“Ain’t enough, is it, son, you’ve recovered from your almost fatal seizure of Desperate Empties. Whole town out there is up to their earlobes in watchsprings, no hands on the clocks, afraid to get up every morning and find it’s always and forever Sunday! Who’ll offer salvation, boy?”

Amon Bubastis Rameses Ra the Third, just arrived on the four o’clock limited?”

“God loves you, boy, yes. What we got here is a giant seed. Seed’s no good unless you do what with it?”

“Why,” said Charlie, one eye shut. “Plant it?”

“Plant! Then watch it grow! Then what? Harvest time. Harvest! Come on, boy. Er—bring your friend.”

The colonel crept out into the first nightfall.

The mummy came soon after, helped by Charlie.

Labor Day at high noon, Osiris Bubastis Barneses Amon-Ba-Tut arrived from the Land of the Dead.

An autumn wind stirred the land and flapped doors wide not with the sound of the usual Labor Day Parade, seven tours cars, a fife and drum corps, and the mayor, but a mob that grew as it flowed the streets and fell in a tide to inundate the lawn out front of Colonel Stonesteel’s house. The colonel and Charlie were sitting on the front porch, had been sitting there for some hours waiting for the conniption fits to arrive, the storming of the Bastille to occur. Now with dogs going mad and biting boys’ ankles and boys dancing around the fringes of the mob, the colonel gazed down upon the Creation (his and Charlie’s) and gave his secret smile.

“Well, Charlie...do I win my bet?”

“You sure do, colonel!”