Authors: Steven Savile
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Short Stories & Anthologies, #anthologies, #Short Stories, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Fantasy, #magical realism, #Single Authors, #Anthologies & Short Stories
Time's Mistress (15 page)
He didn’t want to know anymore. He didn’t want to hope. This was hell all right. He didn’t know what he had done to deserve it, but he would work it out eventually.
Draydon Meer clambered over the railing and stood on the narrow ledge one hundred feet above the city though all he could see beneath him was fog. He brushed the hair away from his boy’s face and kissed him softly on the forehead.
And then he stepped out into nothing, wondering if his mind would invent the pain for him. He wanted to hurt physically as well as mentally, even if it was only for a fraction of a heartbeat.
There was no impact.
For a moment there was nothing. It was as though they had been cocooned in the fog. The he heard the ethereal strains of conversation, other voices, other Eden’s, so far away from him it was all he could do to open his eyes and look down.
He was alone, one the corner of Courtney Place, the streets lost to the Goddess of the Smog.
He checked his watch. It was a little before eight. On the corner of the street a vendor was selling roasted chestnuts, beside him another was selling the daily rag. Meer reached into his pocket for coins and bought both. Hunger gnawed at him as he folded back the crease and saw the day’s date writ bold above the headline of the newspaper: December 9th, 1952. It took a moment for the significance of the numbers to sink in, then the fog that dampened his mind cleared and he remembered. It was the day his boy died. He looked at his fob watch again. He had time. A little more than an hour.
And hope flared inside him as this stray voice that wasn’t quite his own whispered: “Perhaps this time you can save him?”
All he knew at that moment was that he had to try.
There wasn’t a father alive who would do anything else, not while there was still a chance.
Before he knew it, he was running, his little boy’s hand in his, so desperately grateful for a second chance to break his own heart.
***
Last Kisses
Come here.
Closer.
That’s it. Don’t be shy. All the way in. Come on.
I’ve got something to tell you.
A secret.
Ready?
Love is a sickness.
Never forget that.
You’re young. You probably think it’s all hearts and flowers and pretty girls’ smiles and broody boys and losing yourself in sad songs and thinking you’ll never find
the one
. Sure, it’s that, but it’s other stuff too. Stuff they don’t like to talk about.
But me, I’m contrary. I like to talk. Talking is as close as some of us come to magic.
Think of me as a magician. No. Make that
the
magician. And a kiss is my spell.
Imagine a sickness capable of lighting the darkness and firing the heart, inspiring poets to pretty words and torturing time until it stands still. That’s the L word for you right there. There’s a reason it can move mountains; it’s the same reason it brings down kingdoms. It makes fools of all of us. And the magic of it is that all it takes is a single kiss.
I have to admit I like love. I can work with it. It’s my favourite mischief-making tool. I mean who doesn’t want to catch fire? And what is love if not the whole world set on fire?
Let me paint the scene: 1646 and all is far from well. England is deep in the throes of Civil War, which always amuses me because let’s be honest, there’s nothing civil about war, is there? Cromwell’s Roundheads (the bad guys if you like the Royal Family, they’re the whole rule by the people for the people mob) are making short shrift of the King’s men (England’s always had this thing for blue blood, don’t ask me why). It feels like forever since the Royalists last tasted victory, but then three years is a long time when you are fighting for your lives.
Picture painted, enter our hero, a tricky young fellow with a passion for a certain Calvinist’s daughter.…
If you didn’t catch the inference, that’d be
me
.
O O O
I’m a bad man. I’ve got the attention span of a newt and I’m drawn to shiny things. Frankly, life’s so much more interesting with a little mischief to liven things up.
Like I said, she was only the Calvinist’s daughter, and if I was feeling a bit more creative I am sure I could come up with a bawdy little limerick to finish that little thought, but for now you’ll just have to settle for the boring old truth: she was a wee Scottish lassie, flaming red hair and a heart-shaped face.
I remember the important things.
I remember that it was the last time I was ever going to see her.
She didn’t know that.
She had dreams. They included me. The poor girl was in love.
So was I, of course, but my love only lasted a few minutes before it flitted off to some other unlucky lovely. I won’t pretend it wasn’t a poignant moment. It was. Two hearts beat as one and all that nonsense. See, I can be sentimental too.
