Warp (3 page)

Hollis watched him run easily through the parking lot and out along the edge of the road, until he disappeared around the bend. Hollis took his hands out of his pockets and blew into them to warm them up.

A car horn blared behind him, a dissonant interval, and there was the sound of skidding tires. He turned around: the white Camry was stopped sideways in the middle of the road, blocking both lanes. An oncoming car had just barely managed to screech to a stop a few feet short of a collision. The driver honked his horn and shook both his hands at Hollis's landlord. Apparently he'd started to pull out without looking, then panicked and changed his mind, and now he was trapped in between.

As Hollis watched, the Camry made a couple of laborious cuts until it could swing back into its lane. His landlord honked his horn back at the other car and accelerated away out of sight.

“God, I have to get out of this city,” Hollis said to nobody.

The old men in the village told stories about the Devilfish, but Malo had never believed them. Wings thirty feet wide, and horns, and a strange, horrible face on its underside. It only came into the bay at night.

Malo came up to breathe. The speed with which it was dragging him piled up water against his chest. Already he was even with the sandbar that marked the mouth of the bay.

He was doomed if the Devilfish reached the open sea—it would pull him out into the depths and drown him. There was an old wooden post that stood in the middle of the channel, that had been there for longer than the oldest fisherman in the village could remember, and Malo felt for it in the darkness.

When he found it he took a deep breath and dove down to the bottom. He made a loop around it with the rope.

His mind was racing. Would the old post hold? Or would he be dragged out to sea, to drown?

By degrees the sunlight became more and more golden and less and less transparent. The wind was turning Hollis's ears pink against his short, razor-cut hair, which was dyed a bright white blond. Afternoon was moving into early evening. He'd locked his bike to a guard barrier made of thick rusty cables, and past the barrier came a thin line of trees, and past them the ground kept sloping away downhill. Far away in the distance he could see the rest of Brookline—bare trees and evergreens and brick buildings all mixed together, still lit up by the sun.

He started jogging down the hill. His shoes slipped on the grass, and he had to catch himself with his hands. When he got to the bottom he was breathing hard, and he had to bend over with his hands on his knees for a few seconds before he could go on.

He was a mysterious figure—arrogant, aristocratic, coldly beautiful, impossible to understand. Even those who tried to draw closer to him, lured by his wealth or the secret of his success, found him enigmatic. Rumors flew around him: bizarre affairs, ruinous addictions, fortunes lost and won, crimes both passionate and dispassionate. His resources of indifference were immense, his capacity for remorse minimal. His contempt for those around him was absolute and matched only by an equal contempt for himself.

Hollis rode back from the park in twilight, pumping hard down the hill, with sunlight flashing behind the trees and casting thick orange bars across the road. There were no sidewalks this far from the center of town, and he rode the very edge of the asphalt, sometimes straying off onto the sandy shoulder. Station wagons stood in the occasional driveways, and every once in a while a powerboat on a trailer under a blue tarp. A film of sweat burned coldly on his forehead.

He stopped at a traffic light, breathing hard, and ran his hands through his hair. The gas station on the corner was lit up with white floodlights, and he could see a clock on the wall through the window: it was almost six. A glowing red-and-black Merit sign towered over him against the blue evening sky. His chest hurt. His breath showed white in the cold fall air.

As he rounded the last corner he passed a few homeless people hanging around in front of the liquor store. The shabby Laundromat on the opposite corner was still open. Hollis's apartment building—one of three identical buildings in a row on Commonwealth Avenue in Allston—stood a few hundred yards from a busy intersection. A mile or two outside downtown Boston, Commonwealth was six lanes wide, with train tracks running down the middle. The block of stores across the street had a Parliament billboard mounted on the roof: a scene from the Greek islands, in turquoise blue and alabaster white.

The landlord's car was already there, parked right in front of his building. Hollis spotted it as he coasted up to the steps. There was no point in hurrying anymore. He jumped off his bike, braced himself, and hoisted it up onto his shoulder. A black leather glove lay on the ground by the curb, in an empty parking space, and he glanced down at it as he walked by.

It was lying palm-down, with the thumb folded under it. A tire tread ran across the back. He set the bike down again, bent down, and picked up the glove. Holding it by the fingertips, he slapped it against his thigh a few times to get the sand off and stuffed it in the pocket of his overcoat. It was one of his.

Picking up the bike again, Hollis dug his keys out of his pocket with his free hand and let himself in. The lobby was old and a little run-down: there were scratches on the wallpaper and dents in the walls from years of people moving in and out. He took the stairs, cautiously, lugging his bike with him.

When he got to the fourth floor he peered carefully around the corner out into the hallway.

The landlord stood in front of the door to his apartment. He had to stoop a little as he tried to look in through the peephole the wrong way. Hollis watched as he knocked on it smartly a few times. He called Hollis's name.

Shhhh. I'm hunting wabbits.

Hollis kept climbing, up the stairs two more flights to the top floor, then on up an extra flight of steps, littered with trash and dusted with white plaster powder. The aluminum door at the top was padlocked, but somebody had pried out the nails that held the latch to the doorjamb. With his bike still on his shoulder, Hollis kicked the door open and pushed his way out onto the roof.

From the rooftop the city lights were spread out sparsely across the dark shapes of buildings, like a glittering brush stroke, dominated by pink sodium streetlights. The roof wasn't built to be walked on: it was made out of nothing more than overlapping scraps of tar paper laid out over something that gave a little when Hollis put his weight on it. Here and there an assortment of vents and ducts and boxy air conditioners poked up at random. There was no railing around the edge, just a low brick wall at about knee height.