I leaned down and touched her cheek, knowing all it would take was one last kiss to set it all motion. Grand plans. Cogs grind the gears that turn the wheels that keep the world running.
How could I resist?
You know me; I couldn’t.
Well, no, let’s be honest. I didn’t
want
to. That’s different.
So I did the deed and sealed it with a kiss, and that was that.
She skipped out of the old barn and straight into—and under—the path of a coming horse. Horses will always try to avoid trampling someone, but the rider was an idiot and his manhandling caused the poor animal to kick out. Its hoof caught my red-haired lovely in the head. She didn’t die straight away. We carried her broken body back to the chapel and laid her down. I left her father to stand vigil. He waited six hours for her to go. As the life left her eyes he kissed his little girl farewell, and so my kiss was on
his
lips. See how it works?
Greif took him to a house in the hills between his village and the next. The widow MaCallan lived there, and for a while he hid his grief in a kiss, a kiss is a kiss is a kiss.
And so it went, in that last kiss, my tricky little kiss moved onto the lips of the widow MaCallan.
Not that she kept it for long.
She wasn’t
that
kind of woman. Within an hour there was another knock at the door.
A young lad who come dawn would be escorting King Charles down south to Parliament where the New Model Army waited.
And so my kiss went south.
The who’s who is a little dull, and not frightfully important. Kisses came and kisses went, between men for the King and against, working their way finally to the King’s gaoler. It all gets a bit confusing, trying to keep track, but the important thing is where it ends up, not where it is in the middle.
He had lips like warm steel. That’s the other thing I should have told you, I’m never truly gone from my kisses when I send them out into the world to do their thing. What’s the point of causing mischief if you’re not around to enjoy it?
Remember what I told you right at the start? Love is a sickness. What I really meant is that it mutates like a virus. That first last kiss with the Calvinist’s daughter was full of hope and longing, the one she shared with her father loss and grief, and by the time it reached the widow MaCallan it was lust and hunger to drown out the loss, then it was fear of the unknown, and now as it reached the gaoler it had changed again. Now it was righteous anger at the tyrant who had ruled over us all. I’m rather pleased that my love is so versatile. Mother would be so proud.
As is so often the case, fate sealed itself in the confessional when, plagued by the demons of doubt, the gaoler sought solace in the hands of God. In that holiest of holy rooms he confessed his fears, believing that the coming trial was a sham and that the King’s enemies had always intended to murder him.
On bended knee, the gaoler kissed the Archbishop’s hand. And just like that that kiss of mine became a traitor’s kiss.
The priest ran and didn’t stop running until he stood at the gates of Whitehall.
He was too late.
The scaffold was already being erected outside the Banqueting House. The King had refused to plead, insisting that the trial was illegal as he could do no wrong. He was the King. How could they accuse him of anything?
For Cromwell that refusal was an admission of guilt.
The priest begged to be allowed to see the King, who had been found guilty of all mischiefs that had afflicted the nation, which let’s be honest, was a bit much, considering a lot of the mischiefs were mine.
But I’ve never been one to hog the limelight; if they wanted to give him credit for my hard work, well, so be it. Some of us are just meant to work away in the background doing what we do. We don’t expect the praise and the plaudits. Or something like that.
They led the priest into the Banqueting House.
He was the last man aside from the executioner to see the King alive.
When he kissed the King my love became mercy.
O O O
Of course it didn’t feel a lot like mercy standing outside in the square with the crowd of onlookers come to watch the King lose his head.
Funny how one little kiss could trigger a chain of events that only ended once they’d arrived at the executioner’s block. Cause and effect. Chains of reaction. But then, how many men have lost their heads over something as simple as a kiss? Don’t tell me you haven’t. I don’t believe you.
As the axe came down a curious quiet settled over the mob. All it took was one clean stroke. There were no cheers. Beside me a young man stared at the headsman’s block. I could see immediately that like the Calvinist’s daughter he was a lynchpin. A man around whom great events twisted and turned like serpents. His name was Samuel Pepys. He was going to be remembered all the way through history as a great man, one who was there for so many huge moments in London’s history—moments he actually wrote about so the rest of the world could remember them. My kind of man, Sammy. How could I resist? I grabbed him by the face and kissed him. Not once. Twice. Once for the Lord Protector, the second for the Great Fire.
Why kill one man when you can burn down an entire city?
***
The Angel with the Sad Eyes
“Did you ever wonder why Dante decided on nine levels, not say four or six or some other random number?” the voice from the television screen asked. It wasn’t actually something I had thought about. I shook my head dutifully, waiting for it to go on and explain. “Hell on earth, right? That’s what it was all about. There are nine layers of sky above us: the troposphere, the stratosphere, the mesosphere, the thermosphere, the exosphere, the ionosphere, the magnetosphere, the homosphere and the hetrosphere. Nine layers of sky to parallel the nine layers of perdition and then, finally, the grand prize, hell on earth. Think about it, makes perfect sense.”
I looked at the face of Damien distorted by the wide screen and reminded myself again why I loved him. He was anything but what you would call normal. He was grinning like a loon. I shook my head. This was so typically him. To stumble upon some stupid bit of science and realize it had some vague link to something else, in this case literature, and try to convince the rest of the world that he’d cracked the big secret, found the meaning of life. He didn’t appreciate it when I told him it had already been done. Lying in bed I’d whisper: “Forty-two” in his ear over and over. Some couples had romantic words of love they used for pillow talk—we had Douglas Adams.
Damien’s last great spark of genius had been some nonsense about finding the frequency of ghosts. He’d read somewhere that the afterlife resonated in the crystalline structure, and made the leap that if you could somehow tap into the energy of a snowflake before it melted you could tune into the frequency of the dead. We ended up with a very wet attic that winter.
I love Damien but I’m the first to admit he’s as nutty as a fruitcake. That’s one of the things I love most about him. Still love about him. My mother always used to say I collected misfits. He was my beloved misfit. His defense is that all great scientists are mad, that there is a fine line between genius and insanity. He constantly berated me for not thinking outside of the box when we were together.
I hated myself for cheating on him. For destroying what we had. It wasn’t fair to him and it wasn’t fair to me. It wasn’t even a moment of weakness. More like a moment of gross stupidity.
“Think about it babes,” he went on, enthused by the entire notion. “We’ve heard of heaven on earth often enough and hell on earth, but what if they are the same thing and they are right here, right now? Gah! I’ve got so much I want to tell you but it isn’t going to make sense. I miss you. That’s something I’ve needed to say for so long now. There’s this ache. It’s got a name. I named it. I called it you. Yeah, I know. Stupid. Forget I even said it.” Damien sighed. It was a world-weary sound. “I’ve got some people I need you to meet before we go on much further. Monkir’s filming this for me. His brother Nakir is in the kitchen.” The camera swung around to show a powerfully built black man staring into the refrigerator. He was naked. He turned to face the camera, an ice-cold bottle of beer in his hand, and toasted the cameraman before taking a big gulp from the bottle. He had the most incredible eyes. I found myself pausing the tape to stare at him. His physique was incredible. His musculature was sculpted to the point of perfection. But it was his eyes that held me. I felt my heart tripping in my chest.
The video started playing of its own accord. Nakir grinned at the camera again then turned his attention back to the fridge.
“You actually eat this rubbish?” his voice was muffled but his distaste was obvious. I could only imagine the kind of moldy junk food Damien had given sanctuary to. When we were together it had been Chinese takeaway cartons and slices of Italian pizza, the stone baked oven kind, not the deep pan—not that there was a noticeable difference after ten days in the fridge. Nakir salvaged something that looked suspiciously like a rolled up won ton skin.
Behind the camera Monkir laughed, a deep bass profundo. I liked his laugh immediately. It had warmth and kindness. It resonated. It wasn’t like the lazy laughs some people rush through, shrill and soulless.
“Not only does he eat it,” I said to the screen. “He loves the junk. The greasier, the more disgusting it is, the better. Eh, Damien?”
Nakir chuckled. For a moment I thought he was laughing at what I had said but that was just me being stupid.