A wrought-iron ladder led down to the fire escape. Hollis unshouldered his bike and locked it to the ladder with a heavy steel chain. Taking a deep breath, he grabbed the top rung with both hands and swung himself out over the edge.

Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!

The concrete courtyard wheeled around under him, six stories below. He'd never been down there. An old stone birdbath lay propped up in a corner, half filled with brown rainwater. It didn't even occur to Hollis until he was already outside his own window that it might be locked, but when he tried the sash it opened.

He bent down to look in. His bedroom looked weirdly unfamiliar from this angle. Warm air blew out into his face, and past him out into the chilly late afternoon.

Hollis took off his combat boots, set them carefully beside him on the cold wrought-iron grille, and crawled in onto his desk in his socks. He brushed against a stack of paperbacks with his hip; it slumped gracefully over onto the floor. He lived in a studio apartment: one big room, a bathroom, and a kitchen annex, with white plaster walls and a high ceiling. Books, clothes, cards, floppy disks, CDs, tapes, comic books, and bottles of pills littered the floor. Hollis went into the bathroom and turned on the hot-water faucet in the bath. He came back out into the bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed.

The light on his answering machine was blinking. He pressed the play button.

“Hollis, it's Peters.”

A car honked in the background—he was calling from a pay phone, or a cell phone. Somebody else said something Hollis couldn't understand.

“Listen,” he said, “Blake and I have a car. We're coming over to your place, and then we're going to drink your booze and make fun of the Establishment. It's like the Merry Pranksters all over again. We're—”

The message cut off with a
beep
. By now, huge white billows of steam were swirling out through the open bathroom door and dissolving into the cooler air in the bedroom. Hollis was still wearing his overcoat. He shrugged out of it and let it fall on the floor.

The rope vibrated with the strain, surging with the beats of the manta's wings. Malo's lungs ached for air. His eyes were shut tight against the stinging salt pressure.

Then, all at once, the rope went slack.

Slowly, Malo unwound it from around the post and kicked his way back up to the surface, through the warm blackness of the water. His legs felt weak. He took a deep breath, holding on to the old, worm-eaten wood. His palms stung where the rope had cut them.

Across the water the friendly lights of the village still glowed along the shore. Malo turned the other way and looked out to sea. It was dark, and he couldn't see the horizon. He started swimming back towards his tiny skiff, which was still drifting by itself in the calm bay.

Malo had learned his lesson: he would never go fishing alone at night again.

The last of the weak sunlight slanted in through the lowered blinds. The machine beeped again.

“Hollis,” said a woman's voice. “Look, Hollis, is this still you? It's Eileen Cavanaugh.”

A heavy click on the line interrupted her—her call waiting. When her voice came back she was talking in double-time so as not to miss the other call.

“Look, if this
is
your answering machine—and why you can't have a normal outgoing message like a normal person is beyond me”—the call waiting clicked again—“I know you—”

Hollis reached over and turned the volume all the way down.

Suddenly it was very quiet in the apartment. He went over and retrieved his boots from the fire escape. Before he closed the window, he dug the lost glove out of the pocket of his overcoat and laid it out on the windowsill to dry.

“I never saw that glove before in my life,” she said irritably.

She stood there looking down at it, twisting it nervously between her fingers.

I went to join her at the window, and together we stared down at the green park of my sumptuous estate. Somehow the view was oppressive to me, and I rang for the curtains to be closed.

I waited for the servants to go before I spoke.

“I met him today, you know,” I said. “On the moor.”

“Oh?” she replied coldly. “Riding to hounds, were you?”

With the light from the candles behind it, her lustrous blond hair looked dark.

“Everything's out in the open now,” I said. “I know all about it.”

“I know.” A flush rose to her high cheekbones. “I saw him, too.”

Her mouth had a distinctive shape which I had always particularly relished, an unusually full lower lip deriving from her Hapsburg ancestry. I went to the table and poured myself some wine, but my hands were unsteady and a few drops splashed onto the white linen of the tablecloth.

“He'll be leaving soon,” I said. “He told me all about it: an official appointment in the capital. King and country, that sort of thing. I expect he'll be by for you in the night, or some such heroics.”

Before she spoke, she rang for someone to come and open the curtains again.

“Don't be ridiculous,” she said.

 

CHAPTER 2

THURSDAY, 7:45 P.M.

I
had this dream where we were all on the
Enterprise,
from
Star Trek.

Something happens to the Earth, and it blows up, and all these different cities fly off into space. Each one lands on a different planet. We decide we're going to go find out what happened to Boston, so we fly to the planet where Boston ended up after the explosion, and it turns out to be an ice planet. Everything's covered over with these deep, powdery snowdrifts. We drive around for a while looking for people we know, and finally we find some people who are friends with Counselor Troi. She gets out and decides to stay with them.

Then we're driving back out of the city, back to the
Enterprise,
and we're going around a corner, and our truck skids off the road into a snowdrift. Somehow the door comes open, and I get thrown out into the snow. Captain Picard falls out on top of me. He gets up right away, but for some reason I can't get up after him. I'm lying there in the snowdrift, and he gets back into the truck and closes the door. The truck starts up again, and they all drive away without me.

After a while I get up. I start walking back the other way, back towards Boston, to see if I can find Counselor Troi. I walk for hours and hours, and the road curves through a forest, then out across a wide, empty plain.

It's getting on towards dusk when I finally see the ruined skyline of Boston in the distance, through a scrim of falling snow, with a few lights still on among the crumbled-looking skyscrapers. There's somebody coming up the road towards me from out of the city, and when she gets closer I recognize her. It's Counselor Troi.

She comes up to me without saying anything, and we look into each other's eyes. Powdery snow swirls across the white crust and settles on her wavy dark hair, where it melts. I press my communicator badge.