The videotape had arrived in the mail that morning. We didn’t talk anymore that was the extent of our failed relationship. I loved him; he sent me videotapes and kept himself locked up in that disgusting studio he’d rented on the Upper West Side overlooking a meatpacking warehouse and a bakery. The bakery made pastries for one of the coffee store franchises that insisted on ruining a perfectly good cup of coffee with vanilla or cinnamon or hazelnut swirls or some other crud. He always joked that the place was slap bang in the middle between heaven and hell. I had gone out for my usual two mile round the park run and taken a lazy shower before I opened the envelope and stuffed the tape into the machine. Self-flagellation can wait is my patented motto. It is right up there beside keep away from babies and small children. I got that one off a plastic carrier bag but it always seemed like good advice to me.
“Monkir, say hello to the love of my life.”
The camera tilted wildly and came into focus on a grinning ivory smile and eyes of pure chocolate. They were the saddest eyes I had ever seen. I wondered what they could have witnessed to instill such sadness in them and realized I didn’t want to know. This was the age of global terrorizm and weapons of mass destruction. I had never even heard that phrase until a few months ago. Now it practically lived with me.
“Monkir is Nakir’s brother,” Damien explained in case I had missed the familial resemblance. It wasn’t hard to see the pair were brothers. They were cut from the same DNA strand to be sure. “They are … hell you aren’t going to believe me if I just tell you. I wouldn’t believe me. You need to see it. Nakir, show Lee who you are.”
The camera roved again dizzyingly.
In the kitchen the naked Nakir was stood with his arms wide apart, displaying himself in all of his glory.
“Not like that!” I heard Damien say and could imagine him shaking his head exasperatedly in the background.
“But I like this body. It feels good. I want people to see it.” Nakir objected.
“We don’t strut around naked anymore. We’ve got Gianni Versace and Jean Paul Gaultier and Vera Wang to thank for that. We deport ourselves with grace and style. We vogue.”
“But this skin is just the same, clothing. You should revel in it.”
“He would if he looked like you.” I said to the television screen. It was true of course. Hell, if I had looked half as good as Nakir I would have made sure plenty of people enjoyed the view.
“Just show her, Nakir.”
“You take all of the fun out of life, Damien.”
The image quality went haywire, white noise and interference fretting across the screen, the picture wobbling in and out of sight. For a full thirty seconds there was nothing, only a brilliant, blinding white that filled the entire screen before the picture settled and I was left staring at Nakir, naked. Not naked as in my kind of naked, erotic, lithe, sensual naked, the kind that makes you want to lose yourself inside another person naked. He was naked body and soul. I understood what Damien had meant when he said I wouldn’t believe it without seeing it, and I understood why the video camera had struggled so much to capture anything more than light on the film inside it.
Nakir was glorious.
He stood, stretched and unfurled his wings, each feather a delicate, perfect, wondrous creation that defied everything I knew about nature, science, the world.
“Magnificent isn’t he?”
I was nodding at the screen. “That’s not word enough.”
“It was Nakir who explained it to me, nine layers of sky, nine circles of hell. The symbolism of the whole thing. It’s mind-boggling. He’s a bit of a philosopher our Nakir. Monkir on the other hand is the quiet brooding type. I found them—or rather they found me—in the Gate of Heaven Cemetery when I went to see Babe Ruth on his birthday. His grave was covered with stuff. There were seven baseball hats, six baseballs, four American flags, forty-eight pennies, an aluminum baseball bat and a handwritten note that said: ‘Thanks for all the memories and many more to come.’ I laid my own memento, a rookie card of a guy I thought Babe would approve of, and turned to leave. That was when I saw them. They were both hunched over a coffin as it waited beside a freshly dug grave, and they were arguing.
“You don’t usually see people arguing in a cemetery, so I was curious. You know me, dead cat man. When I got close enough to make out what they were arguing about it didn’t make the whole scene anymore normal. Nakir was passionately trying to convince his brother that the dearly departed deserved a shot at heaven but Monkir was having none of it. Once a sinner, always a sinner and all that. He was adamant the dead guy was off to wallow in Hell’s eternal flames. It was a fascinating conversation to eavesdrop on, believe me.”
“I can imagine,” I said, but I couldn’t. Who could?
“Then I saw it. This essence. It was difficult to make out at first but as their arguing intensified the essence solidified, as though their passion was giving it form. It was there, I could see it, but I didn’t know what it was. It looked like a cloud of black and white swirling in the air above the coffin. It twisted faster and faster as the pair of them argued, sometimes more black in nature, sometimes whiter.
“The black won. The white was completely consumed and I saw Monkir smiling. He had obviously won the argument because Nakir did not look happy.”
“Another one off to Hell.” Monkir said from behind the camera.
“Indeed,” Damien agreed. “Can you believe what they were doing? I mean all this talk of judgment day and weighing our sins, the notion that your life somehow flashes before your eyes … it’s all true, in a way at least. Nakir, explain how it works, will you?”
The naked angel settled in front of the camera. His beauty mesmerized me once more. He was perfect in every way imaginable.
“Made in God’s own image,” he smirked at the camera.
“Will you stop doing that?”
“Sorry,” Nakir said, looking anything but. It was disconcerting, knowing this had been filmed two days before, and that he had somehow known exactly what I was going to think, and when. “All right, how to explain it. Put simply, we are the gatekeepers. We look at your soul and decide which way you are going, heaven or hell. Pretty simple really. Sometimes we argue, when it is a close call, but generally it is clear who’s going where.”
“Amazing,” I said, shaking my head.
“You might not believe in God,” Monkir said. “But unfortunately for all you non-believers, He believes in you. That’s where we come in.”
The camera focused on Damien again. He was taking his shirt off and folding it neatly on the arm of the couch. He always was a neat freak. I loved the way he fussed over the creases making sure they were just so. He unbuckled his jeans and pulled them down, then his pants. He folded all of his clothes up neatly on the arm of the couch. It was so long since I had seen him naked, but I recognized every beautiful contour of his body. This was Damien, my Damien. I felt my heartbeat tripping in my throat. Nakir wolf-whistled at the man I still loved.
I didn’t like the way Damien looked at me through the television screen.
“This is it, babes. This is what it is all about. I get to know. We get to know. You see, the brothers have agreed to help me out here. Ever since I met them I’ve been burning to find out what is on the other side … I mean I know for sure there is another side now. Knowing is driving me crazy. So they’ve agreed to help me because I am too damned scared to do it myself. They’ve been arguing about me all day, heaven or hell, heaven or hell. It is amazing the things they know about me. Things I’d forgotten, buried deep. It’s all coming back to haunt me.” He reached for something off camera, then brought it up to show it on the screen, to make sure I could see it.
A gun.
A dull grey metal gun.
He passed it across to Nakir who took it from him.
“This is stupid,” I said, my heart sinking as I watched the angel hold the gun to my ex lover’s head.
“This isn’t suicide,” Damien said, as though to reassure me. “See you on the other side, babes.”
It was all over in one shockingly brutal second.
Nakir pulled the trigger and Damien’s head ruptured. I saw his blood spray all over his neatly folded clothes. I closed my eyes. I wasn’t crying. I should have been crying. That was all I could think. I should have been crying. I had just seen the man I loved willingly killed in front of my own eyes—I should have been crying but I was empty.
Hollow.
“Heaven or Hell?” Monkir asked his brother, the camera still rolling. The sound of his voice after the silence that filled the void after the gunshot jarred in my ears. I stared at the screen feeling sick.
“He’s mine,” Nakir said, laying the murder weapon down on the coffee table beside Damien’s dead body. White mist swirled around his head where the gunshot wound had opened it up, twisting and swirling faster and faster before it evaporated into nothing. “What about?” he nodded toward the camera, toward me.
“We promised Damien they’d go together,” Monkir said. He lay the camera down on its side on the coffee table so I was left with a side on view of very large, very black angel cocks.
“Heaven or Hell?” I heard Nakir say as though the words meant nothing to him. They didn’t, I realized sickly. He had done this so many times, consigned so many sinners to their fate, why should he care about one more or one less?
“This one’s my turn,” Monkir answered coldly. “You got the last one. Besides, this one’s broken one of the cardinals and I am not in a forgiving mood. I liked that kid. He had guts.”
“Brains too,” Nakir said, then giggled. “But yeah, I know what you mean. Good kid. He’ll be okay where he’s gone. Okay, go get the other one, let’s get this over with.”
With that the screen collapsed into a swirl of white noise and the pair of angelic brothers were gone. I didn’t move. I couldn’t bring myself to. Damien was dead. I had just watched it happen.
